Saving on our Curriculum

I know it's been awhile since I posted very regularly on here. But I haven't forgotten about it. I've just been working on a few projects. You'll see some bits and pieces of the beginnings of them, if you look around on here, but I wanted to draw your attention to one of them.

At the top of blog, just under the picture, are several tabs. Here you can find my blog store, a link to the Snuggies for the Soul, Inc. blog, etc. Now, if you click on the "Usborne Books" tab it will take you right to my Usborne Bookstore Online.

Most of you know that we are a homeschooling family. Since our kids are so young, we don't have much experience yet, but boy are we learning. We scoured curriculums last year before finally deciding on Sonlight for Kai's kindergarten curriculum. To say that we loved it would be an understatement. I cannot say enough good about Sonlight. And so I almost feel a bit guilty for writing this post, as I feel it is a wonderful, quality product...but let's face it...we're all pinching pennies, so here goes...

One of the greatest assests of Sonlight, was something we also struggled with the most. Sonlight is a literature based curriculum, so there are a TON of books that you go through in a year. My kids LOVE these books. They are wonderful and I love the way their instructor guides showed you exactly how to teach each book so that they weren't just "reading" but really "learning" the information in them. And these are not "text" books, but instead books my kids will read over and over again It is a timeless curriculum, the majority of which I can reuse for each of our kids.

However, since there are so many books, it's not a cheap curriculum. As I said, we purchased the package last year, and while I do think that it was worth what we paid, it is just getting harder and harder to justify such large expenditures.

So, I've managed to find some ways to get the best of both worlds. Many of the books in the Sonlight Curriculum are Usborne books. So I decided to start selling Usborne books. This gives me money back on purchases, and when I make a large purchase I can do so through an online "e-show" and get hostess discounts as well. Also, many of the books are just cheaper directly from Usborne than they are from the curriculum. This is saving us a ton of money already.

For books that aren't Usborne, I got a list of the remaining books in the core packages and can purchase them from half.com for a fraction of the cost. Now we're REALLY saving money. We will still have to purchase Instructor Guides, Math Curriculum, etc. from Sonlight, but the amount of money we will save by getting the majority of our books at a discounted price is just huge.

If you're interested in saving money on homeschool books, or just educational books for your kids (or to give as gifts- summer reading time is fast approaching!) just click on the Usborne Books tab at the top of the page and have fun browsing. While you're there, remember to enter the free drawing. If you have a large book purchase to make, let me know and we'll set up an e-show and get you the best deal possible. If you're interested in making money selling these books, you can contact me on that as well and I'll help you get started.

I'm not someone who's going to breath down your neck trying to sell you stuff, so you probably won't hear much about this new tab in future posts, but I want to share my discoveries in how to get the best deals possible, so I thought I should at least put it out there for those of you who might be interested.

I'll post more later, when the other new features on the blog are up and running. Hope everyone is staying safe in this crazy weather!