The Simple Woman's Daybook - Nov. 10, 2009

FOR TODAY... Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009

Outside my window... cloudy and foggy

I am thinking...nothing much! HA

I am thankful for... my new laptop so I can make sure the boys do school and sit at the dining room table and get blogging done, read e-mails and be more productive while they are doing their independent work.

From the learning rooms... in Bible class we are doing the Exodus, for history more explorers, more chemistry stuff for science, Haydn and Mozart for composers study, now studying Raphael as our artist, and working on TOS review items

From the kitchen... lots of pumpkin stuff
see Rachel's post with lots of recipes Here.

I am wearing... green pants; red, white, blue and green top, white with green and brown flower/leaves, bare feet or crocs.

I am creating... need to begin working on Christmas ornaments... but have been working on... nothing!

I am going... nowhere this week!

I am reading...same stuff as last week. Hope to begin reading The 4:8 Principle by Tommy Newberry (recommended by a friend)

I am hoping... my dh will have my laptop working soon... he can't get the wireless internet to work.

I am hearing... cars and the White Christmas movie

Around the house... cleaned up, for a guest visiting my daughters today.

One of my favorite things... 4:00pm ... when my hubby comes home!

A few plans for the rest of the week: school, work on Christmas ornaments, play, blog, and read.

Here is picture for thought I am sharing...

Autumn Cookies, Yumm!

If you want to do your own Daybook or read a lot of others go to our hostesses blog:
http://thesimplewomansdaybook.blogspot.com/

Debbie

Blast From The Past - Rachel and Jessica Fall 1994

You will find the rules for participating in my meme by clicking this link
Blast From The Past

Blast From The Past occurs on Tuesdays

This week I am posting pictures of Rachel and Jessica

playing in the leaves in the backyard of my Mom's house,

the house I grew up in.

My mom is in some of the pictures to, the kids call her Nan.

As usual if you would like to see one of the pictures larger just click on  that picture.
Each one should enlarge in a new page then when you close it you will come back here.

Rachel was 8 years old.

Ooooh FUN!

Jessica was 5 years old.
Cutie!

Here is Nan.

A sisterly shove

Just Playin'!!

Ahhh...

the simple pleasures of childhood!

I hope you enjoyed this weeks Blast
Now it is your turn!!
Post a picture from your past... yesterday... days gone by...
Pictures of you, your family, your kids, your spouse...

Make sure you take my Blast From The Past button to put in your post. Tell your readers to click on the button to come to my blog or leave them a link at the bottom so they can read my post and participate if they want to.

Don't forget to come back and sign Mr. Linky
so we can all go read your post!!!

Debbie

TOS Homeschool Crew Review - American Heritage Education Foundation

An Introductory paragraph from the American Heritage Education Foundation.

"AHEF is a non-profit, non-partisan educational foundation dedicated to the understanding and teaching of America's factual and philosophical heritage to promote constructive citizenship and Freedom, Unity, Progress, and Responsibility among our students and citizens. AHEF Free K-12 lesson plans to teachers, students, and families in all 50 states..." accomplishes this patriotic mission by writing, producing, and distributing

Did you catch that?  FREE! This is one product that I am reviewing that every one of my readers can afford!

This product comes as a CD or you can download the lesson plans from the website. The CD includes Elementary lessons, Middle School lessons, High School lessons. The CD and the downloads are the exact same. The lessons are created by and for public schools and some of the activities need a large group. Some of these activities may be adapted to homeschool use and some may not. Some of the activities may be done orally instead of in writing and some of the activities may be skipped altogether. There are a number of choices of activities in each lesson and you may pick and choose what seems best for your family. Since this product was created by a school in Texas and was created for public schools the activities are very "schoolish" and so I skipped or adapted them. But, the topics are worth studying; and even if you don't do them all they may spark your creative juices or be a great addition to an already great education on our government and symbols. 

We are not covering American history at the moment. We are studying the Renaissance and Reformation.  I hope to get to American history later this year or early next year. For now we did a few lessons so we could review this product and we will review or redo the lessons once we get to American History and we will do those we did not cover yet.

The lessons on the CD/download don't really cover a time period in history but themes important to American history like the Declaration, the Constitution, the American Flag, and the Statue of Liberty. On each of the pages for the age brackets you can see a list of the topics included: Elementary, Middle School, High School. Some of the topics/lessons are exactly the same for different lessons, some of the lessons are the same topic but different projects are suggested, and some of the topics are only done in one of the levels. 

We used the middle school and high school lessons. Christopher enjoyed the Declaration Scramble the best of all the activities we did. In this activity the boys were given the whole Declaration and then were given the whole Declaration cut up into paragraphs or parts of paragraphs and they had to put the cut up parts into order. This was fun and familiarized them with our Declaration. Nathan's favorite lesson was the lesson on the American Flag. His favorite part of that lesson was finding and copying a poem about the flag and then drawing a picture to go with it. We also read over the Flag Code for the care and use of the American Flag and we discussed those rules. Then they wrote a one page paper on how and why we should show respect to the flag, why we have a code, and why the code is important. Remember, there are a number of activities for each lesson so you may choose from among them what seems best for your family and you may do one or more for each lesson.

I highly recommend getting the FREE CD. This way you have it saved and won't lose it if your computer should crash, I hope it doesn't, but it was convenient to not have to save it on my computer with my many other homeschool things on there. It is especially good if you have a slow computer, you don't have to bother with waiting for the download to finish. And, since the price is so reasonable... FREE!  you might as well get the CD!

Out of five stars we give American Heritage Education Foundation:

 

I give this product my good value icon:

since it's cost is FREE! $0.00

Get your free CD on this page.  

They also have a binder you can purchase with the lessons already printed out if you are interested in getting it that way but that costs $19.50 per level (includes shipping).

I hope you check out American Heritage Education Foundation

Please check the other reviews by my crew mates to get some other opinions on this

product HERE.

***American Heritage Education Foundation provided me with the free CD so that I could do my review. Though I received these products for free I have given an honest review of them here in this post.   

Debbie

A Verse of Encouragement - Sunday 11-08-09

Psalm 56:8 "Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?"

Thank you Lord that you know the path that I take and that you see and collect my tears and write them all in a book. There are many of them and I suppose you have a Super Sized bottle for my tears.


Debbie