My dh likes to read, but he doesn't read nearly as much as I do. I think he sees it as a leisure activity, when for me, it is a necessity!;) When he does have leisure time, he is more likely to be reading census records rather than a book; he loves doing genealogy. One thing he doesn't understand is my re-reading a book. He can't fathom why you would want to read something again! I can't fathom why you wouldn't want to re-read a good book that you've enjoyed before!

Thanks for the ideas! Salad would be great with the chili, and I love the idea of a veggie platter where they could continue to snack whenever they got a break between patients.

I've read only excerpts from Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan), so that's what I'm tackling this week. As a child I was always fascinated with the leather different-colored editions of the book that Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy got for Christmas from Marmee in Little Women.

I read The Princess and the Goblin for the first time this past year and loved it! I saw where there is a collection of George MacDonald Christmas stories that I would love to track down for next Christmas!

Our local homeschool group helps to sponsor our small-town Free Clinic. Members sign up to provide a meal for the doctors and nurses who volunteer their time there. We are supposed to provide an entree, vegetable, bread, dessert, and drinks for 15 clinic workers. I'm planning on making chili and cornbread (I've recently mastered the Pioneer Woman Cooks recipe in my husband's grandmother's iron skillet!) with seven-layer bars for dessert. I am at an impasse for a vegetable side dish. I've thought about mixed fruit but wasn't sure if the tastes would complement one another. Any suggestions?

Oh, yum! I'll have to try this! I love Harney & Sons, too!

:iagree:

I love tea and prefer loose tea, usually flavored black teas. My all-time favorite is Harney & Sons Indian Spice, which is wonderful when you follow their directions for making chai but also nice with just a spash of half-n-half and sugar. An awesome dessert tea for when you want chocolate but not the calories is Harney & Sons Chocolate Mint--delectable!

I'd like to try this, too. I also got The Well Educated Mind for Christmas, so I'm looking forward to getting back into reading!

Math Saxon 1 Phonics We use OPGTR, with ETC & Bob books for variety. Handwriting A Reason for Handwriting Art We do a craft that either has to do with our Bible study (A Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos) or that is seasonal. My daughter also had an Art and Artists class at co-op this semester that dealt with Monet, Van Gogh, and Picasso and composers (Mozart, Bach, & Handel). Read-alouds in school are based on upcoming holidays or an area of special interest. We read a chapter book before bed.

We ususally decorate the weekend after Thanksgiving (sometimes two weekends after if we travel for Thanksgiving) and leave them up until around New Year's. I remember when we were growing up that my mom made us wait to decorate until two weeks before Christmas, and that never seemed like enough time for me.

I was so glad to read this post! My daughter has fallen in love with the Liberty doll from a catalog, and I thought that it was a Life of Faith doll, too. I see from googling Vision Forum that it is actually what you had gotten. She would love to be able to have a softer one to sleep with. Thanks for the heads up! I was actually planning on making her some doll dresses. Would any 18" doll pattern work, do you think?

Travel DVD players and books/stories on tape work great for my kids. They also like having magna-doodles to draw on. My mother-in-law also gave me the idea of having a bag of inexpensive goodies to open every couple of hours: small dolls and cars, gum, small pack of crayons and notebook, etc.

We have done an Advent calendar in the past with the figures that velcro to the nativity scene. I wanted to add more this year and ordered the book Jotham's Journey to be read each night after dinner. I received it in the mail this year and skimmed through it to preview and couldn't stop reading! It is divided into a high-interest chapter for each day of advent and includes a devotional. I'm really looking forward to adding this to our Advent traditions. There is a trilogy of these books by Ytreeide, but they have been out of print, with Jotham's Journey coming out this year. It is my understanding that the other two will be back in print in the coming years.

I really like OPGTR. My daughter, 5, has done really great with it up until about a month ago, when we hit Section 4 with Two-Consonant Blends. We continued to plug away for about ten more lessons, but she was becoming very resistant and was only guessing at the words and not sounding them out. For two weeks we stopped OPGTR and did Lessons 1 & 2 in Explode the Code 2, fully intending to go back to OPGTR after a break. After these two weeks, which was a nice reinforcement of what we had recently covered in OPGTR and some variety for my daughter, we started back at the beginning of Section 4 of OPGTR. Her attitude about phonics has improved, and she is reading more quickly. This change-up and review did the trick for us. I appreciate the organization of OPGTR, as well as the deliberate lack of visuals. I am definitely an auditory learner, and dd leans that way as well. In addition to reinforcing our learning styles, it really forces the learner to rely on the phonics rules rather than clues from pictures.

Here are some books that we've really enjoyed this season: Thanksgiving on Plymouth Plantation by Diane Stanley This First Thanksgiving Day: A Counting Story by Laura Krauss Melmed Thanks for Thanksgiving by Julie Markes Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving by Laurie Halse Anderson I also have a post on my blog about the Thanksgiving books we've read: http://cellybbusyathome.blogspot.com/2008/11/great-thanksgiving-read-alouds.html

I graduated with a BA in English and a minor in Secondary Ed. The greatest benefit of an English major was the discipline of critical thinking and organizing my thoughts in all those papers and essays under time constraints. While the literary analysis exposed me to many great writers, which I feel is necessary to an aspiring writer, it does have the paradoxical effect of squelching creativity.

My dd 5 is also going through this change, and I completely agree with how frustrating it is. I will stand at the bottom of the stairs when she wants something from her room but is afraid to get it by herself. I also made Psalm 56:3 (When I am afraid, I will trust in You.) one of our memory verses and remind her of it when she gets scared. It's helped us.

jeans, a camel-colored turtleneck sweater, and my LL Bean comfort moc slides (so comfortable, and it's just gotten cold enough to wear them)

I'm looking for some read-aloud suggestions for my dd, 5. Ones we've liked so far are the Milly-Molly-Mandy stories by Joyce Lancaster Brisley and Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace. What she is really devouring right now, though, are the Magic Treehouse books. Any suggestions for chapter books for this age?

"But, I will warn you that once I got it I couldn't wait to start SOTW and so I started it very gently when my kids were that age. They were both young readers and very ready for SOTW." Mindy, I am so glad you said this! It seems like we started with very similar situations, and I have wondered if I actually get TSoftW in my hot little hands if I would be able to resist starting with it! It's nice to know that it may be a good thing to actually start with it early. I would imagine that we would go through it thoroughly and slowly, too.

I have 3 doing history together now, in our 4th year of SOTW with Biblioplan. What is Biblioplan? Thanks, everyone, for the input; it helps to have someone affirm what you're planning!

Hi, all! My name is Celeste, and I am a former high-school English teacher who has been at home for five years. We are in our first year of homeschooling with a dd in 5K and a ds in 3K. Currently with 5-y-o dd we are using Saxon Math, OPGtTR, and A Reason for Handwriting for our main subjects. I am really looking forward to beginning Story of the World next year and was wondering if it were too soon to buy Vol. I and begin tracking down the supplemental resources. Our local library isn't very large, and I would imagine that I would need to see which books were available in our library, which were available through our county system, and which were available through Inter-library Loan. Also, I was wondering how you handle it if you want to teach only one period of history to multiple children of different ages. I am planning on having ds just listen in next year and plug him in to whatever age we happen to be on when he is in first grade (I guess DD would be in Late Renaissance-Early Modern). Do any of you handle it this way? It seems just too overwhelming to me to try to handle more than one period of history at the same time. Thanks in advance for your input.

We just had a horse-themed birthday party for my dd last weekend. For favors, she and I placed some goodies (horse stickers, horse pencils, small containers of play-doh, etc.) in the center of a bandanna. We pulled the corners up and wrapped a piece of twine around the bandanna. I traced a horseshoe shape on some brown foam, cut out, and wrote out "Happy Trails" with a Sharpie and tied them with the end of the twine. She then handed these out as guests were leaving. DD & I had a lot of fun putting them together.