After I explained to our children today why we don’t read just 1 book or source in our studies, but rather several, I came across this quote.
“When you listen to and read one thinker, you become a clone… Two thinkers, you become confused… Ten thinkers, you’ll begin developing your own voice… Two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise.” – Tim Keller
A Cry from Egypt tells the story of the days leading up to the Exodus from Egypt from an Israelite family’s perspective. In the Bible we see this story from the viewpoint of Pharaoh’s palace and the miracles and pronouncements Moses made there. In A Cry from Egypt we see a fictional account of this story from the perspective of Hebrew slaves, living in Goshen, who aren’t quite sure what’s going on but are trusting God. The author, Hope Auer, leads you to compassion for them from the first page.
The main character of A Cry from Egypt is Jarah, a young Hebrew slave girl. Your middle aged children especially, (about ages 9-13,) will be drawn to her and her family and friends. They’ll see life that isn’t “fair”, a family’s love and struggles, and friends that make even a very hard life enriched. They’ll see the tension in a home where one parent is a believer and the other isn’t. They’ll see prejudice overcome by kindness. They’ll see love blossom and be led aright. Miss Auer shows that family life back then and today have many similarities in the issues it deals with, and packs in a lot of Biblical thought in working through those universal issues. Above all, she shows that universally, God is sovereign, and He loves and cares for His people in all ages and times.
I enjoyed reading this book. It presents a familiar story from a fresh outlook, and has plenty of action to keep the storyline moving. Miss Auer did her research, and documents it, and does a good job of showing what it was like to live in that time and place. I think it would be a good book for either your middle aged readers to read on their own, or for reading together as a family read-aloud. The story is not so deep that it will go over your younger children’s heads, but the action and older characters will keep your older children interested too.
For our studies of this time period in Ancient Egypt, in addition to the Bible, we have read and enjoyed two other fictional works, both written in the 1800’s, The Sign Above the Door, by William Canfield, written from the perspective of an Egyptian Governor’s household during these events, and The Cat of Bubastes, by G.A. Henty, (audiobook) more a story of Egyptian life. Both of those are written at a little higher level of understanding. A Cry from Egypt, written for a little younger audience than those and from a Hebrew slave’s perspective—and as truly Christian fiction, without preachiness or moralizing—is a welcome addition to our recommendations for this time period.
A Cry from Egypt is published by Great Waters Press (the authors of Raising Real Men) and is available from the author here. Book 2 in The Promised Land series is coming soon.
Journaling or Notebooking is a huge part of Lifestyle Education through Discipleship™. It is the method we use for documenting our studies in our Book of Remembrance Journals, as we don’t use workbooks, quizzes or tests. Journaling can be done on plain paper, but we like to make special Notebooking pages. Why?
But, of course, designing Journaling pages takes time and some effort. Since this designing of pages isn’t vital to our education, (I think MyMini Books of Remembrance – Lapbooks – need to be more so,) I’m happy to utilize Notebooking pages that have been designed by others, when they fit the topics we study. And Debra Reed, of Notebooking Pages has designed plenty to fit most of our needs (and perhaps yours too.)
You can buy individual sets of Notebooking Pages from Debra, or for a super deal, you can become a Treasury Member and have access for a full year to thousands of Notebooking Pages that Debra offers (including some 3-D ones for designing your MyMini Books of Remembrance – lapbooks), both current and future (while you are a member.) Debra adds new pages every 4-6 weeks. Inexpensive Annual Renewal will keep you getting everything to come.
But, something even greater is in the works at Notebooking Pages. The Notebooking Publisher™ is a new web app being added to the Treasury Membership site that will help you and your children create completely customized Notebooking Pages, easily. You’ll be able to customize text, photos, clip art, and add pre-loaded embellishments to the 100’s of pre-designed templates there, or design your own! Your students can also type their papers right onto the templates before printing, rather than writing on them by hand. (More about that tomorrow.)
The Treasury Membership is already a super value, at $74.95 for over $600 worth of Notebooking Pages (plus all the new updates over the next year). The Notebooking Publisher™ is no doubt worth this amount also, all by itself. But it will be included FREE for members. But that’s not all. (I feel like a infomercial salesman. But this truly is so exciting!) Debra is giving a 25% discount AND an Additional 3 months Membership to those that join the Treasury Membership (or renew) this month. This is a super outstanding value. And NOW is the time to join, and save yourself a lot of time and headaches trying to design your own Journaling pages.
Me & My House will continue to offer our exclusive Journaling Pages specific to our Lifestyle Education through Discipleship™ studies. But, with our new affiliate partnership with Notebooking Pages, these will be of great help for your general studies.
Tomorrow morning I’ll share more about the new Notebooking Publisher™, and a special party to launch it tomorrow night!
Ebooks are rapidly infiltrating home education. This type of resource that was unknown just a few short years ago, is experiencing a huge growth spurt. Some home educators are thrilled with this new technology (especially when they come for FREE.) Some home educators are very leary of it, loving their paper books and not wanting them to be replaced. And many home educators (and the rest of society) are clueless. They aren’t really sure what exactly an ebook is, how to use them, or where to find them.
Putting the ‘E’ in Home E-ducation~Freedom & Simplicity™ Guide to Using Ebooks, the newest Freedom & Simplicity™ guide from Me & My House ministries, will walk you through the answers to those questions and many more.
… Lisa, have you looked at my computer?! I have e-books in so many places that I really need that free software you tell us about and I’ll be downloading it just as soon as I finish this review.
Like so many homeschool moms, I love to research and discovered many gems through the years that I planned to incorporate into our homeschooling. I’m still finding them, although our youngest is a rising junior in college. Sigh.
But YOU don’t have to do that. Lisa is offering her e-book for a limited time at a low introductory price. If you would like to do better at managing and organizing e-books more effectively so they can be incorporated into your homeschooling (and as Lisa pointed out, there are so many free classics!), you might just want to take a look. …
Excerpt from review by Dana Wilson of
Train up a Child Publishing, LLC
Pick up your copy of Putting the ‘E’ in Home E-ducation – available beginning today!
Only $3
I just came across this article on 15 Self-Directed Activities for Toddlers. There are some good, fun ideas there to add to the “Educational Tool Box” we recommend in our article on what to do with Toddlers while you’re teaching your older children. (But all these “activities” aren’t necessary -aren’t a requirement for children so young. Plain ol’ play IS their work, and great for all the learning they need.)
In honor of Ebooks 40th Birthday, here’s another post on ebooks. If you want a chance to win the Birthday Present from this celebration, click on over to yesterday’s post and comment, answering the question I ask there.
Are print books relics of the past, doomed to disappear? Will ebooks completely take over? As a publisher that has gone entirely to producing ebooks AND as an avid reader and collector, with a REALLY good sized home library of real print books, (and ebooks,) AND as an owner of an eReader (and several ebook apps) {understatement} – here’s my entirely unscientific, but not unbiased, opinion.
I believe, more than anything else, it depends on the type of book it is – at least at this point. I think we will see 2 different markets emerge, and hopefully a third in the middle. There will continue to be the nostalgics (like me) who long to hang on to the printed word, and continue to buy print books. These love the experience and convenience of picking up a single book and flipping through it at leisure, or settling in and handling and reading from paper – easier on the eyes, easier to go through. I think this is especially true of “story” type books, biographies, histories, novels, etc. – in particular, longer reading books. Hopefully, as long as these people keep buying print books, publishers will keep printing them. I believe there will remain some people who are dead set against digital books, and will never read anything but a print book. So, I don’t believe paper books are going to go away, as long as this market is there.
Another market we will see, as an extreme, pressing earnestly forward into the completely digital world, is those who don’t treasure books as (printed) books to be collected and passed down, but rather thrive on the digital technology and just use books for the present needed information. They see no purpose for continuing to print books, when everything can be read on a device. These will greatly increase the digital market, but I’m not sure they will do much to diminish the print market, as they probably weren’t huge buyers of print books to begin with. I believe the type of reading these 2 markets do, will determine which books survive in print, and which will be solely available digitally.
I believe reference type books, activity and work- books (if they can be interacted with onscreen), quick-read, and probably even ‘how-to’ books, as well as “short and shallow” books, will eventually go to almost entirely digital form. As our society continues to become more mobile – running to and fro – the ebooks are definitely going to gain. In fact, there is no doubt that ebooks are the wave of the future – not just a passing fad, but also hopefully not an underminer of the past. Hopefully, those of us on the middle ground, will keep good books available in both formats.
As for the homeschool market, although I hope all home educators will nurture in their children a love for printed books and at least keep a few dearly cherished ones, I know for homeschoolers who travel extensively or have large families and small homes, – and even small budgets (that covers most) – ebooks can be a lifesaver. I also hope that, especially with the growing availability and popularity of eReaders, that those who home educate digitally will realize that small, compact, lightweight, and digital does not have to be (and shouldn’t be) reduced to soundbite information seeking, bells-and-whistles inter-activities, and flashcard/workbook binary questions/answers. I am pleased to see more and more publishers making great books available in electronic form. I dream of a world where substantial, real books of mind-developing quality walk hand in hand with convenient digital delivery, without overthrowing the paper and ink business.
In the homeschool market, I also hope that the popularity of ebooks doesn’t do away with live homeschool conventions. Much as I love online conventions, they don’t take the place of physically meeting people and physically seeing and thumbing through books. So while I’m dreaming, I see the vendor’s booths at live homeschool conventions with computers or iPads for taking customers’ orders for ebooks, and the customers getting instant delivery to their devices.
As you can see, I’m on both sides of this fence. I love books of all kinds! I’ll take a “real” book in my hand, whether it’s hardbound, spiral bound, paperback, or e-ink – even audio. At this point I am happy for both print and digital books. I hope it stays that way.
And — Maybe I’ll go back to selling at conventions again. 🙂
Unless you’ve heard of this great celebration, you probably don’t know that the first ebook was created 40 YEARS AGO! Happy 40th Birthday Ebooks! What can you do to celebrate? Read An Ebook, of course!
I almost missed it. I never knew. But now I do. And so do you. And I’m sure no one will mind that the celebration continues on past tomorrow.
40 years ago Michael Hart “decided that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. The first “e-book” was born—a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Those humble beginnings would become Project Gutenberg. Today Project Gutenberg houses 20,000 free texts and over 100,000 books are available through their partners. Today over 3,000,000 books are downloaded each month.” 1
When Personal Home Computers came out and gained popularity, ebooks began to emerge out of specialty areas, and both public domain old books, and new ebooks became more common. With the advent of ebook readers, in the last few years, ebook popularity has grown exponentially. In addition to the written ebooks to be read, digital audiobooks are a popular form of electronic books also. So, whether you read your ebooks on your computer, your cell phone, your ipad, or your Kindle/Nook/Sony Reader, or if you listen to them on your ipod/mp3 player, welcome to 21st century books.
Does this mean print books are a relic of the past? I don’t think so. Stay tuned for my thoughts on ebooks vs. printed books in a future post.
In the meantime, let me know, in the comments, what ebook(s) you (and your family) are reading – and what kind of device you’re reading them on.
Let’s see. I think I need to have some sort of Birthday Present Giveaway for this celebration. If you post a comment with the ebook you’re reading and what kind of device you’re reading it on, I’ll enter your name in a drawing for an Ebook Birthday Present, one of our Me & My House Exclusives ebooks.
Want more chances to win? Sign up for our Newsletter, and post a second comment letting me know you did so, and I’ll enter your name a second time. “Like” our Lifestyle Education through Discipleship™ page on Facebook for a third chance. (Be sure to post a third comment here, letting me know you did.)
Stay tuned for more on ebooks.
Happy New Year from Me & My House!
2010 closed with many “life lessons” rather than book lessons here, yet learning just the same. I am excited though to get back to the adventures of worlds beyond ours that we left between the pages. Though books hold no sway over life’s lessons, they expand our world and our lessons in ways only they can. I am eager to return to them, and let life’s lessons be more peaceful and quiet in days to come. (Death has a way of not endearing you to continuing, intense life lessons.)
With life’s lessons as the underpinnings of all our days, that hold them together in meaning and application, may book lessons form the outer skirts, ever enlarging and expanding our coverage, while held securely by those underpinnings.
Not that our enlarging and expanding won’t be through many life lessons we already know are coming our way in 2011. And not that those lessons will be peaceful and quiet. 🙂 But a mom can dream of such. Our world will expand by at least 3 this coming year, and their events will all hold their own lessons for us. Books will take their proper place, to be opened and enjoyed, but not to supplant those lessons life brings on its way. (Here on the first day of the New Year, we look forward to 2 babies and a wedding in 2011. How’s that for a fresh start?!)
I look forward to sharing our Lifestyle Education through Discipleship™ lessons – from both books and life – with you again this year.
May your life be filled with lessons too, as you walk this journey toward God’s Wisdom – learned from life and books – in 2011.
CBD now offers 1000’s of Christian eBooks!
Whether you’re new to eBooks or an experienced eBook reader, you’ll love being able to:
These eBooks do not require a dedicated eReader. You can read them on your computer, as well as other devises that have a browser, such as iPod, iPad, Android, and more – with the FREE CBD Reader (no app to download.) Your books will always be bookmarked at the place you left off, regardless of how many different devises you use to read them. And you can customize size and font for your reading comfort.
If you do have a dedicated eReader, such as Sony Reader, Nook, or Kobo, you can read your eBooks from CBD on those too. (Sorry, because of Kindle’s propriety format, Kindle devises are not supported.)
Pick up a few FREE eBooks to give it a try today. (I found 3 great ones that I’ve already read in paper format.)
And you can read a FREE sample of any and all eBooks that CBD offers.
Spring is in the air and it’s home education conference time! I’m excited to be heading to the NCHEA Conference this weekend, where dd#5 will be recognized with the other graduates this year, and also plan to attend the CHEC Conference in Denver in June.
Home ed conferences are our “teacher training” and encouragement to keep on keeping on. I believe we all need this kind of boost each year. There are two types of home ed conferences. The first type is a general conference, such as the state conferences are. They cover many types of home education and reach out to all. The second type is a specialized conference geared toward a particular approach to home education. They are generally more helpful in the practical application of home educating in the style you choose. Both are important, as each provides for different needs.
Although I highly recommend “getting out” to a conference where you can see and handle the resources and visit face to face with the vendors and workshop presenters and meet other home educating parents face to face, I know that isn’t always possible for everyone every year. If this is a year you “can’t go”, there are still options for you. In my next couple of post, we’ll explore a couple of those options, both a general and a specialized conference. Stay tuned.
For today, Are you planning on attending a Home Education Conference this year? Which one/where? What do you like best about home ed conferences? Post your replies in the comments.
