I would have her to speak to them in German starting now! My son is speaking Greek because his grandparents visited once a month for a weekend and spoke exclusively in Greek to him. I am now slowly teaching him to read Greek. They could also talk on the phone, read stories to them, watch cartoons in German with them right now.

My son takes two inhalers when he's sick (diagnosed with cough variant asthma). He takes the albuterol (4-5xday) to open his airways and then a steroid inhaler (2xday). His cough won't go away until he's been on the steroid inhaler for a while. Also, find a cough syrup that's an expectorant not a suppressant. Warm baths to help break it up also (or breathing in steam from boiling water, being careful not to get burned by the steam) HTH

When my son took the CAT last year before entering 1st, he did really well on vocabulary. His teacher for 1st grade here was also impressed with his vocabulary. (we put him in school starting the second half of the year) I think the 2 things that helped were Explode the Code (words come up in there that aren't used in our normal conversation so I usually google a photo or a video, most recently a bagpipe and a trapeze). Also, I can tell a big difference in how many new words he's using when I'm consistently reading to him out of good books. When I read 30-45 minutes a night, his speaking vocab increases, when I'm down to 10 minutes a night reading fluff (like right now:tongue_smilie:), he doesn't increase his vocab as much. We also tried Evan Moore word a day for a while but now that he's back at school, we don't have the time for it. HTH

I had an ASD that I found out about when I was pregnant. I had chest pains, thought I was having a heart attack. The ER didn't find anything. After my son was born, I found a cardiologist who took me seriously. He said I just had to keep an eye on it to make sure it didn't get bigger. (he found it with a transesofogeal echocardiogram, TEE for short). He wanted an echo done every 2 years. 6 years later, I moved and changed doctors. This one specialized in holes in hearts (I had no idea that was possible) and said I needed to get it fixed based on my stress test. My oxygen level wasn't high enough and something else was too high during the stress test. He said if I didn't get it fixed, it would shorten my life. He said I should do it within 5 years. I went ahead and had it done at 37 years old. It wasn't open heart because of the location. It was a one night hospital stay, they went up through my groin. I was on blood thinner for 6 months while my heart grew over the patch. HTH

I tried to comment but it made me have an account somewhere else. Can she set it up to take anonymous comments so people don't have to sign into another account (google, wordpress, etc)

This week is bird, total, animal, habitat, mammal, reptile, increase, together, altogether, amphibian Next week is slowly, quickly, forest, desert, polar, aquatic, minus, reduce, decrease, difference. Last month he had some that I was surprised about -- communicator, appreciate, refraction I'm supplementing with AAS to make sure he's continuing to learn the spelling rules, not just lists.

We Skype every week, sometimes more than once a week. My in-laws have visited twice, my dad zero. We will visit once over the summer for 3 weeks. Skype is the best thing for us. My 7 year old will Skype his grandparents several times a week and they don't mind if he wakes them up because of time zone differences. We've only been here for 5 months but so far so good.

We have a blog which is password protected. So only family and friends back home have access.

We're on level 2 also. I just remind him we haven't learned that vowel team yet. He would use "oo" for a few times but after reminding him, he doesn't anymore. Same thing with "ea" instead of "ee". When we got to the "ee" step, I had to remind him we haven't learned the "ea" vowel team yet for spelling. I'm not sure what will happen when we do learn the additional vowel teams though.:tongue_smilie:

Candid - I do have a copy. Thanks for reminding me!

Unfortunately, I can't borrow The Teaching Company lectures because my library access is limited living in India. I'll check out the other things you have listed though. Thanks!

Julie -- Which other ones are your favorites from other companies? I'm not sold on CTC completely. Thanks so much!

Candid - is there a beginners one you would suggest? Thanks for all of the suggestions, I'll look at them today.

I'm interested in doing some self education with a book or two from the Critical Thinking Co. Where should I start? What grade level? I want to stretch my mind:bigear: Thanks

I wanted to add, we are about to start 6 but will do 4 as a review of AAS where we just started syllables.

Book 4. It has the rules for dividing words into syllables. You could give it a try and if your child struggles, skip it. That's what we had to do. We are now finishing 5 but I won't try 4 again until we get through 6.

You could try Lyle Lyle Crocodile and The House On East 88th Street.

I want to buy The Hobbit but there are many printings. Some bad reviews on Amazon show errors and problems. Which printing should I buy?:tongue_smilie:

In2why -- do you remember who read the Dr Dolittle you listened to? I think my son would love it

I've seen 6 trait writing mentioned here and I want to order the e-book for 1st grade. However, when I go to the Evan Moor website, it had the teacher's edition ($30) for download and something called "student practice book" ($8). I think I need to teacher's edition and that's it for my son to work through. Is that right??

Make sure she has regular wet diapers which indicates she is absorbing fluids. She can get dehydrated if there's no wet diapers.

I get the blank stare (& not listening) too with my first grader sometimes. Usually when we've been at it for a while and he needs a break. I find what helps is asking him "is this addition or subtraction?" so he'll have to think before doing it. If I just tell him, in one ear and out the other. But whenever I think he doesn't pay enough attention to what I'm saying, I realize he'd pay even LESS attention in school where the teacher can't sit and force him along. Hang in there!

Thank you for the replies. We've gotten this done for the last 2 days. My son, who doesn't have an artistic bone in his body, did pretty well. We've got the great circles folded and labeled (with abbreviations) and we drew the blobs for Africa, North America and Antarctica. He even said today that this was the most fun he has during school :tongue_smilie: We're both going to do this together and learn geography :thumbup: lamolina -- I bought the kindle book on Amazon. I'm sure your library would have it. The geography chapter alone is worth buying the book in my opinion.

I have a first grader about 3 months younger than your 2nd grader. It takes us 2 hours to do the basics (phonics, handwriting, spelling, math, geography, WWE, WWW). After lunch and a break is Greek, read aloud & he practices his reading aloud to me, and anything we didn't get to in the two hours in the morning. Our afternoon schedule also includes alternating between history, science, and art and it takes about 1-2 hours (including the Greek, reading, etc). So total between 3-4 hours including reading aloud.

Thanks for sharing! Looks great.