Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of World History.

What time to you get up? I'm interesting in knowing how many hours your doctor recommended.

They actually lose IQ points at this stage. They're in la-la land and all this bookwork is so, but so irrelevant! Don't worry, they get their mojo back. But Mandy is right -- you can't really "motivate" someone who is in a hormonal fog very much. Make sure he gets plenty of sleep. Keep up with the gentle reminders to get on with his work. He'll be back to normal in a couple of years.

This is a great idea. My writing program (CW) uses a similar cheat sheet and once they learn how to use it, it works very well.

Ds used to have trouble copying from the start. In third grade I began to dictate to him. I dictated everything, including the punctuation. For example, I'd say: "Capital P - Peter wore his brand new red sneakers - period." I watched while he worked. If he began to write a word incorrectly, I'd correct him immediately. At first, we would stop me every 3 or 4 words and ask for spelling. I gave him the spelling and went on. As time went on, he needed less and less help with spelling and at some point he asked me to stop dictating punctuation because he wasn't a baby. :glare: He's a wonderful writer now. Not ever having copied didn't hurt him any. There are many ways to skin a cat.

Why would she have to memorize that in third grade? That sounds gruesome -- no wonder she's not enjoying it. Have you tried the "Who was..." biographies? Those are great and concentrate on people instead of events.

:iagree:

I disagree with Ms. Mason on this. While I use her methods to the extent it suits our family, I find many of her comments (such as this one) to be sweeping over-encompassing statements that are not helpful at all. All children are different. We use unit studies extensively. My son loves them as do his hs'd friends who come over and want to work on them with us. I do know, however, many children who would rather drink Drano than do one of her famous dictation exercises. My advise is for you to take whatever works for you and your child(ren). No on knows them like you do. Flush all the rest.

If you want your little one to learn Spanish and actually be able to speak it so a Spanish speaker understands him/her, I recommend Rosetta Stone. It's the only program with software that requires the child to pronounce words correctly. They must speak into the headset. There is amazing software that allows the child to "see" the word correctly pronounced and as he is pronouncing it. With a bit of practice, the child learns to make his words "look" correct. This can only happen if the child pronounces it perfectly. As far as I know (and I looked at every program on the market) there is no other system that has this feature. I have the homeschool edition of South American Spanish (European Spanish has a heavy accent from our perspective in the Americas and Caribbean. I'm sure the inverse is true as well.) My first language is Spanish and it's always funny when my friends tell me how well "little Johnny" is doing in Spanish. He can rattle off all sorts of lists of words and sentences. Trouble is, I can't understand a word he's saying. Horrific pronunciation and his parents are oblivious because they can't speak it either. I fought getting Rosetta Stone for a long time because it's so expensive. In the end, I had to ask myself: Do I want my son to actually speak the language well, or do I just want him to pass the tests? I decided I wanted ds to speak the language perfectly. I have not been disappointed. My son's pronunciation is flawless -- something I've never seen with other kids in our group who take Spanish.

Thank you for this. I'm in the same position with ds, who finds cluttered pages overwhelming. Your post helps a lot. And speaking of getting overwhelmed with black and white cluttered pages, does anyone know why this happens to some kids? He doesn't have any learning disabilities -- he's just an average 10-year-old who gets completely turned off and overwhelmed with cluttered pages. I can't tell you how many times I've created my own worksheets for curricula that was really excellent, but had cluttered books. Will he outgrow this?

I'm interested in this attitude. Why would you not give your girls a vaccine that will protect them from cancer? A young girl died after the vaccine in Britain. Another one was run over by a bus the same day she had the vaccine. Do you think they were connected? There is a huge formal body of knowledge that shows no harmful effects from the vaccine. There are no documented deaths or illnesses from this vaccine. I'm wondering how many people are actually going to deny their girls this vaccine on "moral" grounds. Just curious.

My son quit because the den was completely incompatible. They constantly dragged god into everything and had no respect for those who are not conservative Christians. The Scouts medieval attitude on gays also was terribly troubling for me. Last, the Scout's quirk for sending children begging door-to-door with cookies so unhealthy I wouldn't feed them to my dog was the show-stopper for me. I find this akin to the barely-clothed high school cheerleaders out at intersections "collecting" money for their team. This might have been a good idea back in Mayberry in the 1960's. In a large metro area it's a horrible idea foisted as "tradition" to bamboozle tens of thousands of parents to sell cookies and other junk food and send their money to the Scouts, as if they didn't have way too much already. As you can tell, my one brush with the Scout movement was very unpalatable. I just have a thing about backward behavior.

:001_smile: Gremlins! :001_smile:

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Welcome, Tammy. I love the curriculum you're using. Looking forward to running into you on the boards soon.

This seems like such a good program. I'm surprised no one has used these together. Here's a bump.

I've been using it for over a year now and yes, I find it very useful. The Teacher Filebox has everything in their books except for the "Daily ..." books. I use it very often. For example, we're using Junior Analytical Grammar. When we got to prepositions, ds got stuck. JAG only explains it one way and if you don't get it, you're dead in the water. I downloaded several preposition worksheets and had him back on track in a couple of days.

Is there a test you can take to determine immunity? We may have had it, but we weren't tested. I'd hate to get a vaccine for something I can't get again.

We're supplementing with Liberty's Kids - the Complete CD collection. It's available from NetFlix. You can get the whole thing for under $50 at Amazon. My kid loves this. http://www.amazon.com/Libertys-Kids-Complete-Jill-Anderson/dp/B001B73PO4/ref=pd_sim_b_5

This is where I get my reading levels: http://www.renlearn.com/store/quiz_home.asp You can search by title and by author. They also have very good reading lists and series to browse. They don't actually sell books -- just level them and create quizzes. I've found this website invaluable for helping choose my books for the year.

Wow. Thank you! :thumbup:

We get the dilly-dallies here too. I set the timer for 45 minutes. That's more than plenty of time to do everything. If it takes longer, I stop the lesson at 45 minutes and anything that remains unfinished turns into homework which severely cuts into ds's Runescape time. Works like a charm. I have to insist on this, otherwise I'd spend 10 hours a day chasing him around trying to get things done. I have committed five hours a day for teaching and that's as long as I'll make myself available. (This doesn't include the several hours per week I spend on lesson planning.) After five hours, it's all homework and ds is on his own. It's only ever come to that once or twice early on.

Two lessons of TT per day -- that takes somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes, depending on how hard the lesson is and whether ds is distracted. Then we do 15 minutes of TimezAttack drills.

This is what we're using this year for American History. We're reading the stories, a few each week, and will take the whole academic year to read it. It's leveled at 8.3 (or 8.4 - can't remember now), so I will be reading this book to ds. Concurrently, we're using Mike Venezia's books on the American Presidents -- 44 books which ds will read (2 per week). Together, The American Story and the 44 Mike Venezia books cover all the American History we need in one year. And as a bonus, the Venezia books are all leveled 5.0 to 5.9, so they're perfect readers for this year.

It's not just the teachers. The students are going nuts too. This past week in South Florida 2 children killed fellow students (both stabbed their victims), two loaded guns were found in lockers, a student was arrested when his dad called the police to say his son had left for school with a gun (?), and any number of other weapons were confiscated. I went to public school here in South Florida and it was bad enough then. I wouldn't send a dead dog to public school here now.