Did you hear that vidangel.com is free from March 16-30? You can sign up here for a “free stuck at home account” with no credit card that will be charged if you forget to cancel.
You’ve probably heard by now, but in case you haven’t…Audible is offering a bunch of stories for children and teens for free right now due to public school closures. I encourage you all to take advantage of this. Go here to start discovering. It’s not their whole collection, but a sizable chunk of fabulous stories that will engage any child or teen, or adult.
Listening to stories counts just as much as reading them! You also don’t have to sit sill while listening, they or you can put a puzzle together or do crafts or cleaning. (I often have my kids do housework, especially dishes. The older than 9 kids iron clothes while they listen to read alouds, but that’s another post for another day.)
If you are wondering how to keep hands busy during read alouds, Sarah Mackenzie has a great podcast about that here.
Usborne has some terrific arts and craftsy books perfect for keeping hands busy and quiet that you can get from my Usborne store over here.
(Usborne paint with water books are here. Paper plane and other folding paper activity books are here. Sticker books are here. Paper dolls are here. Fashion activity and coloring books are here. Other coloring books are here. )
Here are some Audible stories in the temporary free collection I can vouch for, as I’ve listened or read all of these.
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. Audible’s version with actress Rachel McAdams is so darling!
Rivals 1 and Rivals 2 (I actually have only listened to Rivals 1 but my friend Olivia vouches for Rivals 2, these are fun stories from history about frenemies, like Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth and the two brothers who founded Adidas and Puma)
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett, this is one of Burnett’s lesser-known works but is just as delightful as The Secret Garden, if not more.
River Secrets by Shannon Hale
Jukebox Joyride by Jacob Stein (an Audible original, very enjoyable tour of the history of music in story format for kiddos)
Then these look promising but I haven’t read or listened to them:
books by Gail Carson Levine, Kathleen Krull about scientists like Isaac Newton, Orson Scott Card, and Jon Sczieska and many more including other literary classics that I’ve been meaning to read, and the old ones I read but can’t remember much about, like Moby Dick.
books about memory and the history of the world
Many of the classics like Wizard of Oz, Robin Hood, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Winnie the Pooh, and Tales of Beatrix Potter
Enjoy!
FTC Disclosure: I receive no commission on the Audible link but I do receive a commission if you buy Usborne books from the Usborne links. Promotion of Usborne books on this site does not imply any endorsement from Usborne Books and More of any opinion expressed on this site.
A wonderful look at the remarkable Abigail. I don’t agree with the list of women achievers in the back but I do love Abigail. I learned quite a bit from the book, even though I read the bio of her husband by David McCullough a few years ago which does mention its fair share about her. I also love the HBO series of John and Abigail by Tom Hanks, especially Laura Linney’s performance of Abigail.
This one’s a darling encapsulation in picture book form of Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages. If I had a little girl at home I would totally get her into the Lola Dutch activities here. Maybe I can get Bugsy playing with the puppets at least.
This one’s a great book to illustrate local interdependence. It’s fun to see the cascade of events that culminate in blue ribbons at the county fair and a young girl set a goal and achieve it. I’ll be adding this one to my list of goal-getter picture books!
For our Language Arts themed day of gameschooling, which is Monday, we had to play Codenames after scoring it while thrifting recently! The kids liked it. I think they will grow to love it as they play it more and get into the groove of the language subtleties of the game. It’s a great game to teach strategy, thinking ahead, word associations, and connecting with the brains of other people. I plan to play it often with them on Mondays, and customize the cards, using terms from the different books I’ve read to them, by using index cards with words I write on them.
I’m also going to use pictures to make my own “Codenames Pictures” from three different sources I already have so I don’t have to make anything up:
cards from an old Disney Memory Game I have from when my older kiddos were little. Hey, it’s instant Disney Codenames, DIY!
cards from the Dixit Boardgame
cards from this interesting boxed set of cards I’ve never heard of before that I discovered while thrifting last week, seen here. I paid less than $2. Because the cards were sitting in the board/card game section of the thrift store, I thought the set was a game and got them. Now that I have them here at home I’m realizing it’s not a game. Apparently it’s a promotional gift/advertisement for visiting a retirement center, LOL! I like the cards…they have kind of old-fashioned, unique photographic images on the front and then questions on the back to ask people, especially older people, about their life, to increase human connection through storytelling and prevent dementia. I’ve been wanting cards to use with Dixit that aren’t quite so creepy and God and his angels delivered! So while not a game per se, I’ll take ’em.
I’m hoping to play Codenames online in my zoom room soon. I’ll let you know how it goes. I figured out how to suspend my iPad from my chandelier so that I have a webcam to pick up the image of a board or card game displayed on my dining room table. Then I’ll text the code card via phone to any remote spymaster.
We also played Quelf for Family Home Evening, this time with Dad/dear husband, instituting the new house rules I wrote about here, in the Monday 3/16 of that post. We all had fun. It’s definitely a game that is better with more people, especially high energy people. Any game that makes people smile or laugh or have sparkly eyes is a winner in my book, and this game did that tonight at least once for every one of the five of us.
This is copied and pasted from a message from Usborne Books and More about a nifty educational tool called the Learning Palette. (I used the Learning Palette disc with my older kiddos when they were young. I just found out it’s now an online educational tool as well).
Photo Credit: amazon.com
Watch the video below if you are unfamiliar with the Learning Palette. It’s so cool that now you can do it all online! It’s customizable for ages and subjects you want your kiddos to be drilled on, but overall it’s for elementary school-aged children. With over 660 lessons and 7920 questions, it is sure to keep at least one person in your house who likes to learn this way engaged for some time.
If you like this you will probably love all the books from Usborne Books and More. Check out my Usborne Store here.
Learning Palette online has made this service available to customers FREE for 60 days, for a limited time. There is no need for a credit card or any commitments at a later date.
Learning Palette online is a self-correcting online product, which includes access to 55 titles (35 Math and 20 Reading) for Grades K-5. This is a total of 660 lessons and 7920 questions! The online version mimics the hands-on version of Learning Palette and is aligned to State and National educational standards. Most importantly, it is FUN!
Access Learning Palette online HERE. Simply enter your email address and name and you can begin playing today!
Hey, it’s the best time ever to get all of the non-statist, liberty-lover Connor Boyack’s educational materials (except his monthly Free Market Rules). If you are a liberty-lover you will want these resources. These are truths are country is founded on, no longer taught in schools!
If the Founding Fathers were alive today, they would buy these books for their children!
Are you fed up with socialism and communism being taught as truth? Then get these books to help you and your children know what a freedom-based society looks like.
I had an enlightening evening with Connor a few years ago when he came and spoke to my Hero Project class end of year ceremony/party. You can read about that here. I love the heroes he chose to speak about. These were all true heroes who stood up to government that overstepped its bounds. People like Alexander Doniphan, Edward Snowden, and the brave Unknown Protester, from June 5, 1989.
Would you like to know how you and your children can recognize when this happens? Get these books and resources, read them, and talk about them! They are written for ages 5-11 but older ages can still learn from them, including adults. They take hard to digest books like F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Edward Griffin’s book, The Creature from Jekyll Island and put them in digestible format.
This bundle includes three brand new e-books created for families to use together in the weeks ahead during social distancing and quarantining:
13 Questions to Level-Up Your Family Dinner Conversations
Subtle Ways Your Kids are Taught to Embrace Socialism
10 Tips for Raising an Entrepreneur
The bundle also includes these items:
All 11 Tuttle Twins books
All 11 PDF activity workbooks
All 11 MP3 audiobooks
The Tuttle Tales family card game
The three ebooks listed above
Passion-Driven Education (PDF, but paperback for the first 250 orders)
That’s $265 in content for only $60! This deal will be disabled soon, so grab yours quick! Go here to get it before the sale ends Wednesday night, March 25!
No coupon needed! This price is nearly 80% off!
As a gameschooler, I’m excited to get the new Tuttle Twins card game and test it out!
Enjoy this interview here with Connor by Tom Woods on how freedom-based economy can be taught to children.
Long live freedom in economy, education, and all aspects of life! It can only do so if we the people educate ourselves about the principles of liberty, and then ACT on the principles and hold ourselves and our elected officials accountable!
FTC Disclosure: I receive a commission if you purchase this bundle using the links above. The cost is the same to you and the money I earn helps to run this blog.
What did you learn from studying Jacob 5 for last week’s Come, Follow Me Study of the Book of Mormon? I’d love to hear your comments. Please share below in the comments section.
I thought it was the perfect allegory to be reading during our social distancing time. I’m sure God planned it this way. He knew the pandemic was coming, and He knows that the allegory of the olive tree has answers for us during this challenging time.
I learned from Professor Tyler in the video that the Lord of the vineyard, Jesus, doesn’t just do pruning, digging, and dunging actions to all of the House of Israel. All those actions happen to each of us on an individual basis as well.
Here is what I perceive each action symbolizing:
pruning = cutting or taking something away and out of our life, such as the death of a loved one, loss of money or job, loss of friends, loss of anything held precious by us
digging = stirring things up so that our spiritual and/or physical food is not the same way as it used to be. This could be all the things above, plus things like moving, new neighbors, change in boundaries of your ward (church congregation), change in the arrangement of anything you are used to. Like having to be quarantined. Also change in having to do anything.
dunging = something in our life that seems bad, offensive, and smelly, like dung, but it’s really fertilizer. In other words, it has the potential to create new growth in our life of something even bigger and better than we ever dreamed of. This could be a new phase in life, unkindness directed toward you, any bad thing like an accident or loss as above, but also any trial.
These three things of pruning, digging and dunging are all “tests, traps, and trials” that happen on each of our Hero’s Journey/ Covenant Path. Each one of them can be a test, trap or trial or a combination of two or all three. God, through Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, allow each of these actions to happen on each of us to benefit us. It’s so interesting that vs says that all those things the Lord of the vineyard did were to “preserve” the tree. Likewise, all the pruning, digging, and dunging that God sends our way is to preserve us. True, some pruning, digging, and dunging comes through our own choices or through other’s choices as well. We can all turn it to good if we turn to God through the choices.
My family is going through something right now, which started way before the pandemic, that seems like dung. It’s a huge trial. I’m holding on to all the hope in God I can muster that this seemingly bad thing has all the makings of a huge great blessing in my life. Then we have the pandemic, a new trial, on top of that trial. I trust in God that He knows the end from the beginning, and that despite all the bad things involved in this pandemic (death, suffering, money loss, jobs lost) new wonderful blessings will emerge, bigger and better than we ever dreamed.
Sorry for the lull in posting my #abookandagameaday challenge, this social distancing thing has changed my schedule a bit so I’m adjusting. The afternoons are more full of free time for my kiddos so I’m finding the balance of work (meaning supervision from me) and free play. I can’t exactly remember what books went with what days so the following is my best guess.
Here’s what we did the past week:
Thursday 3/12: We went to visit some friends’ alpaca ranch. Our game for that day was playing with alpacas. Or rather feeding alpacas and learning how to peacefully interact with them. 🙂 I was OK with just taking pictures. I’m totally not much of an animal person which is funny because my bachelor’s degree is in zoology.
One girl got kicked because she got a little too aggressive in interacting. Lesson learned and she didn’t get kicked again. That night I had a parent-mentor date. I played football catch with my 10-year-old and then took him out for a treat. I surprised myself by willingly doing football drills with him even in the dark and drizzling rain. We played until it was absolutely dark. We ended up thrifting after the treat, imagine that, where he was delighted to find a golf club that I bought him for $2. He had been miniature golfing at the alpaca ranch house the weekend before and discovered the game of golf. The next day he spent hours outside playing with it. It’s so fun to see such simple pleasures. I didn’t track the book I read to him that night but he’s always good about asking me to read to him. I hope he keep asking for it even up until he leaves for home. Maybe we have started a reading streak like in The Reading Promise. My older kids never asked for my bedtime reading to them at age 10 like he does, they always just gravitated to reading on their own and allowing me to bedtime read when I insisted. For our books I read the one above and the one below. The Elijah book is a sweet passover picture book, which aren’t exactly abundant, and the one below is silly but not too silly. A good book for talking about the idea of introverts/extroverts.
The amazing cookies the alpaca owners served us!
Friday 3/13: My two boys played football. That night I got to play games with adults. See the games above at the very top of this post. Yep, we played all four: Say Anything, Spontuneous, Letter Jam, and Telestrations. It was a ton of fun! Say Anything is great a as a “getting-to-know-you” and “I don’t want to think too hard” game. I’m having fun getting with adults more often to play games that the kids can’t play, full of trivia questions and references that apply to Boomers (my husband and the older couples I invite) and Gen Xers (me and the younger people I invite). The night was totally worth it just to find out that my neighbors are totally into music lyrics (hence the wife won Spontuneous). Also to see the same neighbor smile more than I’ve ever seen her do so before. I’m learning my husband is really good at this game! He loves to break out into lyrical phrases I had no idea he knew!
Dear husband is digging up the lyrics in the deep resources of his memory, about to break forth in song.
Saturday 3/14:
The best book for Pi Day! Written and drawn in the same whimsical spirit of Dr. Seuss, but educational at the same time. I wish I had found this one in time to read to all the kiddos for our gameschooling Pi Day the Tuesday before. It’s easier to follow than the Sir Cumference book.
This was date night just for hubby and me, after having the group date night the night before. For the first time ever, we played a 2-player board game for our date. We need to do this more often! We were in such a rut of just always watching a movie at home. I picked Davinci’s Challenge. I have supervised this game for our gameschooling twice but this was the first time I actually got to play myself.
I figured out a great strategy that allowed me to win. It involves pattern building and recognition, based on patterns that all come from the Tree of Life/Circle of Life motif, so perfect for Pi Day.
While we played I had this music playing from a YouTube channel I just discovered, Sounds Like Reign. A wonderful date!
Even after date night, my little guy sometimes asks me to read to him for his bedtime settling down. I think I read the one below in addition to the Pi book above.
Sunday 3/15: This was my hubby’s birthday. We had a birthday party online for him to include my four adult children and the three still at home. He’s a big Dave Ramsey fan so we played “Dave Ramsey Taboo,” using my homemade Taboo cards below. It was a hit! We played brown-eyes vs. blue-eyes. It just happened to work out that way after I divided up the group so that a parent and one older child were on each team with two younger children. (The oldest two children had left at that point otherwise we could have had two big children on each team.) I texted pictures of some of the cards to the people who were remote.
For our book that day, we read the Book of Mormon, as we do every day. I gave hubby Fiddler on the Roof as his birthday gift in VHS format, found while thrifting of course. It’s based on a book. We watched Part 1 that night and Part 2 the next night. Such a bittersweet story and the songs are so wonderful!
Monday 3/16:
We had already planned to have spring break for our gameschooling group and spring break for seminary (which means no getting up at 6 AM and driving up into town at 7 AM) so social distancing didn’t change things for that. What changed was having no track practice to drive my son to in the afternoon. I went to the library anyway and I’m sooooo glad I did as that was the last day the library was open! I got restocked just in time! Whew! If only I had known I would have doubled up! I did gameschooling with my own kiddos anyway because I love games and I want them to catch this love of games, especially when this is such a great time when everyone should be home playing games, LOL! I had been itching to play Quelf since finding it while thrifting two weeks before, in what will forever go down as “The Wondrous Game Haul at my Local Goodwill Instead of the Goodwills Faraway Where I Usually find the Best Treasures,” the morning of March 6, right before the moms’ retreat. 6 games for $13.55 with two still brand new in shrink wrap. More on that here.
This was the first time I’ve ever played Quelf. Some of the stunts it asks you to do are a bit awkward and will put some people outside of their comfort zone. I found myself smiling when I did one just because of the sheer funny-ness/randomness of it. I can see that it would help to play this game with a willing crowd who aren’t afraid of randomness and spontaneity. I can see that my kids would enjoy this more with my nieces and nephews with all that youthful energy of their cousins. So I’m definitely bringing it on our next Utah trip. Also we will play it when all the older kids are here for sure. I’ve created a house rule that you can skip whatever card you don’t like and keep going until you find one you want to play. As we increase our level of skill and ability of sportsmanship, i.e. willingness to try something new and unusual and maybe hard, I will drop that rule.
I call it a cross between Cranium, Trivial Pursuit, and Fluxx. The stunts and questions are similar to Cranium and TP and the rules are constantly changing like with Fluxx. People find their inner actors. I like that it got my 15 year old to do a math problem without any prompting on my part. Did you know that 111,111,111 times itself creates a number palindrome for the answer?
Tuesday 3/17: We played Scotland Yard, which I had picked up thrifting two weeks before for less than $3.
It’s a great deduction and strategy game. Everyone but the player who plays Mr. X tries to catch Mr. X as he runs through London. The person who is Mr. X wears the visor so the other players can’t see his eyes looking at where he is. Mr. X puts his pawn on the map every six turns or so and then disappears. Bugsy (my 10 year old) discovered he liked sunglasses instead of the visor to block his eyes from our view. I enjoyed looking up the real sites of London in Google Maps, showing them to the kids, and finding YouTubes of some of the places, like the British Museum.
Tuesday’s book was:
Wednesday 3/18: Book was Fiona’s Lace which is the greatest St. Patrick’s day picture book ever because of its theme of Irishness and family roots and sacrifice. Such a great, wonderful book!
We played three games that day: more Scotland Yard, Getta Letter at dinner, and then Taboo with Dad after he got home from work, after dinner. We got to unbox the brand new Taboo game I picked up for $2.49 while thrifting. Woo-hoo!
I was surprised that Getta Letter was such a hit among all the kids. I let them pick whatever card/category they wanted to play. I picked this up years ago thrifting in Utah. It’s so old the mechanical timer is broken so I just used the timer on my phone. It’s the reverse of Scattergories. You are given a category and then say as many things in that category as you can, one thing that starts with each letter of the alphabet, with “XYZ” as one letter. We played to see who could get the most. I think the older son got 15 or 16. We had fun using our own made-up categories like “picture book authors” and “podcasts” and for the boys, “NFL players” and “country music songs.” My son actually beat me at naming podcasts. You could totally DIY this game, just toss out a category and have people write down answers. Don’t shell out the high price charged on amazon.
Later that night, after dad was here, we played Taboo. I was pleased to see my Taboo skills were as sharp as they were when I played this three decades ago. I loved this game as a kid! I even made a “Taboo Baby Shower” version for when I hosted a baby shower for my BFF from childhood. I feel like I missed out on a lot of great potential family fun nights not playing this game when my older kids were home. The game became a pleasant and faded memory instead of a key player and I regret that. So cheers for it coming back into my life. I like that the “buzzer” is now a mild squeaker that doens’t require batteries, instead of the harsh buzzer that does. Anyway, we played kids vs. adults then boys vs. girls and I won whichever team I was on. Ellie Dix in The Board Game Family book has Taboo on her “Top Ten List” of Dangerous Games but we didn’t have any fighting during it like she warned. Maybe if we had played with the older kids who are more sticklers we would have. Another great DIY game that you can adapt to themes as I did with Dave Ramsey above. Just Google for oodles of ideas for cards.
Thursday 3/19:
A comical Easter book, not really about Easter, just about an Easter egg. Very funny!
This one is a lovely dreamy book about the cycle of life. I love Charlotte Zolotow.
I wanted to play something involving music and the kids on Thursday. I had picked up Hummm…ble, a board game involving humming and “Name that Tune.” last fall and have been really wanting to play this ever since. It’s close to $70 on amazon. I found one for $2 thrifting. I like my edition better than amazon’s because it’s purple. Remember what I said about playing with Boomers and Gen Xers? Yeah this is a game for that. Not kids. It does say 12+ on the box. That would be 12+ twenty years ago, LOL! The pic below shows how excited they were to play it with me.
We used YouTube clips of a lot of the songs instead of humming them, with me taking an active role in cue-ing up the songs and encouraging them to just guess the title based on the lyrics. So instead of humming I let them hear the actual words. The 15 year old picked out “You’re the One that I Love” from Grease after I played it from YouTube. I love that it’s a great game for musical cultural literacy, and pop culture history as well!
Here’s how to make it more fun for them next time: let them pick whatever song they want in the category that they land on, if they are the clue-giver and don’t know the song suggested on the card. Then they can stump me, especially my 15 year old with his country music.
That was during the day. Then at night we played Brain Games. I love the question cards. The four categories are logic, language, mind and body, and vision. This is a great game for my kids Pyramid Math/Science Class. I’m going to suggest we play it virtually during the coming weeks of the school shutdown where we aren’t meeting in person.
I’m thinking next time we play Quelf I will put the mind and body cards from Brain Games in substitution for the Stuntz cards in Quelf, because they aren’t silly like Quelf’s are. I’m OK with silliness, to a point. Then let people choose.
Friday 3/20:
The boys played Stratego for our game of the day. I love seeing my kids visit classics from my childhood. This is technically my 26 year old’s game but he hasn’t claimed it and taken it with him yet. He’ll probably just buy his own when he’s done playing all his other more tantalizing games.
And that’s a wrap! Another gameschool week in the books!
Want a how-to on gameschooling?
Here’s my intro to the #abookandagameaday challenge. Perfect now that we are all homeschoolers!
Here are two PDFs about gameschooling, including how to build a gameschool collection on a budget and instructions for how to play 7 games right away.
I just love March because of the themes of springtime, new beginnings, roots (natural for you if you are Irish and celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, if not Irish, just extrapolate the theme to your own ancestral roots) the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the Book of Mormon (its birthday is in March). To celebrate I’m sharing a list from my Celestial Family Devotionals ebook of songs and stories about those themes. Click on the links below to go to the song or story.
Use these songs and stories for your family devotionals. You are doing devotionals right? Here’s how to do them if you don’t know, in the video by Diann Jeppson above. With increased family togetherness forced upon us by the pandemic, this is the best time ever to learn how to hold them. Telling these stories I’ve listed here below in your devotionals will increase your family coziness during this crazy time. Use them while the kiddos are putting together a puzzle or doing some other activity with their hands busy and their brains available to listen.
I do devotionals on weekdays, in the afternoons, in addition to our family “PoWeR Hour” of the personal PoWeR actions of Pray, Read, and Write in the early morning before I have to drive to seminary. Sometimes, however, I will add a story from the list of stories below to our PoWeR actions in the morning or use it at dinner. Perhaps someday I will combine the two rituals into one. Sometimes I will text the story to my older, out-of-the nest children. You can read about how I discovered the power of doing my scripture study and prayer along side each family member doing their personal study, first thing in the morning, here.
Living By The Spirit8/84 (This article has many stories about teaching children to live by the Spirit. The paragraph that begins, “We’re on our third time through the Book of Mormon…” which includes a simulation done in a family setting is my favorite.)
Stories from the Ensign About Ancestry and Research
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Tree of Life Mothering 
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