Princess and the goblin by George Mcdonald

We just finished Princess and the goblin by George McDonald. It was such a great story. It had a lot of adventure in it. Not just for girl this is a great story with a brave boy and a magical great great great grandmother. I cant tell you all that happens because I don't want to spoil it for you. A really great book and will read it again to my kids. I think that this is on my list of favorites for kids classics. We really loved it, and after we got to one part of the book I had to finish it with the kids in one sitting. My jaw is tired from all of the reading that I did. Great book really on my top 10 list for kids lit.

Wheat Flour Tortillas with Maria J. Ronquillo

These tortillas are REALLY good! Thought that Id share. : )

For a FHE we went to see the lights at temple square with our friends. This is on the street outside of the temple grounds.
I love this area. It is the reflection pool and in the middle of it is Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus in a manger. Beautiful!!!!
Temple. Who wouldn't want to be married in a castle like this? This is what I tell my children. : )
This is on the side of the reflection pool.
Me.




These are our friends that are like family to us. : ) Jared, Audry, Caden, Delton, and Morgan.

Home made raw caramel dip

1 C raw cashews
1 C medjool dates pitted about 8-10
1/4 C agave
2 tsp vanilla
pinch sea salt

Place cashews in water and cover for2-3 hours
in another bowl place dates in water and soak for 2-3 hours
drain nuts and dates save the date water
in blender combine everything and add 6-8 Tbsp of date water
blend till smooth and serve with apples.
I cant wait to try this one. : )

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Bringing the true meaning of Christmas back

So this year our Christmas is looking a bit different. We are focusing more on Christ then in Santa. We celebrate Christmas because it is Christs birthday. So we are not doing Santa at all this year. We are doing 3 presents that represents the 3 gifts give to Christ by the wise men. On Christmas we will sit the kids down and read the story of Christs birth and when the wise men give their gifts we will pause and give the gifts to our kids. So what are the gifts? The first is something that they need (gold) the second is something that they want (frankincense) that something homemade (myrrh).

We also are doing a stocking for Christ. It is white and on Christmas eve we will put in our gifts to Christ in the stocking. Our gifts are not temporal they are ways that we can better ourselves and bring us closer to Him. They are things like pray night and day from now on, or scripture study daily, or stop using unkind words, or not yelling anymore, or keep the house cleaner so that the Spirit can dwell in the house. Those type of things.

We also are doing a 12 days of Christmas secret Santa to a family. That shows the kids that it is not about what we get but what we can give to others and not get recognition for it.

So these are the things that we are doing that I hope are showing the kids what the true meaning of Christmas is.

So why am I doing the Christ and forgetting the Santa? I hear once and it made sense to me that when we focus so much on Santa and not on Christ that when the kids find out that there is not Santa and that it was all just make believe then they have a tendency to also think that Christ also make believe. They never saw Santa and he was supposed to be filled with love, kindness, unselfishness, giving, and every thing else that he represents. Yet he is not real. Christ if also filled with those things and the kids never have seen Him ether so how can Christ be real if Santa is not. I feel like that was a truth when I heard it and it made sense to me. Besides my little Corlie 2 years ago figured out that there was not a Santa and she did it in front of the other kids and so I told them all that it was just a fun game that parents like play. They were ok with that and so the transition to this kind of Christmas was easy for me. : )

Well, I hope that these are some ideas that you can use to help you and your family get back to the true meaning of Christmas. We also read a Christmas devotional everyday here is the link to that. You can start now and still get some great stories in.

http://hccl.byu.edu/faculty/HuntsmanE/Seasonal-eh/Advent/Christmas%20Season%20Book%20complete

Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella - Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Youth book list.

Classics for Young Readers

These are the kind of books that I like to read to my kids. : )

ForSupport and Resources, click here.

Here is an introductory list of books that may be of interest to the Love of Learning, Transition to Scholar and Scholar children; please review and categorize according to your family’s criteria of appropriate literature.

Check out these titles at your library!
An Amazon.com link* is provided for your convenience so you can learn more about each title, read customer reviews, or purchase, if you want to buy your own copy.

*Affiliate links: While your price remains the same, any purchases made on Amazon.com that originate from these links result in tjed.org receiving a portion of the proceeds. So if you’re planning to shop Amazon, please start here! Thanks for supporting TJEd.

• Alice In Wonderland, Carroll
• Animal Farm, Orwell
  
• Asimov on Numbers, Asimov
• The Anne of Green Gablesseries, Montgomery
• Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
  
• “Battle Hymn of the Republic“, Julia Ward Howe
• Ben-Hur, Wallace, Johnson
• The Bible (click here for a list of passages itemized by story/content)
• Brighty: Of the Grand Canyon, Henry
• Black Beauty, Sewell
• The Black Stallion series, Farley
• The Chronicles of Narnia series, Lewis
• Collected Works of Edgar A. Guest
• “The Concord Hymn“, Emerson
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain
• The Constitution of the United States
• David Copperfield, Dickens
• Davy Crockett Legends
• The Declaration of Independence
• The Diary of a Young Girl, Frank
• Don Quixote, Cervantes
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson
• Dred Scott Decision
• The Education of Henry Adams, Adams
• Eight Cousins, Alcott
• Emily Post’s Etiquette
  
• “In Flanders Fields“, McCrae
• Flatland, Abbott
• The Foundation series, Asimov
• Frankenstein, Shelley
• “The Gettysburg Address,” Lincoln
• “The War Inevitable”, Henry
• The Great Brain series, Fitzgerald
• Gulliver’s Travels, Swift
• Mythology, Hamilton
• “Hamlet,” Shakespeare
• Heidi, Spyri
• The Hiding Place, Boom
• History Reborn, Anderson
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain
• “I Have A Dream,” King
• Ivanhoe, Scott
• The Hobbit, Tolkein
• Island of the Blue Dolphins, O’Dell
  
• Joan of Arc, Twain
• Jo’s Boys, Alcott
• Journey to the Center of the Earth, Verne
• “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare
• The Jungle Book, Kipling
• King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table
• Laddie, Porter
• The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper
• “Let America Be America Again,” Hughes
• The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• The Little Britchesseries, Moody
• Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Little Men, Alcott
• Little Women, Alcott
• The Lonesome Gods, L’Amour
• The Lord of the Rings series, Tolkein
• “The Man with the Hoe,” Markham
• Mathematicians Are People, Too (2 volumes), Reimer
• Moby-Dick, Melville
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  
• National Velvet, Bagnold
• Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary of the English Language; see also: Online 1828 Dictionary
• North to Freedom, Holm
• “O Captain! My Captain!,” Whitman
• “Old Ironsides,” Holmes
• Old Yeller, Gipson
• Oliver Twist, Dickens
• Paul Bunyan and Other Tall Tales
• The Phantom Tollbooth, Juster
• “The Present Crisis,” Lowell
• “The Road Not Taken,” Frost
• The Real Benjamin Franklin, Allison
• The Real George Washington, Parry
• The Real Thomas Jefferson, Allison
• The Robe, Douglas
• Robinson Crusoe, Defoe
• The Sackett Series, L’Amour
• Saxon Mathseries
• The Secret Garden, Burnett
• Soldiers, Statesmen & Heroes, Parry
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets
  
• Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers, Kavanaugh
• Stuart Little, White
• Summer of the Monkeys, Rawls
• The Swiss Family Robinson, Wyss
• Tom Sawyer, Twain
• Treasure Island, Stevenson
• The Trumpet of the Swan, White
• The Doctor Dolittleseries, Lofting
• White Fang, London
• The story of William Tell
• Where the Red Fern Grows, Rawls

Adult classic book list from TJEd.

Classics for Adults

For Support and Resources, click here.

Here is an introductory list of books that you might want to include on your list of classics.

Check out these titles at your library!
An Amazon.com link* is provided for your convenience so you can learn more about each title, read customer reviews, or purchase, if you want to buy your own copy.

*Affiliate links: While your price remains the same, any purchases made on Amazon.com that originate from these links result in tjed.org receiving a portion of the proceeds. So if you’re planning to shop Amazon, please start here! Thanks for supporting TJEd.

• Acton, The History of Freedom
• John Adams, “Thoughts on Government”
• Aquinas, “On Kingship”
• Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
• Aristotle, Politics
• Aristotle, Rhetoric
• Augustine, The City of God
• Aurelius, Meditations
• Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Austen, Sense and Sensibility
• Bacon, Novum Organum
• Bastiat, The Law
• Bastiat, “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen”
• Benson, “The Proper Role of Government”
• The Bible [click here for an itemized list of stories from the Bible]
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
• Bronte, Wuthering Heights
• Bronte, Jane Eyre
• Carson, The American Tradition
• Capra, The Tao of Physics
• Chesterton, Orthodoxy
• Churchill, Collected Speeches
• Cicero, The Republic and The Laws
• Clausewitz, On War
• Confucius, The Analects
• Constitution of the United States
• Copernicus, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
• Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Dante, The Divine Comedy
• The Declaration of Independence
• Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• Descartes, A Discourse on the Method
• Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
• Dickens, Great Expectations
• Douglas, Magnificent Obsession
• Durant, The Story of Civilization (11 Volume Set)
• Einstein, Relativity
• Emerson, Essays
• Euclid, Elements
• Frank, Alas, Babylon
• Franklin, Letters and Writings
• Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
• Galileo, Two New Sciences
• Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Goethe, Faust
• Hobbes, Leviathan
• Homer, The Iliad
• Homer, The Odyssey
• Hugo, Les Miserables
• Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary
• Jefferson, Letters, Speeches and Writings
• Keegan, A History of Warfare
• Kepler, Epitome
• Martin Luther King, Jr., Collected Speeches
• Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry
• Lewis, Mere Christianity
• Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
• Lewis, The Weight of Glory
• Lincoln, Great Speeches
• Locke, Second Treatise Of Government
• Machiavelli, The Prince
• Madison, Hamilton and Jay, The Federalist Papers
• Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• More, Utopia
• The Magna Charta
• Mill, On Liberty
• Milton, Paradise Regained
• Mises, Human Action
• The Monroe Doctrine
• Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
• Newton, Mathematical Principles
• Nicomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic
• Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
• The Northwest Ordinance
• Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Plato, Complete Works
• Polybius, The Histories
• Potok, The Chosen
• Plutarch, Lives
• Ptolemy, Almagest
• Shakespeare, Complete Works
• Skousen, The 5000 Year Leap
• Skousen, The Majesty of God’s Law
• Skousen, The Making of America
• Smith, The Wealth of Nations
• Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart”
• Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
• Sophocles, The Oedipus Trilogy
• Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Sun Tzu, The Art Of War
• Thackeray, Vanity Fair
• Thoreau, Walden
• Tolstoy, War And Peace
• Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
• Tocqueville, Democracy in America
• Washington, Letters, Speeches and Writings
• Weaver, The Mainspring of Human Progress
• Wister, The Virginian