We made the decision to homeschool a couple of years back, but then we tried preschool with Jackson and knew for sure we wanted to do it. Right before this school year though I wavered a bit, not really knowing (or not wanting to know) what we were supposed to do. At the last minute I thought how cool it would be to send Jackson off to school for several hours every day, but then I prayed and God gave us the same answer He had all along. Homeschool.

We have started and now I wouldn’t want to do anything else.  Jackson is 5 years old and is in kindergarten and Oliver (3 years old) is preschool age. They both are happy learners, they love to be read to even if there are no pictures at all and enjoy chapter books. Jackson has gone through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons , a book which we loved for learning to read and I will most certainly use it with Oliver as well.

Now Jackson is on to stage one reading, he can read short books and stay focused really well. He can write his letters and is working on his numbers now. We decided to not buy curriculum for this year, but wanted to concentrate on the basics of reading and writing and then next year we will see what we’ll do. I really like the SonLight curriculum, and am leaning towards that for sure. Oliver can’t wait to join in and he is starting to write his letters now too (wants to be just like big brother!) There are some books that we love that I want to highlight over the next couple weeks so stay tuned. And most certainly YES, learning can be is fun.

Look at that smile!

Today I want to highlight some chapter books filled with  good old fashioned values and tons of adventure to keep little boy’s minds fascinated, we love all of them, but the first two are by far the boys’ favourites. Since it is hard to read some of the titles, I have the titles listed below books from left to right and top to bottom.

The Sword in the Tree
My Side of the Mountain
Little House in the Big Woods
Little House on the Prairie
Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook
My Father’s Dragon
Daniel’s Duck
Stuart Little
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

I hope you find some here that will be your favourites too. Do you have a favourite to share? Any ideas on good homeschooling curriculum? Do tell!

I am a Powell’s affiliate and I do receive a percentage of the sales of any book you buy using my links. Thank you!

Hachette Author Photo Image

BEAR Portraits
by Jill Greenberg
104 Pages
Photography of Animals
Non-Fiction
Little Brown & Company

Known for her artistic approach to celebrity photography and advertising, Jill Greenberg goes back to her roots of animal photography with this book- Bear Portraits. Don’t worry, she still gets up close and makes it shinny- but the shine does not radiate off of human skin in this pretty read, but off of the silky smooth fur coats of bears. Closer than ever and sweeter than ever possible for humans, her lens captures the emotions of these not-so-gentle giants.

Jill Greenberg has done some controversial shoots in the past, one with distressed kids, labeled End Times. In that shoot she provoked the children to tears by giving them a lollipop and then taking it away. As much as I don’t agree with those methods, or with her politics- I love this book so much that I can forget that about her.  I adore the shots of the bears in Bear Portraits. I don’t think even Greenberg would have tried to take a lollipop away from one of these huge and fuzzy models.

I recommend this for any animal person, any bear lover, or photography freak (yes, that is me too), or for kids as well. The boys and I read this (note: looked at it) and they were so absorbed in the expressions that they made up their own words for the pictures “he’s saying, ‘I think I am MAD!’” . There are quotes on many of the pages, ones that aren’t cutesy or clever- quotes that are actually good!

The bear portraits are so perfect and amazing that the reader will want to pet the fir on the page, and as the page is turned jump back realizing the ferociousness of the teeth and the size of the animal. These are not teddy bears! I highly recommend this Bear Portraits, perfect for that animal lover on your list for Christmas young and old alike with enjoy this read.

I’ll leave you with a bear:

Images by Jill Greeneberg

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I am a Powell’s affiliate and I do receive a percentage of the sales of any book you buy using my links. Thank you!

Spring Scents Bath Salts
3 Cup Epsom Salt
1 Cup Course Sea Salt
1/2 Cup Baking Soda
2 Tbs. Liquid Glycerin
12 drops lavender essential oil
6 drops Ylang Ylang essential oil
Food Colouring Red and Blue (optional)

Use more or less essential oil depending on how strong you want your bath to be scented. Combine ingredients. I never use a particular order, just be sure to combine them completely so that you have a uniform mixture of relaxation and calm. I poured the salts into pint sized jars and added a lavender flower to the front of each just for pretties sake. The lavender and Ylang Ylang really settle a body down, bringing calm and peace. For an extra charged bath grab your Bible and some worship music to blast you into perfection.

Citrus Blooms Bath Salts
4 Cups Epsom Salts
2 Cups Sea Salt
3 Cups Baking Soda
2 Tbs. Liquid Glycerin
10 drops Lemon essential oil
10 drops Sweet Orange oil
10 drops Ylang Ylang oil
Food Colouring (optional)

Combine ingredients in a big bowl. I realized when I was dumping some of this into the bath, that yellow is not a great choice for bath salts, so I would recommend making this a different colour, or leaving it white. It is up to you. This is perfect for that soothing bath after a long day, read the Bible, listen to some tunes and restore all that faith goodness back into you. Great for relaxation and refreshing of the body too! Just as above I poured the salts into pint size Ball jars for gifts this Christmas. I also left half of the mix without colour and alternated to make a striped pattern.

This is the second recipe I have shared out of our Christmas a la Homemade (a handmade Christmas). I will be posting these up until Christmas to give you ideas for gifts you can make for your friends and family.

Previous Recipes from my Christmas a la Homemade (A Handmade Christmas):
Rosemary Sea Salt Recipe
Bath Salts Soak Recipe

I checked for recipes for Rosemary Sea Salt all over since I wanted to make some of my own. I really couldn’t find much, I did find one by Martha Stewart, and another one that had ground up the rosemary in the sea salt, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. So, I did like I usually do, I just read the stuff and do it on my own. I hope you’ll do the same!

Rosemary Sea Salt Recipe:

*48 oz. of Sea Salt
*6 decent branches of fresh Rosemary (depending on your love or Rosemary)

That’s it for ingredients. Yeah, you did read that right…nada mas, nothing more.

Squeeze the Rosemary and pull your fingers down the branch, in order to pull off all the rosemary leaves. Repeat on all but 2 branches (those are for the rosemary garnish at the end). Dump all the sea salt into a pan or pot and then add the rosemary. Turn heat on to medium heat and keep watch, stirring for 8-10 minutes. Remove from heat, dump contents into a large bowl. Let sit to cool, without a cover for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, then pour into an air tight container (I used a large Ball Jar)  and let sit with the lid sealed for 24 hours. Then the Rosemary Sea Salt is ready for its pretty little containers. Use a colander with a large bowl underneath, dump the contents into the colander and shake so as to sift the salt out the bottom and keep the rosemary to discard (it is completely used up and dried at this point, however you can keep it in if you would like). Put sifted Rosemary Sea Salt into containers and slide sprigs of fresh rosemary down the sides, 2 or 4 would be great. Screw on an air tight lid and you are done.

Rosemary Sea Salt is great anywhere you’d use regular salt, meats, soups, stews, whatever.  My personal favourite is to sprinkle it on top of a sunny side up egg. Oh, my tummy grumbles.

Give yourself a good pat on the back, your peeps will love getting these gifts from you for Christmas! They look completely wintery anyway, it looks like snow and pine. Doesn’t it? A great gift for anyone who likes to cook or likes to eat….I don’t think that leaves anyone out, at least not in my family.

Ecoholic with its Canadian cover and its US Cover

Over the last week I have been enjoying an amazing book, Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products, and Services by Adria Vasil. It is in my opinion a comprehensive guide to doing your best to protect your family from toxins, and save the planet at the same time. Tons of helpful information on everything. I will be posting my review later this week, and be forewarned that it will get my glowing praise then too. Adria has done an excellent job of guiding the consumer through each aspect of what they buy and why they should know what’s in it! Okay, before I give it all away I leave you with a little sample of how helpful her tips are in this article, Save Cash and Trash: Packing Healthier Waste-Free Lunches.

Save Cash and Trash: Packing Healthier Waste-Free Lunches
By Adria Vasil,
Author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services

I won’t lie. I loved my juice boxes, pudding cups and classic cream-stuffed snack cakes as a school kid — but they were all wrapped in plastic destined for the lunchroom garbage can (not to mention totally unhealthy!). Add them all up and a typical student trashes a whopping 70 pounds of lunch packaging every year!
Now, what if instead of reaching for pre-packaged munchies, parents everywhere bought snackables in bulk and placed them in their own reusable containers? By god, we’d have a lunchtime revolution! In fact, if every student packed a zero-waste lunch, we’d save 1.2 billion pounds from landfill a year. You’ll also be saving some serious coin (since individually wrapped foods tend to cost more) and coincidentally cutting out many of the not-so-healthy heavily processed ingredients that often come with pre-packaged snacks.

So how do you lighten your lunch load?

• Say goodbye to disposable plastic baggies. Get reusable sandwich-size sacks like Lunch Skins (3greenmoms.com). They’re perfect for, yes, sandwiches, as well as chopped up veggies like carrots, peppers and celery.
• Buy yogurt, dried fruit, snackables like pumpkin seeds or even organic cookies in bulk, then pack them in reusable food containers (just not the kind made of clear, shatterproof polycarbonate plastic since those contain hormone disrupting bisphenol A — the same stuff that made headlines in clear plastic baby bottles).
• Pass on pricey, packaging-heavy drinking boxes and buy juice in large cartons/jugs. Pour a single portion into a polycarbonate-free drink canister like Thermos’ Foogo (keeping in mind that a stainless steel container of tap or home-filtered water is way healthier than a shot of sugary, nutritionally dead boxed OJ).
• Pour last night’s soups and even stews in an insulated thermos for a homemade meal on the go.
• Don’t forget to toss a cloth napkin and, if necessary, washable cutlery into your lunch box.

Keep the lead out of lunchtime
Speaking of lunch boxes, stay away from anything made of vinyl, aka PVC. Back in 2005, California’s Center for Environmental Health filed a lawsuit against some big-name makers of soft PVC lunch cases (including Toys”R”Us, Warner Brothers, DC Comics and Time Warner) after testing revealed that their products contained high levels of lead.

Better to go for all-natural cloth or even nylon.You’ll find a bunch of alternatives online at sites like www.reusablebags.com (think funky organic and recycled cloth bags, stainless steel containers and compartmentalized bento-box-style Laptop Lunch kits).

Move the message school-wide
Once you’ve got the knack of trash-free lunches, why not spread the message throughout your child’s school? Consider forming a zero-waste lunch committee. If you’ve got a keen teacher on your side, you might even get students to kick things off with a garbage audit (think garbology 101). That means measuring how much trash goes in bins before and after lunch hour. The mini researchers can put on rubber gloves and note what kind of disposables are taking up the most room.
Raise cash for trash
Whatever you do, don’t let any disposables that you and other parents might still use end up in landfill. Talk to your kid’s school about saving them up and sending them packin’ to be made into purses and pencil cases! Once you’ve collected a bunch of branded drink pouches, candy/cookie/energy bar wrappers, chip bags and yogurt cups, ship them off to TerraCycle and the upcycling company will give you 2¢ to 5¢ per package for your trouble (terracycle.net). Call it a cash-for-trash fundraiser and you’ll be garbage-free in no time!

©2009 Adria Vasil, author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services

Author Bio
Adria Vasil, author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services, is a best-selling author and journalist for Canada’s NOW, where she has been writing the “Ecoholic” column for five years. She lives in Toronto.

For more information please visit www.ecoholicnation.com