Never spank. Especially if they prefer a spanking. Duh! ;) Seriously, several new studies have surfaced in the past few weeks and it doesn't look good for spanking. We're talking long term emotional issues, lower IQ, do I need to go on? I never laid a hand on dd who is 27. Ds (10) has taken me to the wall and back and has gotten smacked at least 10 times in his life. I wonder how many IQ points he's lost.:tongue_smilie:

Make your husband stay with the kids while you go to the corner store. Also, stay away from all prune products until this issue is resolved.

Ok, I went to the website and bought the textbooks, activity book, HOTS, Homework, and Tests for 5/6. After reading everyone's comments, I think this will be a good fit. It seems to stress scientific inquiry over science facts, which I like. I can always supplement and fill in biology and whatever else I feel needs more coverage. I'll post when they arrive and we've had a chance to kid test them.

Dian, thanks. Your post clarified several issues. I haven't looked at Singapore Science in Ages. Their new books are much better than the ones we had in first grade. I see four books for each level. Do you do two books per academic year for the two year spread?

We like DailyGrams!

This is a common complaint about CW. The program itself is wonderful. We're doing Aesop B now and we're making good progress. That being said, the curriculum is extremely clunky and confusing. You have to jump around from one book to the other just to figure out how you're going to teach today. I I find the system awkward. The author could have done a much better job of it, but it is what it is. I still think it's good enough for me to wade through it every week to prepare for next week. If I were to find a program that is as good as CC, and has better support for the teacher, I'd ditch CC in a minute. It is the one subject that takes me longest to prepare for. I'm currently looking at IEW for next year. I love CW, but in middle school I'm going to be way too busy teaching to spend hours trying to decipher CC each week.

Why is it your job to encourage the other women in the discussion group? You tried going to one meeting and you did not enjoy it. You gave it a try. Tell her so gently, but in no uncertain terms. And right after you tell her, before she has a chance to counter, continue with, "So I won't be coming back to the group."

That's what we do. In Florida, you only have to demonstrate that the child has progressed commensurate with his ability. I don't count days. We school year round with plenty of breaks. If we spend the summer in Canada, we only do language and math. It's too much fun at the lake to do too much book learnin'. I schedule six weeks off between Thanksgiving and New Year. We still read and do math, but that's it. We also take weeks off any time we want to. In the end, we do formal schooling about 40 weeks, but they're spaced out year round except for the six weeks I take off for the holidays. When we're done with our math book, or spelling book, or whatever, we don't call it a year. I just pull out the next level and keep going. Hard to say what grade my ds is really in that way. ;)

Do you find the MPH science curriculum to be rigorous enough on its own? I'm all over the place with science. We're doing RS4K, but it's really very light. So I bought a couple of fat science textbooks to supplement. I'm going to get scoliosis just lugging them around for lesson planning. I'd love to find a rigorous science curriculum for a fifth grader that loves science.

Go with cursive. Get the HWOT workbook and tell her it's grownup manuscript. (It sort of looks like connected manuscript letters.) It's traditional to begin with manuscript, then segue into cursive in third grade. My personal experience with my children, and the children of my home educating friends is that manuscript is sort of a waste of time. Go for the gold.

We still use SOTW now that we're in the logic stage, but we add more to it. Last year (fourth grade) I used it as a spine and added the Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of World History. This year, we're doing History Odyssey and we're using even more books and resources to flesh it out. I'm also combing NetFlix for movies regularly for more resources.

Wait for us. Hey, what are the chances that we'll all fly to Washington for Thanksgiving for an American History unit.

I think you've got a wonderful plan -- very well thought out. You're going to do great. I have two comments. One is grammar -- I'm not sure you need any grammar until he's in fourth or fifth grade. I know it's traditional to start in first grade, but my experience has been that you can teach the whole thing in 12 weeks in fourth or fifth grade and done. My other comment is on handwriting. Some kids just don't get into manuscript writing at all. My son refused to write even in second grade. A good friend recommended HWOT and it changed everything. He now has a beautiful hand (although he prefers to type). You're going to do a wonderful job. It's very obvious that you have planned this very carefully and thoughtfully. Your ds is lucky to have you.

We do a cursive worksheet every day and that's the extent of his handwriting. He really hates putting pencil to paper, so he types everything else. This has always perplexed me. He has beautiful handwriting and has complete mastery of it, but he says it takes too long and really gets whiny and grumpy if he thinks he's going to have to hand-write a couple of paragraphs. He simply hates the process even though he's so good at it. I think it may be a boy thing -- lots of my friends with boys complain of the same thing. We do one lesson from CW every week which takes about 20 minutes of typing each day. We also do narration exercises from our history and science books in which he tells me what he's learned, I jot it down, then I dictate it to him while he types. This year he's taken a step further (his own idea) and he's typing his first draft directly without me jotting notes then dictating. We print it out, he does his editing by hand, and takes it back to the computer for a final draft. That's another 20 minutes a day, so in total I'd say we do handwriting 5 minutes a day, and composition for 45 minutes per day.

No. She will either choose a hand when she's neurologically ready, or she'll be ambidextrous. (I'd like to be ambidextrous!) Seriously, all you can do is mess her up if you start forcing her to use one or the other.

We have always had a four-day week, except in grade one when we unschooled. On Fridays we do co-op, field trips, etc. For lesson planning purposes, I plan 40 weeks of 4 days each. Since I don't have to count days in Florida, this is just to help me stay organized. We traditionally begin the first week of August or as soon as we return from Canada if we're spending the summer there. We work until the week before Thanksgiving and start again after the New Year. There was a time when I used to plan work for those six weeks, but frankly, nothing ever got done. I've gotten more real in the past few years and I just don't plan work for then. When we return to lesson in January, we work straight through until about June or whenever we finish the curriculum I chose. We take a whole week off from time to time for no apparent reason or just to take a trip or do something different. During months or weeks when we are not formally schooling, we still do lots of reading, writing and math games.

This worked really well for us. When ds was 7, we'd do a 10 or 15 minute lesson, then go jump in the pool for some laps and splashing around. Come back in, do some math, then go outside and run around with the dogs. While it took longer to do the subjects with so many breaks, by the end of the day I'd gotten much more work out of him and I wasn't all stressed out. Little by little we shortened the breaks, and lengthened the lessons. Even now that he's 10 and in fifth grade, I know to give him a "go outside and blow off some steam" break every hour or so. Fifteen minutes later he comes back inside and we're good to go. Sometimes he makes it through an entire session (we do 3 am hours and 2 pm hours) with no breaks. And in the past few months he's gone straight through with no breaks because he wanted to be done so he could do something else. You could have knocked me over with a feather. But still, every once in a while I have to stop for a break after half an hour. You just have to play it by ear. Your little guy is such a young age. You could completely unschool him for a year until he's ready for more formal study and it wouldn't hurt him at all.

Good luck. Your little guy sounds like a typical 7-year-old. I was raised by my divorced mom with just one sister. There were no boys in our family. When I married I had a daughter. Everything was so normal and expected. Seventeen years later I had a boy. Boy, was I in for an education! Boys can be extremely challenging. Other than the anger issue which needs to be addressed, everything else sounds like all the little boys I've met and worked with. They can be willful, stubborn, and just plain rude sometimes. And wait until he gets into bathroom humor. Take deep breaths and know that by the time he's 10 or 11 he's going to be fine company. You just have to tough it out now. Keep working on discipline and focus, but know that you won't get overnight results because he's just not there yet.

Yes. He asked you to do it for him, but he works 12 hours a day. In other words, he's foisting her on you. I think, all things considered, that would really tick me off. I'm sure I'd say, "She can come over when you can take time off to entertain her."

Definitely go with the Xanax. Either that, or you'll have to strangle her with your dh's intestines. That won't do. Take the Xanax.

Thanks for the heads up. I just ordered it from our library.

Beautiful work! What a wonderful job you've done teaching her.

I've had this happen. Ds said he was bored. What he actually meant was that he was frustrated, didn't get it, didn't see how he was ever going to get it, and I was still making him work on his useless text. In his place, I would have been ripping out my hair. His response was to whine, tell me he was bored and generally fail to learn. Our cure was to swap math curricula to something he could understand. The enjoyment followed when he began developing a sense of accomplishment. All math curricula are not going to work on every child. You could be using the "best" curriculum, the one everybody raves about, the one with all the research backing it up. If your child does not make progress, I call it useless. Have you tried different workbooks, Key to... books, etc? Having switched to a completely different format turned our entire day around. Math is now my son's favorite subject, even though he's working twice as long and doing twice as much work every day.

Sounds like a sick puppy to me. Take your little girl to the vet -- she may have an UTI and those are very painful. :grouphug:

Get an MRI right away. This sounds like a normal migraine, but like the pp said, it's not normal for you. It's probably nothing, but why take a chance?