Montessorimom just sent a note linking to her toddler scope and sequence lesson plans. Many of the skills are linked to a Flickr page(s) that demonstrate visually how the lesson is done. What is especially nice is that the Flickr pages are from varied sources so you get a glimpse of Montessori done in several different places. A picture is worth a thousand words! If you are a Montessori aficionado don’t miss these!  Thanks Irene for putting this together!

Willa posted a link to Simply Charlotte Mason’s article Charlotte’s Wisdom at Christmas. Truly sage advice!  In our cyber age where dozens of books, holiday recipes, menus, and decorating tips are available at the touch of the keyboard you can easily forget that any ONE choice from the above categories suffice for making memories. We tend to pile on more and more expectations of ourselves and our holidays til there is "a shade of anxiety on the mother’s face" as Charlotte says. 

I have been a holiday slacker in many ways.  Worse still because I feel so little remorse over that fact. I have a baby. I love my husband. We are all healthy as of today. We really don’t need more. And I am too tired to drum up much more. Articles like these from days gone by remind me that THIS is normal. Holiday excess is not. We have morphed this into something it likely never should have been.

So, her advice in a nutshell:

Read one Christmas book as a family.   One, not twenty unless you were so inclined, though you could easily find as many to burden yourself with. For us that is The 24 Days of Christmas by Madeleine L’Engle.  We will be reading it AFTER Christmas since it has taken me that long to remember the title (thank you Lissa!!) and track it down but that’s ok. It meant so much to me when I first read it that it is worth the wait.

Rest.  So as not to get that ‘shade of anxiety’ I am guessing. Plus passing out in the mashed potatoes is inappropriate. ; )

Watch over habits.  This has been on my heart as we have been relaxing school since Tess was born. It is easy to relax about a whole lot of things that need attention though. We will work on maintaining the routine  and the good habits even if we do break from academics. 

That’s it!  No clever ideas for napkin folding or dessert. Just read and rest.  I am remembering why I love Charlotte Mason.

No for real – a story about sap ; )   Today’s Big Woods chapter was about Maple Sugaring.  We found these two sites that give a children’s version of how it is done today.  We will be making a notebook page and a Venn diagram comparing the process as it was a hundred years ago to now. Its snowing today here so I am hoping we can drop some syrup outside for snow candy. Or that those of us who can walk that far can lol!

This guide goes along with this chapter also. What I love about these bks is that almost any of the chapters could stand alone as a small study if you didn’t want to commit to a whole bk study.

Misc sites:

maple facts

maple syrup factory

Ck out the Christmas lapbook Dani made for her son Quinn – CA-ute! 

My friend Kristin just brought my attention to the Homeschool Estore freebie this week – Christmas notebook pages with beautiful clip art from Amanda Bennett. This link will obviously only be good for a short time. Don’t miss it!

We made a full St Nicholas lapbook two years ago so this year we decided not to repeat it but to add our St Nick icons etc to a new book about the symbols and feasts of the Advent/Christmas season.  I found this unit at Easy Fun School. (Gotta love anything with a name like that ; ))  It is a BIG document – about 49 pages – though much of that is dedicated to cookie recipes that go with the symbols. My biggest gripe is that it is a pdf file and I can never just click on the plethora of links they include.

Hands of a Child has a Symbols of Christmas lapbook kit as well. You can download a sample and get quite a few ideas from there.

My thought is that it is not at all necessary to do it up big on a given year.  We will learn about whichever symbols we can this time around and hit the others another year. The current plan is to move fwd until the baby comes. Today we are doing an advent wreath paper craft. Actually we will do that craft and then assemble this little wreath craft for the lapbook. Will try to upload pics later.

The first things I reloaded to my favorites were my e-book sites. How much are you paying for books and curriculum these days? Have you checked these out??  Ambleside Online has links to several good e-texts:

Ambleside you will want to click on the links for subject areas and grade levels to get all the links to specific books.  The art and music links are awesome to include printable works of art to study and midi files of classical music

Baldwin Project  this one is a favorite of mine because one of the first purchases I made as a young mom was a set of 100 yr old Baldwin Readers from an open air book sale in Yellow Springs, OH. They have always been some of my favorite children’s books. This collection is not limited to Mr Baldwin’s works however.

Worldwide School

Digital Book index

Collection of etext links

Hoagies free gifted online hs courses

Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopedia havent assembled all my links for him yet but do check it out

My Bookhouse by Olive Beauprey Miller.  Again, don’t hate me <g>, I bought the whole set at a dollar a bag at a library sale in the early 90s before I had a clue who she was.   link 1

the next two are online programs not etexts but we have enjoyed them enough to share here:

Montessori LEarn to Read for free – programmed reading work

Study Dog  reading program

Genevieve shared the Hillbilly Housewife homeschool links which have been growing to now include a full K-12 curric.  These now include links to COMPLETE bks of grammar and math.

these links are to Catholic and Christian sites:

Miniature stories of the saints  Cath.

Written Treasures moralistic stories from yesteryear – Christian

Padfield bible studybks  and Calvary Chapel worksheets  – Christian

Catholic church history, papal encyclicals, and philosophy

Catholic Planet ebooks

Carmelite titles

Honestly – we need not spend a dime. If you have more to share please do!

The Feast of St Nicholas is this coming week.  These lesson plans are uploaded on the 4Real forum already but I will post them here as well in case you don’t frequent the forum. They are based upon the info at the St Nicholas Center online.

Download kims_st_nick_plan.doc

If you have mainly little people then you may do better to just read a few of the interesting stories on the St Nick site and then check out the printable project at Living Education. She also has nice pics of their St Nick icon project.  These should keep us busy this week!

So it’s no secret I don’t follow directions well. ; ) All it takes is for me to say, "I am following such and so’s lesson plan" and whammo, something really falls together in other areas and begs to be followed. And so it went here.

We started Little House in the Big Woods because, hey, we are getting more and more of their life and I figured the kids could really relate now. Well the Dover children’s sampler (not sure if that will pull up for you or not) came in my box today and one of the samples was from an art coloring bk. The sample was Grandma Moses. Never mind that our curriculum has us scheduled for a different artist. (I didn’t like the pics that were scheduled to be honest).  I printed the Grandma Moses pic "just in case".  Then for grins surfed for Grandma Moses stuff. Turns out she was a civil war era figure…..just like the Ingall’s Family.  Hmmm. THAT seems like a providential coincidence. ; )  She also gave birth to ten children. (*I* could relate to that part, though sadly only 5 of hers survived)  Well one thing led to another and suddenly there are links.  So I am sharing them in case any of you are as easily led by serendipity as I.

Bio  (the next link follows this)

Worksheet on Grandma Moses life

eduplace activity

Good book to read  and another and one more for good measure

another bio with links and art project – Grandma Moses liked to paint pictures of Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Now would be an excellent time to try your hand at a similar project.

Google image search with tons of paintings

The Best Kids Book Site is a favorite ‘place’ of mine which I just recovered. Figured since I hadn’t written about it previously I would do that now since there is just so much there. At the main book link you can search for books by genre and by age group. (or by author, awards, series, or any number of other specifications)  The Holidays tab will bring up pages (and pages and pages…) of craft ideas and links for most holidays.  Here is Christmas to get you started.  The Storytimes tab pulls up what amounts to a little theme unit on several topics complete with fingerplays, stories, coloring pages, crafts, songs etc.

There are several blogs that have daily doses of cool things.  The Cast of Characters has a story read daily on the web. The one I listened to was a decent length. About five minutes of listening time. There is a coloring page blog with a different free page to print each day. The Daily Craft blog will keep you in good graces with the pre-K crowd. No creativity needed. Just load it on bloglines and you will have a steady supply of seasonal projects. Finally there is a monthly calendar that pulls the whole shootin’ match together. Here is Nov just for perusal since it is nearly over.