Do you live in Canada? You are so lucky...

You get to access Project Gutenberg Canada.

The DHM at The Common Room blog reminded me about this, when she posted yesterday about being able to access Project Gutenberg Australia in the Philippines.

The short version of all this is that since public-domain copyright laws vary in different countries and for different authors, there are certain free books that you can access only if you live outside of the U.S. Access, as in download to an e-reader, or at least read online (depending on the book). (I have OverDrive on my tablet so that I can get free library books, and I was able to use that to download several books from this site).

Isn't it nice to be the "special" ones, for once?

And it's not all Stephen Leacock and E.J. Pratt. How about downloading the entire Narnia series, plus the Space Trilogy, plus some of C.S. Lewis's non-fiction titles? Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the real deal? How about some classic Eleanor Farjeon? Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats? Charles Williams? Max Beerbohm? Jim Kjelgaard? Greek dramatists? (Yes, I know you can find Greek dramatists on the U.S. site).

We don't have all the authors that made the DHM smile, but we do have Josephine Tey and some other mystery writers, including five Father Brown books. Have you ever read anything by Anna Buchan, sister of John Buchan? I hadn't.(You can get a few of her books on the U.S. site too, under her pen-name O. Douglas.)

That should be enough to keep just about anyone going on books.

Frugalities, and what's for supper

1.  What's for supper? 

A layered casserole made from leftover smoked sausage, leftover cooked barley, chicken broth, celery, mushrooms, and mini potatoes that the Apprentice donated (she brought some of her groceries here).  I cut the potatoes in half, although they were already pretty small; put them on top of the other ingredients; drizzled a bit of olive oil on them; and sprinkled on some thyme.  The potatoes were done by the time the rest was heated through.

Spinach salad with carrots and chow mein noodles

Dessert made from graham crackers, yogurt, frozen blueberries, and a bit of leftover fruit crisp.

2.  Things to make:  I crocheted two doll-sized hairbows and a girl-sized one, after Dollygirl noticed this link on Doll Diaries today.  These are very, very, very easy and fast.  No shaping--you just make rectangles and then cinch them in the middle with yarn.

3.  I downloaded Best Hikes and Walks in Ontario, free right now for Kindle.

4.  Free for the looking:  pink magnolia blossoms on our backyard tree.  Like these ones.  Last year the magnolia blossoms all got killed by a hard frost, along with the apple blossoms.  I've heard that this is supposed to be a good apple year, so maybe the magnolia will stay beautiful as well.

CM is for thick heads?

Well, that's one way to describe CM methods!

"When I was ready for secondary school my parents chose a boarding school for me--Overstone, near Northampton.  It was a school of the Parents' National Educational Educational Union (PNEU).  All exams were set at Ambleside.  It was a school for those who found school work hard to learn, for all was done by repetition of lessons to put them into a thick head."  ~~ Blessings and Testings: A Twentieth Century Christian Life, by Josephine E. Bagby

Want to read some Harper's Young People?

"Oliver sat down on one of the books, took another on his lap, reveling in the dust, and began to look at it.  It turned out to be the bound volume of a magazine called Harper's Young People, published in the year 1887.  The book was mildewed, some of its pages were glued together by years of damp, and its green cover had been gnawed by mice, but it exuded the indescribably delicious odor of all ancient books; better still, it was full of the pictures and adventures of the children of that other world...A world where girls wore sashes and long hair, and boys wore long stockings and button boots, and the horses which pulled the trolley cars wore straw hats."--Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

Want to read some Harper's Young People, sans mildew and mice?  Check it out on Google Books.

I've got it, I've got it! (Aunt Mai for real)

Aunt Mai's 1894 Annual, online and readable. Do a search-this-page for "Mai's." They've misspelled Mrs. Steinthal's name as author, but it doesn't matter. Smyrna rugs (called Door Mats) on page 119. Also the Japanese curtains etc. etc.

And the key to the whole question is...LATCH HOOKING. Yep. No knitting, no weaving...the PNEU programme specifically recommended this particular set of instructions, so the official CM "Smyrna rugs" were short pieces of yarn pulled through canvas with a crochet hook. That's it, that's all.

As for materials, Aunt Mai recommends the following for one door-mat: 1/2 yard of canvas, a yard wide; 1 1/2 pound of "thrums, or the leavings of carpets"; 8 lengths of wood, 7 or 8 inches long and 1/4 inch wide ("The lid of a cigar-box furnishes the best wood"); a crochet-hook; pair of scissors.

Oh, what the hey, might as well write the whole thing:

"Let the pupil wind each piece of wool separately round the wood, and cut through one end, leaving each piece of wool 2 1/2 inches long. Place the canvas on a table and draw the chief lines of the pattern in pen and ink, or with a brush and sepia. Choose the colour to begin with; put the two ends of the piece of wool together; put the crochet hook through the first hole, draw the wool through, loop it, and pull it to make it quite firm. The wool is put in and drawn tight, exactly as the fringe used to be put on to antimacassars. It is the best plan to begin with the border, and then decide what pattern will look best in the centre, and last of all, to choose the background....Dark blue is effective, also a very dark terra cotta.

"Cross-stitch patterns can easily be copied, but after one or two attempts the children find a keen pleasure in inventing thei rown designs.

"When the mat is finished, brush the back with glue and a little flour added, which stiffens the rug and prevents any wool getting loose. Then seam on a strong piece of canvas, and a strong, beautiful mat is produced, which will last for years."

There you go.

Favourite low-cost/no-cost homeschool stuff

These are some of my current favourites:

1. Paper-plate skip counting wheels. I first saw the idea in the Miquon First Grade Diary when Ponytails was in the first grade...so these paper plates are six or seven years old, but still going strong. Very simple--each number has its own plate, with a series of numerals markered around the rim. The 2 plate goes 2, 4, 6, 8, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 0. The 3 plate goes 3, 6, 9, 2, 5, 8, 1, 4, 7, 0. (That's the most complicated one.) The 4 plate goes 4, 8, 2, 6, 0, then again. The 5 plate just has 5's and 0's on it. And so on. Do you see how it works? You count around the plate, and each number you say will have the same final digit as the next numeral on the plate.

2. "Topical" Bible sword drills. [2019: link is broken] My kids particularly like the Animals version. (Warning: some of the words don't match up if you use newer Bible translations.)

3. Beaver Ed's card quiz games, sold at Dollarama. We have the Nature and the Dinosaurs games, and think they're as good as the more expensive versions.

4. This study guide to Tom Sawyer. We don't use a lot of literature study guides, but this one has some helpful ideas.

5. Leslie Laurio's updated Ourselves. (The Common Room family also likes this.)

6. Homemade handwriting sheets. I am using our Barchowsky disk, but you can find other sites to make your own. Who needs workbooks?

7. Index cards--good for all kinds of things. Ponytails and Mr. Fixit are using them along with Christian Kids Explore Chemistry, to keep track of all the elements Ponytails has learned. (They also made Atomic Cookies--see a similar photo at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.)

8. Books from the local supermarket's dollar bin--you just never know what's going to show up there. Recently we've found Magic Treehouse notepads, The Courage of Helen Keller, Madeleine L'Engle's The 24 Days Before Christmas, a Mitford book, and several other Scholastic and Troll biographies.

9. The weekly how-to posts at The Common Room.

10. Julie Gilbert's Planned Spontaneity e-book. A different kind of homeschool planner! (The home page is here.)

Dreams and Designs (Finishing Treehouse Review Week)

Treehouse Review Week

I'm going to finish out this Review Week by mentioning an e-book that nobody asked me to review--I just liked it and wanted to pass it on.

The title is Dreams and Designs: Homemade Supplies to Complement Your Homeschool, and it's by Donna Campos. This is one of the freebies you can get when you register for the TOS Homeschool Expo. And since the price of the e-book is US$12.45, and the cost of the conference is only $19.99 through March 31st, you're almost as far ahead to register for the conference and get the e-book plus a bunch of other downloadable goodies. Have I sold y'all on that yet?

Anyway, Expo or not, this is seriously one of the better e-books I've seen. I like resources that make homeschoolers' job easier instead of harder, and this is one of those resources. Without giving away everything that's in it, it is packed full of clever stuff that would actually work for a lot of homeschoolers, that might save you money instead of getting you to spend more, and that makes good use of easy-to-get materials.

I also really like things that fold flat. Sample idea from the book: using trifold presentation boards as a morning-opening-type calendar/weather/etc. board. More ideas: how to improvise felt boards and quite a few things to do with index cards. There's an 8-page sample here.

As I said, you can order this through TOS Magazine's Schoolhouse Store, at the link above; or you can get it as part of your virtual conference freebie package. Either way, this one's a cut above the ordinary.