I had the opportunity to go to the CPH warehouse sale this weekend.  It was awesome!  Given that we’ve lived in this area for the better part of seven years, I can’t believe I’ve never gone before, but now you couldn’t keep me away for anything.

I really had no idea what to expect.  I went in with a list of things I was hoping to find, but in all honesty, I wasn’t really expecting to get any of it, because I had some very specific homeschooling related needs.  I found it all, though!  They had every single thing on my list, and some other stuff I had no idea I wanted. Each of the children also got to pick out two Arch books, which they were ecstatic about.

This was great for us.  Going into homeschooling, the one thing I knew after choosing Sonlight was that eventually, we would have to part ways when it came to their Bible curriculum.  A big part of the reason we chose to homeschool was so that our children could receive a Lutheran education.  While Sonlight is fine in the lower grades, once the children are a little older, it’s important to us to teach doctrinally correct religion lessons.  Knowing this, I’ve been nosing around CPH’s website, looking for ideas for religion curriculum starting at about grade two.

Well, I’d come up with five years worth of religion curriculum based on what I saw there, and after looking at all of them at the sale, I decided on three of them for our use.  So, now I have my religious curriculum planned out for grades one through four.  Next year, for first grade, we’ll be using the Egermeier’s Bible Story Book that Sonlight schedules, and then in second grade, we’ll use A Child’s Garden of Bible Stories (which my mom has had in Braille since she was a little girl, and read to me as a child) and the My First Catechism that CPH publishes.  We’ll bounce back to Sonlight and The Awesome Book of Bible Facts for grade three (and that will be the last Bible curriculum that we’ll use from Sonlight), and go with 100 Bible Stories from CPH for grade four (another book my mom read to me). I also got a junior high level curriculum called A Bible History that I haven’t quite decided when I’ll be using.  So, I still have a few gaps to fill in here and there (I’d love to find a curriculum about church history, but I don’t know if that will happen), but I have a good start for the next few years, and I saved a ton of money!

I also found a few more Christmas resources to use in our “Christmas School” unit.  One is a book called The Three Wise Women of Christmas, which tells the stories of Elizabeth, Mary and Anna.  I’ve been interested in this book since it came out, but I’d never had an opportunity to get it.  The timing is great, because I needed another story book to use at Christmas, and it can be so hard to find a book that’s different, but that also doesn’t go into the whole Santa thing.  I also got a book called Sacred Songs of Christmas, which I’d never heard of before, but is really cool.  It comes with a CD, and has the lyrics for 19 Christmas hymns, as well as a lot of beautiful pictures and Christmas quotes from different sources.  Very cool.

I also got two texture-y books for Moose:  Touch and Feel Creation and Touch and Feel Christmas.  These are two other books that I’ve been looking at getting for a while, and now, knowing about his sensory needs, they will be even more useful to us, because not only will he hear the story and look at the pictures, he interesting textures to feel on each page.

The warehouse sale was a great experience.  The selection was beyond amazing, the prices were unbelievable, and it was run very efficiently, so that check-out was a breeze.  I wish everyone lived close enough to go to this sale every year.  You can pick up so many great things, for family use, for your children, for Bible study or other personal use, and even for homeschool!