Also this weekend, Thomas the Tank Engine Star Alignment.

Oh, and there is one more thing... we haven't discussed the subject of payment. You can't get something for nothing, you know. But I don't have- I'm not asking much, just a token really, a trifle. You'll never even miss it. What I want from you is... your voice. 

Disney, please don't come after me for using this really shitty Vimeo screenshot. I am poor. For realz. You could maybe get a few plastic clothes hangers and some potted meat out of your petty lawsuit. On the other hand, come at me, bro. I have too much of this potted meat shit. The Husband is kind of into doomsday prepping and I don't want to spend the Zombie Apocalypse sitting in a hole somewhere eating 500 metric tons of motherfucking Spam.

 That was a Disney tangent. Get used to them. I had two of them in the last post that I declined to type but that was pure laziness on my part. This post was literally going to start with "Oh, and..." to indicate an afterthought, you know? And then continue in to the amazing story I have to relay. But you see what happens. My internal monologue is constantly interrupted by Hades or Yzma or Scar. Hmm, that's a bunch of villains. I mean, I hear other characters. Really, I do. But yeah, it's usually the villains. They have the best lines.

Oh, and speaking of Disney tangents: In the above dialogue between Ursula and Ariel, two lines were removed for the soundtrack release of Poor Unfortunate Souls. "You can't get something for nothing, you know." and "You'll never even miss it." So when I hear the recording it really fucks with me, as every word of that film has been permanently and infallibly seared into my brain since the age of eight. So yeah, thanks for screwing with my, Disney.

And now, for something completely different...

 This post is really about Thomas the Tank Engine. Don't believe me? (Ask the dishes! They can sing, they can dance, after all, Miss, this is France! And a dinner here is never second best!) Fuck!

Ahem, as I've stated before, The Spawn loves Thomas. He hugged his little die cast Thomas the other day and told me that Thomas was his best friend. Cue awwwws. He's been collecting the Take-n-play Thomas and Friends but their tracks and other cool offerings are pretty limited. So we started collecting the Thomas Wooden Railroad stuff which have all of the characters and buildings and crap and have been around since the early 90s. These fucking wooden trains are expensive as shit. And by that I mean if the shit in question were made out of a bunch of money. I paid 25 bucks for 3 trains and a little wooden oval track and that was a really good deal comparatively speaking. He also really wants the Trackmaster Thomas trains (which are motorized and run on a completely different track, fuckyouverymuch).

He knows about the existence of these things because of Youtube. So I really have no one to blame but myself. I ignore his crack screen habit every single day so that I can have a cup of coffee and perhaps a nice poop in peace. I've spent a few weeks scouting eBay for used trains and components. Some of these little bitches are more expensive than my fucktitting electric bill. And it's almost July. And I live in FLORIDA. So I came across a Craigslist post for "large lot of wooden train tracks with a few trains, $100". An hour away from my house. Called them up and asked to have a look-see.

You guys. YOU GUYS.

And in the bottom of that giant-ass green tote, I hit the motherlode. 52 Thomas Wooden Railway trains. These are not pictured because I shit myself and had to get cleaned up then forgot to take a photo. There was seriously over a thousand bucks worth of Thomas and Brio stuff.

And then today I took a random trip with my Mom to a goodwill that I never visit and found a giant container of Thomas Trackmaster trains for $24.99. Are you shitting me? The Thomas gods are smiling down upon me this weekend. #blessed

A bit on organization

I'm find that I flourish creatively when things are a little... disorganized. Really, you should see my craft closet. But when it comes to schooling, I've always needed organization. I love to procrastinate and being organized really helps me to stay (by the skin of my teeth, and by the way, wtf is with that expression?) on the right side of razor thin deadlines. Now I'm no longer in school for the first time in many years, but as we ready ourselves for the Great Homeschooling Adventure, I've begun organizing fiercely. Since I'm creating the curriculum for this year I've had to stay on top of things to be ready for August.

The organizational plan is broken into two parts: an online database/calendar, and an offline old-school, write-everything-down planner. For the online aspects, I'm using Basecamp. If you've heard of it you'll know that it's a website for project management. It is very well-designed and lends itself beautifully to homeschooling. More on Basecamp in the future. Onward, heathens!

For the tangible, writable, smellable planner, I went with the Create 365 Happy Planner Teacher Edition. Disclaimer: no one gives me free shit, I just like to pass along info about good shit to other people who may find said good shit useful.

I picked mine up at Hobby Lobby, which made me feel dirty and now I have to donate to a non-bigoted cause to make up for my guilty, shifty-eyed, ear-plugging shopping trip. Seriously, how many ever-loving piano versions of How Great Thou Art are in existence, Hobby Lobby? I totally changed the lyrics to How Great Thou Fart in my head to just make myself feel better. I try hard to avoid that store but they were having a half-off thing and these planners are like 30 bucks and I'm broke and do you know how many books I could get from goodwill with that spare 15 bucks that I saved? Like 15. FIFTEEN BOOKS. Ahem, moving on. This is what it looks like:

 

I love this planner. The original Happy Planner is an 18 month version, the Teacher Edition is 12 and there's also a Student Edition available as well as accessory and expansion packs. I'm planning to expand mine by adding a few of the Home Planner packs to keep up with housework, meal planning, and budgeting (all areas of struggle) in addition to school and life.

That's a really truthy quote. Even contract killing.
I mean, somebody gave Ol' Bugsy some marksmanship pointers, amiright? 

Full year calendar

Month at-a-glance

Monthly calendar

Guess who didn't take a picture of the planning pages? That would be me. I might remember to photograph these tomorrow but in case I procrastinate and you're still curious, each spread has 7 subject columns and 5 rows (Mon-Friday) with approx. 2"x2" lined boxes for content. It also has a space for writing in the week number and the date for each day. Wow, my description was just as good as a picture, right?

 

In the back there are these Classroom Checklist pages which will come in handy for roll taking for all of my 1 students.

So that's the planner. Tomorrow I'll be posting the (hopefully finished) Pre-Primary Literary Explorations schedule for the full year. The expanded units will be released as I finish them, so the full program should be wrapped up by the end of next June. If you're interested for this year I'll try to make sure that they're up ASAP so that as long as you're at least a week behind us you could conceivably start it this fall.

Brown paper packages tied up with strings...

UPDATE: The Readerware Mobile app is now happily installed on my Android devices, complete with a bar code scanner. Boom, baby!

Is there a nicer smell than a bookstore? Freshly baked cookies, maybe? My ultimate goal in life is to own a tiny, out-of-the-way bookshop heaped to the ceilings with books. And I might put in an old-school oven so that I can bake batches of chocolate chip cookies in between customers. I've been a serious book collector since childhood. And by serious book collector I don't mean that I own a 1st edition Dickens in mint condition. I mean that I have so many books that I could probably build a rather large house from them. Oooo! A house with books for walls. That sounds brilliant.

I'm trying to pass on my love of books to The Spawn. We go on book hunting excursions at least once per week. Oddly, I don't really use the library. I like owning my books. I get really vexed and out of sorts when I have to return a book, and libraries frown upon people stealing their books (to which I can relate) so I don't really frequent them. Unless they are having a book sale. Now that's a stand-in-line-for-the-doors-to-open occasion.

In my many years of book hunting, I've often wished for a system of organization. I find myself buying multiples of books because I can't remember what I already own. Then I found Readerware. I am not being paid to praise this software. I simply must rave about a piece of software that allows me to track my collection in a way that makes me feel truly satisfied.

The Nitty Gritty: I paid $57.41 for the Readerware Books Mobile Edition with a CueCat USB barcode reader. I plug in my CueCat, scan the ISBN barcodes on my books, and Readerware imports information from whichever sources I select (Amazon, Library of Congress, etc.) and adds the selection to my library. It makes me feel like a librarian without the $60,000 Library Sciences Master's degree. I can set up categories such as genre, condition, price, edition, and more. I can create Want Lists. If a book has no barcode, I can look up the ISBN or title on Amazon, then drag and drop the Amazon item detail page into Readerware and it will auto-import into my library! Winner, winner, chicken, dinner.

 

There is also Readerware software to track your Music and Video libraries. My only gripe about Readerware is that the mobile app is only available for iOS devices and I'm a die-hard Android user. The software is so good it made me seriously consider buying an iPhone. I cannot make you understand the magnitude of that statement, just know that I loathe and despise the proprietary nature of iTunes and would have serious trouble sleeping at night if I were to make the switch to iAnything. So I'm going to give them a few more months to come out with an Android app before I step off that cliff into the Apple oblivion. In the meantime, I keep a Google Keep checklist of my Wants and Needs, which helps to cut back on multiples.

Literary Explorations

I've finished the booklist for the preschool program that I'm writing for The Spawn to use this year. It's basically a weekly schedule for literacy including a Primary Story and enrichment activities with ideas for further exploration. We'll be starting in August or September and I'll post the enrichment activities as we complete them but I'm leaving the list here in the event that someone finds it useful. They are presented in the reading order so that it's possible to find them at your local library or order a few at a time.

Literary Explorations Pre-Primary Level (4-5 years)

Primary Story Booklist:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown*‡

Freight Train by Donald Crews*

Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown

Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann*

Corduroy by Don Freeman

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans*

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault*

The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister and J. Alison James

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak*

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle

Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson‡

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss

Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram*

Curious George by H. A. Rey*

The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats*

Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina‡

The Story of Babar by Jean De Brunhoff*

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff and Felicia Bond‡

Stellaluna by Janell Cannon*

Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman

The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss

Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham*

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems

Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel and Blair Lent

The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper and George Hauman

The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig and James Earl Jones* 

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton* 

If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond 

Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and John Schoenherr 

The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson* 

Llama, Llama, Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney

 

F is for Felt Board.

Way back in the day I had an unconventional 3rd grade teacher. She was Swedish and liked to make giant block mazes for our class gerbil. She sang a lot and taught us about Santa Lucia and rewarded us for good behavior by letting us select a special treat from her Special Treat Cupboard each Friday. Treat options included real licorice (ick) but also very cool trinkets and toys. Or you could do what I always did and opt for a slab of clay. She'd pull down a giant block of clay wrapped in plastic and use one of those cool wire clay cutting thingies and slice off a chunk. It was great.

She also had a felt board. For those of you who are sadly unfamiliar with the felt board, it is literally a giant board with a piece of felt glued to the front. Sounds like one of those fun "creative toys" that your parents try to fob off on you during especially lean years, right?

"That's not just a stick, Suzy. It's an ULTRA SPECIAL MAGICAL STICK!"

But, I assure you, a felt board can be so much more. I have fantastic memories of creating my own versions of familiar stories with the felt board. It's like storyboarding an animated film without all of that pesky drawing. I've collected a lot of felt board patterns over the years to use with my very own offspring.

Then last week we were visiting my favorite creative reuse store and came across this jackpot:

I cannot stress how much The Spawn is into Thomas right now. He wakes up each morning ready for Thomas in any form that he can get him... shooting, snorting, makes no difference as long as he gets his fix. So I knew this would be a hit. The only problem: many, many pieces... tiny, tiny felt board.

I went in search of felt board making supplies and came back with this:

 

I picked up the poster frame from Cheapo Depot (aka Walmart) and already had the ModPodge, foam brush, and scissors. I didn't get the cheapest poster frame as I wanted a single piece for the actual frame and the el cheapo model is four little plastic edge pieces instead of a solid frame. I got the felt (1 yard though you could certainly use 1/2 with this frame size) from JoAnn's with a coupon. I also picked up a lot of felt rectangles while I was there as I had a 6/$1 coupon.

Putting it together was a snap.

1. I removed the cardboard backing form the frame and used it as a cutting guide for my felt.

2. I used my foam brush to glue down the felt.

 

 3. I removed the plastic from the frame (this was surprisingly glued in). I then inserted the felt and folded down the tabs. Et voilà!

 

As suspected, the felt board and Thomas set have absorbed The Spawn for a solid two hours. Mommy got a nap. Boom, baby!

Let's do this!

Out of nowhere, my once Tiny Overlord is now 3.5 YEARS OLD and interested in learning everything there is to learn in the entire vast universe. I always knew I'd homeschool my kid. It wasn't ever a question of if, but when.

I know, I know, homeschooling is for frothing religious nutters (FRNs) who want to protect their shining examples of God's love by indoctrinating their little brains out. I've seen them too. We're homeschooling not because we're frothing religious nutters (praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster), but because I can provide a rich, challenging, interest-led educational opportunity for my kid. And so, by the hot, hot flames of Mordor, I will.

This isn't gonna be one of those Pinterest-perfect homeschooling blogs, but more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants (when we're actually wearing pants) sort of place. There will be learning, but there will also be cookies-only days, setting things on fire, Super Amazing Adventurey-Adventuring, and possibly some impromptu taxidermy. I do take literacy very seriously, so expect lots of books. If we sound like your kind of people, this is your cordial invitation to Super Amazing Adventurey-Adventure along with us.

I'll also be off-topic A LOT. So I'll try to keep up with tagging posts. That way you can sort and view only the homeschool-related posts if that's what you're here for.

BIG OLE DISCLAIMER: If you don't like the F-word, it's SUPER easy to close this tab and be on your merry way.

A bit about us:
I'm the happy proprietor of The Lewd Shrew, an Etsy shop selling delightfully profane cross stitch patterns and kits. In my spare time I'm working on a book of cross stitch patterns. I'm married, to my devoted Disney partner of 15 years and adorable film-quoting husband. And finally, I'm mother to my reason for 6am dance parties and foam sword fights, hereby known as The Spawn. He's remarkably loquacious, loves counting, spelling, sign language, and attempting to influence me to gouge out my eyeballs with back-to-back Caillou episodes. He is obsessed with Thomas, and can name all eight billion characters. He knows the alphabet, the sounds they make, how to write them in lower- and uppercase, and the signs for each. This is thanks largely to Signing Time and Leap Frog videos, so you can just take all of that television rots your brain nonsense and eat it, Mom.