The following books I have for sale from a smoke and pet free home, postage is included in the price and I will combine shipping if you buy more than one.I take paypal. Please email me directly at ancient.historylover at yahoo dot com

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Pathway
Pathway Readers grade 1 set; First Steps, Days go by, More Days go by all 3 readers for $15

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Christian Kids explore series

Christian Kids Explore Chemistry by Robert Ridlon and Elizabeth Ridlon
$17

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CLE Christian Light Education:
CLE Learning to Read Teacher manual $8
CLE Learning to Read picture flash cards(b/w) $6

CLE Learning to Read Lightunit 103 $3
CLE Learning to Read Lightunit 104 $3
CLE Language Arts 1 extra practice sheets $4
CLE Language Arts 1 level 100 Teacher manual $8
CLE On Teaching Writing: A Handbook by Jennifer Crider $6
CLE Home economics 1 Lightunit 6 $3
CLE Home economics 1 Lightunit 7 $3

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R&S Rod and Staff
R&S 1st grade phonics flash cards $9
R&S 2nd grade Our Father’s World Social Studies TM and student book (9 pages of student book written in) set for $6

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Preschool

Peak with Books: An Early Childhood Resource for Balanced Literacy by Marjorie R. Nelsen and Jan Nelsen-Parish $20

Everyday Discoveries: Amazingly Easy Science and Math Using Stuff You Already Have by Sharon MacDonald $8

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History

Greece: Frank Schaffer Publications, middle school $5
The Usborne Book of World History
by Tyler, Jenny $14

Crazy Horse: Young War Chief (Childhood of Famous Americans) by George E. Stanley and Meryl Henderson $4

Woodlands Indians Coloring Book (Dover Coloring Books) by Peter F. Copeland $4

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Science

Read and Understand Science, Grades 2-3
by Evan-Moor $7

A Unit About WEATHER – Grades 3-6 by Bob Deweese and Joellen Moore $5

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Homeschool Helps

The Heart of Homeschooling: Teaching & Living What Really Matters by Christopher J. Klicka $5

Homeschooling at the Speed of Life: Balancing Home, School, And Family in the Real World by Marilyn Rockett $10

So You’re Thinking About Homeschooling: Second Edition: Fifteen Families Show How You Can Do It (Focus on the Family) by Lisa Whelchel $4

Home grown kids: A practical handbook for teaching your children at home by Raymond S Moore $5

The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook by Dorothy Moore and Raymond Moore $5

Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver $5
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Homemaking and Misc

Dinner’s in the Freezer! by Jill Bond $7

Before You Meet Prince Charming by Sarah Mally $7

Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes $7

Summer Bridge Activities grades 2-3 (2 pages done) $6

Centers on the Go, Gr. 4-6 by Linda Schwartz
Centers on the Go contains more than 30 standards-based, creative, and user-friendly learning centers. Each center fits inside a two-pocket folder that can be conveniently stored in a file box for use at any time. The activities allow for independent seatwork while the teacher works with other groups. And-best of all-the activities target key standards in all subject areas and provide motivating review and reinforcement of basic skills in reading, math, science, and social studies $10

MCP Math grade K teacher guide $5

The Premature Baby Book: A Parent’s Guide to Coping and Caring in the First Years by Helen Harrison, Ann Kositsky $6

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MAGAZINES

Old Schoolhouse Magazine
10 back issues, fall 2006-spring 2009, bundle of 10 for $20!

Homeschooling Today
7 back issues march/apr 2007-jan feb 09, bundle of 7 for $14

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DVDs
$5 ea ppd or all 6 for $26

Lilo and Stitch
Leroy and Stitch
Lilo and Stitch 2 stitch has a glitch
Superman Showdowns
Thomas and the Magic railroad
Legally Blonde 2

++++These prices incl shipping, which I will reduce if you order more than one book
please email me directly ancient.historylover at yahoo dot com

Have you ever had a moment when you picked up a little kid and sat him on your arm to carry him, and you realize….something is wrong, something is …missing. Then you realize what it is that is missing, the kid is not wearing any underwear, and since said child is being potty trained, you ask yourself, WHY is he not wearing any underwear? And since you KNOW this child was wearing underwear this morning….you ask yourself, WHERE are those underwear now? And….were they simply abandoned for convenience sake …OR is there a more sinister reason the underwear are missing….?   If you were to find these underwear would they be alone and empty….or …*gulp*…. full?

My little boys are Wall-e crazy so we had a Wall-e birthday party for them this weekend.  We had use of a church activity building and had about 15 kids.

Wall-e trash toss

When the kids came in we had brown paper lunch bags to decorate  and then our first game was the Wall-e trash toss. My talented husband drew Wall-e on posterboard, and we taped him to the side of a box. We cut open his compactor door and the kids threw wadded up balls of newspaper taped with duct tape at him. 

We followed that with a trash tower build. I had saved a big pile of empty containers (juice, cereal boxes, baby wipes, etc) and we divided those into 2 piles. The went against each other 2 at at time to see who could build the tallest trash tower in 30 seconds.

We played a “find the plant” game, we blew up about 25 balloons and they all had slips of paper inside, but only 3 had a plant on their paper, the children  had to bust their balloon and unroll the paper to see if they won by getting a plant.

I set out bags of marshmallows and dry spaghetti and the children made marshmallow robots.

marshmallow robots...and a marshmallow satellite

That was a very popular activity! After the kids ate and had cupcakes we opened presents and I had a couple more games. Spin the Fat Captain was a take on pin the tail on the donkey. I printed a picture of the fat captain  for each child. I cut out the captains and my husband drew a picture of Autoon posterboard. The children were blindfolded, sspun, and then had to stick their captain on Auto’s off switch. The final game was like a human board game. I printed out a picture of the Axiom for a starting place, then made a path on the floor with a few stars and cutouts of the solar system with Earth as the finish line. We had a spinner that the kids spun to determine how many spaces they get to move (1,2, 0,back 1 etc).

The kids had a lot of fun.  We also had the Wall-e movie playing in the background   and our Marbleworks set out for any children who did not want to participate in the games.

If you are having a Wall-e party and use any of my game ideas please leave me a comment and let me know how it went.

My kiddos birthdays are close so this year I decided to make them each a cake on their actual birthday and then do cupcakes for the joint party they are having this month. I am no cake whiz but I do like baking. Anyway my 4 yo wanted Thomas the train. After looking at various overpriced cake pans and complicated  cut up cake instructions I decided to try a simple solution.

B and his Thomas cake

After baking a round cake and decorating with some festive icing I placed a Thomas  train on top. It was actually less expensive then the Thomas cake topper at our local party store and will get plenty of play value when the cake is long gone.

a close up of the cake

 

My 8 year old wanted Wall-e for his cake.  Once again the cake pan seemed pricey for a one time cake and the cut ups were complex. However, the wall-e toy that J got for Christmas is way too big to put on a cake, and all the local stores were sold out of smaller Wall-E’s.  So I needed something different.  I found a blog full of Wall-e coloring pages and printed out a cute one of Wall-e and Eve.  I colored them and then cut out and laminated the characters.

wall-e cake

I iced a rectangle cake with dark blue icing  and used  Sno-caps for stars.  It turned out cute and was super easy and cheaper then buying a cake topper.   However if I make a cake this way again I would not put the characters on the cake until last minute if I was using colored icing. I put the characters on the night before and overnight the icing dyed Eve a little blue!

Happy Birthday!

This Christmas

 

 

 

It has been difficult for me to get in the christmas spirit this year due to the passing of my grandmother on the Friday after Thanksgiving. At last Christmas is less than a week away and I have been busy making preparations.  I love homemade gifts  and herbs and this year I came up with a few ideas to combine the two.

Thrift store tins and delicious tea.

I found  a wonderful assortment of small tins at a local thrift store. The photo only shows a small sample, as I had already given several away before I thought to take a picture.  Most of them were 25 cents each. I sanitized them (rubbing alchohol or vinegar works well) and let them dry and air for several days.

Then I prepared small bags of herbal teas to go inside. Pictured is my favourite, Jasmine Green Tea from the Bulk Herb Store. I am addicted to Bulk Herb store!  Anyway since  I got such a late start I was unable to procure tea innfusers to go with the gift, but if time had allowed I would have included these lovely ones from Darlene’s Tea Port.

In addition  I made up a few lavender dream pillows.

 

First I cut rectangles out of  some lavender fabric that I had on hand. I added an iron-on butterfly to each and then sewed into a small square bag that I filled with dried lavender flowers  from Bulk Herb Store.  I closed the opening. I trimmed some with pink ribbon and others plain. I put ours in between my husband and I’s pillows and the aroma gives us such a peaceful sleep.

 

The boys love to make gifts too. This past year I had saved the containers from Gerber Graduates puffs. Stripped of thier labels these containers made perfect snowmen.

 

 

The boys added the details and then we filled some of them  with candy and some with nuts.  I had a Christmas photo of the boys that I tied on with a ribbon.

 J  wanted to make enough snowmen to pass out to all our nieghbors but we did not have nearly enough containers for that so I suggested we make cookies instead. This afternoon  my two little cooks whipped up several batches of chocolate chip and m&m cookies.

After baking and packaging, the boys gleefully delivered cookies all over the nieghborhood.  

Merry Chistmas

Angie

J, my first grader

My kids have had a really lazy summer with waaaay too much tv (mostly due to B having heart surgery) So I was anxious to get them back in the school routine. I thought we would make it fun and special by having a first day of school party. We did Bible, phonics and math then we had lunch. I had purchased Balloon Time and we blew up 40 helium balloons. The boys thought they were in balloon heaven!

B, my preschooler

I also made a cake that we enjoyed when daddy came home.

I got the recipe from Family Fun. It was surprising easy to make, I used a dark chocolate cake mix and lemon icing. YUM.

 We are looking forward to a great year!

http://www.naturalchild.org/jan_hunt/child_disorder.html

I found this article amusing and it got me thinking about all of the labels you hear about, odd,pdd,add,adhd,dsi,etc.  I do believe that these disorders exist and that some children have them, but come on, almost every kid I meet had been labeled with something. It seems to me that our society is somewhat intolerant of normal childish behavior and  of children in general. One of my favorite authors is Joyce Herzog. She has written a book called Learning in Spite of Labels  that addresses accepting your child for who he/she is and working to their strengths. Of course we should encourage our children to be the best they can be, but spending your energy trying to “fix”you kid is not only futile but painful for parent and child. It is much for freeing (and usually more productive) to enjoy your child at whatever stage they are in.

Another article  I enjoyed was “Learning Disability”: A Rose by Another Name

I discovered that my little boy seemed to have trouble distinguishing between wild and tame animals.  I wanted a project that we could do throughout the year that would help him learn to classify animals,  so my husband and I came up with The Beastiary.  This was my first attempt at notebooking with my children, and I admit I am now hooked.

monkey

 

I started with a 3 ring binder. We would  read about different animals in the National Geographic Guide to Mammals, then we would add that animal to our beastiary. If we were reading a library or other storybook that had an animal in it we would add that animal too.

kangaroo and raccoon

First, J would color the animals picture in a coloring book. I liked to use the Rod and Staff coloring books for this. Then he would attempt to draw the animal himself.  I would have him write the animal’s name on his drawing.  I would then ask him to tell me what he knew about the animal (this is why we would read first). I would  usually would require him to narrate 2 sentences about the animal, and name if it were wild/tame and we would classify them as omnivore or herbivore etc. 

 

Then J would cut out the pictures and words and paste them on a piece of construction paper, which would then be 3 hole punched and placed in the binder.

 

J loved his Beastiary and likes to  read it often.  I am pleased to say he now is well aware of the differences between  wild and tame animals. He can also identify mammmals and can place most animals in thier  proper habitats.

I really enjoyed this first foray into  notebooking with my son. I am currently trying to gather ideas for Native American and Astronomy notebooks, as we will be studying those this year.

I like using file folder games with my boys.  I have gotten some from teacher resource books and the Mailbox magazine . I also have some easy homemade ones.  Anyway,  I keep my file folder games in a binder on my bookshelf.  I either 3 hold punch the game itself, or put it in a page preotector. Here are  a couple ideas for homemade games.

dot pattern numbers

 

When it comes to making file folder games, velcro sticky dots are your friend. I buy them cheap from Oriental Trading Company.

color match

I use inexpensive die cuts to make some of my games. You could also cut simple shapes from construction paper.

shape sort

I made several short vowel phonics games using clip art from Mailbox magazine.

short E game

 

short I

 I made  flash cards out of index cards, you read the word on the card and move your marker to the corresponding picture.

short e game cards

The 4 of us are all book crazy so of course we are overrun with books. I have  10 bookshelves  at present, and could easily fill another one.  We have educational books all through the house, but I gathered up all the ones that are most pertinent to our home school and put them on one shelf.

my school books bookshelf

 

This one contains all of the curriculum, reference books, teacher books,and resources I anticipate using in school. I also keep homeschool magazines and catalogs here. 

I know you book junkies are trying to look through my shelves, so here is a close up.

This shelf is in the corner of my bedroom. I will take the books I will be using on a daily basis and put them on the shelf in the dining room.  I can rotate them as needed, and hopefully this system will stay intact so I can find materials when I need them.

How do you manage your books?