TIPS: How to reuse old keys

All of us have some of them lying around somewhere. I'm talking about old keys - car keys, house keys, box keys, locket keys, etc. There are keys for just about anything and while they are necessary, there comes a time when we no longer need a particular key. Over time, they seem to build up and you have a pile of keys that you don't know what to do with. Here are some suggestions:

- My older children enjoy playing with keys. They play pretend. If I give them my old keys (especially on a keychain - they love that!), they will use it to play pretend when they play house or restaurant or driving or whatever. Those keys can be used just like we use ours. (I wouldn't recommend this for toddlers or babies, but they should be fine for children over four). They'll have fun with this!
- Some people use old keys to create artwork or decorative items. They might glue them to lamp shades or make a sculpture from keys. Some artists melt them down and use them for metal work. You just have to ask around and see if anyone would like your old keys for this purpose.
- Keys for Kindness collects old keys, turns them in to the recycling place and then uses the money they earn to support research for Multiple Sclerosis. You just mail them your old keys. Here is there web address: http://www.keysforkindness.com/
- Find someone who makes homemade jewelry and ask if they want them. Keys are popular as jewelry items. If a particular key is special to you, have it turned into a charm for a necklace or bracelet. It's simply a matter of adding some spray paint or other decoration or you could use it as is.
- Let the children decorate them (with paint, glitter, etc.), put a hook on the little hole most keys have and use them as Christmas tree ornaments. (There are LOTS of ways to save on Christmas tree ornaments. You do NOT need to spend money on expensive, fancy ornaments.)
- Make some wind chimes and give these as gifts. This is especially nice if the keys meant something to the recipient. (Or keep the chimes for yourself.)
- For homeschoolers, trace each key on a paper with a bunch of other traced keys. Then, give the paper and the keys to your child and have them match each key to the one on the paper. :)

- Finally, my best suggestion, I think. I came up with this one when thinking about how our family could reuse the keys.

If you need to do a drawing for something and only have a small number of people (probably less than 50) or you do family drawings sometimes to see who goes first, who gets to pick the movie for family movie night, etc., use keys instead of tickets.

First, use a Sharpie to mark two sets of keys with a unique number (1 to 50, for example). So you'll have two keys marked "1," two keys marked "2," two keys marked "3," and so on. For each person who participates in the drawing, give them those two keys with the same number. They drop one key into the drawing bucket and keep the other key.

Then, when you do the drawing, the person who has the key that matches the number you drew, they win.

This is a fun way to save trees because they won't have to make paper tickets AND you'll be recycling the keys! You can even have participants dump all their keys back into the bucket at the end of the event, sort them for your next drawing and then do the same thing all over again.

As always, feel free to share your ideas, too!
Sonya :)

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TIPS: How to save water (and thus save on your water bill!)

Here are my tips for ways to save / reuse / recycle water.

- When we give the younger children baths, we start with the dirtiest and then use the same water for every subsequent child.

- If I'm not too tired after giving the children baths, we use that same water to then bathe our cats (you could bathe your dogs, etc.).

- I do not pour out fresh water. We use even small leftover cups of water. You can pour this in the cat water bowl. We put it in our chickens' water containers. Or, now that I keep water on the wood stove for humidity, I can even put leftover water in that pot and I don't have to run water out of our faucet.

- Keep the faucet turned OFF when brushing teeth. Only turn it on when rinsing.

- Collect rain water and use it for whatever you need.

- For particularly soiled clothes that need to be soaked, rather than soaking them in a tub of water or in the washer, put them in your bathtub and let the water run over them while you shower. If the clothes are that soiled, they're probably work or play clothes anyway so it's not like you're going to hurt them even if you stand on them while you shower.

- Rather than wasting the water from my pasta or other things that only use water to cook (like steaming veggies), I pour this into a container and reuse it to water plants and, depending on what the water was, I might also cook with it. I use water off steamed veggies, for example, in soups. It's VERY healthy water with lots of vitamins and minerals.

- If you're cleaning and the water gets so dirty that you need fresh cleaning water, sometimes you can pour the top water into another bucket and then dispose of the water at the bottom of the container. Then, just use the water you saved as your "fresh" water. Most of the sediment goes to the bottom so even though the water might be cloudy, it's unlikely to have as much muck in it.

- This might sound disgusting to some, but we are SERIOUS about saving water. At bedtime, when we know everyone is going to the bathroom anyway, rather than have everyone go and flush it seven times, we let everyone go to the bathroom and THEN flush it one time. (Well, with the exception of Sarah, who IS a 14 year old girl. She would rather die than do this so she is exempted. The three boys - of course - and Hannah, who is only 7, don't care. And I could care less. If you're all taking turns and USING the same toilet anyway, why not flush it all at once.)

- When our washer and dryer broke this spring, we bought an energy efficient set. It's supposed to save us water, but honestly I didn't see even a smidgen of a drop in our bill. That was very disappointing. I'm not sure what's up with that. I'm even washing less laundry now because I'm not having to wash each load twice to get it clean. You think that would really be saving us money, but there has been no difference from this change.

- Our dishwasher broke about six weeks ago and we have been washing all dishes by hand since then. My water bill for the past month came the other day and it was $23 LESS than every other month!! Our normal bill has been $75 / month for water ever since we moved into this house. This past month it was $52. That's an amazing difference and the only change was that we did not use the dishwasher at all. Amazing.

- Put a solid object (brick, bottle of water, etc.) in the back of your toilet so that it reduces the amount of water used in each flush. I have heard this one a lot, but I wonder how safe it is for your toilet. I may try it and see.

- Collect the "warm-up" water. This is a GREAT idea! I'm definitely going to try this. When people shower, they typically don't jump right into the cold water; they wait for it to warm up. I know we do this in our house, especially in the upstairs shower because it literally takes about ten minutes before the water is warm enough to even step into. That shower is about as far away as you can get from our water heater and there are lots of pipes in between. Anyway, the idea is that you put a plastic tub (or something) in the shower while you're waiting for the water to get warm and since that's clean water right out of the faucet, you can use it for anything you want!

Here is another idea for how to use the warm-up water. We recently installed a wood stove (so we could afford to have heat!) and we just LOVE IT!!! We are so very grateful to have it, but I would recommend that everyone save money and try to install a wood stove. It is such a great resource. We have actually been collecting the warm-up water in a large stew pot, then I let it heat up on the wood stove, then I pour that in the sink and that's the water I use for dishes! (We took out our dishwasher about a month ago). This way, I'm not paying extra for the water OR to heat the water to wash dishes. I also save some of the water on the rinse side and rinse the dishes in nice, clean, HOT water. :)

I am so excited about this!

I'm trying to find more uses for leftover cooking water other than the two I mentioned - watering plants and cooking. I would like to be able to cook with MORE of it. And I've wondered if I could use it to water my pets, especially our chickens because they use a lot of water. I'm not sure if it would be healthy for them, though, since some of the cooking water contains natural sodium and other minerals that might harm the chickens.

And of course, if there are any other tips in other areas on saving water, I'd love to hear those as well. I'm sure some of you have some great ideas and I'd like to try them!

Meanwhile, I hope some of you have enjoyed my tips and try some of them. I bet you'll save water and reduce your water bill. :)

Sonya

TIPS: What to do w/ those plastic cereal bags (inside boxes)

If you buy cereal in boxes, you know that most of the time the cereal is actually in an interior plastic bag. The neat thing about these plastic bags is that they are a type of strong plastic that is much more sturdy than the plastic baggies you can buy for sandwiches and such. Here are some uses for these plastic cereal bags:

- Cut them so that they lay flat and use the bags instead of wax paper. They are essentially the same material.
- Use them to store vegetable seeds. Just cut the bag down to the size you want it and tie it closed at the top with a bread twist.
- You can store small loaves of bread in these bags. They're perfect for this because they're actually more sturdy than regular storage bags and they are meant to keep breaded-type products (cereal) fresh.
- Use them to freeze things like hamburger meat or a little bag of homemade dough. When you take out the meat or dough, it comes right out of the plastic.
- Collect all the little crumbs of cereal in one of these bags and keep it stored in the refrigerator. When it's about 1/3 to 1/2 full, use a rolling pin to roll over all the cereal you have in the bag and you create bread crumbs. These are especially tasty because they're a little sweeter than regular bread crumbs. You can use them on your salads, in soup (in place of crackers), or on casseroles. This is also a good solution for what to do with that tiny bit of leftover cereal that isn't enough for a bowl.

Any other ideas????? Please share with the rest of us!

Sonya :)

My thoughts on where our country is headed...

Regarding socialism: “What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is THEIR OWN than what they possess in common with others.” Aristotle

Regarding our current society, where we've been told that it takes a village to raise a child and we're all responsible for our neighbor (via taxes through the government): "Whether it’s property, a job task, taking care of a child, etc., as a responsibility becomes further removed from an individual, the less accountability that person feels, which makes it much easier to deny responsibility, take care of the property, complete the task, train the child, etc." - That one’s from me so if you use it, please quote it! :)

Sonya Haskins

Bad Luck

I told you guys I have bad luck. Yesterday I went to Kingsport (using a lot of gasoline!) and DOUBLE checked the time on the business door.... Hours - 7:30 to 4:30 Mon - Thurs. I drove home, realized my product needed slight tweaking, and quickly drove back.

I arrived at 4:03 and the doors were locked, with a different sign that said, "New Hours - 7:30 to 4:00"

@?!M#KLI#**@!!!!! Anyone want to trade places?!?

Singapore math - first grade workbook

There are several things I really like about the Singapore Approach to math and this workbook in particular.

1. It's all in black and white on the inside pages, which allows the student to focus on the MATH concepts / problems rather than being distracted by lots of flashy color and activities.

2. There is a terrific variety of problem types. Students do basic addition and subtraction in different formats, learn to use picture and bar graphs, figure out how to "translate" items into units, compare numbers, learn to regroup, telling time, counting money, solve basic word problems and much more. Normally I would think this was a bit much for a first grade book, but the concepts are added in a sensible order so that students progress at a reasonable rate.

3. There is plenty of review. Students are not bombarded with the same problems over and over, but the author does include enough review exercises so that the student will not forget the material in previous lessons.

4. The ONLY thing I didn't like about the book were short sections where the student had to write the particular mathematics "rule" for a function. Although I thought this was a bit too much to write for first graders, we got around this problem by simply letting our first grader TELL us the answer out loud (rather than write it down) so the book still gets five stars!

I wish all public schools would use this book. It makes learning math so much easier. As for homeschoolers - you have a choice! Don't hesitate. This is a wonderful product and if you have more than one child close to first grade level, you could let them all work through it together. You don't HAVE to use it just for first grade.

The Ocean by Frank Sherwin (from the Wonders of Creation series by Master Books)

I was thrilled when a friend gave me this book as I had been wanting it for quite some time. We homeschool and I'm always looking for great materials to use as part of our educational curriculum.

The book pretty much covers all the material an elementary or even junior high age student would need to know about the ocean and the author used a cross-topical approach to the material. In other words, he integrated information, statistics, and supplemental material from other subjects as well. As students learn about oceanic ridges, hydrothermal vents, tides, the oceanic food chain, etc., they're also learning vocabulary, science, geology, geography, math, nutrition, and more. There are maps, diagrams, photographs, and drawings.

All the diversity makes the book appealing to learners of all ages and learning styles.

As other reviewers have mentioned, there is a chapter called "The Genesis Flood." In my opinion, a book about the ocean wouldn't be complete without a mention of this event. What I like about it is the fact that this is not simply another book that mentions the flood and expects you to accept it as fact. The author has actually taken the time to evaluate various arguments for a worldwide flood and examine them from a scientific point of view.

Finally, I really appreciated the conversion charts at the back of the book. This was quite helpful when discussing nautical terms like "fathoms" with my students - my children.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone, but especially for educators wanting to provide their students with some excellent educational material that will hold their interest. This book is ideal for any unit study or homeschool curricula regarding the ocean. You could use it independently or find some fantastic supplemental material in the teacher's guide.

Sonya Haskins