I have absolutely no idea how an Apple Pencil works, is it just a stylus? If so, we've really enjoyed the Writing Wizard app by L'Escapadou and Letter School - Learn To Write by Letterschool Enabling Learning. I do remember that Writing Wizard allows you to enter your own words for the kids to practice writing in the paid app. I can't remember if the Letter School one could do that too.

In my experience, raising 6 kids past the age of learning to write and remediating many other people's children who came to me with writing problems, a tripod grip does not just happen for most kids especially if they have developed a less than ideal grip. It has to be taught the same way you teach a child to hold a fork, spoon or knife correctly. It is much easier to gently correct them from the time the are old enough to pick up a spoon or a fork or a pencil but it can be corrected for an older child. I would try to make as many of his writing utensils as I could either triangular shaped or put tripod grippers on them. Make several different types of grips available so that he might take a liking to one of them. (I'll try to link some of the grips I've found most effective for remediating later. I can't seem to make links work from my phone) You can also gently correct his grip and encourage him to write that way. Praise like crazy when you see him using the tripod grip to try and write, even if his first attempts are less legible than the words written with a fist grip. I wouldnt force him to use a tripod grip from now on but each time he writes, remind him to try and write like big boys do and hold the pencil properly. It may take months of reminding him but in my experience the fist grip is one of the easier grips to correct as long as there is nothing physically wrong causing them to use that grip and it is just a preference they have developed. If fine motor is lagging as well (can he play with legos or other toys with small pieces?) then it might take a little long but just be sure to offer lots of fine motor activites as well as gentle correction on the pencil grip and he will get there. ETA: Wrist band type grip correctors really help with fist grip kids. Like this: HandiWriter but you can make one yourself with a large rubber band. The handle style grippers also seem to work well for a fist grip. Once they get used to holding the pencil correctly, they can graduate to this style gripper or some kids may prefer it from the start.

Just wanted to add another reassurance that it is normal. I'm pretty sure that if you look up moody in the dictionary, one of the definitions says something along the lines of "the emotional state of girls ages 9 - 13" lol. Oddly enough just because they seem moody or over dramatic or sullen or just plain mean right now (all those emotional extremes is part of what make middle school so hard for most girls), sometime after 13 they snap out of it and while they are no longer sweet little girls, they aren't as exhausting emotionally anymore like they were in the tween phase. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

This exactly. There is such a huge difference between a husband and wife relationship and a parent/child relationship. There are plenty of things I would do for my husband but not my child and things I would do for my child but not my husband. My husband buys things on eBay pretty frequently, mostly little electronics parts to fix things and tinker that are significantly cheaper on eBay than we can get them locally or even somewhere like Amazon. We agree on a budget for our desired purchases after bills at the beginning of the month. I don't even look to see what he bought because chances are I would have no idea what the tiny electronic part is. I just asked dh what he would say if I decided to up his bid to 125% of his max bid that he wanted to pay for the item so he wouldn't lose the auction and he said, "If my max bid amount was $200, then that's all that item was worth to me and I didn't want to pay $250 for it. I'd probably ask what you were thinking paying more than I wanted to pay for the item and more than we agreed upon for purchases on ebay."

When I told my (now ex)husband that I wanted him and the kids to do something for me for mothers day his word for word response was "why, you aren't my mother. Why should I do something for you for mother's day?".... When I pointed out that I helped the kids do Father's Day for him, his response, "Well, that's your choice." :-/ ...one of the many reasons he is now my ex husband for sure. I just learned to not expect anything on mother's day so I wouldn't get my feelings hurt. These days, my current husband and I don't celebrate Mother's Day or Father's Day at all. We both just feel that if we want to show each other that we care and appreciate each other, we shouldn't wait to do it one day a year. We do little things to show each other we care and appreciate each other all year round. I know it wouldn't work for everyone (definitely would not have worked with my ex-husband or with dh's ex-wife)but it works for us.

The Singing Walrus, Super Simple Songs, Scratch Garden and a couple others have great kids educational songs and videos for filling in a few minutes here and there when I need something to keep my first grader entertained but I don't want something that is pure eye candy. The Scratch Garden video about contractions is hilarious lol. He watches these mostly on the tablet when we are schooling on the go.

Out of 6 kids I have 4 righties and 2 lefties. I never tried to influence their handedness. I would try to always put things in the middle and let them tell me which one they favored by which hand they chose to use to grab the item. I did however correct utensil and pencil grip from the time they were toddlers. I would correct their grip but if they chose to go back, I didn't fight it, I just corrected it again the next time. I also used lots of triangular pencils and crayons when they were little to encourage proper grip. I didn't care if they were left handed or right handed but I didn't want them to develop bad grips that I would have to correct later. My two lefties are the only two left handed people in either side of the family that I am aware of and their personalities are definitely similar to each other but different than everyone else in the family so I don't think they can help being lefties any more than they can help having blue eyes when everyone else's are green or hazel. I was chastised by older family members for not forcing them to use their right hands but I have no regrets letting them decide their handedness. It was obvious by 3 or 4 years old which hand each child preferred no matter which hand they ended up using. One of my lefties struggles to write without a hook but he also has dysgraphia so writing is a struggle period. My left handed daughter can write just fine without a hook and never particularly struggled with writing.

IMO, there is a difference between supporting your children through college and sheltering them from consequences. I say this as someone with suspected Asperger's Syndrome whose parent tried to soften all those mistakes of early adulthood for me by "just paying the extra." I really wish my father would have stopped doing that sooner. That's part of the reason I don't get involved with my grown kids' money unless they will be homeless because of their decision. I will always make sure they have a roof over their heads and food to eat but I won't enable them to live outside their means or stop them from making disappointing but non-life threatening mistakes. Making mistakes is how you learn, with or without autism. He set what sounds like a reasonable budget for the item, he stuck to it, and win or lose he gets to learn a lesson about adulting. Special needs or not, I think that is a fine lesson for him to learn at 22 or even a little younger. Unless he will spiral into a dangerous place emotionally from disappointment, I would be fine with natural consequences in this situation.

My 19 and 21 year old sons both live on their own and manage their own money. I have nothing to do with it and only give advice if it is asked for, and even then they can take it or leave it. I can't imagine interfering with them learning how to "adult" unless it is a life or death situation. They are going to make mistakes. If the worst mistake they make is losing an auction on eBay by a few dollar because they were being too careful staying within their budget, I won't lose a wink of sleep over it.

Thanks! I actually did go ahead and get 2A for him a couple of months ago and it is a nearly perfect fit for where he is. We are just working slowly through it for now and he seems to like it so far.

I'd say your school was a bit.... aggressive with how many words they wanted very young children to learn. I don't have the manual in front of me at the moment but I am 99% positive that the pace for kindergarten, as written in the manual, was 20 - 30 words per week, not per day. Having kindys write and analyze 20 words per day, even if you broke it up into 4 or 5 sessions a day of 4 to 5 words each session is not developmentally appropriate at all. Maybe some kids could do it in K but most definitely not the majority. I went to a Spalding school as a child and taught my children Spalding and Spalding spin-off programs. None of those experiences I've had with Spalding had kindergartners learning 80 - 100 words per week. Now that I've got that out of my system, of course you can make the curriculum work for you as a homeschooler. Use a moveable alphabet, teach as many or as few words as your child can comfortably learn in a day. Break spelling list session up into manageable bite size pieces. I did all those things with my oldest kids when they were young and all have grown up into literate adults. Romalda Spalding wrote her manuals with a classroom in mind. Teaching one-on-one, as I'm sure you know, is not the same as teaching a classroom. If some part of the curriculum needs tweaking for your child, then do it. Lastly, as much as I love Spalding and Spalding based programs, I'm not afraid to say that there are cases where it doesn't make sense to use it with a particular child or that for some kids, it just doesn't work. I had a precocious early reader who started reading at 3 years old. While she knew the phonograms, I certainly didn't force her to start doing Spalding that young just because she was a precocious reader. I waited until she was old enough to understand and appreciate the analyzing of words. She wasn't ready for that at 3 or 4 or even 5. She was ready to understand it around 6 and could take dictation of about 10 words a day at that age. So that's what we did.

We tried but even all spruced up as best we could, it still felt a bit like a dungeon. And we much preferred sprawling on the couch or outside to do school work. I ended up keeping our extra homeschooling supplies in the basement that weren't needed everyday but I wasn't ready to part with like dissection supplies, extra art supplies, books that were too young or too old for our current needs but I wanted to keep... things like that. We had a homeschool "station" in the kitchen and books in every room of the house. Each kid had a crate with their school books and supplies in our homeschool station along with everything else that we used on at least a weekly basis. It worked really well for us at the time. I kept the posters and time lines and such in their rooms, in hallways, made them into notebook covers or hung them on the fridge and rotated them. For a long time, I would put a poem of the week and an art piece of the week, printed out from the internet, on the fridge so that it would be seen by the whole family all the time. I also put quotes or grammar rules or math rules up there that we were working on when the mood struck me.

A lot. I don't even try to keep track anymore. It's 10 miles round trip to town and back. The only thing in town is a small Walmart, a feed store and a Dollar Tree. Oh and a McD's that doesn't even have a playground. There are some other non-chain, mom-n-pop type restaurants but that's about it. It's at least 150 miles round trip to anywhere with a Target, Home Depot, Lowes, Chick-Fil-A, etc. The closest library with a sizeable collection and the ability to pay for a non-resident library card is about 175 miles round trip once a month. Dh's medical condition requires us to travel frequently to the university hospital in the capitol city of our state. That is at least 300 miles round trip sometimes several times a month when he is having multiple procedures done. It is 70 miles round trip to our regular family doctor. That's also where the closest ER worth going to is if you aren't going to die before you get there. (There is a small ER in town but anything more than supergluing a cut together and you will be ambulanced or air evac out somewhere else.) We got a "new to us" car made available for our use whenever we need it last summer. We have put over 60,000 miles on in the last 9 months or so between us and dh's grandmother who owns it. I guess that's over 6,000 miles a month on average. Part of the price you pay living in the middle of nowhere I guess.

Our experience living overseas was the same as 8fillstheheart, friends are friends no matter what language they speak. We also had a similar philosophy on grade level, it's just a number on paper. It does not define your child or your success as a homeschooler. Does your son look forward to this co-op as the highlight of his month or does the schoolwork make him anxious? Is he concerned about his mathematical abilities as compared to his age mates? Is he generally happy the rest of the month with his friends in the village or is he pining the entire time for English speaking friends? Has he lived overseas all his life? Does he know what a third culture kid is? Does he just need contact with other third culture kids? His answers to these questions would weigh heavily on my decision on what to do in this situation. And I would try very very hard to find his honest answers to these questions. I would be very careful about how I ask the questions if it were my child so that he doesn't pick up on any real or perceived bias from me. I want his honest answers, not what he thinks I want to hear. If he really does crave contact with English speaking friends, could he talk to online friends? Maybe friends from the US or other places you all have lived? Cousins or other relatives? Maybe join an online group for third culture kids? It seems you have internet access so it shouldn't be too hard for him to email as much as he wants, should it? Then maybe something like Facetime or phone calls as often as your situation will allow? Then he can take full advantage of the gift of homeschooling, working at the pace he needs to work at and ignore grade level designations AND still have an English speaking social outlet whenever he needs it. You could even have him write snail mail letters if he wants, yes it will take an inordinate amount of time for the mail to get back and forth but it is always fun to send and receive mail.

Community colleges around here start a few days to a week after public schools go back (early to mid August) to help accommodate parents of school age children who are seeking a degree. Fall semester ends in the first week or so of December. Spring semester starts mid January and ends the first week or two of May. Summer Semester starts just after Memorial Day and ends in mid to late July. There are "mini-mesters" between every semester except summer and fall. Each "mini-mester" class is 3 weeks long. Mini-mester and summer classes tend to be condensed classes for those who need to make up a credit or cannot fit the class anywhere else in their schedule.

Nothing from The Good and The Beautiful is secular. From their about page... "... learning materials today are largely disconnected from God, nature, and high character—taking meaning, depth, and joy from learning. We want to change that!" Whether or not you could use it secularly depends on how much editing and replacing you are willing to do and whether or not you want to support their cause with your money by purchasing their goods.

I don't know if this applies everywhere or not but I've had to homeschool under philosophical objection to public school in many US states. Anyways, that said, I've never had to list out what my philosophical objections to public school are when ever I've had to submit paper work. It is either a check box on a form or if I have to write it all out by hand, I write something like: To whom it may concern: My child, <child's name here>, is homeschooling for the 2019-2020 school year due to our family's philosophical beliefs. I assume fully responsibility for my child's educational needs and hold <school district> harmless within the limits of the law. Sincerely, <my name here> And then I have it notarized even if it isn't required. I've never ever had any school district or official question or reject this kind of letter. They cannot (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Australia) ask you to prove your philosophical belief any more than they can ask you to prove your religious belief. I don't like giving school officials the idea that philosophical belief is open to interrogation and that you have to prove your belief is valid. Your philosophical belief should not be treated any differently than a religious belief. If you have the option to opt out, I would. Mostly because it is silly to be asked to jump when the schools say jump. Two weeks notice is not sufficient notice for you to prepare your child for the test and it is just rude for them to even think it is. I would not even feel the need to explain myself. If there is no form to fill out, I would just write a letter similar to the one above but I would change the body to read something like "My child, <child's name> has been legally homeschooled for the 2018-2019 school year according to the <your state> homeschool laws due to our family's philosophical beliefs. Furthermore, my child will not be participating in standardized testing for the 2018-2019 school year due to our family's philosophical beliefs." If the schools got fussy about it and tried to bring legal action on me (not just the school receptionist or principal telling me I have to give more reason) I would tell them I would be happy to comply when my child is in the next testing grade and has had the same opportunity as the public school students to prepare for the test. Just my 2 1/2 cents FWIW. Of course this isn't legal advice, just my experience as a philosophical homeschooler.

I didn't find the instructor guide all that useful but I was already familiar and comfortable with Singapore style math and was used to coming up with my own mental math practice by the time I got my hands on an instructor's manual. I imagine the textbook would be frustrating to someone who was not familiar with the teaching and problem solving strategies presented because, at least in the lower levels, there isn't a lot of written explanation in the textbook like many American textbooks have.

That is exactly why I would have him diagram his own sentence. I don't just do diagrams as in exercise in studying why good sentences work. I also use it as a tool to analyze my own, and my children's own, sentences. If it won't diagram, then very likely there is something wrong. Does he understand that punctuation shows the reader where to pause? Does he understand that when he pauses for a brief second in reading his writing aloud that there should probably be a comma or some other form of punctuation there? I know a lot of kids think that punctuation is just a bunch of rules teachers made up as an excuse to use red markers and torture children but in reality, it does serve an important purpose. Does he hear the difference when reading something like "Let's eat Grandma" and "Let's eat, Grandma."? Does he understand that a single comma changes the meaning of the entire sentence? If he is typing all his work, is it set to show him grammar and mechanics mistakes? Does he just ignore the squiggly lines under everything when his grammar is incorrect? I know in MS Word it's a green squiggly line for grammar and mechanics mistakes but I don't know about other word processor programs. What is he using? All that said, in my experience, there are two kinds of teenage writers, ones who over use commas and ones who use no commas. lol Almost all can identify a comma and give a few instances where one should be used, but it doesn't seem to cross over into their writing. I've only met a few would not benefit from a grammar and mechanics review at the very least in high school.

Can he diagram or analyze and underline like they do in MCT? Pick one of his sentences and have him diagram or analyze and underline. Read his sentences aloud to him (without letting him see what you are reading) using the punctuation (or lack thereof) to guide your voice and inflection. Can he hear when a sentence doesn't sound right? Does he type or hand write his essays? Maybe typing his essays in something like MS Word, where it will highlight most his grammar and mechanics mistakes and suggest how to fix it, will help him to polish his prose? Perhaps seeing his writing consistently corrected over and over again, in real time instead of after he turns it in, will help him learn how his writing should flow. Those are the first things that come to mind to try with a teenager to help them understand sentence structure and flow.

Agreed on the too much coloring and cutting with young elementary kids, especially boys. I used colored paper to print them out on to eliminate the coloring and I cut them out for my kids. My kids placed and glued them. My goal for this particular project was for them to have a memorable way to study the human body on a basic level, not practice cutting or coloring skills. A lot of prep work for sure but I can tell you that my 21 year old son still remembers doing the My Body book project fondly. :-)

You can buy the e-book version of My Body. It is much easier to just print the pages out than photocopy them imho. I just purchased the regular one, not the enhanced one. The additional features of the enhanced version just were not anything I would use for this book.

You can get The Sentence Family for 40% off right now at Currclick if you order and download before they close down next week.

Could you do it like a research project class? Grade him on his ability to research and find what he needs, more or less the effort he puts in to the project, rather than purely on the finished project. If you can find someone to peer review his project, you can count that as a percentage of the grade. Even in high school, learning isn't always about the finished project, it is about what you learn along the way even if your finished product doesn't come out exactly right. One of my required elective college classes for my degree was a summer internship. My grade for that "class" was based on turning in weekly reports (2 - 3 paragraphs) to my internship supervisor about what I had learned that week working in an environment similar to what I would work in upon graduation and then a peer review from the people I worked with of my work that I had completed over the course of the class.

I would also leave a fancy stationery and envelopes and stickers (all printed out from free online sources or bought on clearance) for a writing center to use when they were bored along with a single sheet of story and writing project ideas and starters if they were stuck for ideas. I would change out the story and writing project ideas once in a while to keep it interesting. I also usually had a science center of sorts with a TOPS science book and the needed supplies for them to use when they were bored. Lentil Science was a hit with elementary age kiddos, we had all different ones they used in middle school. Once they could use it properly and safely, the microscope was freely available for them to use along with a curated collection of prepared slides to look at like these. Telescope, binoculars, magnifying glasses, bug collecting containers... these were all freely available when my big kids were little and I'm working on making them available to my last little guy. I also had the ultimate boredom cure. When they would come to me saying they were bored, I would put them to work doing chores that no one wants to do... scrubbing baseboards, cleaning out closets and under beds, cleaning the toilet thoroughly from top to bottom, not just the daily scrub... for some reason they stopped telling me they were bored lol! Every once in a while though they would forget and all I would have to do is say in a cheerful voice, "Oh you're bored? Do you want me to find you something to do?" and suddenly they remembered that they had found themselves something to do, lol ;-)