You can take your school anywhere!

Happy Wordless Wednesday!

I love Notebooking Pages and use many of them in my home schooling. I recently purchased the  Character Study notebooking pages and have really enjoyed them!.  We will be using them while studying the  49 Character Qualities this year and then I plan on making these into laminated, bound booklets for my children to keep, re read, and hopefully share with my future grandchildren.

Today Notebooking Pages has partnered up with with the Homeschol Freebie of The Day and is giving away a copy of their Character Study Notebook Pages.  You can get your copy here, and you will also receive 25%  off any item  you order in their store through July 31 when  you use the coupon code: hsfree25off.

Besides the Character pages,  my  other favorites are the Bird Notebooking Pages ,the Famous Composers Notebooking Pages and the American Presidents Notebooking Pages. Told you I liked them

Also, the Classic Prayers for Children sale ends today. I am planning on using this his little book with the the copywork notebooking pages for my two elementary aged children this year!

If character training is something you are looking to do more of this year, I  recommend the Character Journal website for loads of free ideas. I also like this site for lots of lap book  and minit book ideas. Notebooking pages also has many free resources for building character habits here.

What do you use for character training? I am always looking for more quality resources so please share your ideas!

You have no idea how hard it was to come up with title for this post! Anyway…

As a home schooling mom, I find myself making lots of copies. Nothing will throw my homeschool day off more than when we don’t have the copies we need for something or are spending time finding where a certain document is on the computer.

Recently I found a simple solution that has been working beautifully for keeping me aware of  my last copy, and reminding me not to write on it before I realize it is my last copy!

Take a yellow highlighter and draw a big ‘x’ on  your final copy. You can run this through any copier and it will not pick up the highlighter! Not only do I remind myself it is my last copy, I also have the master on hand to copy from without digging around trying to find it.

So simple, but it certainly works for me!

Have you ever celebrated Purim? It is really a fun Jewish holiday and a great spring board for studying one of my favorite Biblical heroines, Esther. This holiday begins next week, starting at sundown on March 9th until March 11th.

What is Purim? Wikipedia says this:

 ”Persian Empire, resulting from the Babylonian captivity (after Persia had conquered  Babylonia), from Haman’s plot to exterminate them, as recorded in the Biblical book of Esther.  It is characterized by public recitation of the Book of Esther, giving mutual gifts of food and drink, giving charity to the poor, and a celebratory meal (Esther 9:22)”

 
In years past, our church would get together and read the story of Esther. The children would dress up, and each time Haman’s name was spoken we would clap, stomp or try to drown out his name. When Mordecai was spoken, we would cheer. I think the adults had more fun than the children! Even though we are not celebrating with our church this year, I still wanted to incorporate a few things into our school and home next week.  Here are a few things we will be doing and some of resources we will be using and things we will be doing:

Studying the Book of Esther. I am planning on studying this book of the Bible all week with my children and discussing different things from it. I am mainly going to focus on character lessons from the book: pride, courage, loyalty, moral strength, prayer and fasting. I use For Instruction in Righteousness a lot when we are doing Scripture studies. It’s a great resource!

 I have also found these lessons that I will print out for my girls to work on (click on lesson title to view):

Colors of Character Lesson 1

Colors of Character Lesson 2

Colors of Character Lesson 3

Colors of Character Lesson 4

Colors of Character Lesson 5

This study I found here will also be good for our devotional time together and I will probably pull questions from it.

Making Hamantaschen. This is a traditional jam filled cookie that is supposed to represent Haman’s hat. These can be labor intensive, but I have found a simple step by step tutorial for making them here. I use jelly or jam that I have on hand instead of making a filling.  

Read Books:  I found a few books at the library on Purim for my 1^st grader, and we will also be reading these books:

Chronicles Of Faith – Esther

Hadassah: The Girl Who Became Queen Esther Purim (Rookie Read-About Holidays)

Sammy Spider’s First Purim

Watch a Movie: I love Netflix and am excited that they carry one of the best renditions of Esther and on DVD! This one is the most accurate and easy enough to understand and it is put out by Trimark (this is the one we like) , and we will also watch One Night With the King (If you haven’t read the book, you should!) just because we love it so much! I think Veggie Tales has a movie out about Esther too.   

Study Persia: I will print out a few maps of Persia (now Iran) and have the children color and label them. I use these resources for most of the Bible maps we study: Deluxe Then and Now Bible Maps and The Holman Bible Atlas

Crafts & Songs:  Danielles Place has some great ideas for making a crown and scepter. We will role play king and queen for the day just for fun. I also love the Purim  version of “Zacchaeus was a Wee Little Man “listed at the bottom of the page. Instead it is “Haman Was an Evil Man”. Love it!

Outreach: One of the themes of Purim is giving to the poor. I am trying to find a soup kitchen we can volunteer at next week. We always make a gift basket to give to the needy for Purim, so we will do that as well. I may try to see if our local food pantry needs help as well.

Beauty Treatments: My girls and I have fun doing facials and manicures, just like Esther received in preparation for the king.  We will do that on the weekend when my son and husband have some man time.

Other: We use A Family Guide to the Biblical Holidays extensively when studying the Biblical feasts. Its a great resource (I love Heart of Wisdom curriculum too, by the way!). I will have my children doing various things using it, such as journal topics, creative writing, and outline etc. There is also this great resource online that goes more in depth into Purim here. Homeschool mom has tons of Purim resources. I like these realistic coloring pages here and this page also has a lot more ideas for you!

Happy Purim! I hope you have found this helpful! If you choose to do any of these activities or have additional ideas for celebrating, I would love to hear about it!