Review: Couponing Made Simple

Contrary to its name,  paper money in the United states is printed on a blend of linen and cotton.  I propose that the Treasury department start adding some spandex to help me stretch my dollar a little bit further each month. 

All kidding aside, most families are seeing money flowing out at a greater rate than their income is rising.  It’s even more noticeable in homeschooling families which tend to be one-income households (with more members than the U.S. average).  So one homeschooling Mom, Christi the Coupon Coach decided to do what we do best—teach others what she has learned.    Her book ,Couponing Made Simple states you will “Learn to save 80% today & for the rest of your life.”

The paperback book ($18.00, or $4.99 for an eBook) is just over 125 pages and contains ten chapters—starting with Success Stories to motivate you to try the system.  The next seven chapters are the meat of the program—learning the terminology, suggestions for organizing coupons, the step by step process, and coupon ethics.  The last topic is really more about the legalities—don’t copy coupons, don’t pull peelies off of things you’re not buying.  It doesn’t delve into whether or not it is ethical to clear the shelves of 200 bottles of energy drink leaving none for other shoppers.  There is a bonus chapter on finding bargains at yard sales and thrift stores and a final chapter sharing a plan of salvation. 

The book is an easy read, I got through most of it in 3 hours at the pool.  There are also several money saving tips that don’t involve coupons—like weighing bags of produce (say a 3 lb. bag of apples) because some bags weigh more than others. 

Do her techniques work?  They certainly can.  Last week our Schnucks store has yogurt on sale 20 for $10.  That may seem like a lot, but you don’t really have to buy 20 to get the sale price (Christi explains this in the book).  Since I had two coupons for $.40 off of eight, I bought 16 yogurts.  The great thing about our Schnucks store, is it’s the only place in driving distance that doubles coupons (for the first 15, $.50 or less). 

 

I scored a better deal on a recent trip to Walgreens.  They had my mother’s supplement drink on sale Buy One Get One Half Off and my husband’s deodorant Buy One Get One Free.  I had four $3 coupons for the drinks and four $1 coupons for the deodorant.

Neither of my two best examples is close to the 80 percent mentioned on the book cover but I have several factors working against me.

1. I live in a rural area.  My local paper doesn’t carry coupon circulars.  I have to get the big paper from St. Louis but I live outside the normal delivery area so I can’t take advantage of the great sale prices they offer for subscriptions.  If I buy four papers as Christi suggests, I’m out $10.00.
2. The only store that doubles is 13 miles away and they restrict me to the first 15 coupons less than $.50.  They are a pricier store to begin with so I don’t normally shop there.  I figure is takes a gallon of gas to drive round trip so that’s nearly $4 I can’t spend on groceries.
3. My two local groceries are Mom & Pop stores.  Their sales flyers are filled with their house brands, not national brand named items so I can’t match coupons.

I seem to have better luck with personal care items at the drug store than actual groceries.  I’ll take my dollar stretching victories where I can get them.  Couponing Made Simple is really the basics so I still need to find online sites that  help me no what order to present coupons at Walgreens – Yes, order does matter.  Christi does have a page on her website with some of her favorite Coupon Match Up Websites. If your new to couponing this book may be up your alley.  And I prefer learning from a book than sitting in front of a computer screen browsing websites for help.

 

TOS Review: Susan Marlow Books

Am I the only mother that cringes when her kid says “I’m bored.”  My response is always the same—read a book!  If you looked around our home, you’d think I could open my own branch of the county library.  Fortunately for me, our latest review was a book my son wouldn’t put down so thank you Susan Marlow and Kregel Publications .   Goldtown Adventures is her latest series set in California town after its Gold Rush heydays.  In the first book,  Badge of Honor , we are introduced to 12 year old Jem, his 10 year old sister Ellie, and their widowed father.  Jem still dreams of striking it rich on the family claim, but the father is moving on—purchasing a ranch, taking on the sheriff’s job, and inviting his recently widowed sister Rose and her son Nathan to bring a woman’s touch back into the home.

As my son and I sat on our porch swing we were transported back in time to a land of lucky strikes and claim jumpers.  Actually, I was the one sitting as Schnickelfritz acted out the story.  Ms. Marlow certainly took P.T. Barnum’s motto “Always leave them wanting more” to heart.   Most chapters end with a carrot dangled in front of your nose, daring you to put the book down without finding out what happens next—sentences like: And he found himself looking right into the business end of a Colt .44 revolver.

Which brings up a good point.  The setting  is a mining town in the wild west.  There are saloon fights and shootouts.  A constant plot element is Jem’s concern for his father’s safety as the new sheriff in town.  At one point Jem is held prisoner and his life is threatened. The the reading level for Badge of Honor is ages 8-12 (and my 10 year old can certainly read it on his own), but you may want to make this a read aloud so you can edit some passages and soothe anxious listeners.

The book has 142 pages and 18 chapters.  I was able to read it all waiting for my son to finish robotics camp—just shy of 3 hours, it really is a page turner.  We enjoyed the book as summer reading fun but if you’re studying the era and want to make it more like school, there are free study guides available for each book.  There are 24 pages of vocabulary, word searches, writing prompts, and informational articles.

The Goldtown books may be purchased separately for $7.99 or as a package for $13.95.  The third book in the series is due this fall.

Canning Dill Pickle Chips

One of my favorite memories growing up was staying at the farm where my grandmother grew up and helping my great aunt can her dill pickles.  Actually, eating the pickles was better but canning them was still fun.   I tried  to get my aunt’s recipe – she’d long since forgotten it and neither of her daughters had a copy.  Public Service Announcement:  Save your recipes for your children!   Food memories can be as much of a cherished heirloom as any you leave behind.

Anyway, I ended up using a recipe from the Ball Blue Book for Hamburger Dills.

4 pounds 4-inch cucumbers                                            2 heads fresh dill per pint

6 Tbsp. canning salt                                                         1/2 tsp. mustard seed per pint

4 1/2 cups water                                                               2 peppercorns per pint

4 cups white vinegar (5 % acidity)                                  1 garlic clove per pint (optional)

Wash the cucumbers and drain.  Cut them into 1/4 inch slices (crosswise or lengthwise) and discard the blossom ends.  Also start heating the water in the canner.  I put a round cooling rack in the bottom and set my clean jars inside to heat up.  I put the lids in a separate smaller pan to heat as well.

Combine salt, water and vinegar in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. 

Remove the jars one at a time from the water.  Pack cucumbers leaving 1/2 inch headspace.  Add 2 heads of dill, 1/2 tsp. mustard seed, 2 peppercorns, and 1 clove garlic (if you like) to each jar. Ladle hot liquid over cucumbers leaving 1/4 inch headspace.  Remove air bubbles.  Don’t use a metal knife to remove the air bubbles –use something plastic.  Ball makes a great plastic tool just for this purpose and one end has notches to help you measure headspace.  Adjust the two-piece caps.

By the way, I found a great way to peel the paper off my garlic.  I just sat it on my silicone oven mitt, folded over the finger area, pushed down and rolled the clove in small circles.

Make sure there’s at least an inch covering the jars in the canner—two inches would be better.  Process for 15 minutes at a rolling boil.

2013–2014 Planners Giveaway

 

Although the temperatures around here wouldn’t give it away, it is July and that means a new school year here in Missouri.  Isn’t it amazing that just a few weeks ago we were trudging through our final days of fourth grade but now I’m pulling out new books and designing new printables and rarin’ to get started with the fifth grade.  Of course one of my first projects is always to print out and bind a new planner for the school year: calendars, field trip lists, books read, even a page to add  pictures for the first and last day of school with a sample of Schnickelfritz’s handwriting.  The great thing is most of the work has been done for me with the Schoolhouse Planners.  All I have to do is decide which pages to print.

This “Big Mama” planner has over 800 pages sells for $39.99. It has calendars in a variety of formats, almost 80 pages of homeschooling articles,  another 80 pages of lists (composers, states & capitals, periodic tables, etc.) forms for recording field trips, library books, and progress charts.  And that’s just the school side of the planner.  On the house side are dozens of recipes, grocery lists and meal planning pages,  chore charts, family medical records, financial forms and more. 

 

 

The Primary Planner ($9.95) is the youngest specialized planner with articles written just for primary students, lists of Caldecott and Newbery award winning books,  grammar rules, multiplication tables, and more.

 

 

 

 

 

The Intermediate Planner ($19.00) is for 5th-8th graders (and their parents).  There are planning sheets, calendars, and an address book.  There are also forms for book reports, a kid’s financial record, and Bible reading schedules.

 

 

 

 

 

The High School Planner ($29.00)  can help your kids finish their home education and prepare for the next steps with articles about study skills and college planning.  There are forms for tracking scholarship information and exploring career ideas.  They can work on time management and organization skills with calendars, record-keeping forms, and forms for goal planning and objectives.

 

 

 

Special Learners of all ages get their own planner ($29.00).  The articles come from special needs experts as well as homeschooling mothers who’ve walked this path before you.  There are forms for medical and therapy records, weekly food and behavior diaries, and task analysis cards to help teach life skills.

 

 

 

 

So how can you get these planners for yourself?  You could always purchase them at their listed price through SchoolhouseTeachers.com,  but you know I’m all about frugal options.  Members of SchoolhouseTeachers.com have access to all the planners with their membership and you can try your first month for only $3.00 (continuing at $12.95/month).

Of course for frugal folks, the best option is FREE.  And I have the opportunity to giveaway 1 Big Mama Planner and 1 other planner (winner’s choice) to followers of my blog.  Just sign up below.

Entry-Form

TOS Review: Classical Conversations

In our digital age of keyboarding and texting, it seems that handwriting and penmanship are going the way of the buggy whip.  And yet who doesn’t relish finding a letter from a friend in the mail or cherish a well written thank you note?  And as far as I know you aren’t allowed to text your essay in at the SAT tests, so I still want my son to be able to make a good first impression if his means of introduction takes a written form.  Daily practice is what he needs and now he’s got it with PreScripts Cursive Words and Drawing.  It’s part of a new series or copywork,  history facts, and art instruction published by Classical Conversations.    

The organization is best know for its network of community learning centers, and if you attend one of those, the subject matter of the copywork will tie in with the history facts and Bible verses your kids are learning.  The spiral-bound, consumable book can stand on its own as well.  As far as my Schnickelfritz is concerned, the verses chosen for copywork just start with the letter of the alphabet we are practicing.  Fritz is at the high end of the suggested age range (5-10), but penmanship is one of his weaker skills.  Still, he hasn’t found the text or the drawing exercises too childish.

You can set your own pace through the material—there’s enough to last a school year if you do just one page a day.  This had been enough for us during our lightened summer school, but I think I’ll keep it at this schedule as we ramp up this fall as well.  It keeps Fritz from getting too frustrated and because the pages alternate from copywork to art exercises he only has to do cursive every other day.  He’s still getting some small motor exercise as he draws shapes like circles, lines, and swirls and combines them to make animals and simple objects.   Sometimes he tries to get away with just copying the sample images he sees and I have to remind him the instructions say to “fill the page.”

I’m not sure where the whole mutant, cannibal worms are coming from.  Just take it as proof that this was done by a 10 year old boy.

Prescripts Cursive Words and Drawing and the higher levels of the series retail for $11.99.  There is a beginning book that focuses on letters and coloring available for $12.99.

Black Bottom Banana Bars

This week the youth at church were having a spaghetti dinner and baked goods auction to raise money for their mission trip.  Here’s what I contributed.

Ingredients

1/2 Cup butter, softened                                                  1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 Cup sugar                                                                       1 tsp. baking powder

1 egg                                                                                   1 tsp. baking soda  

1 tsp. vanilla extract                                                            1/2 tsp. salt

1 1/2 cups mashed ripe bananas                                     1/4  cup cocoa

Cream together the butter and sugar, then add the egg and vanilla extract.  Beat until thoroughly combined.   Mash the bananas (approx. 3), but measure them to ensure you have enough.  This measuring cup is great for shortening and sticky things like banana.

In a separate bowl combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.  Add to the creamed mixture.  Remove about 2 cups of the batter and reserve it to the side.  Add the cocoa to the remaining batter.  Spread the cocoa batter into a well greased 9X13 baking pan.  Spoon the reserved batter on top and swirl it with a knife or spatula.   Bake at 350 for 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.  Cool before cutting into bars.  Yields: 2 dozen.

                                       

TOS Review: Institute for Excellence in Writing

I was first introduced to the Institute for Excellence in Writing (henceforth referred to as IEW) with a review of their Teaching Writing with Structure and Style program two years ago.  I knew how to write but didn’t have the first clue with how to teach my son to craft a good paragraph.  I was so pleased with  TWSS and the Student Writing Intensive program that EIW was become my go-to language arts source.  We’re using their recommended spelling curriculum and next year we’ll be using their Fix-It Grammar text.  Still, I was surprised when I was offered the chance to review Teaching the Classics.  It seems the writing company was expanding to a second “R” –Reading.

I received a spiral bound workbook and 4 DVD’s  of Adam Andrews teaching a Socratic Method for Literary Education.  Note: there are no closed captions available on the DVD’s.  To be clear, this program is designed to be watched and read by the parent/teacher who will then turn around and use it with her children/students.  The great thing is the students can be any age—in fact, it’s probably easier to teach kids to recognize plots and themes with children’s literature than War and Peace.  The examples in the DVD workshop include The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Tom Sawyer.

My Schnickelfritz just began reading for his own enjoyment in the last 18 months.  Left to his own tastes he would never get beyond the Hank the Cowdog series   Here’s how our conversations went when he finished a book.

Mama:  So, did you like the book?

Schnickelfritz:    Yeah, it was good.

Mama: What did you like about it?

Fritz:  It was funny.

Mama:  In what way was it funny to you?

Fritz:  I don’t know, it made me laugh.

Mama:  Can you give me a specific instance where you laughed?

Fritz:  No.  Can I go to my room now?

This past year I began assigning other types of books to expand his exposure to other genres and to tie in with our history lessons.  In this case I was less concerned with whether he liked the book or not, I wanted to know what he’d gotten out of the reading.  My question changed to  “What did you read today?” and he’d respond with a synopsis of the chapter he’d completed.  It still wasn’t much of a conversation, really just an exercise in memory. Once again I was struggling as the teacher how to teach my son—in this case, how to glean information from the words on the page.

That’s where Teaching the Classics comes in with two special tools, a Story Chart and the Socratic List of questions.The story chart is a visual organizer for the student to fill in the five basic elements in all stories: conflict, plot, setting, characters, and theme.   The Socratic List has 21 general questions, each broken further down into 5-10 more specific questions about the elements and author.  The sub-questions are arranged from least to more difficult  following the classical education stages of  grammar, logic and rhetoric.   You’re not expected to answer all the questions with every book,  just pick our 3-5 for discussion.   To really delve into the questions correctly, you as the teacher should have already read the book and have several examples from the pages to back up your answers. 

Here are story charts from our reading of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (this is way below my son’s reading level but I chose it for that reason so we could focus on the plot).  I filled one chart out as I planned our book discussion and filled out the other based on my son’s answers (he was intimidated by the small ovals to write in)—can you guess which is which?

 

 

One of us thought the conflict was man vs. man with the question being “Would Mike or Henry win the bet?”  The other of use thought the conflict was man vs. nature.  Put in question form: “Would Mike finish the basement before the sun went down.”  Notice how this shifts the climax of the story.  (By the way, mine was the bottom story chart).

We’ve also been able to have some meaningful conversations about other books and actually expanded our analysis to compare and contrast settings and characters.  Our fun summer reading has been the Great Brain series set in Utah in the 1890’s, but then we received Badge of Honor for an upcoming review and it’s set in California in the 1860’s.  In the grand scheme of history and geography, that puts these two books in roughly the same setting and the main characters of both are adolescent boys.    Yet when we studied the towns and boys  we found some key differences.  Fritz noticed that the gold town was smaller yet had more saloons than the Utah town.  This led to a discussion about the Mormons in Utah and their stand against alcohol.   Better still, he commented that while both boys had a desire to strike it rich, Jem in California was working several jobs to earn money while the Great Brain was satisfied to swindle his friends for their money and property.  Now these were the kind of conversations I dreamed of when I began the homeschooling journey!  I’m looking forward to the upcoming year as we read Sign of the Beaver and Johnny Tremain.   Swinging to the far opposite side, my mother is also interested in watching the DVD’s so she can discuss an allegorical book she’s found fascinating but is having trouble putting her thoughts into words.

Teaching the Classics retails for $89 and you may preview the lesson plans and a sample on the IEW website.  You may also visit the Andrew’s website CenterForLit to download blank story charts, a curriculum guide (titles that work well with Teaching the Classics), and a suggested reading list.