Attached is a Graphic that my children and I made when we did the stuffed animal drawing for the Homeschool Blog Awards. Each blogger was assigned an animal to represent them and we wrote out the prizes on slips of paper and drew for the animals. The kids enjoyed taking photos of the animals and watching mom create graphics. We would love it if you would use the graphic in your post when you get your prizes or just telling about what you won. It would make my kids feel special.
Isn’t this a cute little stuffed animal? I have to admit, it did give my husband and I the giggles, thinking that I was represented by a COW!!! LOLOL!!! But it’s adorable! Here are the prizes that I won:
HERE IS WHAT WAS DRAWN FOR YOU:
25$ Amazon Gift Cert
Red River Paper 40$
Patchwork Quilt Tic Tac Toe
20$ in MindBites Lessons
Heart of the Matter Online Homeschool Conference Tickets for 2010
The Old Schoolhouse – 1 Year Magazine Subscription
It was fun to be able to participate, and I’m thrilled to win! We work very hard on our blog, posting almost every day, and it was so nice to feel supported and encouraged. Thank you to everyone who voted for us!
I’ve recently been connecting with friends on LinkedIn. I invite you to send me an invitation if you want to connect with my business.
The HomeScholar Total Transcript Solution Contest!
Hey there, Mr. HomeScholar here (the one on the left)
Since I’m all about fun, I want to invite you to participate in our contest!
It’s simple to enter the contest. Just leave a comment on this blog post, with your answer to this question:
“How will creating an AMAZING transcript help my child achieve their dreams?”
Keep is simple, and keep is short (maybe 100 words or so.)
We will judge the entries after Thanksgiving and will announce the winner the on December 2. Entries are due by Midnight November 30.
And what will you win??
The lucky winner will receive The HomeScholar Total Transcript Solution for FREE! If you are on our newsletter list you will be getting more information about our December 3rd product launch. It’s going to be fun – with lots of prizes!
Please, no “sob stories.” We love you, but we want this to be and UPLIFTING experience for everyone.
Matt here, guest posting. Lee’s feeling a little blue today. Her big plans for Mother’s Day kind of fell apart because of strep throat. Strep throat she contracted while caring for our youngest’s strep throat. Ironic that on Mother’s Day, she has this persistent reminder that she is a great mom!
Anyway, I know she would appreciate some encouragement from other moms. Let her know about your Mother’s Day plans. She’ll have to do a bit of vicarious celebrating with you!
OK, for all you Latin nerds and nerdettes out there….
Here is my son’s Latin professor’s blog: SputaTilica, aka Blogula mea (“my blog”). My son thinks this is extremely cool. It’s all Greek to me (so to speak.)
Bonus points for the first person who can give me a translation of SputaTilica (I think it has something to do with spit….)
When my children were younger, I didn’t do many practical jokes, but I loved making funny food for April Fool’s Day. My favorite was to make vanilla pudding and peaches for breakfast. Spoon the pudding on a plate, and put an upside down canned peach half on the pudding. It looks a LOT like a sunnyside up egg!
There are lots of ideas on FamilyFun.com. My favorite is the sushi made with Rice Krispies!
Those of you who follow along on my blog have seen photos of our “Pemberly Ball.” My son is Presidents of the Pemberly Society – the Jane Austen Club at Seattle Pacific University. He organized a Regency Era Ball this month. Since posting about the ball, many people have written to me asking where the girls got their lovely gowns. Being the mother of boys, I must say that I don’t have a clue! But I do know where to find the answers – the Vice Chair of the Pemberly Society. Sandra gave us some suggestions earlier about where to BUY these gowns, but recently she shared with me how to MAKE the gowns. So if you are itching to do some Home Economics, let me share what Sandra gave me:
The best online resource I’ve found for making dresses is Jessamyn’s Regency Costume Companion at http://www.songsmyth.com/costumerscompanion.html . From there you can find links to everything you would need including patterns and textiles. The best shop in the Puget Sound area to go for supplies is Nancy’s Sewing Basket in Queen Anne. One of the ladies who works there is the official costumer for the Jane Austen Society of Puget Sound, and she not only has some of the best dress patterns for Regency gowns, but she also carries the kind of Indian muslin fabric popular during that era (this is different from the modern fabric known as muslin. It’s much more sheer).
Although don’t know much about gowns and sewing muslin, I do know a LOT about Facebook. When I saw the “Austenbook” version of Facebook, I knew I had to share it with you. If you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice, this is the Cliff’s notes version in Facebook. Hilarious!
Here is on the Pemberly Ball, here they are for your convenience. Just think of this as a unit study of Jane Austen. You have history, literature, home economics (with includes math, of course). Have fun!
If you are considering a “Pemberly Ball” for your own homeschool literary studies, you might be interested in how to find the costumes! Here is the email from my son’s Pemberly Society Vice-President, describing the process.
Have fun!
Hello everyone,
Although costumes for the Pemberley ball are not required, I’m sure some of you would like to come in one anyway and are wondering how to put one together on a student’s budget. As someone who has bought, constructed, and altered several Regency costumes before (five ladies’ gowns, and two gentlemen’s including our illustrious president, to be precise), I’d like to give you some tips for putting together a fabulous look without using up your life savings.
For the ladies, really all you need is the gown. That’s all anyone will see. A basic starting point for that can be found courtesy of the Jane Austen Centre here. If you want to buy your own, my best suggestion to you is to look on E-bay. One particularly reasonable vendor is Wendy’s Doll closet: most dresses run between $40-80. They ship very quickly, usually within a week, and are of excellent quality even though the pictures online are not particularly impressive. The only drawback is that are completely unadorned, but all they really need is a sash, which you don’t even have to sew on, and that only costs a few dollars for ribbon. If you’re more ambitious you can also add beading and trim to suit your fancy. Really, all you have to do is put your hair up in a bun. If you want to leave out your bangs, be sure to part them down the center if you really want to be period-correct.
For you gentlemen, there is a really good guides for MacGuyver-ing a look together from secondhand items. It can be found here. There are also good instructions for tying a cravat here. Do this so that you will not face the scorn of Sir Percy Blakney, the Scarlet Pimpernel, “Odd’s Fish, m’dear! The man can’t even tie his own cravat!” Remember that most tasteful cravats in Jane Austen’s time were white.For those of you looking for a tailcoat and a waistcoat, I got tailcoats for two of my gentlemen friends from an E-bay vendor called Monkeysuits. In both cases I was able to get them used tailcoats in their exact sizes and in excellent condition for only $20, and waistcoats run about $10, and recieved both items within three days of ordering them. For the waistcoats, the higher they button, the more period-correct they will look. One last word about tailcoats: darker colors were more fashionable for that time period, so given the choice between black or gray, the two most common colors you can find, go with the black. For pants, long pants will work in a pinch, but if you want to go for knee breeches, a good trick is to get a pair of women’s capris or petal-pushers as long as they’re relatively plain and not denim. Then you just stick a pair of white knee socks with them, and you’re done.
Well, that’s about it. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
Take care and God bless,
Sandra
Vice-President
The Pemberley Society
The HomeScholar’s FREE mini-course“The 5 Biggest Mistakes Parents Make Homeschooling High School” will help you homeschool high school with confidence!
Drop what you’re doing, and learn! Take a day off! In a homeschool, we can actually spend ALL DAY studying American Government and Current Events.
Tuesday if the inauguration of President-Elect Obama, and there is a lot to learn. You can take the day off from most of your formal schooling. . It’s an historic day, whether you voted for him or not. Research Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy, so that you can evaluate the comparisons as the pundits talk. Listen to the crowd, and discuss the meanings of words they use to describe Obama. Listen to the history of the 20th Century as they discuss Civil Rights. Watch the proceedings – there have been very few Presidents in our history, so this is a very special event.
In the Seattle area, one local school district has required parental permission slips before they allow students to watch the inaugural day proceedings. Homeschools don’t have a bureaucracy. We can learn during life, without getting permission. It doesn’t take an act of congress to be flexible with our homeschool. We can soak it up, and strike while the iron is hot! Seize the day, and allow student to watch history being made. Help them understand what is happening, and explain the views of the commentators. You can explain the historic nature of the event while presenting your own viewpoint.
Flexiblitiy is the key to supporting children when they learn through life events. In September of 2001, we moved into our new house in Seattle. After painting the interior, we were finally ready to start homeschooling in our new home. On our first day of school, before the children woke up, we were hit by the terrorist attacks of 9-11. It was incredibly traumatic, but we were together as a family, experiencing and learning together at home. I dropped all plans of studying Africa in geography, and we started with Afghanistan and the Middle East first. We spend hours talking about what happened, and the comparisons to Pearl Harbor. Remember all those comparisons? It was a great opportunity for the boys to REALLY learn the impact of Pearl Harbor, by learning about 9-11 as it happened.
So seize the day, and soak all the learning up while you can! Regular days are for regular school, but special learning days like this only come around once in a while.
I was invited to present information about homeschooling to the Washington State Republic Caucuses Staff Issues Briefing. Looks especially cool and official when you capitalize every word, doesn’t it? But really, it was just a presentation to a round table of under-staff about education issues, and I was representing homeschoolers. Here is the audio, so you can hear what I said about you:
I was really trying to convey that we don’t want the legislature messing with our homeschool laws. While not perfect, it’s certainly better than what could happen if they opened up our laws and tried to change them. I also wanted to tell them what a great job you are all doing educating your own children, and that colleges love you! I thought that if I mentioned how politically active you are, then they would be less likely to take advantage of homeschoolers.
Anyway, I hope you think I did a good job for the homeschoolers of Washington! I tried very hard to represent everyone’s concerns, while recognizing that you simply can’t make everyone happy all the time.
I now have 33 live articles on homeschooling high school on ezinearticles.com. Working hard to become the number one homeschooling author on this very popular article directory. Check you my articles here:
What do delight directed learning, GPA, and reading lists have in common? They have all been made easier by the brain power of my husband!
Unfortunately, his best ideas came AFTER I stopped homeschooling!
I was working with a client that used only delight-directed learning, and I was struggling to put all the pieces together. My husband watched me struggle for a moment, and then he shared information about “affinity groups” that he had learned at work. He demonstrated a painless way to organize all the pieces so easily even *I* could do it! I’ve described his technique in my ebook in detail.
One woman contacted me this morning, asking about the free transcript templates with my ebook. She wanted to know if they have GPA calculators. Originally I said no, but then my husband read her email over my shoulder and said, “Oh! I can do that!” He quickly and easily added a grade point calculator on some of the transcript templates. I had no idea he could do that! So now some of them have a GPA calculator, and I’m left to wonder why I didn’t have that when I was making my OWN transcript! It would have been so much easier to have an embedded GPA calculator instead of crunching numbers myself!
The reading list story is my favorite. I was helping a client brainstorm ideas about keeping a reading list. When I told my husband about it, he chimed in with “why don’t you just save your library receipts?” LOL! It’s easy enough to say that – but why didn’t I think of it YEARS ago?
Yup. His best ideas came too late for me. I’m trying to make sure to pass his ideas along, though.
About 90 minutes until launch of my e-book!!! I am excited and NERVOUS! Please Pray it all WORKS WELL!!
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