Good web site for educational games.

MR Nussbaum  We played the Grilled Cheese Please game for a while this afternoon.  :-)

On my mind today.

I have various things on my mind today.  My husband and kids are getting rid of things today because our county is doing its annual 'bulky item" garbage pickup this week..  We finally got rid of the couch that I hated in the living room and the living room looks so big now.  (yay!)   I'm also worrying a bit a lot about this choir thing.  My daughter talked me into singing for the Easter concert, and then I got asked to sing this duet and another couple of songs that are way above my skill level.  Consequently, I am stressed about that.  I kind of feel like I should do it because of that whole thing I'm always telling the kids about how they should step outside their comfort zone and should not avoid doing something just because it's going to be difficult, blah, blah, blah.  Oh, how my words have come back to haunt me now.  Should I?  I'll feel bad for the concert attendees and the rest of the choir if I mess it up but I'll also feel  bad if I don't even try.  :-(

Also on my mind is what my oldest son should do.  He's currently on a gap year basically.  He has delayed college to find a job to help with costs and hasn't found a job so he's just helping out around the house (a little) and practicing guitar (a lot) and art (a lot).  Meanwhile, I've been looking around for ways to cut college expenses and have found these that are worth mentioning.

Straighter Line - Freshman year of college for 1000 bucks.

Berea College 

College of the Ozarks

Internships

More internships.

City Vision College - Another work your way through kind of college. 

Clep - College by examination.

Thomas Edison College.  (The tuition here is less expensive than a lot of places and I have heard it rumored that they accept a lot of CLEP courses as well.)

As you can see, my mind has not been a blank today as it sometimes is.  Today, it's just full to bursting with all kinds of stuff.  Makes it hard to concentrate on work.

From my Email Box this morning.

I get some interesting email each morning.  Here are some of today's highlights.

I got this email from Family Education which included this printable.
Spring Staycation Printable

I also got my daily Hunger Site reminder to click.
The Hunger Site

And my Animal Rescue Site reminder to click.
The Animal Rescue Site

I got a notice that I sold one of these shirts on my cafepress store,
Cafepress Gigi shirt

My daily notification from Cozi to take my pills.  :-)
 Cozi

My daily book section from Daily Lit.
 Daily Lit

I got multiple work status updates for my job with pleas to please type more and faster, but I'll spare you those.:-), also multiple travel advertisements and bunches of  notices of sales. 

 I also get some google alerts about homeschooling and gluten free living which provided some interesting links.
Penelope Trunk Homeschooling Frustration
Heart of the Matter, What I like best about homeschooling.
Gluten causes more than just stomach problems.

It's no wonder it takes me so long to get done with my workday.  It takes me a while to get my email!  :-)

Fun Valentines Stuff

I was looking at Amanda Bennett's post on her Unit Studies page on Facebook and she listed this site, Technology Rocks which has all kinds of fun Valentine activities to do with your kids.  I love the heart shaped paragraph and I think I might write some personalized paragraphs to my family with it.  :-)

How cute is that?!

Useful things.

I was looking around for notebooking topics and ideas yesterday and I uncovered a lot of interesting things on Squidoo.  Here's the main search page.    This is a cool page showing all different types of notebooking.   Here's a page on anatomy.   Here's one on chemistry.   Here's a page on geography notebooking.  Right now my kids are notebooking their way through all of the simple machines.  This is going to take another week, probably and then we'll choose something else.  Now I know where to look.

January 2012.

Wow.  It's already the second.  My amazement at how quickly time passes, never goes away.  We are back to school today, much to the dismay of certain kids in the house. I've been looking at Amanda Bennett's site because she's having a sale.    I'd kind of like to kick off the year with a unit study or something fun, but we'll probably just do the usual because it's easier.  We stayed up until midnight and celebrated the New Year with crazy revelry, playing board games.  Then yesterday,  we had a family Christmas party.  It was nice, really low key although I must admit, some of my relatives kind of drive me crazy.  They were on their best behavior for Christmas though.

My New Year's resolution to start walking has not started all that well.  The kids walked yesterday, but I did not.  I felt tired all day from going to bed late and getting up early, burning the candle at both ends and I didn't want to walk.  Today is another day and I'm going to do it today, along with all the in-town errands I planned to do yesterday afternoon and didn't.  :-P

Holiday fun.

Just for fun, Google "Let It Snow", "Christmas Lights", "Hanukkah" or "Santa Claus".  Other fun ones are "Do a Barrel Roll" and "Askew".    Also, just for fun, visit the Snowflake Bentley site and look at close up pictures of real snowflakes like the one above.  These are very cool.   Also, if you didn't get enough video games for Christmas, go to Amazon and download this one for free and while you're there, you can take a look at the 25 days of free Mp3s that they've done for Christmas this year.  I got some that I liked and some I deleted after downloading. 

We're just lazing it up this week, although yesterday my daughter and I suddenly got an overwhelming urge to, as she says, "do something useful" so briefly, we worked on the house and then went back to our busy schedule of board games, video games, eating junk food and watching movies.  When the book I ordered for myself for Christmas comes I'm just going to sit down and read it ... with no guilt for the messy house. 

Curriculum sale.

Westvon publishing is having a great sale, now through Christmas, all titles are 1 dollar.  Here's the link.  I have used their Boyscribe pack before.  It gives the boy something interesting to write while he's practicing handwriting. 

Still busy.

Today is no exception.  I've got 2 errands to run this afternoon after work and so I'm trying very, very hard to get done with work quickly.  I am trying very hard to get into the Christmas spirit and not just feel like celebrating Christmas means more work.  :-/  I went to American Greetings website and discovered that they have free printable photo Christmas cards.  This might be helpful to someone.  Here's the link. We have a black and white laser printer, so I don't think I'll use them myself.  I've also been going to Amazon and downloading the free MP3 Christmas songs, although so far, I nothing's been too exciting there either.  I think maybe it's just me though.  I did go to Walmart last night and buy 2 gifts for the 4H kids whose names we drew.  I've still got 1 to go but he's a 14 year old boy that I barely know and I probably will get him a gift card.  I hate to do gift cards, but sometimes they just are the best thing.  I've been going through and writing all the family get-togethers in my calendar.  Two of them have been pushed to January this year and I'm fine with that.  Spread it out a little.  Give me a little time to breathe.

In.  Out.  In.  Out.

A good notebooking/lapbooking resource.

Dynamic 2 Moms. 

Okay, I chose something.

I  looked all over the place and finally ended up at Cathy Duffy's Homeschool Review web site, where I probably should have gone in the first place.  I found something that is a workbook, that is suitable for independent study, that is reasonably priced and has good reviews.  Here it is on Amazon.  I hope it's good.  I hope it doesn't make my daughter feel frustrated and I hope it helps her learn to write more confidently.  We shall see, I suppose.  I've also run out of French resources on the internet that we can use with our slow, slow, slow internet connection although there are literally millions of things I could use if I had a decent internet connection, so I'm going to get something at the library today for her to work with.  For her guitar, she is tired of the DVD we were using last year so I'm thinking of putting her into lessons.  I have been given a name of a guitar teacher who only charges 5 dollars per half hour instead of 15 as is the norm around here so I am going to work my courage up and call her.  (I don't like calling people on the phone, have I mentioned that?!) 

In other news today is my oldest son's 19th birthday.   I don't know if we'll celebrate much today or wait until the weekend.  He's requested homemade gluten free pizza instead of cake and I'm going to make that for him, but the rest of the family will also bake and eat a cake in his honor.  He doesn't particularly like cake, but we definitely do.  :-)

What to do about writing.

I had a lot of ideas for things to get my daughter to practice writing at the beginning of the year and she's been writing them each day since we started around August 8 and now I'm out of ideas.  I have looked extensively on line for free resources and I'm not finding anything so now I've started looking at buying some kind of textbook or workbook for her.  I have a book for writing research projects, but she doesn't seem to be ready for it.  She needs to write some shorter things first and work her way up to writing a research project in the spring.  Does anyone have anything they recommend?  I think this looks interesting, but I hate to buy books on line when a quick glance inside the book will tell me what I need to know.  You really can't judge a book by it's cover.   If anyone has any ideas for teaching basic essay writing, editing and grammar without overwhelming the reluctant writer, I'd be glad to hear them. 

This Monday and Last Monday.

We're trying to get back into our being at home groove and today we start back to school  and my husband has to go back to work, although I started back to work on Saturday.   The vacation we took last week from Monday to Friday was the longest one we have ever taken.  Most of the time, we only go 1 state away and we only stay 2 nights.  This time we went 3 states away and stayed for 4 nights.  This time last week, I was having my "what-in-the-world-are-are-we-doing?" moment, when I was thinking about sharing a car, hotel rooms and only 1 bathroom with my family.  My oldest son couldn't decide it he wanted to go or not and I was just ready to call the whole thing off, if it wasn't for that whole thing about it being nonrefundable .... anyway, we went.  The first day, we drove to Birmingham, Alabama, directly to the McWane Science Center.  We were able to visit there for free because we have a local science center membership.  We really enjoyed it.  The things I enjoyed most were stepping into a hurricane simulator which simulated 80 mph winds without really realizing what it was - I just stood there and laughed at myself.  Luckily I was able to keep in my contact lenses in my eyes, though I felt that they might fly out!  Then my sons did a pretend weather forecast with a green screen and I laughed at them trying to point at the right place on the map, by looking at the monitor.  This was a great place for playing and pretty much all of the exhibits said "please touch".  That's the best kind of museum.  Everyone in our family likes to play.  :-)

The future of schooling.

According to this article homeschooling in my state is growing at a rate of 24% per year, but still is only 1% of the population.   It seems like I never used to hear about it at all and now I hear about it a lot.   I hope that the trend continues because I think that homeschooling is just so good for kids.  This is backed up by research.  Here's a really good article.   In the future, I think/hope more people, kids and adults, will be taking their classes at home.  With the technology that we currently have, it's possible and there could be so many benefits from this.  Kids would benefit from spending more time with their parents and vice versa.  The big old school buses that use so much gasoline could be parked so it would be good for the environment.  Wouldn't it be funny to be sitting with our great grandchildren and telling them that kids used to go to big old buildings away from their families every day and have the great grandchildren think this was so strange.  :-)

Google Alerts.

I like to use google alerts to keep up with things I am interested in.  I get an alert every day for homeschooling and one for gluten.  That way, I get to read what's been published about these 2 topics each day on the internet.  Some of it is not worth reading, but I do see a lot of good gluten free recipes, new products and coupon offers.  Sometimes I enjoy reading the articles about homeschooling.  Unfortunately, it seems that most of them don't portray homeschooling in a very positive light or they really don't understand it at all, but still, it's good to be informed and every now and then, you get a really good article or two.  I also have a google alert for notebooking, but so far, I haven't gotten as much out of that one.  If you want to sign up to receive these in your email, visit this link.