Welcome Teacher Toolbox Fans

If you are visiting my blog from the Teacher Toolbox-Welcome! I love homeschooling and encouraging others along the way. My husband and I live in northwest GA with our three children and one dog.
Creating unusual fun unit studies and printables is one of my favorite “teacher” things to do, so hopefully you will enjoy my efforts. The Old Schoolhouse magazine is a great magazine to begin with, but now with the online addition of the Teacher Toolbox, you are in for a real treat. My children eagerly pored through my printables as I was creating them for you. Hope they will enjoy them when they actually have to do them! I am so excited to be on this team as well as on the Curiosity Files team. If you have not familiarized yourself with the Curiosity Files, take a look at them here.
Just a few of the offerings include:

• This Day in History calendar with accompanying printables
• Unit studies
• Tons and tons of freebies
• Devotionals
• Ability to access the online versions of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine
• Menus with lots of recipes

Even as a vegetarian, I find the menu ideas interesting. I am used to substituting vegetarian products for actual meat in recipes that look yummy, so this month should be fun. Did you see the day full of desserts? Yummy!
I could not believe ALL the freebie articles and ebooks that were included. Even one of the WannaBe units is free. How can TOS give away so much for the low cost of a subscription? However they do it, I am glad.
This month my kids will be looking at the printable monthly history calendar and also doing some of the printables going along with each day. What a lot of history knowledge they will easily receive. So much work has been done to ease the homeschool parent’s workload.
If you are a subscriber already then enjoy the Teacher Toolbox. If you are not a subscriber yet, subscribe now!
http://thehomeschoolmagazine.com/teachers_toolbox

Watching Historical Movies

We live in a media-entrenched society, so adding a visual to history study is fairly easy.  Still studying the middle ages, we finished watching El Cid last night.  While the movie strayed from the epic poem, both of which may be more legend than fact, it allowed us a glimpse into Spanish life during the Moorish invasions. Spain was one of my favorite countries to visit when I was in an Austrian school, however I never knew much about their history until now.  We visited Valencia and nearby Sagunto College, but certainly did not know that this was the area El Cid conquered from the Moors.  All I remember about Valencia: the beautiful orange groves by the sea, eating a true, huge Valencia orange outside a large department store which a few years ago was bombed, and eating a sandwich in a cafe with a knife and fork. El Cid is buried in Burgos, located on the way to Santiago de Compostela where supposedly the bones of St. James are buried.  At the time I only knew it as a top Christian pilgrimage site.  This site led the Christian Spanish soldiers to shout “Santiago” as they rose up against the Moors.
A few nights ago, we jumped out of the Middle Ages and watched some of Pride and Prejudice, another movie which shows much of the culture of the British Regency era.  My daughter adores Jane Austen, so we are in process of watching EVERY movie portraying her books. This will take a while! So far Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson is our favorite. We love the Regency costumes and manners, but are certainly glad not to be living in such a time.
To complete our historical movie week, we watched The Scarlet Pimpernel with friends who are helping us review a study guide for the movie from Zeezok. Watch for my thoughts on the study guide after we are completely finished.  Anthony Andrews plays the perfect fop, secretly a hero who rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine. His lines are memorable and the beautiful Jane Seymour is elegant as ever.  My favorite part is when she realizes the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel. This movie is a must see, if you have not.
Titanic and Pearl Harbor are movies that must be screened and fast forwarded or partly watched with the dialogue turned off, but many of the scenes are great at showing the fear, the enormity, the reality of the event.
The Alamo with John Wayne is another epic saga like El Cid. I know Braveheart is an amazing movie, but my husband said it is far too graphic. What are some historical movies you have enjoyed, that can be appropriate for young people?