The Home of East Lake United Methodist Church Academy on the Web, Interactive Resources that include Homeschool Message Boards, 1600 Classic Books in Electronic Format, Crossword Puzzles, and Parent Chat room.

Arabic learning materials and Islamic lesson plans for home educators. In a weblog format.

Bible studies, sermons, and devotionals

Based on Greek and Latin root words, this 'Code-Breaker' curriculum, is designed for use within any Language Arts course in Grades 5-10. Its unique web structure teaches students how to decode thousands of words. It gives underachievers an oppo

Guest Post By Liz Donnelly of www.FamilyFitnessGuru.com 1. Put on that fitness-minded personality Wether you desire a flat belly or just the time to workout, you have to start it all with your attitude. If you are determined to improve your fitness “no matter what,” the you will most likely be successful. Usually this takes the manifestation of anger with your appearance or lack of energy or poor health. Once you’ve made up your mind to be fit, then it’s time to don that “fit-minded personality.” This is where you tell yourself multiple times daily that you have a tight mid-section, that you deserve a flat belly, if that’s your goal, for instance. Promise yourself that you’ll do something every day to work to that end. Your subconscious will listen to you. It doesn’t decipher between good and bad affirmations, it will simply apply what you always tell it. Are you saying or letting others say that you’re “fat” or “overweight” or “thick-waisted”? Time to change those words into “slender” or “sleek” or “tight”. This is also part of changing yourself from the top down, so to speak. What you think about yourself has great impact on your esteem, performance and outcomes. For example, becoming more aware of your body will get you to focus on changes to make like sitting or standing tall to prevent your belly from popping outward. You can apply fixing yourself from the top down in all aspects of your life not just fitness. (For example, telling yourself to have patience will help you be more inclined to notice those times when you are losing your temper.) The big lesson here, especially if you’re the kind of mom or dad who puts him or herself last on the priority list, is that you do need your self-improvement time and that you do need the increased energy, self confidence, strength, etc. to help you meet your many demands, especially keeping up with your kids, right? So the next step is just as important: 2. Get educated on fitness So many people lose their desire to workout and eat well because they either tune out the important messages that tell them why they must do so, or they possibly are not aware of the reasons. So the more you educate yourself on exercise and nutrition, the better off you’ll be to be inspired to keep yourself and your family health and active. This website is a good place to start. In particular, you can get FREE downloadable booklets on exercises for children and for yourself by subscribing to FamilyFitnessGuru updates. Look at the upper right side of the page above the side margin. There are also a host of books on the topic of fitness and articles in the paper on almost a daily level. Scour what you can and be informed. After all, you know yourself and your family best and you will remain motivated to stay fit the more you keep in touch with good information. 3. Now, it’s time to make time for fitness Getting a better working body does take time. If your particularly out of shape, then you must realize that it probably took some time for you to degenerate to this level. Even if you relatively fit, you still need to build in time for your workouts. Talk it over with your spouse, partner or own brain (if you’re a single parent like me) and literally write down and schedule your workouts. For me, I have to do some of my workouts during the week before I teach my 5:45 a.m. Fitcamp class. At other times, I have to schedule evenings after the kids go to bed. If you are with a partner, then you can alternate times to best suit your schedules, especially if the kids are awake and need supervision. If you’re a single parent and you are the residential parent, meaning the kids are with you the majority of the time, then you will have to do a little creative planning and think outside the box as to how you’ll get child care and get the freedom to work out. Many gyms have daycare-style facilities at which you can leave your kids for the duration of your exercising. Of course, if you don’t belong to a gym, then your next course of action is enlisting babysitting help with neighbors, friends or relatives. The next step is to join a local civic group that has a lot of parents as members (like a Junior Women’s Club (for moms) or Early Childhood PTA or regular PTA (for moms and dads). Some times making inquiries within groups like these will give you leads of fellow parents who are in a babysitting network. There is typically no charge for something like this. Your only payment is being available to watch someone else’s kids. There are options for just about any situation in terms of finding time (really its making the time) for your workouts. If you really want it, then you will make it work for you. (I hope you really want it!) 4. Do it! Nike has it right, if they still use that old tagline, that is. You really just have to start exercising. Your body was made to move. So, if your parts seem the Tin Man’s after a rain storm, then it’s all the more reason to continue to do your workouts consistently and stay “oiled up.” “What’s ample?” you might ask. Building an hour and a half weekly is a good place for beginners (30 minutes 3x/week). From there, you can add an additional 30 minutes. Ideally, you want to put in 5-6 days of movement. And it doesn’t have to be in the form of a formal workout. Schlepping things around in the garden or shoveling snow are excellent ways (depending on how intense) to move and burn calories. “What exercises do I do?” Well, start by signing up for FamilyFitnessGuru updates (look at the upper right area of the side margin) so you can download the “Top 5 Exercises for Moms & Dads.” You’ll get tons of details on how to perform those basic exercises to help you get on the road to fitness. My hope is that you’ll be consistent with your plan and notice results to help you stay motivated. Good luck and keep forging ahead! Post from: Homeschool Fitness Coach

Kathy Lowers, Founder of Considering Homeschooling This week we are hoping to hear some happy cheeping from the chicken eggs we are incubating.  Homeschooling is ideal for do-it-yourself living creature projects and the butterfly, lady bug, praying mantis, silk worm projects -- to name a few -- that we have done were easy and yet so valuable. How wondrous it is to view the metamorphosis of one of God’s creatures, right in your own home. A public school classroom might have a fish tank with some leaves and a chrysalis or an incubator with some eggs; the students may or may not see the butterfly or chicks emerge during school hours.  Their teacher might teach the life cycle of a butterfly or chicken, but no credit to the Creator could be given. In contrast, Christian parents who teach their children at home find that such a project rises to an infinitely higher dimension.  At home, there is a bonding between parents and children and among siblings as they experience a living miracle -- and there is a resulting acknowledgement and awe of the One who designed it. So, I jumped at the chance when a homeschooling 4-H mom offered her incubator and a clutch of chicken eggs.  Never having incubated eggs before, I assumed it would be a cinch, just like a cocoon.  Just pop the eggs in the incubator and after a while, you would get your chicks, right?   After some web sites, books and experience regarding this subject, the children and I discovered that incubating can be a complicated and risky process. For one, the incubator we have is not the expensive, digital kind that controls its own temperature and humidity.  It is the old-fashioned version where you have to keep checking the temperature, which seems to meander up and down on a whim.  A few times it got below or above the instructed 99.5 degrees, and we panicked, tweaking it back to the proper temperature, but wondering did the fluctuation affect the chicks? Chicks cannot survive extreme temperature deviations.  And then you have to keep the humidity at the ideal level, which varies according to where you are in the 21 day cycle.  You have to add water into special wells in the incubator.  If there is not enough water, the chicks will stick to the shells.  If too much humidity is present, the chicks will drown. Eggs in an incubator must also be turned several times a day.  A hen instinctively turns her eggs to keep the developing embryos from sticking to the sides of the shell. One of more interesting aspects of the incubator project is “candling” the eggs. You shine a light through the eggs to see if you can determine if there is life in them; sometimes you see a beating heart or movement -- very cool.  What you usually find is that some eggs were never fertile while others started growing but “quit” -- either because the environment was not right or just because they were not meant to make it.  You have to remove the non-living ones because they could explode. Out of fourteen eggs we had five infertile ones, two rotten ones, and seven that may or may not make it -- we’ll know in about three days.  I have to admit I have felt pretty incompetent and stressed when I thought the humidity or temperature was off.  But, we tried our very best to give these eggs the cleanest, safest, most conducive environment possible for coming out healthy.  That, along with prayer, gives us some optimism. I could not help realizing there is a strong analogy here between incubating eggs and raising up children.  While at the beginning all the eggs appear the same, all children start out with such potential, such seeming innocence before some are destroyed by the way of the world. But some Christian parents think that they can place the fragile soul of a child in any old environment, like the extreme anti-God environment of government schools, believing that child will come out just fine through going to Sunday school 45 minutes each week. These naïve parents imagine their child being a great evangelist to all the other youngsters there, not realizing their child is being evangelized more smoothly and intensely, by humanist teachers and curriculum. By the time the process is nearing the end, some have really become rotten, both eggs and children.  While sometimes there was no preventing a bad egg, Christian parents putting their children in the perverted incubators of the public schools is by far the biggest contributor to failed children. If you are a loving parent who really knows Jesus and adheres to His Word in all you do, if you can create an uplifting, safe, inspiring Christian environment for children in your home – and I am convinced most real Believers are more than capable of this -- then you should be homeschooling.  Don’t let the world incubate the souls of your children; God gave that job to you!

Kathy Lowers, Founder of Considering Homeschooling This week we are hoping to hear some happy cheeping from the chicken eggs we are incubating.  Homeschooling is ideal for do-it-yourself living creature projects and the butterfly, lady bug, praying mantis, silk worm projects -- to name a few -- that we have done were easy and yet so valuable. How wondrous it is to view the metamorphosis of one of God’s creatures, right in your own home. A public school classroom might have a fish tank with some leaves and a chrysalis or an incubator with some eggs; the students may or may not see the butterfly or chicks emerge during school hours.  Their teacher might teach the life cycle of a butterfly or chicken, but no credit to the Creator could be given. In contrast, Christian parents who teach their children at home find that such a project rises to an infinitely higher dimension.  At home, there is a bonding between parents and children and among siblings as they experience a living miracle -- and there is a resulting acknowledgement and awe of the One who designed it. So, I jumped at the chance when a homeschooling 4-H mom offered her incubator and a clutch of chicken eggs.  Never having incubated eggs before, I assumed it would be a cinch, just like a cocoon.  Just pop the eggs in the incubator and after a while, you would get your chicks, right?   After some web sites, books and experience regarding this subject, the children and I discovered that incubating can be a complicated and risky process. For one, the incubator we have is not the expensive, digital kind that controls its own temperature and humidity.  It is the old-fashioned version where you have to keep checking the temperature, which seems to meander up and down on a whim.  A few times it got below or above the instructed 99.5 degrees, and we panicked, tweaking it back to the proper temperature, but wondering did the fluctuation affect the chicks? Chicks cannot survive extreme temperature deviations.  And then you have to keep the humidity at the ideal level, which varies according to where you are in the 21 day cycle.  You have to add water into special wells in the incubator.  If there is not enough water, the chicks will stick to the shells.  If too much humidity is present, the chicks will drown. Eggs in an incubator must also be turned several times a day.  A hen instinctively turns her eggs to keep the developing embryos from sticking to the sides of the shell. One of more interesting aspects of the incubator project is “candling” the eggs. You shine a light through the eggs to see if you can determine if there is life in them; sometimes you see a beating heart or movement -- very cool.  What you usually find is that some eggs were never fertile while others started growing but “quit” -- either because the environment was not right or just because they were not meant to make it.  You have to remove the non-living ones because they could explode. Out of fourteen eggs we had five infertile ones, two rotten ones, and seven that may or may not make it -- we’ll know in about three days.  I have to admit I have felt pretty incompetent and stressed when I thought the humidity or temperature was off.  But, we tried our very best to give these eggs the cleanest, safest, most conducive environment possible for coming out healthy.  That, along with prayer, gives us some optimism. I could not help realizing there is a strong analogy here between incubating eggs and raising up children.  While at the beginning all the eggs appear the same, all children start out with such potential, such seeming innocence before some are destroyed by the way of the world. But some Christian parents think that they can place the fragile soul of a child in any old environment, like the extreme anti-God environment of government schools, believing that child will come out just fine through going to Sunday school 45 minutes each week. These naïve parents imagine their child being a great evangelist to all the other youngsters there, not realizing their child is being evangelized more smoothly and intensely, by humanist teachers and curriculum. By the time the process is nearing the end, some have really become rotten, both eggs and children.  While sometimes there was no preventing a bad egg, Christian parents putting their children in the perverted incubators of the public schools is by far the biggest contributor to failed children. If you are a loving parent who really knows Jesus and adheres to His Word in all you do, if you can create an uplifting, safe, inspiring Christian environment for children in your home – and I am convinced most real Believers are more than capable of this -- then you should be homeschooling.  Don’t let the world incubate the souls of your children; God gave that job to you!

Ladies and Gentlemen,Drop what you're doing. Take 5 minutes to enter this giveaway. You will be THRILLED when you win! The WheelyCow and WheelyBugs are premiering TODAY on Tori and Dean (http://tori-and-dean.oxygen.com/), and this giveaway was scheduled to coincide with the premier! WheelyCows and WheelyBugs retail for $79.99 plus tax on the Prince Lionheart website, but thanks to Prince Lionheart, you can WIN one from the Vaagen Family!Prince Lionheart was so generous to share their WheelyCow with my family! I believe my two year old has been on it ever since it came in the mail 2 months ago! She asks if she can sit on it to eat!This amazing ride-on toy is unlike any other I've seen!! And with 4 kids, I have seen my share of ride-on toys! I'd love to share some of my favorite things about the WheelyCow:1. The wheels GLIDE. They don't leave marks on my hardwood floors! 2. The WheelyCow is QUIET! Even when my little 4 year old rides on it... and that happens very often! No more wondering if it is thundering outside, or if the house is falling down, or if the world is ending when my girls ride through the house!!3. Easy to clean! The WheelyCow is so wonderfully easy to clean- I simply wipe it with a damp towel, and because it has a super-smooth surface, no spilled drinks get stuck in impossible-to-reach cracks... there are none!4. Happiness factor. My girls absolutely LOVE this toy. Of all their toys, this is at the top of the list. I can't help but smile when they keep it by the bottom of the stairs. They wake up in the morning, come downstairs, hop aboard the WheelyCow, and ride it straight to the breakfast table! :)Now you know MY favorite things about the WheelyCow, but let me share my daughters' favorite things about it:1. "The top is made of 'comfy squishy stuff.'" Remember, I'm passing along THEIR words, here! :) (The top is made of leather, with a soft padding underneath! It is VERY comfy!2. "It can go really fast in circles!" This toy allows them to "spin out" in one place! The wheels swivel. allowing for MUCH more fun!3. "The horns." I guess they felt like this part was self-explanatory. The horns on the front of the WheelyCow are on springs, and they wiggle like little bobble-heads! :)4. "The handle is not like normal ones." The handle bar is a semi-circle, which I love for two reasons. First, safety. My girls like to fly around on their riding toys, and they have landed across a square handle bar before, and that hurts! The WheelyCow has a soft, semi-circle handle, which would be much more comfy in that situation!Thank you SO MUCH to Prince Lionheart for allowing me to review this AND the Stroller Accessory package! I truly LOVE your products!Readers, do yourself a favor, and enter this giveaway today!To enter:1. Comment below, with your email address2. Visit the "Prince Lionheart" site by clicking HERE, and leave a comment telling me which WheelyBug or WheelyCow you like the most!3. Subscribe to this blog (enter your email address in upper right corner), and comment that you do. **SUBSCRIBERS may leave 2 comments (2 entries) stating that they subscribe! I love my subscribers! Thank you!!**4. Follow this blog (in right hand column), and comment that you do. **FOLLOWERS may leave 2 comments (2 entries) stating that they subscribe! I love my subscribers! Thank you!!**5. Become a fan of this blog on Facebook by clicking HERE, and comment that you do.6. Email this contest out to your friends, and copy me on it at vaagen@bellsouth.net7. Follow me on Twitter (vaagen) and ReTweet this contest on Twitter: http://twitter.com/vaagen/statuses/3070106224. Comment below that you did. You can do this once per day, and leave a comment each time you tweet the contest for an extra entry!!8. Favorite this blog on Technorati by clicking HERE The winner will be chosen by random drawing on http://www.random.org/integers/ on Saturday, August 15th at 6pm. Good luck!Thank you for coming to Mingle Over Mocha with Anna!

From My Mama's Kitchen by Johnny TanWhen you think of a Mother, what do you think of?? If you ARE a mother, what words would you hope your children would use to describe you?Loving, helpful, faithful, sincere, encouraging, sweet, self-sacrificing, trufhful, God-fearing, bold, insightful, descretionary, one-of-a-kind, true, protective, open, trusting, unfailing, caring, comforting, honest... the list could go on forever!Johnny has had a unique experience from being adopted, and then "adopting" even more moms (for a total of NINE MOMS!!)? in his journey of life!You will find a little bit of everything in "From My Mama's Kitchen."? It is a book of encouragement for mothers, a book of love and remembrance for children, and soul food for every one else!You can read other reviews for this book on Amazon, HERE.You can buy this book HERE!This is a little bit about the author, Johnny Tan:Like a pot of the famous Louisiana gumbo, Johnny Tan's life has been richly flavored over the years by his nine moms.In April of 2007, Johnny began recording the various heart-felt memories and words of wisdom expressed and felt in the kitchen setting. The result is From My Mama's Kitchen – “food for the soul, recipes for living.”Adopted at birth in Malaysia, Johnny Tan came to the United States in 1980 to attend college at LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Here, he began a journey that led him into crossing paths with various women he admiringly referred to as Mom. It is the inspiration, support and life skills that Johnny received from his moms that have guided him towards his pursuit for personal excellence.After college, Johnny worked in the restaurant industry for 18 years. He retired from a successful career as Chief Operating Officer in 2001, to begin a new vocation of running his own business.Living by his very own personal vision and mission statement, Johnny continually uses his gift of creativity to enrich the lives of those who know him and for his community through his fellowship and leadership ability.Johnny is also an accomplished amateur ballroom dancer. He has performed with his dance partners for more than 10 years at various ballroom and charity events in Louisiana and Texas.He currently resides in Dallas, Texas. Check out his website HERE, and listen to his radio show HERE!I hope you enjoy Johnny Tan's work as much as I have!Thank you for coming to Mingle Over Mocha with Anna!