Open Book Reviews

Here's a wonderful resource for book reviews (written by a home educated student!) :

Welcome to Open Book Reviews! I hope you find a treasure-trove of helpful information as you seek good, living books for you and your family. My desire is that the reviews here will save you time and energy as you search for good literature as well as school curriculum.

I pray this book review site will make good use of my love of books and help you make better decisions about your family library.

Click here to visit Open Book Reviews

Quote of the Week ~ August 30, 2011

Never be without a really good book on hand. If you find yourself sinking to a dull common place level, with nothing particular to say, the reason is probably that you are not reading, and, therefore, not thinking. ~ The Story of Charlotte Mason, p. 162

Homeschool for Free

Click the links below for a huge assortment of  free homeschooling resources and printables from The 5 J's:

Homeschool for Free

Printables and Downloads

Alphabet Virtues Coloring Pages

Here is a wonderful collection of free coloring pages to teach an alphabet's worth of virtues to little ones! Click here to see and print the whole collection

Free Pages

A wonderful assortment of free printables from Practical Pages:

I am passionate about homeschooling and really enjoy my homeschool journey with my girls.

Here are my notebook pages, minibooks and lapbook projects, handwriting charts and booklets, organizational tips and ideas … that I would love to share with you.

Click here for lots of links

Tracing Outlines of Famous Art Works

From Practical Pages:

I have often made outline drawings of our art work for art appreciation lessons.  The Van Gogh picture  “Starry Night” 
is one of the most popular downloads! It is a simple, really easy and frugal method to create a picture to colour, apply techniques and make your own version of the art masterpiece.

Click here for instructions.

Freebies from Heart of Wisdom

LOTS of free printables from Heart of Wisdom:

There are hundreds of free printables for Bible study, homeschooling, and home organization spread across five different Heart of Wisdom blogs. I put them all here to make them easy to find.

Printable ABC Bible Verses

From Heart of Wisdom:

These are copywork Bible pages for children memorizing the ABC verses. The print is dotted and lined for tracing. Print in color or black and while. There are 5 PDF pages.

Click here to download

Yesterday’s Classics Ebook Package Sale!!!

Yesterday’s Classics is a company that republishes classic books for children from the golden age of children’s literature, the era from 1880 to 1920. Many of the titles they offer have been out of print for decades and so have been hard to find until recently. Now they have also made their entire collection of 225 books available as e-books in both Kindle and E-pub format! These are beautifully formatted, complete with illustrations and table of contents. If you don’t have an e-reader you can still read or print the books from your computer.

From now, until Saturday, August 27th Yesterday’s Classics is offering their entire e-book package to our readers at a special sale price of $99.95! If you purchased all of the paperback editions of these books the total would come to $2,495.75! If you purchased each book in electronic format individually the total would come to $648.80! This is a wonderful opportunity to add a huge collection of wonderful children’s literature to a family library!

Though I have to admit I still much prefer to collect and read from printed books I am delighted to add these to our family collection. The ability to print the books and read them from multiple devices makes them extremely versatile, and the price makes it possible to have an incredible selection at your fingertips.

(Note: There are several books in the collection that I don’t intend to offer to my children as they don’t meet with some of the convictions we hold regarding reading material. However, this collection is so extensive that it is still wonderfully worthwile, even if some of the books never get read. )

We are thrilled to offer this sale to you right now as it blends beautifully with our theme for the rest of August over at Noble Womanhood; home schooling using the Charlotte Mason/Christian Classical methods which both rely heavily on real, “living” books, rather than textbooks.

For lots more information on this package, including a complete list of all the books in the package and a free book to download, please click here!

Review: Song School Latin

Here's a great review of  Song School Latin (which we use and enjoy!):

Satori started learning Latin when she was five with the introductory Latin program Song School Latin by Classical Academic Press. It’s suitable for grades K-3. We used the student text book, CD, and Latin Monkey Match flashcards. The teacher’s guide is not needed, it is a copy of the student text, but with answers. This post is our goodbye to the program, which we thoroughly enjoyed.

Click here to read the rest.

"Not" Back to School Blog Hop: School Room Week

Lots of inspiration and ideas for homeschooling and book organization in big and small spaces at the "Not"  Back to School Blog Hop: School Room Week!

Two Ebook Giveaways!

Head over to Noble Womanhood to enter the giveaway for two brand new e-books: Encouraging Challenges  and Nurturing a Godly Wife by Jason and Jennifer Ross!

Alphabet Avenue

Here's a link to Alphabet Avenue which offers a huge selection of resources for teaching the alphabet to young children. Click here to visit the website.

Free Chronicles of Narnia Audiobooks!

Listen online to these free, well done audiobooks of The Chronicles of Narnia. (The reader even has a beautiful English accent. Very important for this series. ;-))
Click here to listen.

Back to Homeschool Sale at CurrClick!

Now through August 25, save up to 75% on thousands of e-books and downloads from CurrClick!

Home Book Binding Without Special Equipment

From Large Family Mothering:

It's just wonderful the opportunities we have to read old books and other digitized manuscripts for free. But I am not alone in needing to read these nifty tomes on paper—electronic devices just don't seem "right" to me. Besides that, I do not want my children staring into a computer monitor for long periods of time—I am sure there are a profusion of studies relating to just how a child's brain can turn to mush from staring into a box of flashing lights for hours (none of us need any help in that regard.

For a while there I was printing books out on my handy-dandy inkjet and zipping over to the office supply store to have them comb or wire-bound. This was great for the first 20 or so, but I'm passionate, and so are my children; we want a whole collection of superior, educational books. It's just that the cost of all that printing and binding, not to mention all the "zipping", was taking its toll on me.

So I went on an odyssey, surfing the Net for better alternatives. I am so pleased and excited with what I have found that I have to share it with you all!

Click here to read the rest

50% off Coupon Code for "31 Days to Clean" EBook (Plus Videos for Book Owners!)

From Sara Mae at Raising Homemakers:

Beginning on Monday, August 1st, there will be a new video each day encouraging you and helping you along the way with the Martha Challenges from 31 Days to Clean (see a sample video at 31daystoclean.com right now)! Jennifer Ross, a reader, has done a wonderful job showing you that you can complete the challenges…and not go crazy!

And for those of you who would like the eBook but have been holding off, it will be available for 50% off on Monday (and the whole week) by using code: BLOOM

Why “BLOOM”? Great question!

Tune in here (the Bloom book club) on Monday because I’ll be talking about the heart of 31 Days to Clean and my heart for YOU each day during the week – I hope you’ll join me!

Free Online History Course for a Limited Time (From Veritas Press)

From Veritas Press

Back by popular demand. Last summer we tried this and the response was overwhelming, so during the month of August we are offering it again. We want you to experience what we believe is the best way to learn history-and it's FREE. The award-winning Veritas Press grammar school history curriculum is now (or shortly will be) available online in our new self-paced courses. We are so convinced you'll love them that we are giving them away for a limited time. Customers have told us, "the courses are so much fun that their children must not be learning." Click here to sign up for a free 30 day trial.

Here are the available courses:

Old Testament and Ancient Egypt History
New Testament, Greece, and Rome
Middle Ages Renaissance and Reformation
Explorers to 1815

Homeschooling on a Small Budget

Some excellent sugestions on frugal homeschooling from A Wise Woman Builds Her Home:

Times are tough for many and paying for expensive homeschool curriculum can sometimes be very daunting for a homeschooling mom. Just today I was talking to someone on the phone who called for advice of where to get curriculum that would to fit a tight budget . Here are a couple of thoughts:

Click here to read the rest.

Home Library Card/Bookplate

From The Pleasant Times:

Here is a bookplate for your home library, or you can print it out on card stock and use it as a library card for those books that you like to lend out.

Quote of the Week ~ July 26, 2011

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,

And all the sweet serenity of books.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow



Organizing the Family Library

Homeschool families usually have an abundance of books. Said books can often be hard to keep track of and can end up in messy piles of randomness. Here are four helpful articles on organizing your family library:

Library Organization

Media and Books

Bookshelf Organization

A Vision for the Future – The Heritage Library (This is an excellent article on the value of building a family library.There are helpful tips toward the end of the article on book storage and organization.)

Library and Educational Services

Have you discovered Library and Educational Services yet? From their website:

A wholesale supplier of wholesome, educational books, DVDs, CDs, and more. For over thirty years, LES has been committed to excellence in both our customer service and our product selection.

With our variety of Christian, wholesome, and educational DVDs, CDs, books, games, and more—PLUS our personal, superior customer service, we are confident that you will return to LES again and again!

The good news is that, though they are a wholesale company, they include home educators in their list of customers which gives you access to some truly incredible prices!

While there is definitely some twaddle in their catalog I have been thrilled to find excellent living books as well. They have a wonderful selection that does vary, so if you don't see quite what you are looking for check back again.

To view their online catalog you do have to set up an account, but this is free. Be sure to sign up for their e-newsletter as well since in addition to their excellent regular low prices they often have sales that temporarily drop their prices astoundingly.

4 Day Sale on Historical Biographies and More at Library and Educational Services

On sale at Library and Educational Services until midnight July 25, 2011:

Primary Sources of Famous People in American History - Set of 21

Simple text and loads of photographs, original documents, maps, and illustrations shed light on men and women in American history. Each book has 32 pages. Set of 21 Reinforced Hardcover
(Regular Retail Price $376.96) Library and Educational Services Sale Price $19.95! (Save 94%!)

Visit their website to see this set and the other books that are part of their 4 day sale (including a boxed set of James Herriots books for $14.95!) (If you've never ordered from L.E.S. before you'll need to set up a free account before you can view their catalog)

Watch "Divided" for Free Online!

There is a crisis. Christian youth are rapidly leaving evangelical churches for the world. This well-recognized disaster has been the topic of significant discussion in recent years for both church leaders and modern new media. DIVIDED follows young Christian filmmaker Philip Leclerc on a revealing journey as he seeks answers to what has led his generation away from the church. Traveling across the country conducting research and interviewing church kids, youth ministry experts, evangelists, statisticians, social commentators, and pastors, Philip discovers the shockingly sinister roots of modern, age-segregated church programs, and the equally shocking evidence that the pattern in the Bible for training future generations is at odds with modern church practices. He also discovers a growing number of churches that are abandoning age-segregated Sunday school and youth ministry to embrace the discipleship model that God prescribes in His Word.

We watched this excellent film last week and can't recommend it highly enough. Click here to watch online for free

Let's try this again...

It has been a long time since I've updated this poor, neglected blog. Life has been a bit upside down this year and everything not vital for our survival has fallen by the way side (this includes laundry.) I shall give this another try though and we'll see how it goes. :-)

Homeschool for Free

Here's a great article on free (and inexpensive) homeschooling resources fom Kelly at Generation Cedar!

The truth is, really, (and we know it), that learning doesn’t require anything fancy or pre-packaged and can be quite fun and creative!

Obviously, there’s no way to write an exhaustive list of resources for every grade level and subject. So I thought I’d offer some ideas to get you thinking and some resources for your use, even if just to supplement what you already have.

Click here to read the entire article