Layers of Learning

Of course I didn't leave well enough alone, because that's how I roll. ;)  And when I was going through materials and came across my "Layers of Learning" materials from last year, i knew I had to pursue this avenue this year. 

The units come in packets of between 40-60ish.  You can buy them printed from rainbow resource or ebooks straight from the company which is what i'm doing.  I am taking part in their review program so I wanted to be able to figure out how to use the ebook without having to use it on my kindle or ipod, since, with this type of material, i prefer to have it in hand, so i can flip through it, mark it up, etc.

So what I did was use my brand spanking new printer (wooohoo!) to print out the units front and back. stapled the spine, then covered it in colored duct tape.  Its working beautifully. I have units 1-1, 1-2 from last year and just purchased 2-1 and 2-2 for this year.  I printed each myself except for unit 1-2 which i printed at the library.  We get a good amount of free printed pages each week at my library, which is great to take advantage of, the one downside being that I can't get it printed front and back.. so the packet is  much thicker.  After seeing the beautiful laser printer color, however, i'm sold on doing  it that way and will probably just suck it up and deal with the increased packet size. 
Here's a picture of it.  The thicker packet, what I did was stapled three times in one direction, flipped it over and stapled three times along the other stapled parts.  Since i'm duct taping it, it won't matter if its pokey.  I gotta say, i'm feeling pretty brilliant about this one ;)

So in order to keep things complicated, as I like them ;) I've decided to use the space and geography unit from the first year, then add in the history from the second year.  I'm not entirely sure if we'll use the science unit from the second year yet or not. It looks like fun, but everyone is bent on studying astronomy right now, so that's probably what we'll do.

So anyway, one thing I love about Layers of Learning is that I can pick and choose parts of the unit, or the whole thing, and it all works out.  Plus- at $5 each, its affordable to do so.  So we'll be doing space, geography from  unit 1-1, then move on to 1-2 in the same themes, meanwhile on history days i'll be adding in LOL in addition to our Build your Library routine.  We'll be starting history with 2-1 which is AWESOME since our local greek festival is coming up at the beginning of October, which i'll be posting about, but essentially its a smorgasbord of food, dancing, but most of all, Byzantine Art, just AMAZING. 

So i should add, that as a review member, I will be getting compensated for my reviews with additional units, but the reviews I post will all be entirely my own.  They are awesome.  Period. And if you don't believe me, you can try the first unit free on the Layers of Learning site
Ok, so that is all!