Hi, I don't know if this has been posted yet, but for fans of Lively Latin - The first chapter of Lively Latin 2 is on sale. Also there are samples for book 2 on the website. Blessings Zoraida

Marla discussed this in detail several months ago on her radio show. She said to use her Zone lists only as an example. Everyones home is different so it would be best to come up with your own list of chores that needs to be done in each Zone. Once you have decluttered your Zones and have either her master list or your own master list - continue using the timer for 15 minutes. Start at the top of your Zone list and work down. Once your timer goes off stop and continue where you left off the next day. If you didn't finish everything in your Zone by the end of the week, don't worry because you will be back in the same Zone next month. I usually do my housekeeping in the following order; 1. Morning routines (daily chores) 2. Weekly chores ( I believe Marla says she does all of hers on one day in 10 minute increments) but I like to do mine throughout the week - dusting on Mondays, vacuuming on Tuesdays, change sheets on Wednesday ect. 3. Zone work daily (15 minutes deep cleaning) 4. Grab a cup of coffee and with a timer set for 15 minutes read emails and check Kelly's mission of the day. 5. Go back to Zone and do Kelly's mission for 5 or 10 minutes. I get up at 6 every morning and can get all of my housecleaning done by 8:30 or 9 in the morning and than spend the rest of the day focusing on homeschooling. The most important advice I have recieved from flylady is the bedtime routines. Before I go to bed I do a walk through the house and make sure that every thing is tidy and in its place. Blessing Zoraida

My 13 year old son is reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped (required reading) and for pleasure he is reading The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt. My 14 year old son is reading The Hound of Baskerville by Arthur Conan Doyle (required reading). He noticed that in our area that Tom Cruise's War of the World will be on ABC Saturday night so I am requiring that he reads the original novel before he watches the movie. He's reading it and loving it. For pleasure he is reading Airman by Eoin Colfer. My 16 year old daughter is reading The Portable Dante (required reading). My daughter is the most avid reader out of my 7 children. She constantly has a book in her hand. She wants to go to collage and major in English or library science. She has a stack of books in her pleasure reading pile. The last time I looked at her pile the books were: To Kill a Mocking Bird, A. S. Byatt's Possession, The Thirteenth Tale, The Time Traveler's Wife and Water for Elephants. My 18 year old son who has been accepted to Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, TX and who says he might be considering the priesthood is reading Ivanhoe (required reading) and for pleasure: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly and My Losing Season by Pat Conroy. We were watching Oprah this afternoon and she had her book club show. After watching this my son thought that Ken Follet's Pillar of the Earth sounded like a good read. So he's supposed to be at Barnes and Noble about now (hopefully) purchasing the book for another pleasure read. Blessings Zoraida

You can get lesson plans for 25.00 for a high school public speaking course along with the text Basic Speech Experiences Text for 25.OO at http://www.olvs.org if you want everything laid out for you. This is a Catholic homeschool sight if you are not familiar with it. I don't think the text is Catholic though and I don't know what the lesson plans are like. But this course is part of the English requirements for eleventh grade students. You don't have to be enrolled to purchase textbooks or lesson plans from their site. I have my ninth grader enrolled in the ninth grade program and the ninth grade lesson plans are nicely detailed. Blessings Zoraida

I'm currently trying to read my way through all of the Man Booker Prize winners (Britain's Major Literary Prize) I began with the 1969 award winners and nominees and am working my way through the list. I have just recently started the 1976 list beginning with David Storey's novel Saville. I got this idea to read all these award winners when I was browsing Amazon one day looking for something to read. I noticed in their side bar they had an award winner category. So I started browsing the different lists and came up with the idea of reading all the Booker awards and I have been having great fun doing so and meeting great authors like my favorite Iris Murdoch. I was telling another mother about this and she said that there is a Booker Yahoo group where they pick different Booker books to read each month. I was thinking about joining but I belong to so many Yahoo groups already I decided not to join. I'm starting to think that reading through major award lists is a popular thing to do these days. Yesterday I received my new issue of Entertainment Weekly. The cover story was about what to do during the writers strike and everything is in repeats on television. One of the reviewers wrote that her and her friend just recently started the Pulitzer Prize Book Club. They started with the 1917 winner and are working their way to 2008. Blessings Zoraida