Many, many thanks to everyone for bearing with me during this tough time.  My friend passed away last weekend, and while we are sad to lose her, we are glad that she isn’t suffering anymore.

I except that things will be able to fall back into more of a normal routine soon, so I’m going to get ready to start back up with the lesson plans.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little goodie I ran across that you and your children might enjoy tonight - A color your own election map!  You can save and print this image to color in as the voting results start rolling in:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/egp/2997125355/sizes/l/

I recommend downloading either the Large or Original sizes for best print quality.

Enjoy!

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Just wanted to let everyone know that I won’t be able to make quite as much progress with updating the Mosaic 2 curriculum over the next couple of weeks as I would like. I apologize if you are trying to use the lessons this year and find that you pass me!

A friend of mine needs as much help as she can get for various projects as she goes under the care of hospice, and into her last couple weeks of life.  We’re trying to help her get some things in order for her little girl.

I don’t want anyone to think I am abandoning this project!  But I’m having to prioritize fairly ruthlessly right now.

And one of my priorities this week is to hug my girls tight, and count all the wonderful blessings that we sometimes take for granted.

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This week I’m beginning to enter lesson plans for week 4 in Mosaic 2.  Meanwhile, we’ve started back to school in our household.  We only got through one week of lessons before I contracted bronchitis, so our school year has gotten off to a slow start.  The girls are learning so much (already!) this year, and I can’t wait to get to all the great books we have ahead of us!  We just finished The Kitchen Knight today, and the kids loved it.

I’ve mentioned before that I do work for the new homeschool review site, ChoosyHomeschooler.com.  Well, I just wanted to pass along that they are sponsoring a new contest!  It’s called the “Wednesday Winner” contest- They are giving away a prize each week to a randomly drawn subscriber of their free newsletter.  The first drawing is this Wednesday, and they are giving away a $50 gift certificate to Rainbow Resource!  There’s a new winner each week, and all you have to do to enter is sign up for their newsletter.  As long as you’re subscribed, you’ll be entered every week that the contest runs.  Here’s the link to find out more.

Enjoy!

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I’ve been updating the site this week to get Mosaic 2 ready for the beginning of school!  The complete book and resource list is now up, and I’ve also got the online lesson plans going, with the first week of lesson plans complete and uploaded.  You can view the weekly summary and detailed lessons for each day, plus you can print out daily checklists to help you keep up with everything.

Uploading and formatting the lesson plans is time consuming, especially since I am trying to make the plans more aesthetically pleasing, with beautiful artwork on as many pages as possible.  I believe, however, that I will be able to keep well ahead of the pace that you all will be able to work through the materials!

I think that this online format will make it much easier for me to update the lesson plans, keeping links current and fixing errors as they come up.  Users can print out checklists a few days or weeks ahead at a time, knowing that they have the most up-to-date version of the lessons at any given time.

I’d love to hear what you think, either here or in the users group!

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I just added a page to the main site on one of my favorite topics - school supplies!  This little project was inspired by a post I wrote on one of my email lists, and I thought I’d share some of the ideas with you, since I’d already gone to the trouble of typing it all up.  I added a few supplies I’d forgotten, and viola!  The list has simple items, as well as some creative solutions and ideas that even veteran homeschoolers might appreciate!  Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments to this post.  I’d love to see what you all can’t do without!

School Supplies: What to Get and Fun Ways to Use Them

Enjoy!

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Get a behind the scenes glimpse of the spreadsheet I’m currently using to develop the schedule for Mosaic 2.  Fancy it is not!  But it is lining everything up, day by day, so that I’ll be able to construct each day’s lesson plans from it.

I’m uploading a couple of editable versions to the Mosaic users group, so you can download and view in your Excel or OpenOffice programs if you prefer.  Note that this is a work in progress, and definitely subject to change.  In particular, there is a Shakespeare unit near the very end that will have several more resources added ASAP.  I’ll continue to post updates as I get them ready!

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I thought some of you might appreciate this shot of my “desk” (also know in some cultures as the “kitchen table”).   Those piles are all the books I’m currently weeding through, trying to decide which ones make the final cut.  I’ve almost gotten all the history scheduled.  I’ve organized the poetry, as well.  Now I just need to finalize the literature selections, schedule in the map work and timeline assignments, research the websites I want to include, and work on the lapbook type activities that I REALLY want to design.  As an added incentive to get me moving on that, I just purchased a year’s subscription to ClipArt.com.  Now that I spent $160 on the graphics, AND posted about it here, I’m pretty much locked in to following through!  (I’ve found that I have to use psychology like that on myself in order to get anywhere with big projects.)

It sounds like a lot, but it is amazing how much you can get done by working an hour here and a half hour there.  With the history scheduling, though, there’s no way around spending a big block of time plowing through all the spines to get the reading assignments cohesively organized.  So, a couple of weeks ago (when I was feeling enough under the weather that I didn’t feel obligated to clean house) I spent one whole day patching most everything together.  I’ve got a few more odds and ends I’m waiting on to finalize the history scheduling, and then I’ll post a first draft for your perusal!

I’m “this” close to being able to eat on our table again!

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I’m excited to report that I’ve got history assignments almost completed for the SOTW version of Mosaic 2.   I just have about 15-20 more lessons to account for, but the tricky work of coordinating the encyclopedia and SOTW in a way that makes coherent sense is done, and most of the activities/supplemental books are done, too.  So now I need to work on finishing that up and then working on the Little History of the World version, plus scheduling the historical fiction and all the other add-ons.  I have to tell you that I loved ancient civilizations so much I thought I would have a hard time getting primed for the middle ages, but now that I’m into it, I LOVE IT!  I just love history so much, and the Middle Ages are going to be every bit as fun for the kids as the ancient civilizations are!

I’m at the “carried away” stage right now, dreaming up dozens of cool improvements like adding in free picture study materials and discussion questions and even copywork and notebooking pages and a free lapbook.  I’m sure reality will settle in shortly, when the reality of how much time this all takes sets in!  So we’ll see how much I can get done before the reality check comes!  In the meantime, let me know what features YOU think are the most valuable.  Perhaps that will help me prioritize my time!  You can email me, or add your comments to this post, or, if you are on the Yahoo Group, you can chime in with your thoughts there.  (And do sign up, if you aren’t already a member of the group - We have some great ladies over there who are starting to chime in with supplemental book suggestions, modifications, etc!)

In other news about Mosaic 2, I’m very happy to have in my hands an advance copy (called the “galleys”) of an upcoming activity book (due to be released the first of September) called “Great Medieval Projects You Can Build Yourself”.  I emailed the publisher when I found out it was being released soon, and I begged them to let me look at a copy so that I would be able to schedule out all the projects in time for fall.  I love this book, and the fact that the projects range from simple to quite complex, which means it will be easy for those with older or younger kids to adapt for their needs.  Another potential bonus of using this book is that many of the other books in this series are available as free downloads at Wowio.com - I don’t know yet if this one will be included, or exactly when that would happen if it is, but it is another possibility that is exciting.  I know ebooks aren’t always the easiest to use, but a project book, where you only refer to selected pages, can be a good use of the medium.  Or, at the very least, it’s a great way to try the book out before you decide if you want to buy it!  Either way, though, I think this book will make a great selection for the Mosaic 2 curriculum.

A quick note about Wowio, in case you are interested in finding out more about this service - They are apparently doing an upfit on their site, to allow international customers to use it, so the site should be live again sometime near mid to late July.  If you aren’t familiar with Wowio, they enter into agreements with selected publishers to make available free downloads of their books.  The books are paid for by inserting ad pages in a few places.  (The ones I downloaded were sponsored by Verizon.)  The ads are NOT at all obtrusive, and the whole project is a great idea!   I hope that they are very successful with this venture.

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UPDATE: I have received word from ChoosyHomeschooler that due to outstanding response, they have received as many applicants for paid reviewers as they can handle at this time.  I’ll be sure to pass the word along if they require more participants in the future!   In the meantime, the review site is now in a public preview phase, and you are welcome to check it out!  Use the contact feature to let them know if you have any issues or suggestions for improvement with the site so far.  They are busy tweaking it to make things as useful as possible!

I just wanted to let you know that the company I work for part time is looking for homeschoolers who would like to be paid for writing reviews about how educational products worked (or didn’t work!) for their families.  They are paying $10 per review for 350 words or more, until they have enough reviews to make their new site very useful to homeschoolers.  They also have an opportunity for you to fill out a survey about your homeschooling preferences for $15.  (They are trying to determine how to structure their website so that it is most helpful.)

The company is called ChoosyHomeschoolers, and they are getting ready to launch their new reviews website.  I’ve been helping them out part time, writing and consulting, and they have been just wonderful to work with!  Rich Rasmus, the owner (and former CEO of K12), has been super nice to communicate with via email and phone conversations, and Jennifer Gray, the editor, is great, too.  I know it is hard to find good ways to earn a little extra spending money from home, amidst all the scams and pyramid schemes and junk out there, so I just wanted to let you all know that this is a legitimate small company.  They want to employ homeschoolers for as many of their staff positions as they can, so it is even possible that a few of these reviewer positions could turn into further employment opportunities.  (That’s how I got started with them.)  When I found out that they were advertising for new contributors, I asked them to let me put in a good word for them, in case any of you heard about it and were wondering if it was on the up and up!

You can go here: http://choosyhomeschooler.googlepages.com/temp for more info!  (And let me know if you have any other questions or such about my experience with them.)

In the interests of full disclosure, I wasn’t asked to pass this information along, nor am I being paid to do it - It just seemed like a good opportunity that I wanted my readers to know about!

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If you are a member of the Mosaic users’ group, especially if you are on “no mail” and read messages on the group website, I wanted to give you a heads up:

I updated the group name to reflect the new website, and that means that the address for accessing the group and the address for sending emails to the group has changed.

The new email for sending posts to the Yahoo group is: bringinguplearnersmosaic@yahoogroups.com

The new address for accessing the Yahoo group website is: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bringinguplearnersmosaic

If you have email filters, etc, set up for the old group name you may want to change it, and if you keep bookmarks of the homepages of your groups, you may want to update that as well!

I’ve really enjoyed all the good ideas and conversation lately, and I especially appreciate those of you who have been chiming in with your own tweaks, ideas, schedules and resources that help make this Mosaic curriculum work for even more people!

Thanks again for helping get this group successfully launched!  I’m looking forward to many great discussions and resources ahead!

(Also, if you are not currently a member, but want to get in on the fun, you can join us at any time here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bringinguplearnersmosaic)

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