CurrClick LIVE Open House

If you are a homschool mom, there's no doubt you have stumbled upon CurrClick at one time or another. If you're a homeschool mom like ME, you stumble there several times a month! :) CurrClick offers us moms a great way to grab great curriculum on the cheap! They bring hundreds of publishers together in one place, all for our convenience!
Well, I'd like to invite you to an Open House event for a side of CurrClick you may not have seen before.
CurrClick LIVE!
CurrClick LIVE is a platform that offers online classes to homeschool students of all ages! Click the image at the top of this post to get signed up for the Open House and you will be emailed a list of all presenters and teachers that will be there to provide you all of the information you will need to understand how CurrClick LIVE works, all from the comfort of your own home!
Plus there's a chance for you to win a CurrClick gift card! you can't lose!

Learning with Lapbooks

Blessings have been all around me lately! I am thanking God for the doors He has been steadily opening. Let me catch you up to speed on the most recent thing I am doing. As I'm sure you know by now, I like to talk. Well now people will be paying to hear what I have to say! As of today I am the newest author for Media Angels, Inc. I have written a Thanksgiving Lapbook and have two more in the works as we speak!! I have wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl and thanks to my dear friend and mentor Felice Gerwitz that dream is finally coming true. God started me on this amazing journey a year ago when He led me down the path of homeschooling my son Braydon. Now that lifestyle and all that goes with it has erupted in my life! Our wonderful family has supported our decision whole-heartedly making the change in our lives that much easier. Now I am able to take two of the gifts God has given me and mold them into one terrific product!

Thank you to everyone who has supported me during this entire process and a BIG thank you to my sweet hubby! Randy has cooked dinner, tended to Braydon, done laundry and virtually been Mr. Mom in these last days before releasing the book. I could not have asked for a better helpmate! God has truly shown His faithfulness to fulfill His plans for me! I'm just trying to learn to stay out of His way.

Alot Can Happen In A Month!

Wow, I knew I was busy, but a whole month since my last post? Sheesh! I gotta get on the ball here!! Well here's a recap of all the great things God has done in my life in the last 31 days... and boy has He been busy! 

We have completed the Ultimate Back To School Blast and are gearing up for the Ultimate Special Needs Blast. I got all of this years curriculum lined out and even got a couple of weeks planned (which is good since we start in 10 minus SIX DAYS!!!). We kicked off the new school year for the youth group and Randy and I serving as Lifeguards (youth coaches)! We are both so excited to be working with the amazing group of kids!!! Plus Kay is in the youth so that's going to be a pretty neat experience for us!! Randy has started work on the Permian Basin Fair and we'll probably only see him in passing for the next couple of weeks. And we're about to embark on an awesome experience through our church called The Tabernacle Experience. 

This is a life-size interactive Tabernacle of The Wilderness. I am so excited to be a part of this! If you are within driving distance, I urge you to make a trip to visit this exhibit. It will be open Friday, September 30th through Sunday, October 9th from 9 am to 8 pm everyday. And if you're a homeschooling mom I think this would be a great opportunity for your kids! We don't have many "field trip" destinations around here and this is a an excellent chance for them to witness something they can't see anywhere else!! 

“When the cloud lifted from over the sacred tent, the people of Israel followed it. And where the cloud settled, the people of Israel camped. In this way, they traveled at the Lord’s command and stopped wherever he told them to. So they camped or traveled at the Lord’s command, and they did whatever the Lord told them.” Numbers 10

How many of us follow God's lead the way the people of Israel did? Do you seek the Lord's guidance in everything? I'm afraid for some of us this is all too rare a concept! I encourage you to grab your Bible and LISTEN to what the Father is asking of you! LISTEN to what he wants to reveal! And LISTEN to where he wants you to go!! 

And remember to teach your child how to hear Him too!

I am so excited to get to travel through this intimate experience with my own child!

  "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates" Deuteronomy 6:4-7

Well, that about wraps up the month of August! 

I hope you are all having a great start to your school year!!

The Randomness That Is My Life!

Well, here we are... the end of November. It feels like these last few months have just flown by!! Something I'm learning with homeschooling is that you can't take a break with planning for even a minute or the holidays and specific dates that you want to be teachable dates sneak right up on you! I found myself still putting together Thanksgiving material ON Thanksgiving!!! While I have to say that it was interesting to have it all fresh on the brain when we celebrated Thanksgiving with our families, it would have nice to have had time to dig a little deeper BEFORE the turkey came out of the oven!! :)
All-in-all I have a great list going for next year's first semester lessons, but sadly this year has been a bit of a tester year for us. Well, I say sadly... Braydon is loving it. When mom doesn't get it together in time, we chalk it up to early prep for next year.
I don't have a specific topic for today's entry but I do have a couple of neat stories for you. I'll start with the funnier of the two.
A couple of weeks ago we were in the car and Braydon (getting together his mental Christmas wish list) says to me "Mom, can I have a Pocket Rocket? Cuz I wanna ask Santa for one but I know he doesn't get you things that your parents won't let you have."
It was too cute! Partly because he thought ahead enough to get permission before asking Santa but mostly because of his innocence!! Now is about the time (if he were still in public school) that he would begin to doubt the story of Santa, but hopefully being homeschooled we will be able to hold onto the magic a little longer!
The second is more a quick thing I wanna share rather than a story:
As I have said before. Now that we are homeschooling I see so much of Braydon's creativity coming back that I'm ashamed to say I didn't realizing he was loosing. Well tonight as I sit preparing lessons for tomorrow he comes into the office that doubles as our classroom and sits down at his desk. He opens up his History folder and takes out some research that I had printed out for the unit we are planning to do on Greek Mythology. Then he begins to do his own research on the laptop (using MY printouts only to help him with spelling). After a few minutes he is writing his own rendition of the struggle between the three brother Zeus, Hades and Poseidon. WOW!!! Just out of nowhere he decides to do a little writing!! Of course I am elated because I myself LOVE to write and have always hoped he would too, but I am even more impressed that he is WANTING to research and write just for entertainment! I remember a time after high school when I would get interested in something I saw on TV, begin researching it at the library and the write a research paper on the subject JUST FOR FUN!!! I thought I was the only person in the world crazy enough to do that... but here I sit, almost 20 years later watching my son do the very same thing!!!
God has blessed me so much this year with this adventure Braydon and I are taking together!
I am so thankful to be able to experience these things with my child AND to get to encourage and aid him as he begins to figure out what he enjoys, what he is good at and what he excels in!
We serve an awesome, loving and powerful God and I hope to raise my son to be just as in awe of his Father as I am!

Mapping Made Easy!

Now this is what I call learning about Geography and how to make/read a map!! We are studying about Kansas this week and the lesson came with these little single page maps to label as you go through the lesson. Well I decided it would be SO much more fun to make our own map to label with the lesson. So that's just what we did. We used 3 different transparencies of Kansas, one for the state itself with major cities and the capital, one showing rivers and lakes and another showing railways. Now we are going to work on a legend and continue labeling what the lesson calls for. We have had a blast and his retention of major parts of the state is amazing!! So much more effective than those silly sheets in his book that were difficult to understand anyway!! Not to mention, look at that face! He's having the time of his life. BTW this overhead thing also led to another (self driven) art project. Homeschooling has done amazing things for his creativity and desire to do more and learn more!! God is so good!!!