At the conference on Sunday I spoke on the topic of ‘Don’t Break the Bank! – Home Education on a Budget’.  I offered a number of suggestions for ways to save money on curriculum and extra curriculars.

In addition to those ideas and principles that I shared then are the special offers that come around from time to time.  Here are some free educational resources that I’ve ordered in the last week, available only for educators (this includes home educating parents):

History of US – free dvd set – my kids have really enjoyed the History of US books as well as the audio version that we’ve checked out from the library.  This hasn’t yet arrived but I anticipate that it will be a nice addition to our history studies.

Journey to the Stars – free dvd – I just checked the site and it seems that the demand has been so high that they are temporarily not offering this. But you can still sign up to be notified when they do make it available for free again.  This also hasn’t yet arrived – I think the site said it would be mailed close to the start of the official school year.  I plan to use this to supplement science.

Books by Ayn Rand – these are provided by the Ayn Rand Institute to educators who plan to teach these works to their students, and as such are suitable for students about 8th grade and up.  I read Atlas Shrugged a year ago and thought it was extremely thought provoking as well as being a very interesting story.  As an important and relevant side note, there was a thread running through the book of some physical relationships between characters that I don’t consider appropriate for my kids (or me) to read.  Though this might sound strange, I’m not sure how detailed it was since I immediately skip any sections that seem inappropriate and resume when the book seems to be back at the main storyline – I read very fast and I can scan a page at a glance so I can tell when something isn’t suitable without having to read every word.  I may skip too far at times but I don’t think I’ve ever missed out on the essential points of the story, and if it seems I went too far, I just go back a page at a time until I’m at the right place.  This is a book that I would like to do as a read aloud with my older children, thereby skipping over any questionable scenes while being able to discuss important points together.  I haven’t read her other works but plan to read Anthem next to see if it can be given to the kids to read independently.  The box with the three books I ordered arrived remarkably fast, within just a couple of days.

Here’s a site that my kids enjoyed watching a couple of days ago: http://animatedtalmud.com/. The kids (even ds16) enjoyed it, and I’ll happily let them watch it another time to further integrate the information.

Avivah