Carnivals

What are your favorite carnivals? What carnivals do you participate in?

The Carnival of Homeschooling posts tomorrow at The Daily Planet. You have until 9pm EST tonight to get your entry in. It is easy-schmeasy if you use the Blogcarnival link!

Amanda is hosting the The Homesteading Carnival this week at The Daily Planet. I know this, well, because she is my daughter, and also because I put a post in about our Late Fall Cherry Tomatoes. You don’t have to be a homesteader to read these great posts! Be sure to stop by and check out the cool posts and her cool winter theme! You are sure to find some recipes, ideas or just plain fun to enjoy!

One thing to remember about carnivals is that word is spread as we advertise them on our blogs. If you find a great carnival, let us know and advertise it on your blog!

Contests

There are ALWAYS great contests going on. Amanda just found out she won the Love Dare Book from JoJo Tabares’ contest. Rachel won a cute apron in Penny’s contest a few days ago! These are GREAT places to look for contests. JoJo and Penny are always giving stuff away!

Here are some great contests going on now:

Home Educator Appreciation Day

This one is of special interest to YOU! You cannot enter it personally, but you can assign your children to! What a great assignment! Who is your favorite teacher?

There will be three selected winners for this event, which will be chosen from the following categories:

Less than 2 years
Less than 10 years
10 years or more

How To Participate:

1. You must be a student to nominate
2. The teacher (or a member of the family) you’re nominating must have a blog displaying that they’re homeschooling.
3. Write a post about why this home-educator deserves to win, why you appreciate them. Please include exactly how long they’ve been homeschooling.
4. Link this post, encouraging others to nominate their home-educators.
5. Post the honourary HEA icon in your sidebar (link is on the GGM site)

Prizes? Well, you are going to have to go look!! There are BUNCHES! GREAT prizes!

You will find all the details at Growing in Grace Magazine.

For 1 WHOLE week starting today, Shanna at Learning At His Feet is giving away 7 items!

It is easy to enter her contest: Grab her pretty button and leave a comment to let her know that the button is on your blog and you will be entered into all the giveaways!

Follow The HSBA Post on Twitter!

Another great place to hear about contests now is Twitter. Some contests give out an extra entry if you tweet their contest, so you will find out about them there. If you are not tweeting, it is simple. We use the Firefox plug-in TwitterFox at our house, and we get the updates as they happen.

If you would like to follow HSBA on Twitter, you can Follow at http://twitter.com/hsbapost.

Also be sure to promote The Post: grab the icon on the sidebar!

You will find some other great contests and contest sites on our Contests and Carnivals page!

Links of Interest

2008 Awards Nominees

The Awards are over for 2008, but the Nominees are still listed on the pages. Be sure to check out all the new blogs in each category.

The Weekly - latest updates and links, polls and additional contest information.

Pro Marriage tags at Apple of Gold

Heart of Wisdom Homeschooling: Greek vs Hebrew Thought

Bunny Trails: Rule Follower or Breaker?

Scripture tags at A Pondering Heart

Closeout at Blue Thistle Books

Prayer Requests

Please pray for families who will be celebrating the holidays for the first time without loved ones who have gone on to be with the LORD. Some that come to mind for me is the David and Marsha Drews Family, the Lirette Family, Raising Arrows Family, Rachael Kligmann’s Family, Brendon Knight’s Family, Chrissy Mamasmurf’s Family,

Also remember these homeschool families who lost a loved one in the past couple of years: Lorrie’s Family, Missey Gray’s Family, The Sams family, and the Garvey Family, who lost a newborn and had multiple injuries in a car accident.

Well, there are lots more links and contests to link, but I am hungry, and dinner is already on the table! Be looking for a great giveaway here at The HSBA Post!

Wow, September already, huh? I hope you all had a fantastic weekend and Labor Day. Over the weekend my sister, Amanda, and I had a surprise birthday party Mother Dear. We had a wonderful time and she had no idea about it! We were thrilled! It was her 40th birthday and we wanted to something special, though we have been thinking about the Drews Family TX all week. Please continue to pray for them and offering your words of comfort and encouragement. We also published our September issue of Growing In Grace Magazine the layout is BEAUTIFUL. We had so many wonderful articles and three giveaways going! If you have a daughter, or are just a mother, please go check it out.

THEME

I hope last week’s theme helped you get a bigger view and maybe some ideas about different ways to homeschool or curriculum. There is so much to share and so I hope this helped, especially the new homeschoolers, narrow things down a bit. I am sure some of you are still getting into your homeschool routines. I know some people are very routine oriented while others may be more “day-by-day”, and it all depends on your family and what works best for your life-style. This week please post what your planned homeschool routine is. The theme banner should give you some ideas on how to do that. I had fun making that and adding in real info (except for the times! lol).

When you’re done posting your routines please share your prayers for this school year, and then sign the linky so others can visit.

Again, please enter in your DIRECT link to your HM post and not just your blog link. When others go back to look over the themes they will be able to go directly to your post rather than just your front page.

MY THEME

While I am going to be following Mother Dear’s lead with the routine here is what I plan to do for myself. I will be doing a lot of independent studies, I think.

7:30 - Rise, feed animals, do chores

8:00 - Read Bible chapters, prayer time

8:30 - Hygiene - brush my teeth, get dressed, hair/make-up

8:40 - 20minutes room sweep

9:00 - Check email, read comments, post (if scheduled)

9:30 - Start mathematics

10:30 - Write articles (Growing In Grace Magazine, Feelin’ Feminine, Homeschool Seniors, A Pondering Heart)

12:00 - See about lunch

1:00 - Manage business work (GGM ads, A Pondering Heart designs, The Homesteading Carnival)

That’s all I’m planning to for now. I know Mother Dear has some wonderful plans for school, including learning Spanish, Bible-Ancient History-Jewish Culture Study, Science, and lapbooking. I’m not sure how well I can stick to this routine, but at least I have some goals set forth and perhaps that will give me more motivation to stick with it.

Blessings!

Seeing how I am not smart enough to use the random number generator, um, like to do things the old-fashioned way, I cut up little slips of papers with appropriate numbers on them, folded them, put them in my favorite teacup, and had my son draw one.

And the winner is . . .

#18 - Karen at Lil Momma’s Haven!

Congratulations, Karen!

I was so excited to have the opportunity to review the new Schoolhouse Planner. If you’re anything like me, you’ve worked your way through a variety of planners, but may have had a difficult time finding one that encompasses all you’d like. The people at The Old Schoolhouse sought out ideas and suggestions from the homeschool community, to find out exactly what homeschool families need to better organize and plan their lives. The result is a well-thought out and comprehensive planner.

The Schoolhouse Planner starts out with full-page 2008 and 2009 calendars for the broad overview of your year. Then it moves into the individual monthly calendar pages. Instead of sticking to “just the facts, ma’am,” each month includes helpful tips (teaching writing, chore training, unit studies, and more), useful reference information (7 Wonders of the Ancient and Modern World, famous composers, important US documents from the National Archives, to name a few), a resource list (links for products at The Schoolhouse Store that correspond to each month), and recipes (Amish breakfast casserole, chalupas, easy chicken casserole, anyone?). Much of this will be of great value long after the school year ends.

The second section contains all the Homeschool Forms you might need, and then some. The beauty of this planner is that you can easily print the specific forms you need, based upon the number of children you have and your homeschool. Because of the number of forms available, I might not print the entire Forms section. Instead, I would print the list of forms, so I know what’s available and then print just those that I want, as I need them.

Here’s just a taste of available forms:
Planning sheets – annual, curriculum, twelve-year, weekly, field trips, and more
Record keeping – grades, report cards, high school hours, books read, science lab, nature journal, and much more
Other information – extracurricular, website and vendor list, co-ops, support groups, etc.

Following this is the Household Forms section. There are forms for housekeeping, chores (varying ages of children), menu planning, contact and phone number information, financial and budget records, Bible reading plans, and even garden plans. As with the previous section, there’s much more in addition to these.

Each Forms section also includes some basic instructions for each. I came across useful some ideas here that I hadn’t thought of, which will help me in my own school planning.

With The Schoolhouse Planner, a binder, and your printer, you’ll be set for organizing and planning everything in life. I’m excited to put this planner into use and I will definitely recommend this to other homeschool families!

The creators of The Schoolhouse Planner have generously offered to give away one copy of this fantastic planner! Simply leave a comment here, and be sure to include an email address or contact information if your name isn’t a link (if you win and we can’t contact you, we’ll have to draw another entrant).

Want another chance to win? Post about the review on your blog and link back to this post. Feel free to grab a copy of the image to include in your post. Leave us another comment, complete with link, letting us know your post is up.

This giveaway is open until Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 10:00 p.m. (Mountain Standard Time). The winner will be announced here Wednesday morning.

Growing in Grace Magazine is having a special contest for daughters age 18 and under to submit a small essay to say what makes their mother so special. This is a great opportunity for daughters to have a gift to give their mother for that special day. The prize package includes:

Some prizes are coming in and here is a sneek peek at what
C.S. Flowers is offering the winner! (U.S. Resident only)

Also we have an e-Book on menu planning that was donated by Graham Family Ministries.

We also have a lovely little goody basket full of stationary (note pad, scrapbooking stickers, shopping list pad, pink note cards, Mary Engelbreit Journal, and garden note cards), a $5 Starbuck’s gift card, a Semi-Precious Stone heart charm necklace with additional charms, AND that’s not all!

You’ll also get a KJV New Testament pocket Bible, and a fun book for mom, ‘Death of a Six Foot Teddy Bear’. A fun little book on Girlfriends ‘Moments of connection’

A Season’s Best Recipe cookbook from Pampered Chef.

Also you’ll get a Strawberry and a Cherry Lip Balm from Burt Bee’s, as well as their Mini Lotion kit.

Prize Package valued at approx. $100

This is a wonderful way to show your mom and the whole world how much your mother means to you. Please pass this news onto your friends and invite others to join us. Here are two graphics you may use:

BUT WAIT! There’s more! If you blog about this on your sites and send us the link to your entries, we’ll enter your name FOR EACH BLOG you post this on, into the drawing. So help spread the word for a greater chance to win!

Also, keep in mind that GGM accepts submissions from Christian girls. It’s a wonderful opportunity for a young homeschool girl to write for the Lord and learn about journalism as well. So come on by and enter for your chance to win!