Shopping at Hampstead House Books (for Canadians)

I got a print catalogue recently from Hampstead House Books near Toronto (remainders, imports etc.), and noticed several things that homeschoolers and other curious readers might like. Remember that their inventory changes quickly, so what's there one month may be gone the next, never to return. I haven't actually seen most of these, just going by the titles and sometimes the online reviews.

Some of what I found:

Freshwater Heritage: A History of Sail on the Great Lakes

The Greek Myths: Stories of the Greek Gods and Heroes Vividly Retold, by Robin Waterhouse

Sacred Art

A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome

Kipling's Just So Stories

Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Pride and Prejudice

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

A reprint of Puss in Boots from the 1930's

Learning Resources POP For Colors and Shapes. "Give your little ones (ages 3+) a head start on language skills. Set incl. a 34-pp. write and wipe spiral book with marker, 20 flash cards, activity guide, 100-pic. colour and shape games, 4 double-sided Bingo cards, and a spinner." Also: POP for Numbers.

(I don't work for Hampstead House or get compensated for posting updates: I just like to point out good things.)

Christmas presents for those who like books and beauty (Hampstead House)

For those Canadians who occasionally (or frequently) order from Hampstead House Books: their new catalogue is especially nice this month, and might offer some inspiration for holiday shopping.

For crafty and cooking types:

Design Your Own Crocheted Hat (DVD)
Op-Art Socks
Cut Up This Book!: Special Occasions (paper cutting)
Happy Stitch: 30 Felt and Fabric Projects for Everyday
Christmas Origami Paper Pack
Granny Squares 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle
The Gingerbread Book
Apples: From Harvest to Table

For nature nuts:
Reader's Digest Earth Essential Atlas (Canadian Edition)
The Real Rudolph: A Natural History of the Reindeer
Lars Jonsson's Birds: Paintings from a Near Horizon
The Universe Rocks: The Complete Guide to Space (book for kids)
National Geographic Backyard Guide to the Night Sky
Make Your own Woodland Creatures: 35 Simple 3-D Cardboard Projects
Dragonfly memo cube

For literary types:
Alice in Wonderland 2016 Calendar
My First Travels in North America, by Isabella L. Bird
A Christmas Carol: deluxe keepsake edition
The Story of the Treasure Seekers (Nesbit)

For music lovers:
Opera The Great Composers and Their Masterworks
Glenn Gould: A Musical Force
The Art of Opera 2016 Calendar

For art fans:
Christopher Pratt: Six Decades
Clarence Gagnon: An Introduction to His Life and Art
The Illuminated Manuscript
20-piece gel pen set
Staedtler Triangular Watercolor Pencils
Alex Colville 2016 Calendar
J.M. Waterhouse Pocket Notepad

For little ones:
Christmas with the Mousekins: A Story with Crafts, Recipes, Poems and More
Making the Forest: book that comes with modelling clay to mould a fox, hedgehog, bear cub, owl, etc.
ABC Floor Puzzle
Pop-Out & paint Farm Animals
Genius Deck for Kids: 75 Super Word Puzzles
Storytime Origami
Tangram Puzzles Kit
Birds of North America card game

Useful stuff:
Positive Difference Folding Green Tote Bag
Japanese (paper) Notepad
Folding magnifier

Generally interesting:
The Secret Language of Sacred Places
Earthly Paradises: Ancient Gardens in History and Archaeology
Popular Mechanics 75 Tools Every Man Needs And How to Use Them Like a Pro
Edwardian Farm (book, DVDs)

A package from Hampstead House

We don't get brand-new books all that often.

But I saw some things that might be useful in the last HH catalogue, and I had a credit note for some stuff that had gone out of stock, so I decided to send in an order.

Violet Comes to Stay: this will be a birthday gift for a young relative later this year.

World in a Box: I posted about this earlier today.

Watching Water Birds, by Jim Arnosky.

Mouse Tail Moon--a book of poems, also for a birthday gift.

Stars & Planets: a book with lots of tabs, things to unfold, photos, and a poster in the back. Even The Apprentice thought this was pretty cool.

Photos: Ponytails

Learning Geography (Things we like, including Aunty Dot)

Aunty Dot's Incredible Adventure Atlas, by Eljay Yildirim, is Crayons' favourite geography resource right now [2013: and still is!]. We bought it a few years ago from Hampstead House; it was published in 1997 but is still listed on Amazon. Aunty Dot and Uncle Frank have won a trip around the world; the book is full of their letters home (real letters in real envelopes), maps of their travels, and photos of their souvenirs. "Well, here we are in busy Beijing. Elephants weren't such a good idea--if we'd stuck with them we would never have gotten here! Beijing is a real contrast from our journey across the Tibetan Plateau, where we hardly met a soul. There were plenty of yaks, though--very useful animals!"

Children'sAtlas.com: "The Book, CD-Rom, and Website That Work Together." I posted about this rummage-sale find a few weeks ago. Published in 1997, still occasionally available (on Amazon); the CD-Rom runs fine on our computer but the website is gone. Crayons found this a lot of fun and fairly challenging, although she bought up all the "souvenirs" so fast, by playing a couple of favourite games and winning a certain number of points, that she lost some of her interest in trying out the other activities...we'll probably bring it out again next fall anyway.

We found Hammond's Discovering Maps in a sale bin at a department store. There is another edition available on Amazon, but this one is pretty up to date (2006). Ponytails has been using this for general map skills, and the Apprentice also found it useful for a twelfth-grade class that required knowing facts about the "world's longest rivers" etc. It also offers little tips like the fact that if you point at the North Star with one hand and at the horizon with the other, the resulting angle will tell you how many degrees north or south of the equator you are. (How you're supposed to measure the angle while holding your arms like that, I'm not sure, but anyway...)

Maps and Globes: a classic Reading Rainbow selection--looks like a little kids' book, but there's a fair amount of information in there. "Globes (unlike flat maps) are shaped exactly like the earth--like a ball or sphere. They are very tiny models--the earth is really 30 to 40 million times bigger than the globe in your classroom. Globes, because they are round, put all the world's geography in its proper place; they give the truest possible view of the whole earth."

Geography Songs--don't all homeschoolers know about these? "The British Isles, the British Isles..." The Apprentice used to sing the Scandinavia song at the top of her lungs on the swingset, which the elderly lady next door found amusing as well as educational.

[2013 Update:  There were a couple of other resources originally included in this post, but they turned out not to really make the grade, so I've cut them out.]

It's a book, book, book, book world

Yesterday was a day full of books.

It started with a quick visit to one of the city libraries while Crayons was having her dance lesson (the library's across the street, more or less)--we needed to take several books back anyway so we stopped in there. Mr. Fixit found a couple of Glenn Gould videos, The Apprentice found some things she wanted, and Mama Squirrel found a whole lot of booklets on countries of the Middle East on the discard shelf. And Paddington Goes to Town (also discarded).

So we got out of there, picked up Crayons, dropped off Ponytails for her lesson, made a quick run for groceries (the store's five minutes away--gee, you'd think we did this on purpose?), picked up Ponytails, and collapsed at home with some lunch. So far, minimum book damage (especially because there weren't any yard sales or rummage sales worth going to this weekend). Mama Squirrel planned to spend part of the afternoon psyching up and finishing the wording to a support group talk she was scheduled to do last night: on books, of course. And do all the coloured laundry that's been piling up (homeschoolers can theoretically get away with pajamas but public high schoolers can't).

Then Mr. Fixit got a bright idea. Mama Squirrel had mentioned that the BIG library downtown, the one we don't get to very often, was having its annual book sale, and he needed to drop some used motor oil at that place where you take used motor oil, and the big library is sort of on the way there, so he offered to take Mama Squirrel and anybody else who wanted to check out the library sale, drop us off and then pick us up an hour later on the return trip.

Note this was Mr. Fixit's idea. Mama Squirrel, as I have said, would have settled for a quiet afternoon of puttering and writing. But there were a couple of other errands that could get done as well if we went back out, and the laundry could wait a bit longer. And Mama Squirrel had missed this particular sale LAST year, and it was too good a chance to pass up--so with a promise not to get TOO many books, Ponytails and Mama Squirrel went hand in hand down to the very noisy library basement full of tables of books and people squirreling through boxes.

To make a long story very short, we filled up a carton (33 books, mostly children's non-fiction; you pay by the box) and hauled it home. Ponytails was a great helper and found some good stuff to put in. Mama Squirrel was very happy because she found three of Edwin Way Teale's nature seasons books (we already had two of the four, so there was just one overlap to pass on to somebody else); The Winged Watchman; Amelia Mixed the Mustard and several other books of funny kids' poetry; a Mary Poppins cookbook; two Charles G.D. Roberts animal books (this is the other one); Carl Sandburg's poems, his memoir Prairie Town Boy, and another book by him; and some other things I can't remember but will get to in another post. Oh yes--while we were there and waiting for Mr. Fixit, I did a quick run into the children's room (borrowing, not book sale) and borrowed Rumer Godden's Little Plum for Crayons and Jean Little's Look Through My Window for Ponytails--both books I hadn't been able to find at the other library. (Crayons just finished Miss Happiness and Miss Flower (by herself), and Little Plum is the sequel. Ponytails just finished Spring Begins in March (by herself), and although there isn't another book about Meg--which makes her sad--I thought she might like to try another Jean Little book. We do have a paperback copy of Look Through My Window, but it doesn't have Joan Sandin's illustrations.)

We brought the books home--it was almost suppertime by now--and deposited the box in the middle of the living room where the Squirrelings pulled out books and Ponytails played "bookstore" with a calculator. Mama Squirrel reheated Friday night's potato casserole, put in some frozen chicken wings to go along with it, and hid downstairs with the computer until the garlic timer went off. She also pulled a couple of dozen favourite books from the shelves to take as examples for the meeting: so by this time we had library-sale books all over the living room floor, and books from our own shelves all over the rec room--not to mention a big box of support group library books that other people had returned here and that had to go back to the meeting too.

We got all that in the car and Mr. Fixit dropped Mama Squirrel at the meeting, where in addition to giving the Book Adventures talk she also picked up several Hampstead House books from a friend (we did a joint order; some of these are for Christmas presents) and several new Scholastic books for the group library. So they all came back in the front door along with that basket of favourites. And there was Paddington still languishing where he'd been left as well, without even one marmalade sandwich.

It's a book, book, book, book...floor.

But that gives me something to do this afternoon besides laundry and enjoying the sunshine and appreciating the Lord's Day. No, not reading them--making the Treehouse habitable again, or at least not dangerous.