"Your Amazon order has shipped"

Some of the nicest words in the English language, especially for those of us living hours away from independent booksellers.

I spent part of the long weekend not involved in relocating baby bluebirds (they hatched before Tom could take them out of the swather, and are doing well in their new location, a custom-made nestbox atop the diamond harrows), ferrying Tom around to various tractors, celebrating independence, doing laundry, and, like lots of my invisible friends at this time of year, thinking about books and curriculum for the fall.

In fact, the other night I moved beyond thinking and ordered some of the books from Amazon.ca. I ordered some of Galore Park French curricula, particularly their "So You Really Want to Learn French Prep" series, since shipping from England would be prohibitive for us; if you're thinking of doing the same (and even if you're in the US, shipping from Canada rather than England would be much cheaper), I'd suggest searching the items on the Amazon.ca website using the ISBN numbers provided on the GP website. Much less dizzying that way.

I've been thinking of combining the more textbooky, grammatical approach of the GP French course (three levels are available) with The Learnables' audio approach, and was happy to hear from another invisible but nonblogging friend in PEI that she has chosen to combine the exact two programs for her kids, with considerable success. Even combined, the two programs are still cheaper than Rosetta Stone, and the kids won't each need computer time to learn.

My order:

Skeleton French, which includes an audio CD (Amazon.ca link)

So You Really Want to Learn French Prep, Book I (Amazon.ca link) -- on the way! -- which has an accompanying answer book (Amazon.ca link). However, since my own French is just very rusty rather than nonexistant, I'm not going to bother with the answer book ($27.38!), the accompanying assessment pack of tests on CD-ROM (Amazon.ca link), or 40-minute audio CD of passages from the main text (Amazon.ca link)

Other, non-French, goodies in my order:

English from the Roots Up, book 1, with spiral binding, by Joegil Lundquist

The three-DVD set of Devine Entertainment's award-winning and highly recommended "Composers' Specials", this one featuring Bizet, Rossini, and Liszt; the other year, after discovering their Leonardo da Vinci movie at the gift shop of the Metropolitan Art, I bought, directly from Devine the complete six-DVD sets of the "Inventors' Specials" and the "Artists' Specials", but only half of the composers, to save money. Lately, Laura has been begging for the remainder, and she does have a birthday coming up next month. These are the sort of item I wish our library carried, but they're not to be found in this neck of the woods even through interlibrary loan.

Stay tuned for Part 2 (the BookCloseouts box), and there should even be a Part 3 when I finally turn my wish list into a shopping cart at Chapters.