Friday, April 29, 2011

Happy Birthday, The Old Schoolhouse!

This post is part of a TOS 10th Anniversary Blog Hop only I can't seem to get the linky to work.  So to join up you can post about some favorite thing about The Old Schoolhouse and link up here.

The Old Schoolhouse is celebrating ten years of existence.  Wow, is all I can say.

I have no idea when I first found the magazine.  Six years ago, maybe?  But I know everytime I would receive an issue I would immediately flip to the back and read the various reviews of curriculum and books and programs.  I read reviews at various other websites and such, but those always felt so, so, so... professional.

TOS had reviews that weren't professional sounding.  And I mean that in a very complimentary way.  I read the reviews and I always felt like the person had actually USED the product.  With kids.  And they were able to tell me something about how it worked in the real, messy, not always organized world of homeschooling. 

I loved those reviews.  When I first started doing reviews of any sort (long before I started blogging), it was those reviews from The Old Schoolhouse that I tried to emulate.  Only mine are longer, LOL!

Of course, now that I'm nearing the end of my second year of actually writing reviews for the TOS Homeschool Crew, I have different reasons for loving the reviews that TOS does.  Because I'm now a part of one aspect of their reviews.  And the Crew tries to be what I so loved about the magazine reviews -- real moms with real kids using products and telling you how they really worked.  Only with the Crew, you get up to 100 different real homes talking about it.

Earlier this week, when my TOS magazine arrived, I turned first to the article about Robotics.  Because that is so incredibly timely for us.  Boy Scouts of America just released a new merit badge -- Robotics!  And Connor doesn't know it yet, but he is going to have the opportunity to work on it after his birthday this weekend.  But after reading that amazingly perfect for us article, I immediately flipped to the back and read the product reviews.  I haven't had time yet to read the rest of the magazine.  I will get there though.

Do you subscribe to the magazine?  Right now is a good time to do so.  They are offering 19 amazing gifts with a subscription at the moment.  I resubscribed, so I'm now good until 2013.  I'm loving the free gifts though... and they are on a mission to sell out of the free gifts before May 1 -- with a bonus free gift to everyone who subscribed if they do!  AND... if you do subscribe, and put my name (Debra Brinkman) in the Comments field, I get a $5 gift certificate.  If I do get any gift certificates, I'll turn it into a blog giveaway...

The free gifts have included a lapbook (on Knights, in my case!  How perfect is that for us right now?) or two (the other is for Apologia Elementary Science), some great physical books, some amazing ebooks, a Beautiful Feet guide, a DVD, a vocabulary book, computer programming lessons... these have been phenomenal.

Disclaimer: Some of the links included in this post are affiliate links.   


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4 comments:

Kristenph said...

I was just coming to suggest you add this to the TOS Blog Hop, and then I noticed that you had :) You can add the code to your own blog too and make it a hop were people go from blog to blog instead of back to the host blog. Maybe I should make that more clear in the post on the Porch...

Debra said...

Kristen! I've been *trying* to add the code. If I can't get it figured out, I will link to it. Grrr.....

Heather Randall said...

Hi Debra,
Thank you for joining the TOS Blog Hop. I'm sorry for your frustration with the code. If you copy in the Wordpress code into your Blogger post the Linky Tool will appear at the bottom of this post. I'm not sure why, but that works.

Debra said...

Okay, I got it to work :)

Yay!