Homeschool Freebies…

From International Paper - The Life of the Forest. This is a great set of teaching tools and the posters are R E A L L Y nice! I wish I had the wall space to hang them all.

The EPA offers tons of free materials, some shipped to your home, others for download. I did a simple search using the word “tidal,” filled out the form and received some really nice posters and materials for my area, the Chesapeake Bay.

The Chart Jungle offers free printables…calendars, charts, checklists…you name it!

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I use my crockpot quite frequently to make easy meals for my family but I especially love to use it in the fall, along with some fresh bread from my bread oven. The house always smells heavenly. I visited CrockPot.com and found not only the latest in crockpots (I wish mine would break so I could justify buying the newest one…it does everything!) but some tasty-sounding recipes too.

To use up leftover chicken (one of those store cooked Perdue oven stuffers), I bought one of those chicken and dumplings freezer crockpot meals, added a bunch more baby carrots, new potatoes and fresh thyme. The boys loved it.

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Sophie Anderson’s art makes such pretty Victorian Journal pages. Click to view and download PNG. Print on heavy cardstock.

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Thoughts on Solitude

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. ~Henry David Thoreau, “Solitude,” Walden, 1854

Language… has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. ~Paul Johannes Tillich, The Eternal Now

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Ode to Autumn
~ John Keats ~

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.