Those of you who think that Coca-Cola is being really generous by helping out the polar bears might want to take a look at their bottle of Coke. According to the 2-liter bottle of Coke that my husband picked up for me, they only want to save the home of ONE polar bear.

That’s right, they only want to save ONE polar bear. If you notice, my Coke bottle says “Protect the Polar Bear’s Home”. Anybody who has taken a third grade English class knows that if you want to indicate the homes of PLURAL bears, you would write “bears’ “, with the apostrophe on the end. As a homeschool teacher, I know that you teach this in third grade English class, because I taught it to my daughter last year.

In most cases, I wouldn’t bother to point out a simple grammatical mistake like this. When someone makes a grammatical error on their blog, a message board post, or in a small business situation, I can sympathize – we all make grammatical mistakes once in a while. When a larger publication, like the New York Times or some book publishing house, allows a grammatical mistake to slip by them, I shake my head, wondering how they could let the mistake pass the grammar checkers.

However, I really wonder how a mistake like this could end up going through the checks of a BILLION dollar corporation. Coca-Cola’s packaging more than likely goes through focus groups before it hits our store shelves. A lot of people look at it before it leaves the factory, yet nobody noticed this mistake? It really makes me fear for the future of the English language and for the education of our country.

The kids weren’t very happy that they couldn’t get a toy with their meal anymore. We don’t go to fast food very often; I’d rather get food at home most times. Even this past week, when we had to go straight from gymnastics to Vacation Bible School, I made my own “fast food” at home (one night I made fried chicken with carrots as a side; another night we had homemade Subway sandwiches with a peach as the side). I explained to them that the reason why they couldn’t have a toy with their food was because some people in government thought that they knew better than us and decided to make it illegal to give out a toy with their food. They thought it was stupid; I told them that when they get older and could vote, it was important to know who you were voting for, because votes have consequences.

If you have children and run into this new toy policy, when they ask why there is no toy, you can use it as a way to teach them that voting is important, and they need to pay attention to what attitude the people that they are voting for have towards “We the People”.

Most of the kids in my neighborhood have already started school for the year. Our church started school Monday; some kids started on the 11th, and some really crazy schools started at the end of July. We’re still on summer vacation until September 8th.

No matter when you’re starting school this year (or if you already have), if you are choosing to homeschool your child, you might want to check out The Old Schoolhouse’s Online Homeschool Expo. It runs from October 4-8, and it should be pretty exciting. There will be guest speakers, door prizes, and fellowship. Best of all, it doesn’t matter where you live, if you can get online, you can attend!

Some of the guest speakers include Zan Tyler, Dr. Jay Wile, Jeannie Fulbright,Carol Barnier, Diana Waring, Todd Wilson, Davis Carman, Kim Kautzer, and Lee Binz. The theme this year is “Celebrate Homeschooling”. If you homeschool, you have a lot to celebrate. The freedom to let your kids have a couple extra weeks of summer while everybody else is already working, for example. The freedom to teach about the Founding Father’s without a lot of progressive propaganda. The freedom to spend time with your kids. The freedom to fit education to your child’s needs and abilities. You probably have your own unique reasons to be thankful to be homeschooling.

Between now and midnight on August 22nd, you can save $5 off the price of the Expo. Right now it’s $19.99. With this, you’ll get more than $200 in free eBooks, plus an mp3 copy of the sessions.

This year, there will be special teen sessions, plus there will be an emphasis on writing. Although my little boy is only going to be working on writing letters this year, my daughter, on the other hand, needs to start writing more. Over the summer, she’s learned that writing can be valuable… I told her that she can keep any money that she makes from designing t-shirts, but she’ll need to know how to write to do that work. No matter what level your child is at, I’m sure that he or she does a lot of writing too.

If you sign up early enough, you’ll be able to attend the preconference shows with Dr. Jay Wile, Jeannie Fulbright, and Kim Kautzer. They will take place on August 24th and September 1st.

If you’re like me and need to Tivo everything to fit it into your busy life, you might prefer the October Expo to Go instead. Tickets for that will be $14.99 if you order this week.

Tickets sell out (at least to the live event), so if you’re interested, then you might want to think about signing up as soon as possible. The Old Schoolhouse is a Christian organization; I like that, although perhaps the leftist visitors that I had at my blog a few weeks ago might not.

In case you didn’t catch the link earlier, you can find out more at Schoolhouseexpo.com. Or click on the picture at the top of this post.

Let your homeschooling friends know too!

I just discovered today that Amazon.com is offering free Amazon.com Prime Membership for students with Amazon Student. I believe that it is for college students only. All you have to do is enter your grade level, .edu email address, and major, and Amazon will give you a year of Amazon Prime membership. Amazon Prime membership allows you to have FREE 2 day shipping!

I am really excited about this, because my husband is a law student. I am always winning Swagbucks, but I always try to wait until I get $25 in Amazon.com gift cards before I can place an order to get the free shipping. With Amazon Student, I don’t have to wait until I get the $25 for free shipping, I can just order when I have enough gift cards saved up for the one item that I want.

When I ordered The Overton Window, I ordered several books with it, including Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and Wives of the Signers. Since The Overton Window was on pre-order, I had to wait about a month to get my other two books, because my shipment was waiting for Beck’s book. I won’t have to do that any more.

Now if only I could find enough time to read the books that I have. I have enough Swagbucks for American History in Black & White, but I still have other books that I haven’t read yet. That darned Glenn Beck for recommending so many good books! I may need to buy some curriculum at Amazon in the next couple of weeks though. At any rate, when I’m ready to order, I can get free two-day shipping. If you’re a student (or share an Amazon.com account with one), so can you.

All the great deals on school supplies are on. Yesterday, I finally got around to inventorying all our school and office supplies. I bought so many pencils for cheap last year, I didn’t need any. I didn’t need pens either. I had plenty of mechanical pencils too (the pens and mechanical pencils are for me and dh; dd uses pencils). I still had four boxes of crayons from last year; dd isn’t using crayons as much as she used to, and ds was still not using too many last year. So what I really needed was markers, a couple rulers, college ruled 1-subject notebooks (for me), and colored pencils. I could use a few more crayons and a few file folders too.

So I went shopping for school and office supplies for the upcoming year. Wal-Mart had a great deal on 1″ notebooks; our choir needed some, so I picked up 10. The aisles were busy with parents getting supplies for their kids.

Today, I had to go register dd for soccer. There were tons of other sports teams registering today too. As I pulled up, I saw a crowd of kids in football gear standing outside.

Getting ready for another school year and registering dd for soccer, watching all the other parents registering their kids for sports and buying school supplies, struck me as odd. On one hand, the country is going to hell in a hand basket. The people that want to see this country destroyed are in power. The prophecies regarding the last days are lining up to be fulfilled. Yet we are all buying school supplies and signing up our kids for sports like nothing is going on.

I guess you have to do that. There’s not much else you can do. It just seems a little weird planning for the future when it might not even arrive.

It has been a long time since I taught myself how to type. I waited until I was in middle or high school to learn. Nowadays, my three-year old pecks at a typewriter. Learning how to type (at an earlier age) is more valuable than ever.

This is where Keyboarding for the Christian School comes in. I was recently sent a copy to review. Because my daughter is in the second grade, we took a look at the elementary school version, but there is a version for middle and high school students.

There are a lot of things that I like about this book. It goes through the keyboard systematically, just like I learned to type when I was in school. There are periodic reviews. Once you start learning how to type sentences, your child gets to type Bible verses. This book also teaches the number pad and gets into some basic word processing. The book has some time tests towards the end, but it’s mostly focused on learning the positions of the keys and actually learning to type. This is a good thing for my daughter, who is a perfectionist and doesn’t like the pressure of a timer.

There are a few things that I don’t care about in this book, and it’s fairly minor. They use Times New Roman font, which is great for word processing, but scrunches up some of the letters together so it’s harder to differentiate each word when you’re trying to learn to type. I personally think that a fixed-width font would have been preferable for most of the book; the one exception being the word processing section at the end. They also use the New International Version for the verses; this might be preferable to many people, but my church likes to use the King James Version, so there might be some confusion there.

Overall, this is a pretty good book. While it’s likely that a secular book would work just as well (or a program like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing), this book is a good choice if you want to use a book, and you want to incorporate Christian beliefs into your typing program.

Earlier, I reviewed the Beehive Reader and All About Spelling. I really loved All About Spelling, but the Beehive Reader was a little youngish for my daughter, who is now working on 150+ page chapter books like Ramona Quimby, Age 8. I was recently given the opportunity to review What Am I, which is the first volume of Level 1 from All About Reading.

This book is a lot like the Beehive Reader, but it doesn’t directly correspond with All About Spelling like the Beehive Reader does. Because it is Level 2, it is a little bit more advanced. Like you would expect out of a reading text, the stories get more difficult as it progresses. In the beginning, the sentences are primarily one-syllable words, and the sentences are fairly simple. The final story, “What Am I?”, is considerably longer, has more difficult words, and is more complex.

Like the Beehive Reader, the book is beautifully illustrated, and is hardbound, so it will last through several children, if you need it to. It is 160 pages.

My daughter thought that this book was more interesting than The Beehive Reader, which was much too simple for her. This book was closer to her level, but over the year, she has exploded in her reading ability, and this book was still a little simple for her. I do recommend this book for early readers who have progressed past the Beehive Reader though. It’s a little too early for my little boy to start working on this set… he’s still working on his letters… but this will probably do nicely as a supplement for his reading (I’m partial to BJU reading). I’m a firm believer in having something available for kids to read.

I have taken this book to church as well. The sermons sometimes go over my daughter’s head, so she sometimes reads this book, along with Seasons of Faith. Even though it’s a little simple, it’s something that we can take along.

Today was a pretty good Mother’s day.

The kids colored stuff for me today, which was really nice. What was super sweet was that my little boy was going to give me Kunky and Puppy, which are some of his favorite stuffed animals (Kunky is a Monkey, when he first got it he couldn’t say monkey). I told him that I couldn’t let him give them to me. I could imagine his cries at bedtime tonight if he didn’t have them. It’s the thought that counts though.

Dh gave me a $25 gift card to Amazon.com. Yay! I’m going to add that to the $10 in Amazon.com gift card codes that I recently earned on Swagbucks. Since I’m an internet content producer, I’m always using it to search for the things I’m writing about. I usually wait until I get $25 worth of Amazon.com codes saved up so I can get the free shipping, but since dh just gave me a $25 code, I don’t have to wait. I usually get to buy free books from Amazon from Swagbucks codes two or three times a year, just by doing something I’m already doing: searching the internet.

I definitely want to get The Overton Window. It doesn’t come out until June 15th, but that definitely looks like something I’ll want to read. The cover on that book is sweet. I guess Glenn Beck had a contest or something where viewers voted for their favorite cover. He must have only mentioned that on his radio show, because I watch the television show every night and I missed it. The good thing with it coming out this summer is that I won’t be teaching school, so I theoretically should have more time to read. I’m not going to take a month-long vacation this summer either. Since I’m no longer writing full-time, I wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway. I wanted to go to Yellowstone for a week, but I think that we’re downgrading even that to a Northern Arizona trip. My husband is in the running for a job in American Express’s fraud department that would pay more than he’s ever made before (we worked for the same company and they laid off both of us on the same day), but my friend will be going with me and her finances are tight, even if dh gets the AmEx job.

I think that I might also get Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence by Wallbuilders. Probably also Wives of the Signers. I was interested in reading both of those after I went to Glenn Beck’s American Revival and I heard David Barton talking about it. They used to study these people in school… I never learned about any of them except the really famous ones, like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. I will probably make these books required reading in my school. It’s important to learn about these people, IMO.

So that’s about my $35 right there. I might also get John’s Story, by LaHaye and Jenkins (I have a few days before I make my order; it will take a couple of days for my Swagbuck gift card order to go through). It’s only $5.46, but my library has it (although it’s currently checked out at my branch). Edge of Apocalypse also sounds interesting, but my library has it (although it’s out too). It’s also more expensive. Not like I don’t have a ton of books that I’d like to read in the near future.

So it was pretty good. Dh made me steak for dinner, and I bought two small steaks, so I can have the other one later. Maybe I’ll have half for breakfast tomorrow. Lately I’ve discovered Sean Croxton from Underground Wellness… he’s a nutritionist, and what he has to say makes a lot of sense. It seems I need to eat more protein.

So if you’re a mom, or a want-to-be mom, I hope you had a great Mother’s Day.

A story hit the news a couple of days ago that was fairly bothersome to me: students were kicked out of school for wearing American flag t-shirts on Cinco de Mayo. Really?

I don’t have a problem with Mexicans, or any other race for that matter. I have friends that are from Mexico. However, I do have a problem with Americans kowtowing to Mexico. What makes their country so much more important than say… Russia… or Germany… or Zimbabwe?

I don’t celebrate Canada Day, or Bastille Day; why should I care about Cinco de Mayo? Actually, I do care about Cinco de Mayo, it’s my brother’s birthday. So I have to make sure I give him a phone call or something. Other than that, who cares? I thought about making tacos that night, but we already had them earlier in the week, so we had chicken instead.

I’m American, not Mexican. If people want to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, that’s fine; I just don’t think that it should be a national holiday in America, any more than St. Patrick’s Day or Valentine’s Day are. We don’t celebrate every country in the world’s Independence Day, and as far as I am concerned, Mexico is no more (and no less) important than any other country on the planet. Well, that’s not true. I’m a big fan of Australia. I spent five weeks there once, and it’s like a home away from home. I love it there. But I don’t expect other Americans to share my love for Australia. Any more than I expect Americans to share my daughter’s love for Italia (she was born in Italy, so she happens to have feelings for that country).

Another way that Americans often tend to kowtow to Mexico is by what language they learn. “Bilingual” seems to be code for speaking both English and Spanish. That’s not the definition of bilingual, bilingual is speaking two languages. Parents will say “I want my kids to be bilingual so they can get along in this country.” In some places, it’s absolutely essential that you speak Spanish if you want to get a job at McDonald’s or Taco Bell. If you really want the big bucks though, you’ll be bilingual… in something like Arabic. Don’t get me wrong, I love languages. My daughter is on her way to being bilingual… in Chinese. They’re going to own our country anyway. I have studied several languages myself. My second language was German. I then studied Russian. Spanish was the fourth language that I worked on (I don’t use it much though). Right now, I think that Chinese and Arabic are more useful.

I like America. I love the Constitution and what it stands for. I just think, if we’re all going to be Americans here, that’s what we need to be. It’s great to have your favorite country outside of America, but I don’t necessarily think that it has to be Mexico… and I don’t think that everyone should be forced to give any non-American country any more prominence than any other non-American country.

I was watching America: The Story of Us on the History Channel (it’s a great series, I highly recommend it for both you and your kids), and I noticed that they were giving away a copy of the video to every classroom in America (or that was their goal). I figured that I’d take a look to see if that included homeschool families, although I doubted it.

To my surprise, I discovered that to be eligible for the free DVD, the “School must be an accredited public, private or home school, grades K-12 and college.” Now, I’m not sure what an accredited homeschool is, but I signed up for the DVD. They said that it would be on its way this summer in time for the fall semester.

I have the first episode on Tivo; I’ll try to get my daughter to watch the video tomorrow. We have already been over American History from Columbus through the Civil War, so this will be review; however, I started teaching her about Columbus when she was 5, so she really doesn’t remember much from back then.

So far, they showed Episodes 1 and 2 on Sunday. There are things in there that I didn’t know, and I have been through AP American History, have read extensively on History, and am currently reading A Patriot’s History of the United States. I’ve also read a great deal of The Real George Washington. I haven’t seen too much bias… yet… although I do expect to see some bias when they start talking about the Great Depression.