Mystery of History

I'm not sure how many other people are using the Mystery of History curriculum, but I really love it. It's a great way to piece together world history (so much of what I covered at school focused solely on the UK!) and covers a wide range of other topics in a chronological way.

The only problem I have had with it is that it's sooooo expensive. I mean, it's fine if you live in the US, but shipping to the UK nearly doubles the price of the curriculum, especially if you get charged import tax by customs (yes, even though it was marked educational resources, they decided to charge me anyway).

So I was super excited when I found out you can get volumes I and II on kindle!! Not only that, but there appears to be some kind of promotion on, because despite each quarter of volume II being listed as £6.34, when I bought it I was only charged £1.06! Not only that, but I had promotional credit from my prime account, so I all of volume two on my kindle for FREE.

Pretty sweet deal.

Sadly it doesn't have volumes three and four, but hopefully they'll be released before we get to them, and with all the money I've saved I'm going to go and download the MP3's so we can listen to volume one for revision in the car. 

In your image...

This week we've started our mystery of history curriculum again. Lychee is now old enough to join in and get something from it, which makes it a whole lot easier than it was last time around!

To be honest, we stopped because we moved house and taking our timeline off the wall meant we would have to reconstruct everything we'd done and I couldn't face doing it at the time. Starting again means rebuilding slowly, which is a lot more manageable. 

Today the children are using play doh to create men in their own image... Which quickly descended into creating their own "beasts of the field" and "birds of the air".  Cosmo is enjoying it so much more having a sibling to encourage creativity. First time around he wanted to make everything look perfect, exactly like a real person. 

Second time around, with a little encouragement from his sister, he's created a six legged, long necked, mammal that swims and has a number on its back which changes each year to tell you how old it is. 

I love how they inspire each other and learn from each other in ways that I couldn't teach. 

Family learning is the best! 

Valentines Activity

 Looking for a fun activity for valentines day? How about learning to make genuinely healthy, organic and fairly traded chocolate? That's what we are going to be doing. I'm told it's easy enough for the kids to join in with too.

You could also do a study on fair trade, it's a little early (fair trade fortnight starts on the 23rd of February) but personally I think they've missed a trick because everyone will be marketed nasty commercial not fairly traded chocolate for valentines day without giving it a second though just nine days earlier.

The fair trade website has tonnes of free resources aimed at all age groups which look great and I will definitely be looking at these both with the teenagers I work with and my own two.

And if you are looking for links to buy the ingredients you need, you can find them at the bottom of yesterday's post on my other blog. :-)

You Are There - Lamplighter Theatre

We love audio books, not only in the car, but Cosmo is really enjoying listening to them at bed time. Audible credits are a cheap way to get regular audio books and we've really enjoyed the Inspired by the Bible Experience audio with Samuel L Jackson, Denzel Washington and some other really big names. We also love the Adventures in Odyssey series for fun and light hearted entertaining stories.

By far and away though, my children's favourite audio we've ever bought has been the Lamplighter Theatre plays. The stories are incredibly engaging, with fantastic truths hidden in them and really inspirational heroes. They are exceptionally well produced and every child (and adult) I know who has listened has loved them. So I was super excited when Lamplighter brought out the 'You Are There' Series.


It's a dramatisation of Bible stories for young children. The bible experience is word for word scripture read and acted, which is fantastic; but this is something different, so I don't mind investing in both. Thanks to YNAB we had some money in our 'homeschool: Curriculum' budget, so when I saw that Lamplighter had a half price deal on I jumped at it. We got the MP3 downloads (shipping to the uk is pricey!) and I can't wait to start listening to them with the kids.

Here's the promo video:

And some longer interviews about the series:

If you order them quick, they are down to $99 for the entire set (that's about £62 in English money).

Enjoy!

Music Appreciation

I found a link on pinterest for How to Teach Music Appreciation The Charlotte Mason Way and I've decided to add it into our schedules this year.

The author suggests picking one composer each term, listening to a piece of their music daily and changing it each week (easily done whilst we are on copywork or something else). We then also need to discuss and learn about the composers life and learn about them.

I think part of the reason I'm so excited about it is that we have really been enjoying a fantastic audiobook which includes the story of Johann Sebastian Bach and I had no idea what an amazingly faithful overcomer he was.

We're going to start with Debussy this term, because I like his music, then do Bach in January (for contrast and because I already have a biography of him) and the Chopin in the summer (because I like his music too.

If you are interested in doing this with us, I've made youtube playlist with some of their music so you can play it easily on your phone, tablet, laptop etc... whilst your littles are working to help familiarise them with the music.

Bach
Brahms
Chopin
Debussy
Mozart

And I'll add more as we get through them, so just keep an eye on the playlists in my channel, or let me know if you make your own and I'll add a link to them.

Thanks.

Reading Practice

I made a playlist of flash card videos that we use with Lychee for reading practice - so I figured I'd post it here in case anyone else wants to do some practice with little ones.

It's for children learning sight words or 'whole word' reading methods, NOT phonics.

Enjoy :-)

Brain Quest

Cosmo was lucky enough to be bought a gift from one of the boys we live with, all the way from the United States!

The gift is a set of flash cards called 'Brain Quest' which I had never heard of, but they are brilliant. Each little pack is a notebook full of strips with different categories of questions on and answers on the card behind.

Cosmo was bought a grade 3 pack, bearing in mind that he is pre-K age, I was a little skeptical, but actually he really likes them. The math and science sections are still easy, but language arts, social studies and miscellany are all brand new to him.

Actually, it turns out brain quest have a huge website with downloadable resources and apps for the iphone/ipad too. It's only £2.99 so I've bought it and we'll be playing it later on today.

These sets are a great way to build encyclopedic knowledge, which is perfect for the developmental stage we are currently at.

***Update***

The app is AMAZING! It allows up to three users, so the kids can work at their own level each time they come back and not miss any stages/have to start again.

It's easy, multiple choice style means that even Lychee can play as I read the questions and she has to choose an answer. It's great for reading practice as I ask 'Which describes a girl? He or She?' and she has to look at the two answers to work out which one says 'she'.

Obviously Cosmo has zoomed through to level 24 in just half an hour, but he's enjoying it and building knowledge, so I'm really pleased. I also have no idea how many levels there are, but it hasn't shown any signs of being completed any time soon.

£2.99 well spent :0)

Yes He Is (Death is Not Natural)

Okay, so this isn't technically a homeschooling resource, but I recently discovered this website that is full of media to make sharing your faith on things like facebook and twitter easier. The thing is, it has such simple, clear summaries of the gospel, that it is actually perfect for little ones to get a grip of the metanarrative of the gospel.

The website is called Yes He is and you can see a sample video, called 'Death is not Natural' here:

Lovely animations, which would make a great change to devotional time, and with a few basic questions you could easily make it a comprehension task, whilst all the while reinforcing the truth of the gospel. 

Go to Yesheis.com and you can view hundreds more videos and images that portray biblical truth in a simple and eye-pleasing way :0)

Knowledge Quest Geography

Just a quick heads up for those of you who, like me, have a little geographobia (despite having a geography teaching husband, I have never studied geography and find my lack of knowledge in this area disturbing!) Knowledge Quest have kindly made their 'GLOBALMANIA: Master world Geography in 7 months or less' text available as a free download (RRP $14.95)

It's a big file, but they've split it for smaller downloads too.

Enjoy mastering the world!

IPad Education

I'm in awe of people who managed to homeschool before the internet. How on earth anyone got through lesson planning without Pinterest is completely beyond me.


I've said before how disenchanted I am with our public library. It's really big, and I know we are much more fortunate than many who live in small villages. The story time group is fantastic, but the books available to children, particularly early readers, is devastatingly lacking. Anything that would even vaguely challenge his reading ability seems to be about vampires, or witches, or completely inappropriate relationships (he recently brought home a book about a kid with a crush on his teacher. We didn't get past the first chapter).

With this in mind I'm so excited to be ordering some books from Lamplighter publishing to add to our home collection, (in no small part thanks to their current offer of buying a $100 certificate and getting a second one free!) but the reality is although my children love books, right now the iPad is where it's at.

I've only had it for a month, so maybe it's a novelty thing, but I feel like my homeschool life just got a whole lot easier.

So this post is, for the most part, dedicated to how we use it - although some of these uses worked fine on my iPhone too, it's all so much easier on the pad ;0)

1. Record Keeping 
There are tonnes of free apps, but my personal favourite is Evernote. We used it long before we got the iPad, and there is a desktop download, web based page and phone app that you could use instead (as I did for the last two years).
The most useful thing about it is storing examples of work. I take two seconds to snap some photos for the worksheets the children have just completed, tag them (subject, child) and they are automatically stored by date. Very useful when it comes to looking back through for end of term reports!

There is also a recording facility, so I've recorded the children doing things like reciting a new memory verse (which will be totally cute to listen to in years to come).
I also use the note taking facility to jot down any developmental leaps (walking, reading, swam 5m etc...) and once again Evernote auto tags the date and, if you like, location. Fab.


2. BrainPop
Brainpop is brilliant, we are using the free version of brain pop jr without an account currently. It's brilliant and there is a new video every week. The videos are cute, subtitled and have two quizzes on the content at the end (easy and hard) as well a joke and a relevant comic strip. The best part (according to Cosmo) is that there's a little leaderboard so you can try and beat your score on the quizzes by taking them again, and/or compete against a sibling.




3. Montessori geography
We LOVE the Montessori geography apps. There are some free ones (the UK for example) but we have chosen to pay for the European one. Cosmo is happy able to work on this alone and is learning to identify all the countries in Europe, not only by name and location, but also by shape. I'm learning as he does!
Eventually we'll upgrade to the other continents, but right now this one has plenty of content to keep us busy.
The Montessori pre-language opposites app is also brilliant for lychee.

4. Starfall ABCs
It's no secret that we are massive fans of the starfall website and subscribe to more starfall too. The app isn't free, and it also doesn't have all the content of the full site, but it's perfect for little ones who can't use a mouse yet to explore limited content. Lychee happily spent 30 minutes playing on it whilst I had a church meeting last week. For £1.99 it's been totally worth it.

5. Little writer
Lychee needs some serious help with this app, but she loves it.
I would have thought it was beneath Cosmo, but he seems to really enjoy it too, and it's encouraging him to form letters and numbers correctly (instead of two circles for an eight, for example) so I'm not complaining.

6. FlashCardlet
A great little app that allows you to create sets of flash cards for memory work. Easy to set up and easy for the kids to use. Cosmo loves flipping through his memory verses from Plant's Grown Up.

So those are my current favourites, obviously I'm sure we'll discover more as we go, but that's it for now.

Do you have an iPad/iPhone other electronic device you use for homeschooling? What apps do you recommend?





This post is linked up at noordinarybloghop

Half term

So we've just had half-term, but with this being a homeschool the learning never stops!!

This holidays we signed Cosmo up for his first ever holiday-club with Wilstead evangelical church and he had a fantastic time. It was for two hours every morning and he came home having learned new songs and games, as well as a memory verse.

There were some competitions, including boat building, for homework and he worked so hard to create a boat that actually floated - experimenting with gluing coins and pebbles to counter weight his beautiful sail (those are ants that he drew on it), and covering the whole base in cling film to make sure no water would get in it.

There were also homework sheets, with word searches and crosswords and he won gold medals for completing those too.

At the end of the week there was a medal ceremony and he was presented with a certificate and a sticker book which he is very proud of.

He did miss two days of holiday club as we went to stay at my mothers to spend a little time with my sister who is about to emigrate half-way around the world :o(


We had a great time and celebrated a cousins birthday with a family trip to gulliver's land which was obviously a huge hit.

My aunt also stopped by on the second day with a box load of Math resources and games for us and we've been excitedly sorting through them, looking at which ones we'd like to play now and which ones to put in our 'soon' shelf in the school room.

And finally I've spent some time with Lychee on the new iPad (yes! I've finally got one!) and been working on the Montessori pre-language opposites app and starfall ABCs. Both are excellent and I highly recommend them, although it can make it hard to limit screen time as the children get really into the 'work' they are doing.

So that's been our half-term. Did you do anything exciting? 

Twinkl

A few of you have already commented on my facebook photos of the new posters in our 'school room', asking me where I bought them. 

Well lucky for you guys, they are actually a free downloadable resource on a website I've been asked to review called Twinkl. 

Twinkl have a ridiculous amount of free resources available for both classroom environments and parents at home to help with everything you could ever want for your preschool,  KS1 and KS2 children. 

 

You can buy the resources printed up nicely, or if like me you invested in a laser printer and ink is not a premium commodity you can print them yourself for FREE. How generous is that?

The posters in the picture above is from the literacy section explaining homophones. Highly useful with an extremely verbal ASD child who tends to take everything said very literally. Knowing that hole and whole are two different words is more important than you'd imagine...

In fact, in the parent's section there is a whole load of SEN (special educational needs) resources including pictorial timetables (which were a massive help to reducing stress levels and allowing my son to cope in sunday school) and simple chore charts. 

The cutting worksheets are also proving a massive hit with Cosmo (he feels so grown up with his own scissors) and there is just a tonne of resources for things like bonfire night and thanksgiving. There's book lists and recommendations, classroom display ideas... this website is honestly a home educators dream!   

I'm pretty new to the site (I only discovered it about a week ago) but you can expect to be seeing and hearing lots more about it on here as I work my way through the whole thing. There's just so much to see! It's basically my new Starfall (and you know how evangelical I was about starfall...).

What's in the Bible discount

In case I haven't made it clear enough in the past, we LOVE 'What's in the Bible?' DVDs from JellyTelly.

JellyTelly actually have a tonne of free videos that you can watch, including some episodes of 'Adventures in Odyssey' and, my children's personal favourites, 'Clive and Ian's Wonderblimp of Knowledge' (how do they come up with this stuff?). My personal favourite's are Dr Von Schniffenhausen's science lessons.

Anyway, as much fun as the freebies are, the 'What's in The Bible?' DVDs are out of this world great. They bring together short, funny clips on a theme and introduce children to concepts such as 'salvation' and early church history in easy, manageable ways. My children have learnt loads and we've really enjoyed it too.

They make an excellent addition to any christian home, and right now JellyTelly are offering 20% off through a referral scheme. You get 20% off, I get a $10 gift certificate. Win, Win.

Click here for 20% off

And just to whet your appetites, here's a clip of one of my favourite songs from one of the DVDs. 

Lamplighter Publishing Offer!

Great news from Lamplighter Publishing!!

Recently a coupon code for their audio books accidentally got released. It was only supposed to go to 100 people who had attended a seminar, but somebody put it on facebook and... well they got enough downloads to crash the server.

I was so impressed with the way lamplighter handled this. I personally paid to download without realising the code was supposed to be exclusive, so they sent me a polite email, letting me know that they would be honouring my purchase, but requesting that I don't share the code with others.

I was so excited to have received the audio books (me and my children are enjoying them so much) but disappointed to not be able to share the offer with my friends.

Well, we are in luck! Lamplighter are doing another phenomenal deal, and this time we are allowed to share!

photo credit

There are several packages which have each been discounted to $7 (£4.30) each. That means that for £8.60 you could get all of the audio books that we have. I'm also spending the same amount again, this time to download the ebooks for some of the same stories and several new ones that weren't dramatized. My son will love reading through the books that he now knows the stories to - we had to listen to 'the hedge of thorns' four times through before he let me put on the next one - but I'm eager to read some of the new books to him as well, particularly titles like 'boys of grit who became men of honour' and 'The Giant killer'.

photo credit

This is genuinely a fantastic deal and I can't recommend it highly enough, but it's only for the next 24 hours. Once you have purchased you will have plenty of time to download, but you must make the purchase today.

Click here to buy!

Exercise for Brain Power

Check it out! My baby can ride a bike!!

One of the great things about home education is being able to spend plenty of time doing stuff away from a desk. The kids get way more exercise because we spend a large portion of the day walking to and from shops, the library, the park - not to mention swimming and active play at those places.

I believe at this age school is very active too, with lots of playing and discovering in the classroom, and not too much sitting at desks, but I really value the fact that as my children get older, their activity levels don't have to drop. They won't lose afternoon recess, or be confined to 1.5 hours of sports timetabled in a week (that's what we had when I was at school).

Before you think I'm sports mad (I'm not - ask anyone. I managed to escape PE since 4th form by volunteering for  extra music lessons) there is a good reason I encourage my children to get plenty of exercise - it increases brain power and productivity.

This week I was sent this great infographic by a woman named Alison from Online Courses, which puts it so much more succinctly than I ever could.

http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/

If you want to see more from Online Courses you can click on the link below the picture. They are a great resource for further education and even have links to lots of free programs, such as the open courses at Yale, which are high quality educational materials made available through download. 

Synonyms and the Book of Centuries

As with most homeschooling blogs we've been a little slow over the summer. One of the joys of home educating is being able to enjoy the sunshine whenever you like and not having to stick to a schedule.

With that in mind, we don't actually break for the whole summer like some other families do. Although we don't formally hand in registers to our co-op, we continue with a relaxed pace - nothing to strenuous, but a little now and then to ensure that we don't get completely out of the habit of learning.

One of the games we've been playing is called synonyms. I made it up, but it's really fun and Cosmo loves it. We basically wrote lots of words on lolly sticks (actually they're waxing spatula's from my old beauty business, but lolly sticks would work just as well) in categories. For example, ten of the sticks have words that are synonyms for 'big', such as huge, gigantic, enormous, massive etc... and ten have words for 'small', ten have words that mean 'delicious', ten have words that mean 'brave'...etc...

Then I flipped them over, shuffled them and continued to do the same with more categories.

The game is then to shout a word, such as 'small' and then everyone has to try and snatch as many sticks that contain a synonym for that word. The winner is the person with the most sticks. They then get to chose the next category.

I'm trying to introduce games that a) broaden Cosmo's vocabulary and b) make use of grammatical terms. Being an avid reader, he has already grasped many grammatical rules (such as where speech marks should go, that a capital letter should start a sentence etc...) but you can't absorb the vocabulary to diagram sentences from just reading. Someone has to explain to you the difference between a noun, adjective and a verb for you to understand what those words mean.

I've been reading a bit more about the Charlotte Mason method of teaching, and I've fallen in love with the idea of a Book of Centuries. It's the perfect accompaniment to the Mystery of History curriculum that we already use.

A Book of Centuries is basically a timeline in a notebook. You have a double page spread for each century, and as your child finds out about a person or an event, they can write about it, draw pictures, or create a lapbook in that double page spread. It's a fun way to record what they are learning, and keeps it accessible to flick through and revise. Everything is in order, so it helps the child to get an idea of what happened when.

I know that since we started our timeline in our hallway, I have a much better understanding of how different cultures evolved world wide, and how the pieces of history fit together. I'm obviously a visual learner, but this stuff has never sunk in for me before.

As great as our timeline is though, there is not a lot of space for information, just a small picture to remind us of an event. I think the book of centuries is a great accompaniment to go with it.

If you'd like to start your own book of centuries, you can find a template for it on Simply Charlotte Mason and the best part is that it's free to download. There's actually some other really great resources on that site so I'd encourage you have a look around whilst you are there.

I suspect we are going to have to do a section on the olympics soon as Cosmo and Daddy have and such a great time attending some of the events. I'll blog about that soon, but in the meantime you can see a couple of the photos on our travel blog.

Free Resources

We have been plodding along with various things this term, and whilst I enjoy following whatever subject Cosmo is interested in at the time, I feel like we could probably start introducing a small amount more structure next term.

Although he thrives on being able to follow his own ideas of what he wants to study, poor Lychee rarely gets a say in what we are doing and I feel like until she is verbal enough to ask questions or make it clear what she wants, it would be nice to follow something that progresses - rather than changing topic on a whim.

I found this amazing FREE resource today called Lesson Pathways and I think it is going to be so useful to us.

Okay, so the video is a little annoying, but I genuinely love the resources they've put together. It's great to be able to jump in when you have some free time with the children and not be worrying about what to do next - just click on the next lesson and you are good to go. 

I especially like the language arts section for Cosmo. Although he is very good at reading fluently, his comprehension could use some work, and I'm not sure he understands grammar. Having the groundwork done for me makes a huge difference. 

Speaking of having the groundwork done for  you, I've also been using Homeschoolshare.com a lot recently. It turns out Cosmo LOVES lapbooking, especially as you can choose just about any topic and there is a unit study for it. Volcanoes and Tsunami's are his topic of choice right now, and whilst the resources are in an easy to use format and even a four year old can understand them, his vocabulary and knowledge in that subject area now rivals his daddy's GCSE classes.  

The best part about lapbooking for me is that there is a LOT of cutting and gluing, and laying out on the page, involved. Although I do the vast majority of the cutting, he does practice with his plastic scissors, he uses the hole punch, and (although he often finds it frustrating) he is getting better at using the pritt stick. Art is something I've struggled to get him excited about, but combining some of these skills with topics he's interested in (rather than just art for arts sake) has led to much more successful mastery of these skills.  

Lychee Update

We talk so much about her big brother on here and Lychee tends to largely get ignored. This is for the most part because I feel like a lot of the posts would be very repetitive if I told you what we did with One child and then repeated it when the next one came along!

However, with regards to reading the children have learnt VERY differently. We tried the flashcard and YBCR system that worked so well with Cosmo, but had very little results with Lychee. She just wasn't interested. However she loves Starfall.com and we noticed that unlike her brother, who learnt using the whole word system, she was able to name individual letters by their sound. 

With this in mind we started using the hooked on phonics videos with her a little while back. Today she started sounding out words that she had never seen before by herself for the first time. She still pronounces each letter separately ('T-H-I-S' instead of 'Th-Is) and annunciates VERY clearly (it takes a long time to read when you pronounce each letter as a syllable) but it is a great leap forward developmentally and a step in the right direction decoding sounds ready for reading. 

I'm absolutely thrilled. If you want to see the video she was working on, it's here. 

Centre of the cell

Its taken me ages to get around to writing this, but in half term we went to a vicious venoms and poisonous parasites workshop at centre of the cell in London.

The day began with a train journey into London, or should I say Luton, where I got kicked off the train for having a cheap ticket. Turns out I'm not allowed to ride on virgin trains if I have an FCC ticket, much to my sisters amusement.

Anyway, we made it to centre of the cell, which was fantastic. They really do cater to all ages, with questions simple enough for a four year old to understand and knowledge deep enough to hit GCSE requirements and more.

The first section was called a 'pod show' and you get inside a pod which is shaped like an 8 day old embryo.

There are huge screens on the ceiling where they show videos at various points through the show. In the centre of the pod is a 'nucleus' which contains tons of touch screen interactive games. They're done simply enough that Will was easily able to identify a gene for deafness, raise a colony of bacteria, treat severe burns and even watch a simulation of himself from birth to now.

I was worried that the lights and sound might be too much for him, but they whole place (including lighting) has been specially designed to be an optimum learning environment and epilepsy safe. It was incredible to see Will's ability to concentrate and focus improve so dramatically being in a low stimulation environment. It's definitely made me more sympathetic to him wanting the curtains closed during the day when he is doing copywork. The light is just too bright for him to focus.

We then moved on to a lecture room where we got to see an experiment of what happens to blood when venom is added, and learn a bit about different venomous animals. Did you know that a jellyfish has 24 eyes? Me neither, but I do now!

We were also amazed to find out that slow loris's are one of the most deadly animals. They lick their elbows (where they secrete poisons) just before they bite you, which makes their saliva deadly toxic. Poison arrow frogs on the other hand are not actually poisonous at all. They eat poisonous insects, then excrete the poisons through their skin, so they are only ever as dangerous as the prey they have recently found.

There were some craft activities and interactive learning packs for older children, but the toddlers were happy just pottering about looking at everything and making bracelets out of 'DNA' beads.

Then as we headed home we stopped in a bakery at St Pancras and bought some really extravagant cupcakes.

We brought them home and had just enough time for a tea party with all the teddies before bed.

A fantastic day out which I hope to repeat again soon.

To see all of our photos, check out our 'travels' blog.

Readeez

We love Readeez in our house. If you don't know what a Readeez is, you should check out this video.

I mean, seriously how cute, yet stealthily educational, is that?

Cosmo's personal favourite is 'Geometreez' where the little girl, 'Isobel' performs various acrobatics to demonstrate rotating on various axes.

There's readeez to help with general phonics recognition and frequent sight words for smaller children with reading and english grammar for slightly older kids. The videos use music and 'syllable sync' (where the words pop up syllable by syllable as they are spoken and sung) to help children learn.

I love this. How much easier was it to learn the alphabet, months of the year or even the periodic table when you had a song that went with it?

And then there's just some really cute videos that my children love like the lullaby 'Tonight and every night'.

The great thing about Readeez is that they don't dumb it down too much. There are long words, used in context, that my children learn to recognize and use without being concerned by them.

If you want to just watch a few readeez there are a tonne on youtube, but I recommend downloading them for a couple of reasons.

i) somebody works really hard to produce this excellent and innovative resource and I like to support that. I respect that they give so much content away for free and think it's nice to give back

ii) they are excellent value, especially if you by the bundle. Three half hour movies and a CD of songs is excellent for what ends up costing about £15.