Haystacks Full of Needles

We've been getting a lot of absolutely lovely reviews of this book. Please visit the author's blog to read them all.

Unfortunately, we have had yet another setback at the printers and the book will be delayed about another two weeks. We appreciate the patience of those of you who have placed preorders. Please pray with us that whatever obstacles remain can be overcome quickly. We are so anxious to get it out, and we have never had as many delays getting a book printed. I hate to be so Catholic (well not really, I actually love it), but perhaps the devil isn't so happy about this book.

It's a book about charity, first and foremost, and being open to the friendships in Christ that God has planned for us.

We'll post again when we have the book in hand.
Blessings,
Margot

Lingua Mater Americana

I was so gratified to read this post and learn that I am not the only one who takes on too much and then can't get it all done. Last December I posted a pretty ambitious publishing schedule. Of the items listed, we have only brought 2 to complete fruition. One more is ready to go this week and the rest . . . well, who knows what I will be able to accomplish. We are still working on these projects in various stages of production:

Lives of Plutarch: The Modern Edition of Twelve Lives edited and abridged with an introduction by John W. McFarland. This is a reprint of a version recommended in the MODG syllabus for 7th grade. It has been out of print for quite some time and can be very costly to buy used. We are sending it to the printer this week. Hooray!!

The King's Thane by Charles Brady. This is by the same author as Sword of Clontarf and was part of the Clarion series published by Doubleday in the 1960s. We have it typeset and will perhaps have it to the printer by end of the summer.

Mass Book for Children. Originally published by Benzinger Bros, this little gem includes stories and devotional explanations of the parts of the Latin Mass. We hope it have it done by Christmas time . . . . we'll see!

And now that brings me to Lingua Mater Americana, which is the follow up to Lingua Mater 7 and can be used for 8th or 9th grade. I have been working on this one in my head since the day that Lingua Mater 7 was published and at least 10 people wrote and said, "Don't you have one for 8th grade?" That was 3 years ago. Since then I have been listening to what people/users have said about Lingua Mater and what they think is best for language arts for the bridge to high school. I think I finally have a handle on the approach I want to take with it and have found an answer to my quandary over including grammar in it. Will it be done by the 2008-2009 school year? . . . sadly no.

However, I will be completing the writing of it this year as I work with a group of 8th graders who did Lingua Mater in 7th grade last year. They are my experiment group. If you'd like to participate, we can arrange to get you the lessons about a week ahead (oh sometimes a day ahead since I usually prepare for the week on Sunday night or early Monday morning). Actually, the first unit will be done before the first day of school. Please email me at sales@hillsideeducation.com if you are interested in getting the lessons by pdf as I go along. I only ask that you give me feedback at the end of the week or unit on how the lesson went and if everything made sense or got results. There were a few families who did this with me on Lingua Mater 7 and I am deeply grateful for their honest feedback.

So, what's in this volume?
The first nine weeks is a review of Lingua Mater 7 (modes of writing, basic grammar). The second nine weeks is work on sentence combining and voice, the third nine weeks focuses on the expository essay, and the last nine weeks is a kind of short story unit - many lessons based on one short story. The grammar lessons will be on that which is important to the writing BUT we will also have a really unique grammar supplement . . . mysterious, heh? More details on that will be revealed as we go along.

It's called "Americana" because it is meant to integrate with studies of American history which are done in 8th or 9th grade depending on what curriculum you follow. So all the literature pieces are written by American authors, all the paintings are by American painters, and all the poems are by American poets. It features the work of two contemporary authors: Elaine Woodfield and Suchi Myjak. Elaine is the author of the Stories of the Saints series from Catholic Heritage Curricula, and she has written two original stories about American saints for the book. Suchi is the author of Behold and See, also published by Catholic Heritage curricula, and she contributes two essays on science topics particular to America: the beaver and the life of Thomas Edison. The short story we use in Unit 4 will be reproduced in full in the book.

Perhaps by working through it during the year I will have it ready for printing next summer - depending on the length of the editing process. Lingua Mater 7 took one year to write and one year to edit (and it still had many mistakes).

Thanks to all those who have been patiently accepting my "it's not ready yet" answer every year. I'm sorry to have to say it again. But I think I have finally found a way to make it happen. Best wishes for a restful and rejuvenating summer.

Haystack Full of Needles

We are close enough to take preorders on this new title:

Haystack Full of Needles

A Catholic Home Educator's Guide to Socialization

by Alice Gunther

Please visit the website for all the preordering details.

From the Foreward by Laura Berquist:

"I love this book and I don’t say that lightly. It is truly wonderful."

Conference Update

Next weekend, you may view Hillside materials and subscribe to mater et magistra magazine at Mary Gildersleeve's table at the Rocky Mountain Catholic Home Educators conference. (RMCHEC) Mary will be showcasing her knitting book and taking orders for all of our products. Be sure to attend her talk on handcrafts in the home school!! She will also have an article on handcrafts in the next issue of mater et magistra.



The following weekend I will be attending the IHM Conference in Chantilly, VA.
Please stop by my table and say hello.



Finally, I'll be speaking and vending at the Family Centered Conference in beautiful Lancaster, PA. The topic of my talk is authentic literature study: making good readers great thinkers. Alice Gunther will be the main speaker. See our next blog entry for information about her new book Haystack Full of Needles, A Catholic Home Educator's Guide to Socialization.

I hope you will consider attending one of these conferences in your area. I've found that it's so wonderful to meet other homeschoolers and feel recharged in our efforts to provide the best for our children.

A New Beginning

Hillside is the new publisher for Heart & Mind magazine. Please visit our new magazine website.

We have renamed the magazine:

mater et magistra

Educating the Heart and Mind in the Catholic Home.

If you had a subscription with Heart & Mind your subscription will continue. If you didn't, now is a great time to subscribe!! All the great features of Heart & Mind will continue in the new magazine including the unit study pull-out section, resource reviews, and columns on literature, science, the Liturgical Year, and more. There are lots of opportunities for readers to contribute, so please visit and see what's coming up!

Margot

Spring Cleaning SALE

We're having a sale!

All picture books that accompany Catholic Mosaic or Christmas Mosaic are now on sale. You will also find most of the books in the category "Books of Interest" on sale as well.

Help us clean our shelves and make way for our new titles.

Another New Title

Even though we got about 8-10 inches of snow today, it certainly feels like spring here at Hillside!

We have another new book to announce, and I can't help feeling it's something bright on the horizon of winter, like the slowly lengthening days, full of promise.

Introducing:

Great Yarns for the Close-Knit Family,

Over two dozen original hand-knit designs
inspired by one dozen fantastic family read-alouds

By Mary C. Gildersleeve

The book will be available March 12th and we're now accepting preorders on the website. Each preorder will receive a pair of birchwood knitting needles that can be used for some of the hand-knit projects.

So what are these projects and why is Hillside doing a knitting book?

Well, this book features knitting projects that accompany great works of children's literature:

Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

Canadian Summer by Hilda van Stockum

The Hobbit By J.R.R. Tolkein

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little House in the Highlands By Melissa Wiley

The Lost Island by Eilis Dillon

Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater

Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle

Redwall by Brian Jacques

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Wheel on the School by Meindert de Jong

While your family enjoys reading aloud these great "yarns" you and/or your children can be knitting the projects. All the projects are original designs by Mary, the knitting guru.

Visit the Hillside website to find out more about the preorder.

The Mystery Revealed At Last

In our closing-for-Christmas post we alluded to a homeschooling resource book that we would be publishing this year. I'm very happy to announce this book to you now!

Haystack Full of Needles,

A Catholic Home Educator's Guide to Socialization

by Alice Gunther

Most of us at one time or another have had to wrestle with the issue of socialization, either in dealing with friends and family members who question our decision to home educate, or from our own hearts as we worry about our children's hopes for friendship. In this book Alice shows that "Socialization is not the weakness of home education—it is its strength and joy."

Alice chronicles her own path from skepticism about home educating's ability to provide sufficient social experiences for her children, to the flowering of a local home school group that provides its members with meaningful social experiences within the context of home educating.

Full of examples and practical suggestions, this will be an extremely uplifting addition to your cache of home education resources. We'll post more details as the book nears publication. We expect to release this book in the spring.

(Cover design by Ted Schluenderfritz)

Conference Schedule 2008

Here are the conferences where you can view Hillside material and ask questions (and meet me!):

Memphis, TN March 14 and 15

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania April 5

IHM, Chantilly, VA June 13 and 14

Family-Centered Learning, Lancaster, PA July 25 and 26
(new dates)

As dates are added we will update this post.
Margot

Book Giveaway

Visit the love2learn blog today for a chance to win some Hillside titles.

All the novels are up for grabs as well as Stories with a View.

We have found a new printer for Stories with a View and now the pages are more sturdy, the images sharper, and the cover is double laminated for greater durability. It's a beautiful version!!!

Hope you win!!

Only a few days left of the great love2learn book giveaway. So visit today!

Loving Literature as the Basis for Literature Study

Part 1
Explanation in progress for Purposeful Literature Study: Making good readers great thinkers.

Believe it or not, there is a way to do literary analysis without killing the love of reading for a child/student! My experience has been that by discovering deeper and more meaningful levels in a story, a reader/student falls more in love with a story. By creating an atmosphere of wonder, questioning and discussing, relating your experience with the text, predicting and sharing your prediciton, the story comes to life. Notice that each of the activities mentioned above is done with someone. Reading is a social event. That sounds shocking. "No, it's not," you say. "It's an isolating event where everyone has his own nose is his own world." I would object and say that we long to share what we are reading with someone. If we're reading a great book, we're talking about it. (Just ask my husband!!) "Conversing about a text deepens our understanding of virtually everything we read (Keene/Zimmermann, Mosaic of Thought, page 7)."

The underpinning keys to good literature study then are: 1.) a good book with rich layers of meaning; 2.)shared reading in a community of readers who are talking to each other about the story--that is, discussion; 3.)a study designed so that the student is lead to discover and/or construct the meaning; 4.) quality over quantity, that is: not every book the child reads should be analyzed. Many other books can be read and discussed, but 3 or 4 per school year is sufficient for in-depth study.


The goal of literature study is a search for meaning, the discovery of a story, and the appreciation for the craft of the author. The most important teaching technique for this is modeling behavior. Children need to see us read, they need to hear us ask questions about a text or predict something in a text. The study is divided into three parts: Before Reading: Anticipating Meaning, During Reading: Constructing Meaning, and After Reading: Reconstructing and Extending Meaning. While all of the Hillside study guides have these three sections, this is not something I made up myself. It is well-accepted, long-practiced, and heavily researched method for teaching almost any subject, even found in the Ignatian method of education.

More to come in further posts:
Research on reader behavior
Levels of interpretation and critical thinking
Writing as part of literature study

Family Centered Learning Conference

Hillside will be attending this conference and I will be giving a talk there entitled: Purposeful Literature Study: Making Good Readers Great Thinkers.

Many people have asked me over the years about the literature guides we write and how to do literary analysis, even, "What is literary analysis?" I will be posting a series of articles to this blog over the next few months in which I sort out some of the ideas for my talk and present my vision for literature study. I'll be talking about levels of interpretation, recent research on reader behavior, and tips for growing your good readers into great thinkers.

Book Giveaway

Maureen Wittmann, author of the newly released For the Love of Literature, is hosting a series of book giveaways. Some of our Hillside titles will be included in the promotion. But there are also a lot of other great books up for grabs.

See the details at Maureen's blog . . . and check out her new book!

Website Closing for Christmas

Dear Friends,

This year we will be closing our website for the Christmas season. We will close from December 20 to February 2 (Candlemas). During this time we will be spending time with our families and taking a long needed breath. The last few years at Hillside Education have been a non-stop race, so we'd like to step off the track for a few minutes and reassess our game plan. During this break we will still accept wholesale orders. If you have an emergency, a damaged product, or any other questions, please email us at sales@hillsideeducation.com. We will also continue to post translations for Olim Erat at the translation blog. We'll post updates to this blog and may reopen sooner if we accomplish all that we'd like to during this break.

We're working on the following new projects for 2008:

Great Yarns for the Close-Knit Family: Over two dozen original hand-knit designs inspired by one dozen fantastic family read-alouds by Mary Gildersleeve. We hope to have this book available at the end of February.

Fireside Folktales for All Hallows Eve written and illustrated by Sean Fitzpatrick

The King's Thane by Charles Brady (This is one of the "Clarion" books published in the 1960s as part of the same series as Sword of Clontarf and City of the Golden House.)

Mass Book for Children. This is reprint of an old Mass book that includes stories and devotional explanations of the parts of the Latin Mass.

Lives of Plutarch: The Modern American Edition of Twelve Lives edited and abridged, with an introduction by John W. McFarland (This is a reprint of a version recommended in the MODG syllabi.)

Novel Inquiries, Volumes I-A, II-A, III-A. These literature guides will correspond with the time period following the original Novel Inquiries. So they cover Augustus Caesar to the year 1056. In February we will post a list of the novels covered in each volume. As a byproduct of this work, we will offer a discussion guide for MODG titles for grade 8.

And last, but not least, a resource book for homeschoolers written by a home educating mother of 7 children. We'll update this post with more information as the details are sorted out. But we feel it will be an uplifting, much appreciated treat!

We keep all of our Hillside customers and benefactors in prayer before the Child Jesus as Christmas approaches. We hope you will all receive the blessings of His peace in your lives.

In Christ,

Margot

Chance of a Lifetime!

Calling all fans of Father Brown . . .

Ted Schluenderfrtiz, the illustrator of our recently released The Father Brown Reader is offering his original cover artwork for sale on e-bay.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150191101584

What a great gift this would make for the Chesterton lover on your list!

Shipping Information for Christmas Mosaic

Thanks to all who placed a preorder with us for Christmas Mosaic. The preorder period has expired!

We had so many preorders that I had to order another print run before I had even received the first one . . . so thank you!

I will now be shipping the books in the order I received the preorders. It may take me a few days to get through the huge pile of invoices. I've enlisted the help of some local elves to scoot me along, but please be patient with me! You'll definitely receive your order by the end of next week, (considering that it takes longer to get to you if you live on the west coast).

We hope you will be pleased with the book.

The booklist of over 200 Christmas titles and Cay's annotations of about 75 of them will be available for purchase as a pdf download on the website sometime later this weekend.


Happy Feast of All Saints to everyone!!!

Blessings



Thanks to the Infant of Prague for continued protection of Hillside Education.

Christmas Mosaic Book Package

Many people have been asking about the book package we will offer for the Christmas Mosaic titles. These books will be included in the package:

The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski
The First Christmas Stocking by Elizabeth Winthrop
An Orange for Frankie by Patricia Polacco
Father and Son, a Nativity Story by Geraldine McCaughrean
The Christmas Donkey by Gillian McClure (this is an out-of-print book and will be a used copy)

Book Package Price $65.99
All are hardback books except The Christmas Donkey

You may preorder this now, but they will not ship until November 2.

Updates on the new Titles

The Father Brown Reader has hit the streets! Thanks to all of you who placed preorders. If you ordered both Christmas Mosaic and the Reader, you will receive them all together when Mosaic is ready.

Speaking of that, we have had some delays at the printer. Our new ship date for Christmas Mosaic is November 2 or 3. To thank you for your preorder and to make up a little for the delay, we will be including a copy of one of the featured books with your order. Be sure to order by November 1 to receive this special gift.

God bless you and your families as Advent approaches.
Margot

New Titles this Fall

Well, all the projects we had hoped to have completed last spring are slowly coming to fruition, somewhat fittingly, in this season of harvest. Two new books will be released later this month, both very special projects at Hillside.

The first is the long awaited Father Brown Reader, a set of four Father Brown mysteries adapted for young readers by Nancy Carpentier Brown and illustrated by Ted Schluenderfritz. Perfect for the 8 to 10-year-olds in your life . . . and you might enjoy them, too!

The second is the long awaited Christmas Mosaic by Cay Gibson. ("Long awaited" seems to be a theme around here!) Sequel to the popular Catholic Mosaic, this books features study guides for 30 Christmas-themed picture books. Cay has also compiled a list of over 200 Christmas picture book titles and annotated quite a number of them. We've included Christmas poetry and recipes from our readers. A special highlight is a series of essays contributed by Karen Edmisten, Kathryn Faulkner, Elizabeth Foss, Alice Gunther, Dawn Hanigan, Jennifer Miller, Gwen Wise, and yours truly. We hope you find it a treasure worth adding to your Christmas observances/celebrations.

Both are available to preorder on the Hillside website. Check the "What's New" page.

Saint Collage Contest

Please visit the Arma Dei website to find out about a really neat poster contest.

It would be a great way to prepare for the upcoming Feast of All Saints.