Free 100 Easy Lessons- reading program

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the book, Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. If not, it's just one book with 100 fifteen minute lessons that were created years ago and tested nationwide. Many homeschoolers do the complete program.

In any case, one of the developers of the book has created an online version of teaching 4 - 7 year olds to read and it sells for $249 ordinarily.

Due to hard economic times for public schools and most other people, he has decided that during January only, he's giving this downloadable program away entirely for free. It's not a gimmick.

If you're interested, you only have through the rest of January to download it.

http://www.funnix.com/

Free Martin Luther King, Jr. Activities

• EnchantedLearning.com
• A Brief Biography
• Activities and Resources 
• Coloring pages, crafts for kids, word searches 
• Free Martin Luther King Jr. Day Notebooking Pages

Shhh...

CurrClick has a secret sell going on

I'm a little late but......

Books

Have you read more than six of these Books? The BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books listed here. 

Instructions: Copy this into your POST. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started, but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds if desired.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (plan on finishing eventually)

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (read most)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (read a few chapters with Trista, she is finishing the rest herself, don't know if I'll finish it myself or not)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis 

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (I couldn't finish this because it was too disturbing for me)

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Read:22

Started but not finished: 5

Many of these books I plan on reading eventually!

Bringing in the New Year

I hope anyone who stumbles upon this had a great Christmas and New year.

My New Year night went pretty well. My hubby and I helped out with the youth group at church. We had fun. Then, when we got home we found that one of our dogs was missing. He has been missing before, but this time he hasn't come home. :( The kids have been at my parents for the last two nights so it has been really quiet around here. I'm enjoying the peace, but looking forward to them being back home again.
............................................................................................................

I don't really believe in New year resolutions, but I think the beginning of the year is always a good starting point to begin any goals and plans that you may have. Below are a few of the plans I have for this upcoming year.

• For one, I would like to actually update this site more often. I want to be able to actually document things that are going on around here. I also have things I would like to share and haven't gotten around to it. 
• I want to lose weight....who doesn't!? I only want to lose 10 pounds, which is not a lot, but that is my goal. The 10 Ibs. that I want gone all seems to be in my midsection and I want it to go away!
• I really really want to be more organized. This last year things haven't been very smooth and I need to get a lot of things back in order including finances.
• I would like to have a baby.......Ok, that really isn't up to me, but I'm just throwing it out there..lol!
• I'm pretty sure there are more I just can't think of anything else right now. The above are the main goals for the year.

What are your goals for the new year?

FREEBIE ALERT

free crochet patterns for making pillows

http://freecrochetpattern.weebly.com/crochet-patterns-pillows.html

Free printable gift tags!
http://www.eatwisconsincheese.com/assets/pdfs/ButterGiftTags2010.pdf

Free online homeschool planner

http://www.home-school-inc.com/

Free homeschool resources page! 

http://www.hstreasures.com/resources.html


Educational games FREE

http://quizhub.com/quiz/quizhub.cfm

January Homeschool Planner - Free Download 

 If you are ready to begin making plans for January's homeschooling,
here is a free downloadable planner for January 2011. This download
comes complete with month and week calendars, 3 different lesson plan
forms to fit your individual needs, and a variety of forms for unit
planning, daily assignments, spelling and vocabulary words, library
books, reading log and chore charts.

Preview the January planner now!
<http://www.examiner.com/homeschooling-in-denver/preview-the-january-201\
1-homeschooling-family-planner-before-you-download-picture>
Ready to download? Click here
<http://christianhomeschoolhub.spruz.com/downloads.htm?a=&act=get&guid=0\
9985A0C-A362-4900-AEB6-2069107CBCE3>

Christmas Curriculum 2010

Bible:
Read the Christmas Story from the Gospel of Luke


Picture Study:
Adoration of the Shepherds by Bartolome Esteban Murillo

Read Aloud
Keeping Christmas by Henry Van Dyke
Christmas Every Day By William Dean Howells
The Gingerbread Boy


Poetry
In the Week Christmas Comes Eleanor Farjeon
People, Look East by Eleanor Farjeon


Hymns
Tell Me the Story of Jesus

Handicrafts
Make Gingerbread cookies

Copywork
Isaiah 9:6, Galatians 4:4-6, John 3:16

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
~Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Math
Christmas Math and Worksheets

C-SPAN's New American Presidents Timeline Poster

C-SPAN is delighted to announce our new American Presidents Timeline poster for classrooms. The 6ft long poster details the lives and public service careers of every president, plus key historical events, Supreme Court cases, and technology milestones throughout 280 years of Presidential history. They are free of charge to C-SPAN Classroom members. To reserve yours, simply log-in and click on "Get Offer" below! *(limit of one poster per member and only available to members with an address inside the continental U.S.A.)

Click Here

Great Moments in Public Education

A school district in Massachusetts has banned the Pledge of Allegiance from its classrooms, Fox News reports:

Charles Skidmore, principal of Arlington High School in Arlington, Mass., has offered to allow students to recite the pledge before school begins--but in the school's foyer and not in the classrooms, as 17-year-old Harrington had hoped.

Kathleen Bodie, Arlington superintendent of schools, told Fox News Radio that "The principal wanted to be very respectful about the pledge and be sensitive to the Supreme Court ruling that students are not forced to say the pledge. He wanted to be sensitive to the diverse group of students we have."

Bodie said there has been reluctance to put the district's teachers in a position of reciting the pledge, and she acknowledged that some have raised concerns about its inclusion of the words "under God."

Now you may think these teachers are unpatriotic. But there's another possible explanation. Consider this Associated Press dispatch:

The school superintendent in Springfield, Mass., has taken responsibility for tests given to the district's 11th- and 12th-graders that were rife with spelling, grammatical and factual errors.

Two tests given in May to about 2,600 students contained about 100 errors combined.

The mistakes included the phrases "truning around" and "For God's skae," as well as a note on one test that read "This is the end of the Test," when there were two more pages.

If Massachusetts teachers can't get simple phrases like these right, how can they possibly be expected not to bungle the Pledge of Allegiance?