Free Educational & Self-Improvement Classes Online: Discovered by Ms. Wise & Ms. Otherwise

Whether you are looking for something for yourself, or to supplement the education of your children, these free classes are a great tool!


Free Ed -- This gives a pretty comprehensive guide of free internet courses in varying subjects. You simply click on the desired course and start learning. They have attempted to locate courses for which you don't need to purchase extra materials

BYU Independent Study -- It appears that everything you need for each course is right there online for you. They have a lot of free family history courses, religion, relationships, physical fitness and other courses. (If you are participating in the NVBL, the bowling course would be great!)

About.com -- This site is a place to find more places that offer free online courses. It is not too comprehensive a list.

Online Education Database --Here they list 200 college courses you can take for free in varying categories. It includes a short description of each.

Word2Word --This site has compiled a listing of language courses from all over the internet. There are too many to evaluate well. Interested in a language? take a look around.

Good Typing -- Simply learn to type here in several lessons.

Yale Open Ware Courses -- These courses use prerecorded lectures, etc. Some of the classes give you a final exam, some give you the final exam review, some have none, you can check back through your lessons to see how you did. It appears that you need to purchase some texts at least on the courses I looked at.

Berklee Music -- These courses appear to be partial courses of the complete course.

Notre Dame Open Ware Courses -- Here you probably need additional texts. The lectures appear to be class notes with some extra links to full-read materials and videos

Utah State University Open Ware Courses -- The courses I tried to preview didn't give a lot of information, but it looks like you simply have to click the button to download the course in its entirety. Some of the courses are right there for you without having to download, (ie the math). It is complete with lessons to read, homework, answer sheets, and quizzes.

Have you done any of these? Do you know of any more? Let us all know about them! Hope these are helpful.

Marika Lee's Christmas Songs for the Beginning Pianist

My youngest daughter needed some Christmas songs that she could play on the piano herself this year. Here’s what I came up with for her!

Each of the songs are incredibly easy to learn. None of the songs require the piano player to change hand positions. One song gets just the left hand practicing. One song works just the right hand. All the others use both hands, but keep things just right for someone starting out.

The included songs are:
*Deck the Halls
*Hark! the Herald Angels Sing
*If I Were an Angel on Christmas Night
*Jingle Bells
*Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful
*Silent Night
*We Three Kings

I included an .mp3 of We Three Kings in case your child isn’t familiar with that song.

Click here to purchase and download right now (all 7 songs for $1.49 ). If you would like to try before you buy, please try out this free sample song!

Please adhere to copyright restrictions. If you have friends, family, coworkers and others that would like a copy of this music, send them a link to this page or to www.completelee.com where they can download their own. Thank you.

Questions? Contact me. Subscribe to my music blog at to keep updated on when new music is published.

Cool Ideas

Here's a fun site if you want some tips for raising a musical child. The author of this site offers lesson plans, guess the instrument, musical crafts, what musical toys are good purchases and more. If you follow along with her, you can get some great ideas every day towards furthering your child's music education. It is mostly geared toward young children.

Also, today Peanut took an old poster board and created a stencil of a dragon. The stencil is kind of hard to tell how it works from the picture, but basically, you just cut some basic shapes out of the poster board. Then you put your homemade stencil on a fresh sheet of paper and trace the shapes, remove the stencil and color your picture as you would like. The fun thing about stencils is that you can create the exact same design but then choose different patterns and colors each time you use the stencil.

It turned out pretty cute for using very simple shapes in the stencil design. :)

Tonight for Family Home Evening, we sang a bunch of songs together and recorded several with the video camera. On the kid's suggestion, we incorporated actions to one of the songs. It turned out to be rather fun. We managed to roll the spiritual, the fun activity, the song, the together time and even a snack in one fell swoop. I'll post the videos on youtube soon. :)

Happy schooling!