Junior Great Books Table of Contents and Overlap in Stories

We discovered Junior Great Books when my daughter Callie took a homeschool co-op course around 5th grade. Now I'm in love with them and try to buy up all of them. Some of them we consume and are not in love with, so we pass them on. Some we save and I hope to teach my own Junior Great Books class at the co-op someday :-) Here you can find the Table of Contents for the books we have read:

Series 2, First Semester (1992) (selling in upcoming homeschool used book sale)

The Happy Lion by Louise Fatio

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter

How the Camel Got His Hump by Rudyard Kipling

Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest, and Piglet Has a Bath by A.A. Milne

Arap Sang and the Cranes (African folktale as told by Humphrey Harman)

Blue Moose by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

Current Read-Alouds and Independent Reading Winter 2021

Welcome to the Winter 2021 edition of Current Read-Alouds. If you're not familiar with Read-Aloud Revival or Pam Barnhill (morning basket) or Brave Writer, simply click on the links 😉 I also read to the kids from our Afternoon Basket (because we can't all get going early enough to call it a Morning Basket 😂), which currently includes Story of the World Volume 1, The Gift of the Magi (oh, the vocab words!), and Reading 7 for Young Catholics, among a few other things, like this one:

Scroll down to find out who is hearing which book!

Time4Learning $12 for up to FIVE KIDS in Same Family Through April 30, 2016

YES YES YES! Okay, so we already made the decision to switch over to Time4Learning instead of virtual school for 2016/2017 and supplement with some Teaching Textbooks for Math.

Anyway, it would be $90 for all 5 of my kids per month. But they give a discount for big families and it was going to be $70 per month, which I was cool with.

Then I logged in today to find some things out just for fun and saw that if you sign up by April 30, your FIRST MONTH IS ONLY $12 for up to five kids!

BAM! SOLD! Why not sign up now and get it going? I can pause the membership over the summer if we want to (I've heard some kids still dig doing it in the summer) and start back up end of August or early September.

I'll be back to let you know how it goes for our family. We only really have two computers and one is mine for work purposes most of the time, so I'm going to have to relinquish it for hours at a time ... which is no big deal because I wasn't using it when homeschooling usually anyway. So my plan is to get two kids going at a time on Time4Learning while the others play or read. Then the next two can go, then the final kiddo. Maybe that "final kiddo" will be Callie, who loves to homeschool at night anyway. Probably do half hour increments or so many lessons or whatever but we'll see how it works best for our family!

Here are some screenshots from the site:

Here's my referral code!

Daily Homeschool Checklist Sheet Second/Third Grade

So I finally have my brain back. Well, the best it can come back after 5 kids sucked my brain cells up. That's a sacrifice I was willing to make, though. Moving on ...

My point here is that I WANT SO BADLY TO GET ORGANIZED in my homeschooling yet I am somehow a Type A Free Spirit. Yep, I am both organized/structured and also a rebellious hippie. I love my planner so I can see what we have done, even though my state doesn't require me to even keep records.

And I love when we take Forget Homeschooling days. There is a tad bit of guilt but as the years go on and I see that my kids are indeed learning and, most importantly, learning how to be kind individuals, it gets easier to take a day off to go to the zoo (nature/science!) or to Kaleidoscope (art there plus history at the Hallmark Visitor's Center!). I tell people we half homeschool/half unschool.

It's also difficult to get anything done in the midst of remodeling and not being able to find half the books, but that is another post!

So here's the Google docs link of Callie's checklist so you can see how I have set it up. She pretty much asked for this since she knows we are starting a new school year and she wants to keep all her stuff straight. I put it in a page protector so she can use a dry erase marker to cross things off. Maybe we'll do something like by Friday she has 5 checks by some stuff and only 2 checks by the history and science. Or maybe she'll want to cross it off each day and I'll log stuff in the planner.

Then there comes that day that I want to chuck the planner across the room and just play with my kids and read to them and have fun with them. It's all in the balance and moderation. I can be a Free Spirited Fun Homeschooling Mom and a Let's Get Some Stuff Done For Real Today Homeschooling Mom, too!

Review: Education.com

I found Education.com when I was Googling math worksheet helps. I get sick of buying workbooks that are full of fluff and that sit on my shelves. And I also get sick of getting workbooks for my older kids that are full of pages and pages of the same darn thing. I mean, once they get it, the get it, you know?! (interabang!)

So since I'm now trying to make sure my kids are learning much of what they are "supposed" to know (as well as tossing in puh-lenty of play and free and reading time!), I don't have to worry about having every stinking resource imaginable on my shelves. I'm not that homeschooling mom with 10,000+ books on her shelves. We have plenty for the kids to read and learn from, then we supplement with the library!

Okay, so I found Education.com and signed up because I get 10 free worksheets per month. Soon I found that wasn't going to be enough. I could either sign up for $3.99/month and pay for a year all at once or I could sign up for 1 month at a time at $4.99 (and they gave me a free month via email, probably because I was waffling). So as of the other day I'm sitting on a free month then only pay $4.99 per month to print all the worksheets I want.

The more expensive monthly plan only allows me a limited number of entire mini-workbooks, but that's okay because there are so many worksheets and slideshows and activity ideas that I think I'm all set.

What I'm saying, people, is that when I need to teach a kid about symmetry, I print some fun-looking worksheets, we cover it til the kid gets it, then we are done. Maybe we come back to it in a year to make sure it stuck. Oh, and the stuff on their site goes all the way through high school, from preschool!

So it is possible to homeschool for CHEAP! (of course I'll be spending a fortune on printer ink!)