I expect this list will keep growing throughout the summer…

• A subscription to Moo Cow Fan Club magazine—a terrific kids’ magazine which comes out in themed editions, each issue focusing on an interesting topic like bugs, the weather, Scotland, Egypt, wagon trains, or dinosaurs. I had the opportunity to check out several issues of Moo Cow, and to be frank, it was WEEKS before I could wrest them away from the kids long enough to peruse them myself. The themed format means each issue is sort of like a little unit study. My gang loves this immerse-yourself-in-a-topic aspect. The cartoons and zany Moo Cow characters have also been a big hit.

• A subscription to Muse Magazine, which I wrote about in this post on our favorite children’s magazines. I think if I’d been keeping a list of all the interesting conversations Jane and I have had this past year, a whopping majority of them would have begun, "So Mom, I was reading Muse and…"

In fact, so central has Muse become to our family discussions that not only am I now reading it cover to cover myself (and catching up on back issues, because quite frankly, Jane has learned so much interesting stuff from this magazine that she is leaving her mother in the dust), this year I am spending a chunk of our Fun Learning Stuff budget on some more magazines from Muse’s publisher.

Cobblestone (the educational arm of Carus, which publishes Muse, Cricket, Spider, and a host of other children’s magazines) is currently running a special offer: buy four subscriptions and save up to $54. I looked for information about whether this offer definitely applies to homeschoolers, didn’t find it, placed an order anyway, and got the discount.

I’m trying:

Ask (like Muse, but for younger kids—should be perfect for my 6- and almost-9-year-olds);
Odyssey (like Muse, but for older kids);
Dig (about archeology! How cool is that?);
Cobblestone (about U.S. history).

I’ll report back on those in a few months.

Now back to my list of stuff to buy instead of curriculum…

• Board games. We just got Clue. How did we not have Clue? I LOVE Clue!

Others we enjoy:
Settlers of Catan. (You know this. I’ve raved about it before.)
Rummikub.
Yahtzee.
Monopoly. (Who doesn’t love Monopoly?)
Caves and Claws. (Such a simple little game, but it has been popular here for, gosh, at least five years, maybe longer.)

• Origami paper.

• Good paintbrushes and watercolor paper. There is just nothing quite like painting on real watercolor paper.

• Family memberships! You know about our zoo membership. We recently bought an aquarium membership too. It was cheaper than two visits’ worth of admission would have been.  The girls want to live there.

I have to go make breakfast, but as I said, this list will probably keep growing.

*UPDATED ALREADY! I asked Jane what else she’d add to this list, and she said:

• all of Hilda van Stockum’s books

• all of E. Nesbit’s books

• the entire line of unabridged Puffin Classics. LOL!! (It looks like many of the newer editions of Puffin Classics have been abridged. Bummer.)

"Learning," says Sandra Dodd, "comes from connecting something new to what you’ve already thought or known."

Charlotte Mason called this understanding of education "the science of relations." Relations, connections, rabbit trails: these are the terms homeschoolers use to describe the natural processes of learning. One topic, even one word, sparks an interest or a memory, and zing, learning happens.

It’s like playing with those magnetic rods and balls you stick together to make cool geometric shapes. (You know, the ones currently banished to the top of my closet because they are so fearfully dangerous for babies.) When you touch one of the little rods to one of the shiny silver balls, there’s such a satisfying click as they draw together. You can feel the power of the connection.

I dearly love, at the end of a day, to think about all the connections my kids made—or that I made!—that day. So many satisfying little clicks, so many pieces of knowledge fitting together in interesting ways.

I had the Sandra Dodd "connections" page open on the laptop today because I wanted to look up that quote for a post. (This post, I suppose, although, as you’ll see, the page took over and became the impetus of the post.) If you scroll down Sandra’s page a little, you’ll see there’s a fun exercise for sparking connections, the bit with all the words in balloons. This caught Jane’s eye and she wanted to know what it was about. I showed her, and she asked if we could try it. She decided to start with the word "purple."

We started shouting out ideas or things we associate with purple, and of course "royalty" came up, and neither one of us could remember the name of the shellfish the original purple dye came from. We looked it up and found this page, which told some tidbits I’d never heard before. Did you know the legend says it was actually Hercules’s dog who discovered the dye? Hercules noticed its mouth was stained purple after it ate some snails.

King Phoenix received a purple-dyed robe from Herakles and decreed
the rulers of Phoenicia should wear this color as a royal symbol.

  We also found this part particularly interesting:

The chemical birth of the synthetic dye industry can be traced to the
discovery of an aniline-based purple dye, mauveine, by William H.
Perkin in 1856, who accomplished this while searching for a cure for
malaria. Perkin was an English chemist who changed the world of his
time by making this purple color available to the masses. It became
quite fashionable to wear clothing dyed with “mauve,” and Mr. Perkin
became a very wealthy man.

We had lots of other associations with purple, but the Hercules thing was so interesting we got sidetracked, and about that time Rose asked me to make a baby duck out of felt for Beanie, to match Rose’s Beanie Baby duck (!), and in the middle of that endeavor I remembered I’d picked up a book of patterns for knitted animals, and hadn’t shown it to Jane yet, and she got all excited and went off to translate the knitting patterns into crochet patterns, because she much prefers crocheting.

Rose asked for a felt dog next, or maybe Jane will crochet her one, but I don’t think we’ll stain its mouth purple.

What are your three favorite educational resources, and why?

Do you use del.icio.us? I was just meandering through my list of del.icio.us bookmarks, and wow is there some good stuff there. Like this link, which I flagged with the intention of sharing it, and now I can’t remember if I ever did, nor whom to hat-tip:

Kids’ Corner – Featuring the Stories of Beatrix Potter (and more!)—Read (or listen to) Beatrix Potter tales and lots of other stories (including A Christmas Carol) in German, Japanese, and more. There’s also an audio interview with Mr. Rogers.

Every time I remember about del.icio.us I wonder why I keep forgetting to use it. It really is a handy way to keep track of links you want to bookmark—instead of bookmarking on your computer, you’re bookmarking on the del.icio.us site so that you can access your links from anywhere.

The tags feature makes it easy to group links by topic. For example, I created a tag for links I want to blog about, and another for posts I think Scott would enjoy. You can create public tags and private ones. Very useful.

If you’re a del.icio.us fan too, send me your username so I can add you to my network!

They’re tiny, they’re shiny, and they love to boogie. They jitter and jive their way around the world in the company of my college pal Kristen, and yesterday they danced right into my house and won my children’s hearts. Before that, they trotted off to Japan, and we’ve had a ball seeing the sights with them: it’s the world up close and miniature, and the result is poetry in pictures.

We hope they’ll dance back down this way very soon!