A reason to clean...

Yesterday we were cleaning the family room, getting prepped for the holidays and company. Under Cricket's desk, there is a large box, where I had stored a miscellany of books that I had scored a few years ago in a Craigslist deal. I bought several bags of books when another mom stopped homeschooling, sorted through them, sold a few things, donated a bunch, and put these away for someday use. Anyhow, Bug asked me if we could go through the box, to "see if there's anything exciting in there", so sort through it we did, and I found all kinds of books I had stocked away, books that were ahead of them then, but perfect now.

Among other finds, we came across:

Several levels of Developmental Mathematics
A nice, simple little grammar guide/workbook called Practice Exercises in Basic English
Several grade levels of a guide/workbook called Science Made Simple
Top Secret Guides to about ten different countries, which will be handy for Cricket's world culture studies
A McGraw Hill middle-high school workbook on biology

So I started thinking about how we could use some of these resources. I really like the simple, one-topic approach of Developmental Mathematics, so I may have the kids do a page or two a week to boost their basic skills. With the biology book, I'm going to use it as a reference guide to enhance our nature studies. As for Science Made Simple, again, a guide to various topics, and maybe a few hands-on experiments, a worksheet here and there. I think I might hand off the English book to Bug and see what he gets out of it.

Lesson learned? If you have boxes of books "waiting", go ahead and go through them! I did put some of it back for upcoming years too, so we'll have another treasure hunt through the box in a year or two.