Zen-Mother

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I have a special place in my heart for Big Lots. I furnished my first home with stuff mostly from Big Lots. In recent years though I have stopped going so I don’t get sucked into buying the plastic, low quality toys and in general…stuff I don’t need.

Today though I wanted to check out their school supplies because I have gotten some great deals there before and I had a great purchase day. I got:

A LeapFrog LeapPad Learning System for almost half price. It is listed at $77 on Amazon and I got it for $40 and mine came with two first grade books.

Two Hooked on Math sets…one for 1-2 grade and one for Kindergarten. They are $15 each on Amazon and I got them for $5 each.

4 manuscript tablets for $1 each. These will be great for handwriting practice.

A big bag of pencils for $1.

And a teacher’s notebook that will be perfect to record our daily/weekly homeschool activities, $1.

I also got my daughter a couple books.

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I just recently heard about the Rock Your School program featuring Kimberly-Clark. While I think it is overall a travesty that our schools are not in better financial shape I do think it is awesome that people are being encouraged to try and make their schools better and that private groups are lending a hand. Next year I will have one child in homeschool and one child in a private christian school so I feel kinda guilty I guess for abandoning public schools. If I had the money I would try and help them out so that children can have experiences and supplies they might otherwise do without.

Anywho…Kimberly-Clark is already focused on how to bring some fun - and extra resources - back to school this fall with a Rock Back to School program. She has partnered with Box Tops for Education, a program dedicated to helping schools raise money to develop programs, purchase books, and buy school supplies. To celebrate, they’ve launched a nationwide contest offering parents a chance to win 100,000 Bonus Box Tops, plus an exclusive concert featuring Radio Disney star Jordan Pruitt for their child’s school. Wow! That would be so special for our city schools here.

Bonus Box Tops go a long way. Here is what 100,000 - equivalent to $10,000 - of them could mean for your child’s school:

· Technology Upgrades: A mobile cart complete with 20 wireless-ready laptops, allowing travel from classroom to classroom.
· The Necessities: Enough No. 2 pencils so that, when laid pencil to eraser, they would stretch across the length of more than 145 football fields.
· Hands-on Learning Outside the Classroom: An educational class trip for 20 students including airfare, hotel accommodations and museum admission.

Parents or legal guardians of students in grades K through 8 can enter the sweepstakes daily June 28 through Sept. 15 online at www.RockBacktoSchool.com. Winners will be selected at random from all eligible entries on or around Sept. 22. Look for Box Tops on specially marked packages of participating Kimberly-Clark brands like Huggies, Cottonelle and Kleenex. Of course it would be even better if the box tops were not on disposable (aka wasteful products) cause we don’t buy that stuff but I am sure there are tons of families that do.

So if you want a chance to raise some money for your local school district and have a shot at bringing a concert their way check out http://www.rockbacktoschool.com/!

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I joined an online unschooling group recently and foolishly I did not read the group’s mission statement. It was actually a group of “radical unschoolers”.  I think I have talked about them here before and while I think they have a lot of valuable lessons they can teach about living with compassion and peace, sometimes I think they are a bit off their rockers and I am pretty “out there” myself.

Right after I joined the group a discussion started about an unschooling magazine run by an unschooling family. Apparently the family ran across hard times…financial and possibly an illness. Basically this means they stopped publishing the magazine six months ago with little or no communication to their subscribers. To make matters worse they are still accepting payments for subscriptions today and have been this whole time. So people have been sending money for this magazine for months and getting nothing in return. AND they have been in contact via email with some of the people on this particular group so they can’t exactly say they are not able to get online, otherwise communicate, or refund money.

Some of the unshooling moms on this group were getting pretty angry and felt as though perhaps a talk with the BBB or taking legal action was needed….since they were out money and also since this family was still collecting money under false pretenses. Basically this family is stealing IMO and in the opinions of several others on this group. The family is not answering emails or letters in regards to this situation either.

Well, when legal action was mentioned a nice portion of the unschoolers started belittling the women who were upset by this theft. I kid you not they started telling them to let it go….that the family must have needed the money more than they did and they should be thankful their family is healthy instead of making a big deal out of $30. They told these women that they had no sense of compassion and that a decent person would just consider their money lost as a donation to a worthy cause and get over it. Oh and here was the BEST one…one lady said that the ones upset by the theft were actually given a gift. You see they had been looking to a magazine to fix some deep seated problem in their lives and when their money was stolen they now had a chance to look inward and fix that problem and come out a better person.

Oh wait…no…the most outrageous thing was when another lady compared taking legal action to how some jerk actually called the police on her to “punish” her when she decided to leave her baby in the car while she went into the library to check some books out.

WTH?!?! Now they use radical unschooling (RU) to explain away theft?? What a bunch of BS! Apparently RUs believe that stealing is okay if you need whatever it is you stole more than the person you stole it from. And compassion dictates you let people steal from you as needed.

Ugh….I think I should unsub from this group.

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I think by now everyone has heard of the popular Baby Einstein series of DVDs for young children. Some swear that it helps to “smarten” of their babies and some groups say they do the opposite.

Well, I had a chance to review one recently and I have to say that I kind of like them. I am big on movies and DVDs in general because they can be reviewed first by parents and kids like to  watch the same stuff over and over I find. These particular videos are supposed to help babies develop playful movement and motor skills.

I thought they would be cartoons like you see on the covers but I was very surprised to see lots of real babies and children in the video. They were crawling, dancing, jumping, clapping, and playing. My youngest was extremely interested in what they were doing and had a big smile plastered on his face the whole time. I could tell he was trying to figure out how he could do the stuff they were doing.

The soundtrack was also really good with classics from Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi, and Mozart so even I enjoyed it. It was a really cute video and I think young would benefit from watching…just not too much. After we watched I took my son to the indoor play park and we worked on some of those motor skills.

You can be the Baby Einstein Dvds at Amazon!

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I think many people would be surprised how many homeschooling and unschooling blogs I read…especially since I don’t homeschool. But I do think about schooling and education quite a bit and I like to read about how other families are handling it.

One of the major reasons that I don’t homeschool is because my kids want to attend an outside school. My 7 year old son LOVES school at the moment and despite the fact that I have discussed homeschooling with him he wants to go to public school. My daughter, who will turn 4 next month, has been begging for many months to be able to go to a school. Today I started researching preschools for her for next term or maybe even this one if allowed.

Public preschool is not an option because we live outside the district limits. My son attends a county school which is no problem at all because it is the #1 rated school and it has bus service. BUT there is no preschool program there so my daughter will have to attend a private preschool.

This presented two issues for consideration. I had to make sure that the private schools would allow a non vaccinated child…so far so good. The other issue is that BOTH preschools have a faith based curriculum and are in fact inside churches. One is a Methodist church and the other is a Nazarene Christian church. This is an issue for me because my kids have been raised up until this point with minimal religious education or exposure, despite the fact that my husband and I both have a very religious background and upbringing. I also have no idea what each of these churches believes as far as doctrine is concerned.

They wouldn’t be learning about religion necessarily but they would be exposed to things like prayer and faith based morality. So I am not sure if I should even care. I have much to think about I guess but first I need to tour both of these schools. One of them has a constant access webcam so that is a big plus but they are pretty similar in price and proximity.

One of the public preschool programs within the city hinted that I might be able to fudge my way into their program if I bring them a piece of mail with a city address on it (even though it wouldn’t be mine). That doesn’t feel right to me though. Because it would be lying and also because the spots are limited and I would hate for my child to get accepted into a state funded program while another child whose parents can’t afford a private school gets passed over.

Oh well ….much too think about.

My oldest will also likely be attending some art classes on the weekend held at a historical playhouse. He is REALLY looking forward to that. I just hope we have nice weather because I HATE driving on icy roads!

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I recently got to test out the JumpStart World First Grade software with my first grader. I was really looking forward to it because this would be his first foray into video gaming (his epilepsy was a concern) and it would be an educational experience. When the package came in the mail with its vibrant colors and pictures it was hard not see how FUN this game was going to be and since we have had a few snow days lately when regular school was called off…it gave us the perfect opportunity to play the games.

My first thoughts: the animation is amazing and so it the ability for kids to really interact and not just sit by and be entertained. I was concerned that the music might be annoying or it would just look to cartoonish for me but I was pleasantly surprised. There are 12 Adventure Packs or learning units that actually progress in response to your child’s own learning pace and it is quite personalized as well. You can keep things going by downloading more adventure packs from the site too. It uses clever games to get kids involved in the learning process in a variety of ways. My son gets stressed about having to do homework so much for school but he finds this game very enjoyable and stress free and yet he still learns. I can see why homeschoolers love this system so much.

My son had a blast with it and my 3 year old daughter learned a lot just from watching.

At the JumpStart World web site you can download some trial games to see how you like it before you order. that is a great feature that parents should take advantage of. I am glad my son has something to look forward to on snow days now! And I think we may have to keep buying.

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