You can use normal purchased white board cleaner, or you can use a spray bottle filled with rubbing alcohol. Both work great on our showerboard-turned-dry erase boards. This is random, but did you know you can wash dry erasers? I discovered that not too long ago..you just use warm water and dish soap (rubbing with your hand), then squish on a towel before letting air dry the rest of the way. My boards look much better now that I clean the erasers every few months!

Yay for him!! (And you!) Mine just started a few months ago and it is AWESOME!!

You might try mowing through a pile of the needles to break them down before putting in beds. Works for leaves, too. Helps if you have a bagger mower, but it can be done without, you just have to rake. :glare:

First, hi! Second, the stuff at the bottom of our posts is our signature. If you go to User Control Panel and then on the left side you'll find (somewhere in that list) "edit signature." That's the place to do it. Took me a while to figure that out, so I'm glad to share. :D

Many of the Masters (5th-6th graders) Tutors I've spoken with say they have to come up with other ways of presenting the memory work for that age group. The littler kids usually memorize well that way, but 6th graders tend to find it cheezy. I would talk with your potential Director about it and see what she says about the Tutor your son would have. They're trained to use all sorts of memorization techniques. I tutored a class of 4K-2nd graders this year and we didn't sing more than one subject a week, because that's not how they all learned well. Some of them were visual and some were chanters, some were hands-on learners. So I tried to incorporate a variety of activities into each week so there would be something for each of my students to grasp well. My "fall-back" was always the audio cd, but I didn't use it every week.

My daughter played organized sports for the first time last year and I was shocked by the snack thing. I had no idea this was happening in the world of organized sports. If she plays again this fall, I just might bring this article to the coach and ask if he'd be willing to forgo the snack schedule. I want to teach my children to eat well at mealtimes and if there's extra calorie-burning going on, then a healthy snack to recharge is perfectly fine. There's just no reason for Kool Aid at 7 PM after a soccer game (or the chocolate, or the Skittles, or the Cheetos...).

This is totally the reminder to pay attention that I needed today!!

Delaney, are you thinking about Classical Conversations or the more general term of Christian Classical education? I think you've gotten two good answers either way...

We have three neutered male cats and every now and then (maybe once a year or so) one of them has an issue with their anal glands. Yep, this is kind of gross, sorry. The others let out a little at a time when they do their thing in the litter box, but this one has trouble with it and they tend to get um, stopped up. If I happen to smell him ('cuz you know I love being woken up by a cat plopping down on my chest) and notice, I'll take him to the vet, who will...express the glands. Otherwise, it'll happen naturally one day when he gets spooked or falls off something (he is sort of a klutz) and it'll stink for a day or two. It's much more common in dogs, but in my house, everyone is special. :D It really is a very distinct smell. Not horrible, but very strong and it does sort of stick in your nose.

I have not seriously considered using OLVS but have seen materials from them and Seton. I'm also totally turned off by any curriculum that has "seatwork" as a subject! I want to give my children a Catholic Classical education and neither of those fits the bill. Even with that, though, I've chosen not to use Mother of Divine Grace or Kolbe Academy. I'm putting together my own, using a variety of resources. Oddly enough, one of the curriculum providers that I really love is Catholic Heritage Curriculum. I find books like Chats With God's Little Ones are usually what is referred to as "twaddle." This is totally just my opinion, so please don't be offended if your family enjoys them. I will also say that we have the coloring books that are listed in their Kindergarten set, which are the same ones that are used by Seton and they're not very well done. The facial expressions are...interesting. I haven't yet seen well-drawn Catholic coloring books, but I've heard that they're out there. In case it helps you, for our "religion" next year (with a 1st grader, K'er and an almost 3 year old) we'll be using: New St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism (two years to go through), A Year With God (a living the liturgical year guide from CHC), New Catholic Picture Bible, Devotional Stories for Little Folks, a ton of saint stories and Father Lovasik books. For coloring pages, we'll print some out from CatholicMom.com. Religion is one of those subjects that sort of infiltrates for us...we'll be using Prima Latina for Latin, learning more Latin prayers and Latin text hymns. We go to Mass as often as we can and say the rosary at home. As part of our music studies, we learn good hymns during the week. For History we'll be using Connecting With History which is written by a Catholic and includes Church history throughout the years. The more crafty, hands-on stuff will be covered by our liturgical year guide. I'm sure other moms with older children can critique the curriculum better than I can by looking at the website, but that's my two cents. Hope it helps.

Catholic Heritage Curriculum uses MCP Math and you can "attend" their virtual conference: http://www.chcweb.com and see sample pages from various level MCP books. My general impression is that it's a Saxon-style (do this, do this, now do that) but not spiral and a little more thorough for those lower levels.

Thanks! I just can't tell from the descriptions. I saw a 1993 TM on ebay for really cheap and was sorely tempted...thanks for helping me out!

:lurk5:

We have CC on Tuesdays, then we do our schoolwork Wednesday-Saturday. We go to ballet on Mondays and our piano teacher comes to us on Thursdays. I use Fridays and Saturdays for field trips and once a month co-op stuff. We started at the beginning of August this last year, planning to finish by beginning of April. It hasn't worked out that way, though! I have found that about every 6 weeks we take a whole week off (usually there's some reason) so I'm going to figure that in to next year's plan. So with that in mind, we'll start beginning of August, but won't finish until end of May/beginning of June leaving us with an 8 week summer. I'm toying with the idea of going down to 3 days a week for April, May and June, taking July off completely and then starting up again with 4-5 days in August.

I don't care for scripted, which is why I chose it over OPGTR. It's very thorough and easily adapted as you go along. It took a little staring for me to figure out how to use it (you pretty much just start at the beginning and read through it). For your older child you might not start at the beginning, but definitely flip through the easier pages so they can be confident when they get to the harder stuff. We do some of the pages on the white board (I just write out the words), sometimes we use it for copywork (that 2-for-1 where they write it out and have to read it as they go!). Some pages take us days to do, some pages we do two or three in 20 minutes. We supplemented with Bob books and other beginner phonics readers at first, but now we're somewhere around pg 119 and both girls are reading pretty much anything they want to.

Does anyone know if the 1993 edition teacher's manual will work with the 2005 edition student workbooks? I can't find that information anywhere on the internet. I'm looking specifically at the Kindergarten level.

For stories that last less than 5 minutes, my kids have to wait until the end and then they can ask to their hearts' content. I'm like you, Tara the Liberator, and can't stand the interruptions! We don't generally read aloud for more than 15 minutes at a time, so I do try to stop about halfway and give them a chance to ask short questions for a minute or two. There are some questions I tell them I can't answer that right now but I will later. It definitely took a while to train them to not interrupt (and they still do occasionally) but it's been worth it.

Lab Sheet Annotations has been my best friend this year, but I found a lot of value in reading the other two teacher's books: Notes to Teachers and First Grade Diary. I use the Annotations more like a teacher's manual. I'm not a mathy person and stared blankly at the first half of the Orange book for a few months at the beginning of last summer, but eventually we "got" it. The Cuisenaire rods are necessary and we've used "home-made" manipulatives for lots of the pages (like buttons, beads, oodles of pencils, anything you can count and group with).

Cathy Duffy's 100 Top Picks is a great curriculum review book. You can just read from cover to cover and then go back and look for particular things once you get an idea of what you want/need. You can go to her website: http://www.cathyduffyreviews.com but the book is great, too. Reading the raves and rants on here can be confusing, can't it? Just remember that you're bound to find some duds-not everything works for everyone!

I don't have much to add to the discussion other than about CC. I find it kind of funny that an info night prompted the queries you have, but I remember how the Christian Classical model was emphasized at ours so it makes sense. I'm a tutor for a CC group and I can tell you that there is NO time for proselytizing or anything else, really. Yes, the materials are from a Christian perspective and the leaders do all attempt to be good Christian examples. Maybe our group doesn't belabor the point because we have a huge variety of faiths (I'm Catholic, a couple of families are Baptist, our director is whatever she feels like being at the moment-by that I mean that the actual people involved at the church seem to be a higher priority to their choice of church than the doctrine, I'm not maligning it, just trying to explain). We've had some interesting discussions during lunch and after our program day is over, but nothing that involved the kids. So I guess all that to say: it sounds like you have a lot of thinking to do and I wish you the best. I hope whatever you find you are at peace with. I wouldn't worry about CC unless you're uncomfortable being around Christians or having your children being led by them.

No ideas for you, but I have a friend asking this same question! BUMP!!

I agree with CynthiaOK. It would certainly make me sad if the only active group was one that I couldn't join due to disagreeing with their required statement of faith. If the group required it for membership, then I probably wouldn't be happy in that group long-term anyway. Good for you starting your own group, floridamamma!

...because it's just how I think. I'd think oh, we can spend $30 a week on dance lessons for the year for two girls. But then I'd see the CC tuition numbers and do a double-take. When I see $824 as a lump sum, I tend to see that as a lot more money than breaking it down into $40ish a week. So I had to break it down to realize that it was worth the investment in terms of time and money for us. If I'm willing to spend that much on dance, then I'm willing to spend that much on "school" especially when it's filling a gap in our education plan. In the end, we are doing CC and loving it, but I definitely had to stop and think about it!

My husband has two, almost three, degrees in music and he's an organist-choirmaster for a church. If your son has any interest in sacred music, even as a pianist, there is a demand for highly skilled pastoral musicians. Solely as a pianist, he might have a tough time finding a professional (income earning and supporting a family on it) niche. That's awesome that he loves playing so young and that he's good at it! Definitely find him a challenging instructor and encourage him to "diversify" by learning other instruments or getting involved in a choir or other ensemble.

That's why I love these forums...I didn't even know you could clean those erasers!! Thank you!