You may have noticed a new little button in my sidebar that I am so VERY excited about! Starting this month, I’m joining a group of ladies to be a part of the Guidecraft Mom Bloggers. Recognize any of the other faces below?

Many of the ladies participating with Guidecraft are writers for the Totally Tots blog. Throughout the upcoming year we will be reviewing some great educational toys and sharing our reviews and as well as giveaways with you all.

The big kick-off event is the Guidecraft Back to School Twitter Party on September 28th where we will give away TWO $500 gift certificates to Guidecraft along with a some other great prizes. If you haven’t already joined Twitter and started Tweeting about it ~ start now!! Your tweet could win you this great Magnetos set!!

You can read more about all of the other FABULOUS Guidecraft Mom Bloggers here and learn more about the Guidecraft Twitter party here.

This is just a quick ‘thank you’ to all of you who participated in the Curriculum Clean-Out by either offering things from your shelves or visiting around and entering the giveaways. There were almost 100 links up to the Clean-Out!!!

Your generosity in sharing is a true blessing to others and I hope that you all made some friends and were blessed in return! Thanks so much for helping to make it fun. :)

I have been eyeing these historical paper dolls for quite some time and today saw that Noble Rose Press is having a summer sale of almost 40% off {until August 31st} on their beautiful Daughters of His Story Paper Dolls. The entire collection of 6 dolls is available for $21.95 ~ and if you find a friend to order along with you, they are offering free shipping on orders of $40 or more!

Be sure to check them out {and plan on seeing them in some of my future posts!}. I’m off to find a friend to share shipping with!

I generally share bits and pieces about what we’re doing in our school week, but every now and then I am hoping to pull all of the kids together in one post and sum-up what we are doing ~ and participate with Kris in the Weekly Wrap-Up. For our first week I had intended on starting off slow and over the next few weeks adding more as we go along.

Turns out the only thing we didn’t have in our day was Spanish. Way to start off slow, eh?

We’re getting back into a semi-routine and still working out a few kinks, but overall the kids are doing great ~ and starting off the new year with a bang. This year we added a few new texts to our studies and we are loving them!!! Here’s a quick sum-up of our week.

History ~ We’re going to be mixing the literature part of Beautiful Feet along with the Time Traveler Units from Homeschool in the Woods. Can I just say I LOVE the New World Explorers unit that we are doing? The kids are really enjoying the hands-on activities that we do almost every day.

This week we talked about explorers {what they are and reasons for exploring}, the life of an explorer {jobs of a sailor, flags, maps} and parts of a ship. We learned how to tie knots…

and completed some interactive notebooking pages on the parts of a ship.

Science ~ Our first week using Nancy Larson Science 1 and it has been great timing since we’re talking about the stages of life and have a new little nephew to observe and talk about while we’re learning! I am so excited to use this science program this year!

Sunday I’ll be posting about our latest science experiment too as a part of Science Sunday, so stay tuned for that. :)

Spelling ~ The girls are reviewing some of the lessons in Level 3 of All About Spelling {and I’m so glad to see that they are remembering more than I thought!!}. Zachary is also reviewing a few lessons in Level 1 and doing great!

Reading ~ I have been beyond amazed at Zachary’s reading this past week. We picked up our Cobweb the Cat reader and he has been reading so well. Considering he hasn’t been reading to me all summer, I was really worried that we would have some major catching up to do. He has been so proud of himself!

Language/Writing ~ We started right back in with First Language Lessons and the Complete Writer. So far, so good! Zachary isn’t necessarily enjoying the step-up in needing to write more…but he’ll get there. :)

Preschool ~ If you’d like to see what we did for preschool this week with Kaleb, you can visit my Preschool Corner post that went up a little earlier today.

That’s it for this week! I generally share bits and pieces about what we’re doing in our school week, but every now and then I am hoping to pull all of the kids together in one post and sum-up what we are doing ~ and participate with Kris in the Weekly Wrap-Up. Be sure to head over and see what other families did this week.

I have another giveaway at No Ordinary Moments {our family blog} right now for a $50 gift certificate from Novica…be sure to stop by and check it out!

I had every intention of starting school last Monday. Guess what? It isn’t going to happen in the way that I had hoped. Despite my well-dreamed plans, things just haven’t fallen into place the way I had anticipated and truthfully I’m feeling a bit flustered. Overwhelmed. And I’d really like to take a nap ~ or several.

Today I’m going to give you a peek at a room in my house ~ a glimpse, and let you in on a little something.

I don’t have it all together…and I have picture proof to show you.

Read more at the Homeschool Village…