"The river was in God's hands, the cows in ours." So passed the days on Indian Farm, a dairy operation on 700 acres of rich Illinois bottomland. In this collection, Alan Guebert and his daughter-editor Mary Grace Foxwell recall Guebert's years on the land working as part of that all-consuming collaborative effort known as the family farm. Here are Guebert's tireless parents, measuring the year not in months but in seasons for sewing, haying, and doing the books; Jackie the farmhand, needing ninety minutes to do sixty minutes' work and cussing the entire time; Hoard the dairyman, sore fingers wrapped in electrician's tape, sharing wine and the prettiest Christmas tree ever; and the unflappable Uncle Honey, spreading mayhem via mistreated machinery, flipped wagons, and the careless union of diesel fuel and fire. Guebert's heartfelt and humorous reminiscences depict the hard labor and simple pleasures to be found in ennobling work, and show that in life, as in farming, Uncle Honey had it right with his succinct philosophy for overcoming adversity: "the secret's not to stop." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DooGQqUlXI4&index=1&list=FLPxtuez-lmHxi5zpooYEnBg

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NEWBERY HONOR AWARD WINNER A classic YA novel about a teenage girl searching for a sense of home and family that celebrates the true spirit of independence on the American frontier. For most of her life, sixteen-year-old Hattie Brooks has been shuttled from one distant relative to another. Tired of being Hattie Here-and-There, she summons the courage to leave Iowa and move all by herself to Vida, Montana, to prove up on her late uncle’s homestead claim. Under the big sky, Hattie braves hard weather, hard times, a cantankerous cow, and her own hopeless hand at the cookstove. Her quest to make a home is championed by new neighbors Perilee Mueller, her German husband, and their children. For the first time in her life, Hattie feels part of a family, finding the strength to stand up against Traft Martin’s schemes to buy her out and against increasing pressure to be a “loyal” American at a time when anything—or anyone—German is suspect. Despite daily trials, Hattie continues to work her uncle’s claim until an unforeseen tragedy causes her to search her soul for the real meaning of home. This young pioneer's story is lovingly stitched together from Kirby Larson’s own family history and the sights, sounds, and scents of homesteading life.

The Key to the Blue Workbook gives clear, thoroughly-explained answers to all exercises in the Blue Workbook, one of four workbooks in the Grammar for the Well-Trained Mind series, providing detailed, well-designed exercises in the correct use of English grammar. The Key to the Blue Workbook gives clear, thoroughly-explained answers to all exercises in the Blue Workbook, one of four non-sequential books in the Grammar for the Well-Trained Mind series, providing detailed, well-designed exercises in the correct use of English grammar. The Key, along with the accompanying Blue Workbook and the Core Instructor Text, make up Grammar for the Well-Trained Mind: a complete course that takes students from basic definitions (“A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea”) through advanced sentence structure and analysis, all the grammar skills needed to write and speak with eloquence and confidence. This innovative program combines the three essential elements of language learning: understanding and memorizing rules (prescriptive teaching), repeated exposure to examples of how those rules are used (descriptive instruction), and practice using those rules in exercises and in writing (practical experience). Each year, parents and teachers go through the dialogue, rules, and examples in the Core Instructor Text; students follow along in the Workbook. This repetition solidifies the concepts, definitions, and examples in the student’s mind. There are four Workbooks, one for each year. Each Workbook contains the same rules and examples, but four completely different sets of exercises and assignments, allowing students to develop a wide-ranging knowledge of how the rules and examples are put to use in writing. Each Key to the Workbooks provides not only answers, but also explanations for the parent/instructor, and guidance as to when the answers might be ambiguous (as, in English, they often are). All of the rules covered, along with the repeated examples for each, are assembled for ongoing reference in the Comprehensive Handbook of Rules (soon to be renamed as The Grammar Guidebook). Every step of the sentence diagramming process is gathered for reference, along with illustrations, in The Diagramming Dictionary. These will become the student’s indispensable guide to writing through high school, into college and beyond. Step-by-step instruction takes students from the most basic concepts through advanced grammatical concepts such as modal and hortative verbs and multiple functions of noun clauses. Extensive diagramming exercises reinforce the rules and help technical and visual learners to understand and use the English language effectively. Each step of the diagramming process is illustrated and thoroughly explained to the student. Text for examples and exercises are drawn from great works of literature, as well as from well-written nonfiction texts in science, mathematics, and the social sciences. Regular review is built into each year of work. The Key accompanies one of four non-sequential workbooks, each containing new exercises that allow students to practice and apply the grammar principles under study.

David Kline has been called a "twentieth–century Henry David Thoreau" by his friends and contemporaries; an apt comparison given the quiet exuberance with which he records the quotidian goings–on on his organic family farm. Under David's attentive gaze and in his clear, insightful prose the reader is enveloped in the rhythms of farm life; not only the planting and harvesting of crops throughout the year, but the migration patterns of birds, the health and virility of honeybees left nearly to their own devices, the songs and silences of frogs and toads, the disappearance and resurgence of praying mantises in fields–turned woodlands, the search for monarch butterflies in the milkweed. There's rhythm in community, too—neighbors gathering to plant potatoes or to maintain an elderly friend's tomato garden, organic farming conferences and meetings around family dining tables or university panels. Interspersed with local lore (when the spring's first bumblebee appears the children can go barefoot) is deep technical knowledge of cultivation and land management and the hazards of modern agri–business. Kline records statewide meetings of district supervisors, knows which speakers and committee chairmen are in the pockets of the oil and gas lobbyists, stands up and says his part. At a time when America's population is being turned toward the benefits of small, local farming practices on our health and our environment, Kline's daybook offers a striking example of the ways in which we are connected to our environment, and the pleasure we can take in daily work and stewardship.

The Middle East conflict originated, literally, in the womb of a beautiful woman –Rebekah, Isaac’s wife. Her ‘struggling’ twins, from their mother’s womb, have often engaged in a love/hate embrace, scorching their lands with periodic eruptions of bloody conflicts. Their descendants, though gradually lost their identity, have spread their struggle for ‘the global inheritance’ into Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. The march of Islam, of Muhammad,“the man of the sword”; the present Jew/arab conflict; the Persian Gulf menace; fanatic Islamic world terrorism and their main target – the West – are a direct result of the twins’ struggle, which begun while in their mother’s womb. Human history and its future can’t be fully comprehended without correct understanding of the roots and turbulent history of the struggling twins. You, the reader, are destined, regardless of your ethnic background and religion, to soon experience the final consequences and glorious triumph of this age-long bloody conflict. Through the pages of this work the author takes you on a fascinating journey of the Biblical and historic records, which faithfully traced the stormy blazing trails of ‘the struggling twins,’from the inception of the conflict to its glorious ‘final solution.’