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!

All Aboard!

For those that don't know, we homeschool. My oldest son, Kai, has been an insatiable learner from the beginning. By the time he was 2 I had to find some way to keep him challeged as he was already far past most of the "baby/toddler" development toys/books/etc. He just cannot get enough and asks a million questions about every little detail of every little thing. So I began using a preschool curriculum with him very early on. He LOVED it. He wanted to do it every single day and was learning like crazy. I'm thankful that he loves learning, but it has presented me with a whole set of challenges that I wasn't planning on when I signed up for this mommyhood thing. By May of this year I realized that he had outgrown his preschool curriculum. There was nothing new in it for him anymore. So I tried a few workbooks and things at a Kindergarten level and found that he did most of them no problem. In fact, when we were trying to find curriculum for him we gave him a math placement test and found that he tested at a 1st grade level.
I had no idea what I was going to do with him. Sure, it was great that he was working at a 1st grade level, but....he's 3. He couldn't even start Kindergarten at a school for two more years. So I either had to ignore his pleading for more, or I was going to have to homeschool him. (This was our initial draw to homeschooling. Since beginning, I have found so very many things that I love about it)
We went with Sonlight Kindergarten Cirriculum and I must say, we love it. It is a literature based curriculum and he looooves books. Kaytie, my 2 year old, also loves reading the books with us. The books are excellent and the teacher's guide gives excellent thought provoking questions and ideas to help him learn. However, I have found that he tends to latch on to one specific thing (i.e. sea animals, horses, dinosaurs) and becomes obsessed with that one thing. It's hard to get him as excited about other things (except math, he could work math problems all day and not get tired), he is, after all, 3 years old.
His current obsession (long standing obsession, I might add) is trains. He cannot get enough trains. And so, I decided we would do a unit study on trains. I found I could teach him nearly everything I was going to anyway, including using the curriculum (not lesson plan, but texts,etc.) we had already purchased, and wrap it all around the idea of trains. There are of course technical terms for all of this, but who wants to be technical? :)
Below is a list of things we have done or will be doing in our quest to learn about trains. So for those of you mommas with little ones who love trains, here are a few ideas. Please keep in mind though, that even though he's 3, this is not preschool level. Use the ideas that work for you, tweak them how you like, throw out what won't work. Only you know your little one.

Train math (counting cars, counting items in cars, number recognition- numbers written on engines) adding/subtracting cars, using ordinal numbers (ie, engine: first, car: second, caboose: third), using money to "purchase" train tickets on a train we make out of boxes and decorate (art/imagination), keeping track of how much money we spend running our train, how much money we make from our "passengers" or "cargo" and whether we lost or made money, using shapes to make pictures of trains, finding "missing" cars in a line of numbered cars, learning about distances and speed, reading Sir Isaac Newton and the Laws of Motion (from his curriculum), studying how steam works, studying solids/liquids/gasses, studying energy (potential/kinetic), forces (direct, distant), machines, heat (movement, expansion, measurement), friction, magnets (maglev trains), sound (train whistle), electricity, how trains work (parts of the train, types of trains, statistics on trains), the history of trains, read about trains in Living Long Ago (from his curriculum), study the American Westward Expansion, Victorian times, how trains were used in war, how trains are used now, how trains have been used for good (carrying people and supplies to help others, etc), how trains have been used for bad (movement of prisoners by Hitler, etc), how we are responsible to use the things we have for good or bad, how God feels about these things, locations of railroads, learning about geography by "destinations" on our train, seeing a steam engine in real life, visiting the caboose downtown, visiting the transportation museum, reading The Boxcar Children (from his curriculum), reading/watching The Polar Express, reading/watching Thomas the Tank Engine, studying character qualities from these books/movies, learning reading using a "phonics train" (ie. in the word CAT "C" is the engine, "A" is the car, "T" is the caboose), and much, much more.

We are loving learning about trains! Hopefully you can have some choo choo fun too!