K is for Kindle, and Other Cheap Ways to Get Books!

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As you know, if you've read my blog at all, our homeschool approach is extremely eclectic. We don't follow any specific approach. One thing that we do a lot of, is use "real" books (as opposed to textbooks). Charlotte Mason would call them Living Books.

So far, since this school year started (July), we have used approximately 200 different "resources" (books, ebooks, videos, audios).  Some of those are review products, and I often don't bother to record the books I read in circle time since the older girls aren't there, and I don't have to report on the little kids yet (our state requires reporting starting at age 8, and one requirement is a list of all resources used).  Still, that's a LOT of books, and such if I had to actually buy them all!

So, I thought today I'd share how I go about finding the books we need without spending a fortune:

MY OWN BOOKSHELVES
The first thing I do is make sure I don't already own the book. Someday I hope to have a searchable list of all books that I own, and their location, on my computer, for now, I *do* have (most of) my books sorted into categories on our shelves, so I just check the shelf.

LIBRARY
When I need a book, the first place I check is the library. I can go to our county library's website and search all books in the county, and have it sent to our local branch for me to pick up. I'm only allowed to reserve 10 books at one time, so, while otherwise, I wouldn't mess with separate library cards for the kids, since I'm always with them, Lexie and Ashlyn both have their own cards. That lets me reserve up to 30 books at a time (there's no limit on how many I can have checked out, but I can only have 10 per card on reserve at any one time). I hole punched all 3 cards and have them all on a key chain clipped to the handle of our library bag.

KINDLE/AMAZON
I have over 300 books saved to my Amazon Kindle account, most of them, I've been able to get free by keeping an eye on blogs that list current amazon freebies. So I check my Kindle account, and also check on Amazon, in case the book is currently free on Kindle. Older, public domain books are usually available free.  While I'm checking, if it's not free, I'll also make note of what the price for the Kindle version, as well as the physical book, both new and used.

PROJECT GUTENBERG
If it's not free on Kindle, and it might be public domain (old enough to no longer paying royalties to the author), I check Project Gutenberg, free e-books. I download the .mobi (Kindle) version or the .pdf (Adobe) version, depending on how I plan to use it.

LIBRIVOX
If it's a book I'm going to use as a read aloud, and might be old enough to be public domain, I also check LibriVox.  This is an awesome resource that saves my voice! Volunteers read and record public domain books to be downloaded free! I download them to my phone and we can listen to them in the car!

HALF.COM
Once I've exhausted my free resources, I start looking at where I can purchase it inexpensively. I already have an idea of price from Kindle/Amazon, but, I also check Half.Com.  This is ebay's used book site. If the price for the used book is the same on amazon and half.com I'll usually choose half.com because they let you combine shipping if you purchase multiple books from the same seller. I check the sellers that have TONS of books in inventory, usually sellers of ex-library books. I keep a running "wish list" in half.com that are books I want, but don't need immediately. So when I DO need a book immediately, I also check that seller for the books on my wishlist. Combining shipping can drop the price of a book, shipped from around $5 to around $3.

Final Analysis
Even if a book is available from the library, if I'm going to use it regularly all year, I'll at least check to see if I can get it inexpensively. Sometimes buying the book new from amazon, and getting free shipping by combining items to get Super Saver shipping can be cheaper than buying used. Sometimes used is cheaper than Kindle . . . it's important to check amazon, kindle, and half.com for any book before buying.   If the price is essentially the same, consider other things . . . If I'm going to be travelling while we read the book, having it on Kindle means I don't have to pack another book, if I'm buying the book new, from Amazon, I might be able to get the Kindle version free, best of both worlds!  My girls prefer to read "real books" rather than ebooks, so if they'll be reading it independently, if the price is the same, I'll go with the physical book.  I can re-sell physical books, but they take up space on my, already overflowing, bookshelves unless/until I do. I can also loan them to friends . . . lots of things to consider, it's different for each book.

But I don't have a Kindle!
I don't! Kindle has free apps for PC, iPad, iPhone, iTouch, and Android. I have the Kindle app on my laptop, phone (Android) and iPad. I also have it on both of my daughters' iTouches. This has worked WONDERFULLY for us!

And that's I keep book costs down for our homeschool!

This post is part of Blogging through the Alphabet at Ben and Me.

Weekly Wrap-Up - December 15

This past week could pretty much be summed up as . . . SNOW! It snowed on Sunday, it snowed MORE on Tuesday, and then it stayed below freezing all week, so the snow STAYED (that's soo not the norm here. Snow at ALL before Christmas is pretty rare, snow that sticks around is ALWAYS rare) . . . and THEN, it snowed AGAIN all afternoon on Saturday!!!!

Much to the girls' frustration, because it stayed well below freezing, the snow was super powdery, and not good for much.

That said, they did spend a good part of Tuesday outside (before the temps dropped to bitterly cold), and built a snow fort, that they continued to play with the rest of the week.

Other than snow . . .

Monday evening, our friend, Denise treated Lexie and Ashlyn to a WONDERFUL evening at Longwood Gardens. They had a BLAST!! Got home chattering a mile a minute about how fun it was, and continue to talk about it. It was definitely the highlight of the week for them!

Otherwise, not a lot going on. We're staying busy with school and such. We're really enjoying our Advent Tea each afternoon. So much, that we've decided to continue having afternoon tea after Christmas. It's a great way to slow down, reconnect, and have some mid-afternoon read aloud time!

During Hanukkah, one of the things the "fairies" did this year was to bring some gel snowflakes for the girls to put on the windows. Ashlyn put half on one side of our big front window and Little Bit put the other half on the other side. She (Little Bit) has proceeded to rearrange those silly snowflakes every day! I never thought a silly $1 pack of gel snowflakes would entertain her for SOO long, but she loves them!

Sabbath School this week included having the kids act out the Christmas story. I was busy reading the story, but another mom took pictures, so I'll post them when I get copies from her, but it was ADORABLE! The curriculum we use tends to assume a large class, so I often have to be creative to adapt it to work when I can only count on 2 kids (Little Bit and J), though sometimes we have 2-3 others. This week's program was no exception. . . As usual, my adaptation means roping my "helpers" (otherwise known as Lexie and Ashlyn) into filling in for the kids we don't have. To start out, I gave Little Bit and J the choice of characters (Mary, Joseph, or 2 shepherds).  They chose to be the shepherds, so Lexie and Ashlyn got to be Joseph and Mary. Then I told the little ones they needed to ALSO be the wisemen. They did GREAT!

Then we headed home and hibernated through the afternoon/evening snow storm :)

Recipe: Snow Ice Cream

 This is what we woke up to this morning! The girls were THRILLED, and headed right outside. The snow was still coming down hard, so 30 seconds later, they were back, "can we put a bowl out for snow ice cream?"

I gave them a bowl, and told them to set it up on the cooler that lives on our back porch, so that it wasn't right down on the cats' level.

The girls spend ALL morning outside playing, and finally came in when they were starving to death (or so they said LOL).  by then the bowl was about half full of snow, so I told them to go find a place of undisturbed snow and scoop a little off the top, not getting down to the dirt and stuff, to get the bowl closer to full.

They did, and while they peeled off all their wet snow clothes, I made snow ice cream.

You need:
A big bowl of clean snow
milk
sugar (I use raw sugar, so it adds flavor too)
vanilla extract (you could probably leave it out, when using raw sugar)

sprinkle sugar and a little vanilla extract, if using, over the snow, then add a little milk, and start stirring. Keep adding milk, a dash at a time, until it all kind of sticks together. Taste, and add more sugar or vanilla if needed.

Eat it right away, because otherwise it melts into sweet, watery milk LOL.



I'm linking up to Try a New Recipe Tuesday

Weekly Wrap-Up - December 9

What a busy week! Sunday we drove home from our Thanksgiving trip.  It was still Hanukkah, and Sunday marked the beginning of Advent as well. AND, I typically do my Christmas decorating on Thanksgiving weekend, so I was "behind" on that too. 

Monday was a school day. For the most part we did our normal school stuff, but I'd seen the cute idea to do "Cranberry Science" near Thanksgiving, and since we hadn't had a chance to do it BEFORE Thanksgiving, AND the big girls were planning to string the cranberries, with popcorn, for the tree that afternoon, Monday was our day for Cranberry Science.  We watched the "Dirty Jobs" episode about Cranberry farming (it's on Netflix), and then we put a bag of cranberries in a baking dish and the kids "flooded the field" and then "harvested" the cranberries by scooping them out into a  bowl. The big girls did it enough to not feel left out, and then the 3 littles happily spent the rest of school time doing it over and over and over again :) 

Monday afternoon was Christmas decorating time. Lexie and Ashlyn, with a little help from Lina, strung the cranberries and popcorn, and then declared that our team needed to have a "theme" this year. Since they'd already decided on the cranberries and popcorn (it was suggested in Christmas Comes to America and they'd been impatiently waiting for it to REALLY be Christmas time so they could try it), they went with that, and sorted through all our ornaments to find the red & white ones. It turned out really nice :) They also put paper snowflakes all over our big front windows. My tree skirt is a piece of white twill that I have the girls all trace their handprints, and write their names/dates each year. To help with their theme this year, I put a red fleece blanket under it. The white basket next to the tree holds our toy nativity sets and on the other side is a big basket of throw blankets (it always lives in our living room, but had to move to that location to work with the tree. In front of it is a red & green hatbox with all our Christmas kids' books in it. 

We had more sensory fun for school on Wednesday. I'd seen an idea on Pinterest to mix baking soda and shaving cream to make "snow", so we tried it. It worked pretty well, but was messier than I anticipated, though I still don't think it would have to be. Little Bit and E tend to "rev each other up", so they're wilder and tend to make bigger messes when they're together.  On the plus side, I had some stains on my table from other art projects (paint, glue, marker, etc), that I figured would wear off in time or I'd attack with a magic eraser someday. The baking soda/shaving cream mixture, with a damp cloth, and slight scrubbing, cleaned all but the wax drips from the candle (my finger nail did that just fine) beautifully, so now my table's white again :) 

When they were done with it, I set the pans of it in the bathtub and have been using it to clean the bathtub, shower, bathroom sink, my glass-top stove, and kitchen sink :)

Wednesday night was the last night of Hanukkah. That's the night for the girls to get their "big gift" for Hanukkah. This year, the big girls had gotten theirs early, when we got them a sewing machine while we were reviewing a sewing course. I'd struggled alot with what to do for Little Bit. I knew, if I asked her, she'd say she wanted another big LaLaLoopsy doll, but she doesn't really play with the ones she has. I'd seen 2 or 3 really cute hand-made ideas that she'd LOVE, but with Hanukkah so early, and us travelling right before it, I just didn't have the time, especially given that she doesn't nap anymore, to make something by hand. . . so I was still struggling, when, a week or so before we left to travel for Thanksgiving, I stopped at Goodwill during a rare shopping trip without any of the kids. I was looking for something else, that I didn't find, but I DID find a fold-up play kitchen! She had seen a big plastic play kitchen in a magazine advertisement and said "oh, mommy, look at that!!!" And she HAS been playing with the play food stuff alot lately. So when, I found a play kitchen (stove/oven and sink) that fold down completely flat, AND that I could get for $3. I was thrilled!! And when she got it, she was thrilled too! And has been having a blast with it! 

Thursday was my husband's office Christmas party. The food was delicious, the big girls had fun playing the gift exchange game (it runs too late at night, and Little Bit's too young to understand/enjoy a game where people can take your present away and you can get stuck with something you don't want, so when the game started, she and I came home). The big girls each managed to walk away with a box of chocolates, so they were happy LOL.  Little Bit thought the plastic glasses they passed out to the kids were fun though.

We finished up our week by celebrating our 16th anniversary :) My parents came up on Sabbath afternoon and picked up the girls. They took them to a hotel with an indoor pool for a fun evening of swimming, with more swimming the next morning before taking them out for lunch and bringing them home.

Rodney and I enjoyed a nice dinner out and some quiet time alone :) 

And one final picture for this week:  

 Ashlyn's cat, Moccasin has decided that the bathroom shelf right above the heat vent is HIS shelf. He randomly rearranges the towels that are there, or pushes them off altogether, to get it just the way he likes it LOL. I think I'm just going to give up and surrender that whole shelf to him for the winter LOL.

I is for Independent Learning

One of the questions that all homeschool parents get asked at some point, and most of us hear it semi-regularly, is some (usually more polite) variation of "what makes you think you're smart enough to teach your kids instead of letting professionals do it?" My standard answer has always been that one of the things I value most from my own education was the teacher who, for a variety of reasons, wasn't doing much actual "teaching". It forced me to learn to read the directions, and look things up, and figure it out on my own, and that ability served me extremely well throughout the rest of my education, and in "real life". Therefore, it's my job, as a homeschool parent, to teach my children how to figure things out for themselves, not to have all the answers ready to hand to them.  In other words, I don't have to be smarter, or as a smart as, than my children, in order to teach them, we learn together and they learn how to be independent learners.

That was, of course, all "theory" when my children were preschoolers, and early elementary age. Children that age are still figuring out the basics of reading and writing and such, and while they are also amazing little sponges, their reasoning and logic skills aren't developed enough to be truly independent learners.

This past year, it's begun to hit me that NOW is when I need to be steering Lexie and Ashlyn toward that independent learning stuff I've always advocated in theory. . . and I'm finding it abit harder than I'd anticipated. One part of it is easy. I am really good at coming alongside my children, and learning WITH them. It's a no brainer that I can't answer all their questions, and they're REALLY GOOD at asking questions, so they've seen me model MANY MANY times, the idea of looking something up online, or checking the library for a book on a topic, and such. The piece that I'm now struggling with is that bit about stepping back and letting them do it all INDEPENDENTLY. Not only because they balk at it, but because I LIKE learning with them. I don't want to "miss out" on what they're learning.

Additionally, Ashlyn is very strongly an auditory learner. She doesn't process things nearly as well when she reads them herself as she does when I read to her, so we've done lots of read alouds, and I'm sure we always will do some. . . BUT . . . while it's important to honor each child's learning style, and help them learn to work WITH their learning styles, it can also be important to help them learn how to step outside that comfort box, because there are certainly times in life when we have to work with others even when it means not doing things the way that works best for us.

So I guess this post is a challenge to myself as much as to my readers. Our children are growing up so fast, it's important to continually adapt and work with them so that they "grow" in wisdom and knowledge, not just physically.

This is one of my goals for the upcoming new year

• to gently push at those comfort levels abit and encourage more independence
• to not be so fast to answer their questions, or even point them toward the answers, but rather to sit back and see how they do on their own
• to "let go" of my own desire to learn along with them, and instead, ask them to "teach me" after they've learned things

I suspect this will all meet with some resistance, but I think it will be a good learning experience for all 3 of us.

I'm linking up to Ben and Me, Blogging through the Alphabet.

Our Advent Wreath

Jenn at Simblissity, is blogging about Advent this year, and has a link-up for pictures of Advent Wreaths, so I thought I'd join in.

The first year we did an Advent wreath, I got a simple metal ring, like this at a craft store and we added greenery and ribbons to it. Then at some point I found our current one at Goodwill. I LOVE it! And while some years we will, no doubt, go the greenery and ribbon route again, a huge advantage of this one is it can be easily moved around, now that we don't have a stationary table (our house is small, and there isn't a good place for a dining room table, even a small one, without impeding "traffic flow", so we have a drop-leaf table that can fold down to a "sideboard" when not in use, it's working well for us, but means that the table gets slid around depending on how big we need it).

This year we are reading Tabitha's Travels for Advent. We've read Jotham's Journey and Bartholomew's Passage in the past. There are some areas in all the books where western ideas take away from the accuracy, but overall we enjoy the books.

Previously, we've used our Advent reading for school time Bible in the morning, but this year, I didn't want to take a whole month off from Bible Road Trip, and couldn't figure out a way to make a daily continued story work when our neighbor, E, joins us for school 4 days a week. 

So, we decided this year, to have an afternoon tea party each day and light our Advent candle and read our story then. Little Bit isn't very into the story yet, but she's liking having tea and some type of "treat" each day. Once her tea and treat is done, she usually goes off to play while I finish reading to the big girls. They are thrilled with it all, it's even helping to motivate them to help keep things tidier around here, since we can't very well have a tea party if we can't "find" the table, LOL.

Don't forget to stop by Jenn's blog to see everyone else's Advent wreaths!

Weekly Wrap Up - Dec 1

Whew! What a BUSY and FUN week we had!!!

Sunday we were still at my parents' house, so the girls and I headed over to my friend Vicki's house for the afternoon. She has 3 kids too, and the world's most tolerant dog. All the kids had a blast! They even got to have a tea party :) And Vicki and I could never run out of stuff to talk about, we've been trying since we were 13 :) (and that's just when we finally got to live near each other, our parents were friends before we were born, we have a picture of us together when she was a baby and I was 1, when I say lifelong friends, I mean it!).  As we were driving home from Vicki's, the girls all agreed that "we should visit them every week". I think that 3 hr drive might be a bit of a deterrent but I sure wish we could! Fun times!!! :)

We got back to Mama and Papa's in time for the big girls to help Mama make German Cheese Dumplings, my great grandmother's recipe, but it's kind of like this, only there's also bread crumbs, browned in butter, in the filling, and after they're boiled, they're covered with an onion, sour cream gravy (and probably other differences too, I've never actually made them).  The girls didn't remember having them (it's been a couple years) but LOVED them, so now I figured THEY can learn to make them and it will just skip my generation :)



Monday we decided to go tour the book publishing company where Mama and Papa worked (technically they're retired, but they still go in and help out sometimes). The girls didn't remember touring the actual PRINTING part of it, so we went and did that again. We use the ends of rolls of paper for our art paper so they thought it was pretty cool to see how big those rolls are to start with :)

While we were there, they got to try out Mark's Segway, which they thought was great fun! Mark said they did pretty well at figuring it out too. They were just barely heavy enough for it, so sometimes it didn't register when they leaned, but overall they did great for a first try. Lexie said the easiest thing was to go in circles LOL.

Monday evening Daddy came down to Mama and Papa's house and Tuesday morning we headed out for Thanksgiving. Tuesday was a short drive (and despite predictions of an inch or more of ice, all we got was rain).  We drove to Rodney's sister's house, and spent the afternoon with her, then had supper with some friends from when we were in college.

Wednesday morning we headed out for the longer drive to TN. It snowed off and on pretty much the entire drive, but never stuck to the roads and traffic wasn't bad, so all in all, a good trip.  We made good time (and had left as early as possible to get as far south as possible before the snow hit (rumor has it it was in the 60s in Boston, I told Rodney next year we should go NORTH, it's warmer! LOL).

The rest of the week, we spent with Rodney's cousin and other relatives. I don't think I'd seen Rodney's cousin, Terry since our wedding, and hadn't met his wife or daughter (the big girls had, when they traveled to Indiana with Grandmom and Aunt Lynette when Little Bit was a baby). And I hadn't seen the aunts and uncles in forever either. We had a great time! Terry's a pilot, so Thursday morning we headed over to the airport. He showed the girls the "little" plane, and then took all 5 of us up in the bigger one. It only seats 6, including the pilot, so Lexie got to be co-pilot.

She and Ashlyn were SOOOO excited to get to fly, they made sure EVERYONE knew that they had been terribly deprived and hadn't gotten to fly in any kind of plane since they were 18 mo old and they weren't old enough to remember that so it DID NOT COUNT! And life is just SOOO unfair LOL. . .

Little Bit was more nervous about it all, and even MORE nervous when she found out that she would be sitting next to Ashlyn instead of with me. So the pre-take-off picture I snapped shows abit of terror LOL. Once were were flying and she realized it wasn't scary, she loved it too.

It was a beautiful clear day so we could see forever from up in the sky, it was amazing!!

Then we headed back to the house for more wonderful food and visiting with family.

Friday we relaxed and hung out. Terry was pulling some fence posts, so taught the big girls how to drive their golf cart, so they could haul the fence posts back to the shed after he, Rodney, and Uncle Gary pulled them. The girls LOVED that! Lexie, Ashlyn, their cousin, and Diamond the dog, spent ALL day driving the golf cart around :)  Now they're lobbying for us and/or Papa to get a golf cart too LOL.

Little Bit quickly declared the golf cart too scary and too bumpy (can't say as I blame her, with her sisters driving LOL), so she spent the day in the house with Lisa and I.  All the girls joined us to go pick up a Christmas tree and once we got lights on it, all the girls came in to help decorate it.

We all had a great time and were sooo sad to say goodbye to head back home yesterday. We left amid many invitations to come back anytime and whenever Lisa or Terry would say "you all have to come back", their daughter, M would say "for Christmas!" :)

In the midst of all our family Thanksgiving fun, we couldn't forget about Hanukkah. The first year we celebrated Hanukkah, to add to the fun, some Hanukkah fairies came to visit, and we've continued that tradition (they sometimes show up during other Biblical holidays as well). This year, they appeared on Wednesday morning, and brought a tiny travel menorah so we would have it, ready to use Wednesday night. That worked well, because even though we didn't get back to the hotel each night until bedtime, the mini menorah candles (birthday candles) burned out quickly enough that we could light it, and let them burn out while we finished up stories. Each night the girls also got gifts for Hanukkah. Thursday evening they theoretically got "dreidels and gelt" but since it seems repetitive to get a dreidel every year, I decided to modify things slightly and just have that night's gift include a game or games. This year they got some games I picked up while we were in Williamsburg. Interestingly, one of them, Teetotum is almost identical to Dreidel only with numbers instead of Hebrew letters. So the girls had fun playing that with their chocolate coins (gelt).

It's been abit challenging to come up with fairy ideas that worked in a hotel room, but I managed. My favorite, which worked really well in the hotel room, was the bubble bath!  Friday night, the girls' Hanukkah gift was bubble bath and bath scrub (the first Hanukkah was about cleansing the temple, our bodies are the temple of the Ruach Hakodesh (Holy Spirit), so one night's gifts are things for cleaning our bodies. Since Friday night is "bath night" that was the logical night for that gift), so when they woke up Sabbath morning they discovered the fairies had "borrowed" their new bath stuff and were taking a "bubble bath" in the ice bucket. Apparently, when fairy dust hits bubble bath it turns into miniature marshmallows :) Though Little Bit insisted that "that is NOT possible!" (apparently all the OTHER stuff the fairies do is perfectly logical?).  It was very nice of Target to have little "rubber ducky" lip gloss things in their dollar section right now, the ducky was just the right size for the fairies' bath, and the girls were "needing" some new lip balm with the dry winter weather anyway :)

I didn't get a picture, but another night the fairies left gel "snowflakes" on the hotel mirror, that we could take back off and take home with us, so we can use them to decorate at home too :)

Sabbath we drove to Mama and Papa's house and today we're heading on home.

Busy, BUSY week, but so much fun time with friends and family!