Healthier Home Awareness Campaign

We are launching a “Healthier Home Awareness” campaign. I am really excited about this opportunity because overall there is very poor public awareness on this issue. The typical home contains 63 products containing hazardous chemicals. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has reported that illnesses like cancer, ADD, birth defects, asthma, infertility, miscarriage and many other profound health problems have all been linked to the chemicals found in these common household products.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to see if you qualify....

• Do you wash your clothes or linens in any of the following products: Clorox 2, Bleach, Tide, Dreft, Cheer or any other national brands?


• Does anyone in your family have allergies, asthma, eczema, ADD, cancer or other health related issues?

• Do you use any of the following household cleaners or solvents: Cascade, Electro-sol, Windex, 409, Fantastic, Pinesol, Mr. Clean, Clorox wipes, Lysol, Resolve, Woolite and or Pledge.


• Do you have any indoor pets?


• Have you ever used Johnson & Johnsons baby shampoo, bubble bath and or all over body wash, including the lavender bath soap on your children?


• Are you currently using grocery store eco-brands but are not pleased with the results and are wondering if they actually work?


• Do you have a good idea of what you need to do to become more eco-friendly and go green, but your budget can’t afford the high end grocery store eco-brands?

If you answered 'yes' to any one of these questions then consider visiting our website to learn more about DETOXIFYING your home to safer products at more economical prices!!!!

School in a Box

Are you making your Christmas wishlist yet? Then you might want to after you check out and see this 'organizational dream'. I think you will find that is worth putting on your list. The Original Scrap Box is a scrapbooking storage system with fold out table and cabinets for the home. The scrap book organizing armoire converts into a storage craft table for the home. Also, it offers shelving, racks, carry totes, ribbon boxes and drawers...

I initially saw this advertised in a scrapbooking magazine over a year ago, but at the time didn't really consider it necessary for our situation. I think all things pass our way for a reason and many times it just has to be in the right time :-)

At Knotty Pines Academy we utilize quite a bit of scrapbooking techniques in many areas of our schooling, but have managed to organize and store our items in a lot of different sized containers and drawersso again at the time I didn't see the need for this cabinet.

As time went on we accumulated several Montessori materials within our schoolroom. Anyone familiar with this form of schooling knows how many parts and bits and pieces there can be especially with all those 3 part vocabulary cards, puzzles, manipulatives etc. Again we ended up organizing and storing many of our materials including our continental box materials in these types of storage containers, They weren't real pretty but they worked great because we could *see* what was in each one.

This is where I have to be honest after a while I got really tired of walking into the room and it looking like an isle out of the container store. To try to lesson the clutter we stored several of our containers in the utility closet, but storage room quickly got smaller as we accumulated more materials. I was also getting tired of having to keep all of our painting, beeswax modeling, knitting, crocheting, felting, and bunches of other craft and school supplies out of site and locked up so that little hands would not get into them.

For the past year I found myself wishing more and more for the ideal situation where our supplies, materials, crafts, sewing machine, surger, instructional books, montessori materials etc. could be more accessible during school hours in the same room as we were working, but could then be hidden during none school time. We brainstormed several different ideas, but we could not hide our school supplies on a set of bookshelves with a curtain or in a buffet/sideboard because of all the younger kids. They would have had no problem opening curtains / doors / drawers and stuff would have been everywhere. I had thought about cabinets with glass doors but these are permanent features and that wouldn't have worked for our homeschooling situation. We even thought about an armoir, but after figuring up the cost to install shelving and supply all the containers it would end up costing more than the Work Box.

I had forgotten about The Original Scrap Box cabinet until last month when I saw it advertised in one of my favorite magazines. This time I went to the website and after watching the video I knew immediately that this was what we had been looking for to solve our storage issues. I also noticed on the website they have several other types of work boxes that look really neat!

The Workbox is advertised towards scrapbooking but it can really be made into a hybrid of sorts between craft/sewing supplies and our homeschool supplies. The cabinet itself is beautiful and when my things are 'hidden' they are safely locked away with a latch on the top. Too far up for the little ones to reach. It takes time to get everything sorted, organized and stored properly, especially for us right now as we are slowly getting our school room reorganized, painted and redecorated to accomodate for more lower grades.

For right now here are some ideas on how to create a hybrid Work box: all current block study materials are kept in the velcro pouches on the righthand outside doors (i.e Montessori 3-part cards, liturgical cards, number and alphabet cards, stickers) and all craft supplies on the lefthand side, (i.e. block crayons, chalk, felting material and needles, crochet hooks, embroidery thread etc). The tiny drawers store a lot of little school supplies (i.e. glue sticks, erasers, pencils, scissors, tape, label maker supplies, marbles, bean bags, etc.) Because the shelves are adjustable they could fit plastic storage containers right into the slots. Books, bottles of paint, candle making supplies, printer paper, construction paper etc. can be kept in the larger slots. Sergers fits nicely underneath the table, and the sewing machine works beautifully on top of the table while in use. When we get done with the school room I will show a detailed virtual tour of what we did with our Scrapbox hybrid and how more functional it has allowed us to become. Our closet is a lot more open now with more storage room ;-)

Down the road I hope to be able to purchase the "Miniworkbox" for my printers, scanners, laminators and other office supplies area. As you can tell I am so excited about sharing our new discovery!! I'm even going to leave a link on our sidebar for future readers... I have many good friends that are either scrapbookers and or homeschoolers and they just are not blessed with a whole lot of room in their homes to store supplies or they school in their kitchens/living rooms and are tired of all the clutter. I think this might be a wonderful solution for those folks. This piece of furniture has so much potential!!

Observer Microscope

We really like our microscope!! For the past three years we have been on the hunt for a microscope that would fit our current family's needs but could also grow with the children as their science became more involved in the high school years. Now I have to admit when I first started my search I was very ignorant of what I wanted.

My dad has spent his life's work behind a microscope as a Paleontologist so this is where I began my search. He was very helpful in pointing out the different kinds of scopes out there on the market. Then my head began to swim with all the different facts so I started to ask around my home school community to see what others were using.

I was given a lot of different recommendations and the closest that came to what I was looking for that was within my price range was the Sonlight Microscope ($197) and Nature Plus Workshop Microscope ($200). The only problem with both of these scopes at the time was that they both used tungsten bulbs. This type of bulb poses a problem that if the scope is left on longer than 20 minutes then it really heats up. This was a problem for me because I wanted the children to have all the time they needed to sketch their observations and if we were to do any wet mount slides the heat would dry out the specimens. I see that Sonlight has since changed over to the fluorescent bulb.

At the time I could not find anything better on the market so I actually settled for the latter of the scopes because it was on sale for $195 with free shipping. Well the very week the scope arrived I was on line doing some research for free 'microscopic experiments' when I ran across this wonderful website. Now why I hadn't run across it before in all my many many many microscope researches on line before I will never know???

GreatScopes is operated by veteran homeschoolers and even offers a discount to home schoolers on their scopes!!! I called the company for more information and within 24 hours they returned my call and answered all my questions. I found their customer service fabulous and their prices beat everything on the market hands down!! For the same quality microscope I could purchase this one for only $179 and even better they used a fluorescent bulb verses the tungsten bulb!! But, I have to admit what I found even more appealing was that the microscope could actually grow with our family. I didn't have to buy all the bells and whistles up front but could add them to my scope as the need arises!!

So I promptly returned my other scope and purchased my Observer. I have to say we absolutely love it and HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend it!!!

Discounted Ink Cartridges

Oh my goodness this is a deal that is just too good to keep a secret....

Last year my good friend Carolyn had referred me to a company she had been using for quite a while to purchase ink cartridges at a discount. The company's name was Tyler-Martin. Carolyn seemed pleased with their products and I trust her opinion but still after a lot of consideration I was just too chicken hesitant to use discounted cartridges in our printer out of fear that they might ruin it.
 

Here at Knotty Pines we really rely on our printer for everything so if something were to happen to it we would be in really bad shape. Well my concerns didn't last long because in just over a year's time our Epson cartridges went up in price drastically. The individual colored cartridges went up to over $13 each and the double capacity black cartridges went to over $37. What ended up happening was we stopped using the printer anyway because it got to the point were we didn't have it in the budget to replace the cartridges.

During our preparations for the new school year I asked Carolyn again who she was using for her ink cartridges. To my amazement not only was she still using Tyler-Martin, she was still very pleased with their quality of ink and seemed even more pleased with their costumer service, AND her Epson printers were still in fine working condition.

So I took the plunge and now I will never look back. I was able to purchase a complete set (double capacity black, cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges) for only $20.95 with a flat shipping rate of $6. You do the math but that is an amazing savings. I have found the quality of ink no different than Epson's cartridges, at least for what we print out in our school and home, and the customer service has been fabulous with same day shipping, so I know I don't have to wait weeks to get a new cartridge. I still haven't found any company that offers our Epson's cartridges cheaper.

My only regret... I should have done this earlier.... I could have saved a lot of money -- sigh!!!