It is continually amazing to me – although perhaps it shouldn’t be – how God answers prayers exactly according to your needs, not your specific desires.

I should probably back up some. I have been feeling very discontent lately, because of my house’s tinyness. In fact, it is not a house at all, but a minuscule one-bedroom apartment in a so-so neighborhood. I’m not able to move at the moment, in large part because I’m planning to purchase my own property in or near Cutler Bay, FL when construction on my parents’ new house is finished in October 2008. Of course, that isn’t soon enough for me. I want things done RIGHT NOW! RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND!

The main current problem with my tiny apartment is not just that we don’t have enough room for our things. I mean, we don’t – we have ONE closet for the two of us, which recently, I kid you not, collapsed under the weight of all our clothes. I’m laughing as I type that, because it really is hilarious, but at the time I was fuming/ranting/otherwise acting all undignified, and it totally fanned the flames of discontent even further!

But the truth is, the storage space issue is a mere matter of convenience. The main issue I have is that the apartment’s size does lead to a problem that, I think, seriously impacts my son’s health.

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I got most of these links in an e-mail today. I have to be honest – I am not overfond of reading entire books on the computer, not when I have an excellent library system at my disposal and a cheapie-heapie little printer that eats ink for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But even the best libraries have their limitations, and I realize that these could be an excellent resource for any home educators who are on a limited budget, which is often a concern among single parent home educators, for which this blog is intended! The last link has a way to get actual free books, not just PDF files, by swapping your old books for theirs. Sign up under me so I can get a free book credit – then refer your friends and earn credits for books that way, too! So without further ado, here are the nine best places to get free books online.

1. Project Gutenberg
2. The Online Books Page
   Listing over 25,000 free books on the Web. The site is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Library.
3. Asiaing.com
   Over 2,000 free e-books and free magazines. Most of them can be downloaded directly.
4. PSU’s Electronic Classics Site
   Read hundreds of classic works of literature for free.
5. PlanetPDF
   Another great source of free classics works of literature.
6. University of California, eScholarship Edition
   The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.
7. University of Adelaide Library’s collection of Web books
   The collection includes classic works of Literature, Philosophy, Science, and History.
8. The National Academies Press
   Read more than 3,000 books online FREE!
9. Paperback Swap
   Swap your used paperback books with other book lovers while reading books from other members for free.

I have finally… mostly… decided what we’re using for school this year for my 9-year-old son’s fourth grade. My goal in our homeschool this year is to have a much more relaxed, enjoyable, engaging and hands-on homeschool than we have in the past. No more “school-at-home” for us! I know he is at least on “grade level” with everything, so I am confident we’re able to go on a different, more experimental track this year. I want to introduce a wide variety of topics that will spark his interest and get him excited about what we’re doing, not make him feel like school is something he has to tolerate until it’s over and the REAL fun (video games, creative illustration and storytelling, computer programming, experimenting with musical instruments, etc) can start. He does well at whatever I throw at him, but I really want him to LOVE what we’re learning about.

I have been reading the incredibly eye-opening and excellently written book Discover Your Child’s Learning Style and, based on the self-assessments my son did with that book, I have really come to accept that he is a Thinking-and-Creative/Performing personality with a great deal of spatial and picture-visual intelligence, whose main modalities of expression are humor and storytelling. I have discovered that he is a morning person and runs out of steam in the evenings. These are TOTALLY NOT AT ALL any of my strengths, nor is it how I learn, and I am a night person so we’ll see how we’ll reconcile that… but this is the way the Lord saw fit to put him together, so it has to be respected

This year we are doing: many more hands-on projects, a great deal more of formal instruction done orally instead of written, more drawing, more storytelling, more performing and skits, more public speaking and recitation (my little extrovert of a son actually enjoys this!) more manipulatives (generously donated by the folks on the HSEduFreeMarket Yahoo! list) , more work on creative writing, shorter lessons, and NO WORKBOOKS. We will be using a couple of workbooks as a resource as my son’s interest dictates, but our focus will be living books and hands-on, interest-led involvement. Here is our curriculum as it stands right now.

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