Whole Lotta Love Giveaway - Royalty Theme

For those of you who like a wee bit of Waldorf in your homeschools or classrooms, think that you especially will love this royal themed giveaway!

The items in this Whole Lotta Love package include the following:

• The Arithmetic Village Math Program 

• A neat fairy tale picture book app from Pic Pocket Books for either your iPhone or your iPad

• A handmade glass pendant necklace custom created by artist, B.D. Murray.

Here is a bit of a review for Arithmetic Village:
Arithmetic Village Math Program consists of lovely picture books and cute characters, including:
Polly Plus, Linus Minus, Tina Times, and King David Divide.

 These characters help to gently and playfully introduce a child to the concept of place value, from 0 to 900.

 One Jewel  = 1
A Golden Bag = 10
A Treasure Chest  = 100

The neat program created by Kimberly Moore has a helpful website that shows video clips, photos, and ideas for how to use and to extend Arithmetic Village. The ideas involve lots of hands-on manipulatives, arts and crafts, and storytelling in the Waldorf style. If you and your family or classroom enjoy storytelling, acting, doing arts and crafts projects, making chalk pictures, painting water color pictures, then this is the program for you!
The program does have some similarities to an existing Waldorf inspired math program through Oak Meadow, but instead of having a tale about place value about a kingdom with gnomes and a king in the story, it has other characters that are all friends of the king in this tale.
Suppose if you already use Oak Meadow, you would probably really enjoy using both, and could do a comparison / contrast, but since we do not use Oak Meadow, although it looks like a neat curriculum and program, we opted to not do this compare / contrast activity, as my boys are not familiar with the Oak Meadow tale.
If you also try to have Montessori elements into your day-to-day and have the Montessori Golden Beads Work, this math program proved as a great extension for the Golden Bead Work that my sons were already familiar with...we also substituted the Golden Beads we already have and use for the jewels in all of the stories and play mats.
You can also purchase Arithemetic Village through Amazon.com if you live in the USA and the books qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
 Here is a link in case you live in the USA and want to get free shipping through Amazon on these neat Arithmetic Village books.

There is a great deal of fantasy in these books, so if your family likes fantasy, you will really enjoy this program. If your children love listening to fairy tales, coming up with their own fairy tales, etc.,  they will have a blast doing this program. We have not done much with fairy tales up to this point, but have started to explore them in terms of having a better understanding of the world and its people with respect to multicultural versions of similar tales. 
So, this again worked very well for our family, especially for Big Bro, who has been doing more with fairy tales this year, now that he is seven.

My sons have a Playmobil castle with all of the villagers and the knights and so forth, so for them, it was fun to do the math and then, have play time in the afternoon with their Playmobil.
Little Bro still loves putting on costumes and dressing up, so the idea of dressing as a King was fun for him also.  Big Bro still enjoys putting on some costumes, but since there wasn't an actual knight in the program, he just did his own thing and added one into the mix, kind of as a narrator...
As far as the play mats and free printables, they are available on the neat website created by Kimberly Moore, the author or this program.
The free printables take a bit of time to find and to print out, but prove to be very useful, so it is well worth the time to go through the various pages on the website to find them and to print them out for your children.

There is a coloring sheet, play mats to do math work, and then, a few sheets that resemble work sheets, but it is easy to adapt these and make them very kid friendly and less like a worksheet.
The coloring page for example could be made into a watercolor painting of a castle...or else, a child could take this outline of the castle to do a chalk drawing, a sketch, or even build a castle out of cardboard boxes or even a big sand castle at the beach...so many options...so if you are creative and can make the most of these ideas with your children, your family or your classroom will have a great time learning about place value while having fun!
Overall, Arithmetic Village was a hit with both boys so am sure that many, many families will enjoy it as well.

As far as Pic Pocket Books, we have had the opportunity to review and use several of their titles, some nonfiction, and some fiction. Pic Pocket Books features a variety of titles and genres sure to please the whole family. To go with this royal theme, our family listened and watched The Crystal Mountain, by Ruth Sanderson, a beautiful tale with gorgeous illustrations.

Such a well written tale with wonderful illustrations...really enjoyable for all ages...

The book is meant for an older child, ages 6-10, so for Little Bro, who is still 4, we broke this into two sessions, making it more developmentally appropriate for his ability to sit and listen to half of the book at a time...worked out great. Big Bro even enjoyed breaking the book into two sessions, as it made it more fun to have time to get to discuss what we had heard for each part of the book.

Finally, the third item in this giveaway is a lovely, handmade glass pendant necklace made by my brother, artist B.D. Murray.
I asked him to create something specifically for you, my readers, as the finale of the  
Whole Lotta Love Giveaways...
He normally has his work featured at galleries, although he occasionally will sell a few pieces of his work. I adore him an his work and have several of his necklaces and paintings.
He did this especially for me to give to you, so hope that the winner will love it.

UPDATE:
The winner of the Royalty theme giveaway, as chosen by Random.Org is Comment #4, Nicole. Congrats to Nicole!
Nicole commented: *fingers crossed* We would love to win this one!

 

• This makes giveaway #14 of the Whole Lotta Love Giveaways.  
• Started  2/15/11and ended 2/16/11. 
• This giveaway has ended, all existing comments have been removed, and how to enter has been removed, as the giveaway has ended.
• Comments are now closed.