We love library book sales!

Before grocery shopping Saturday morning, Adrienne and I stopped at the library book sale. It was really busy, but we managed to find some nice books!

Prices were 10 cents for soft cover and 25 cents for hard cover.

I especially like the DK travel guides we bought for 10 cents a piece. We'll be using these this year as we study our world geography. I thought we could read them and then use some of the beautiful photos for our notebook pages.

Not in the photo is one of Shane Peacock's Boy Sherlock Holmes books that Adrienne was so pleased to find.

We ran into a few other local homeschoolers at the book sale. Homeschoolers love books and great prices!



Native snakes up close!

A few days ago, we visited one of the local library branches for a special reptile show. It was called Reptiles at Risk On the Road. The show was very interesting because all the reptiles they showed were native to Ontario and most could be found in the wild around where we live. The presentators did an excellent job at presenting all the reptiles and explaining how these snakes behave in the wild, especially if they feel threatened. They also explained how it is illegal for anyone to keep any of these native reptiles as pets.

They did bring one type of snake (Corn Snake) that wasn't native to our country to show what a good option for a pet snake could be.

I am only showing photos of the native snakes in this post. The presentation was the first part of the show, and in the second half everyone could hold the snakes! I included links to the names of the snakes if you would like to learn more about each kind.

Black Rat Snake (photo above and below)

Eastern Fox Snake with Adrienne:

Hog Nose Snake:

Andre holding the Hog Nose snake, and Adrienne the Fox snake:

Celeste is holding the Milksnake:

We stayed until the very end of the presentation, when they were starting to pack everything up. Celeste loved holding the snakes and didn't want to leave, actually all 3 of my children have held snakes before and are confortable with them. The one man doing the presentation decided to show us two extra reptiles, both little turtles. The first photo is a Spotted Turtle, the two other photos are of a rare tiny turtle called a Stinkpot Turtle.

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If you are in Ontario, be sure to check the events calendar for this free educational event on the Reptiles at Risk website!
We loved it!

Wordless Wednesday ~ Fun at the Park & Library

Combining two reading challenges...

I have decided to combine these two challenges. We have been doing the 100 books-a-month challenge since November and we love it. To keep us a bit more organized, I am adding the "Reading my Library" challenge hosted by Carrie. Most of the books we read come from the library. Our local branch is pretty small, and I have noticed these past two months that we tend to check certain sections and sometimes not trying others. I think this will help us discover more authors, especially in the picture books area.

Carrie's plan is to read through all the Children Picture books at her library. How is she doing that? Basically by starting at A and making her way through to Z. The library has picture books organized by authors, and she started off by grabing the first 35 books under the letter A. She is giving herself as long as needed, but did mention to try and do it in 1 year.  You can visit her blog at Reading My Library.

We will continue to choose books that attract us for whatever reason, and my older two children will continue on picking their own novels, non-fiction books, and graphic novels.

If Celeste chooses other books, they will get added to our library basket too, but this will provide us with focus when we seem to lack some!

Tomorrow's library trip will find us in the letter A section of the picture books!

And one more thing...Carrie is also hosting a L.M. Montgomery Reading Challenge at her other site: Reading to Know..if you are interested.