Living and Learning at Home

Trivium Tuesdays-Classical Link-Up #58

2013-05-21T04:00:00.000-04:00

Welcome to another week of Trivium Tuesdays! For those of you who are new here today, this is a link-up aimed at encouraging and informing other homeschoolers who use the Classical model of teaching. Here we can share with each other and learn from one another.

Featured Post

Today I am featuring Creating Presidential Reports for Early Elementary Students from Ticia at Adventures in Mommydom. I loved her post because we are doing very much the same thing over here these days. I think that having a child express what they learned in a composition of their own (as opposed to filling out a worksheet or taking a multiple choice quiz) is so effective and gratifying for the child. You can see one way that I'm doing this with my son in my post Help Your Child Capture the Story.

A great tool to have your children use for this is notebooking pages. I want to take a quick minute to tell you about a great facebook party that is going on tonight for the company, NotebookingPages.com. They are celebrating their 7th year in business and want to celebrate with all kinds of giveaways, freebies, and discounts! They are having a facebook party TONIGHT from 9-10pm and would love for you to be there. I'll be there =)

Most Clicked-On Post from Last Week

The most clicked on post from last week was Why My 8 Year Old Loves His Latin Curriculum from Intoxicated on Life. This post was simply a video of Trisha's son talking about Visual Latin, and reading to us some of what he has learned! I thought it was great!

This Week's Link-Up

Here are the rules:

Your post must have to do (in some way) with classical homeschooling (any age children).
Your post may be from your archives as long as you only post it one time on this link-up.
Please link to your direct post, not your blog in general.
Please place my Trivium Tuesdays button (found on my right sidebar) on your blog post so others can learn about this link-up!
It may be helpful to state in your link description what stage of the trivium or what subject your post is about, if applicable, so others can easily find posts they are interested in looking at.
Remember, everyone loves comments =) So don't be shy, and tell someone if you liked their post!

I reserve the right to remove any link-up that does not have to do with classical homeschooling. If you are a regular here at Trivium Tuesdays and have something to share that is a little off topic, but still would be an encouragement to the readers here, please still share it =) I'm referring to people who are just trying to get their blog more exposure without following the rules above.

I will visit each of your blogs this week and feature my favorite link-up for all to see next week! Also, if your blog has a button I will place it on my sidebar (under Friends to Visit) for the week until it is replaced by the next week's favorite =)

Introducing A Plan in Place, Customized Planners

2013-05-20T04:00:00.000-04:00

Today I am excited to share with you one of my new sponsors this month! A Plan in Place is a great company that sells customized planners for homeschool families. That's right, you get to decide exactly what you want in your planner, but you don't have to spend hours trying to format and print your own. My son and I are using their Early Learner planner right now and we are both loving it! Here is a few words from the kind ladies at A Plan in Place...

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We are excited to introduce ourselves to the readers of Living and Learning at Home! We are the founders and co-writers of A Plan in Place, Customized Planners for Homeschool Families. First and foremost, we are ourselves homeschool moms! Combined, we are homeschooling six kids from pre-school to 6th grade.

A few years ago, we were searching for the perfect planner to organize our homeschool and make our days run more smoothly, but after researching the available options, we could not find anything that would meet our individual needs. Being homeschool moms, we are used to doing things our own way and we bet you are, too! We started A Plan in Place with that vision in mind.

Watch this video to see how we can help you put 'A Plan in Place' for your upcoming homeschool year!

Kim Lopez & Suzie Doeren

Simple Spiral Binding Machine - My New Favorite Tool

2013-05-16T17:44:00.000-04:00

I am absolutely in love with a tool I got a few months ago. It's a spiral binding machine. Seriously, I love it. I've been going a little crazy and binding everything in site!

I am not being compensated in any way for telling you about this (although these are amazon affiliate links, so I could potentially make about 50 cents if you buy it ). I bought the Carl Brands Ring Binding System with my own money and I want to tell you about it because I LOVE it (oh, did I already say that?!)

It all started when I got the Young Reader curriculum CD from Heritage History. I love using living books for teaching my kids, and love the clean formatting that Heritage History brings to these old books. The only problem is that they are best used in ebook format. They can also be printed out, but I found myself printing out pages and then misplacing them. I knew I wanted to make these wonderful stories into books, but I didn't know the best way to do it. I looked into many different forms of book binding, and finally found the Carl Brands Ring Binding System. At less than $20, it was a perfect match between price and a great final product!

What kind of things can you bind?

Since I got the binding system, I've gone a little book-binding-crazy! I've been making books out of just about anything I can get my hands on =) Here are some of the books I've put together:

Multiple Heritage History selections
History lesson plans from Simply Charlotte Mason
Notebooking Pages along with copywork pages for our Veritas Press Ancient Greece and Rome studies
Song School Latin workbook pages (just for fun!)
A Nature Journal
A Beginning Writing Notebook
A Story Journal (for simple book reports)
and more!

How the Binding Machine Works

When I was trying to figure out which binding system to go with, something I really wanted was to see them in action to help me decide. I thought it might be helpful for you to see how this spiral binding machine works. I'm not great with videos, but hopefully these will help you get a feel for how it works in case you are looking to make some books too!

This first video is a close up of how the binder actually works:

This second video is so you can get an idea of the whole process and how long it takes to put a small book together:

Highlights of the binder:

punches holes into the paper
you turn the coil through the holes to make the book
punch up to 5 pages at a time
punch any size paper (up to 12 inches)
punch locks into the strip to ensure perfectly placed holes
coils come in many sizes to accommodate different book thicknesses

If you are looking for a way to preserve your children's work, make notebooks for schoolwork, or make physical books out of ebooks (and not break the bank!) I encourage you to give the Carl Brands Ring Binding System a try! Let me know if you have any questions and I can try to help you figure out if it would suit your needs.

Happy Book Binding!