My kids love doing cup stacking for fun and we've always used the mini solo cups you can get from any Walmart or grocery store. Even Dollar Tree has them sometimes. The mini ones are sturdier than regular size solo cups and stand up to the abuse better. Of course if you are thinking of entering them in competition, yeah, you might want to get competition grade cups but if you are just trying to find an activity they might like, I would just get the mini solo cups. If they really like the activity and want to compete, then invest in competition cups.

My youngest is a k'er this year. He is capable and willing so we do maybe 30 minutes of Logic of English which has lots of movement built in. Sometimes we break it up into 10 - 15 minute increments, some days he is willing and able to go 30 minutes straight. He's 6 years old now, coming on the end of kindergarten by the paperwork we have to turn in to the state, and he is able to spend at least 20 minutes in a sitting most days now. Math goes about the same way. He can spend hours playing legos and listening to a read aloud or audio book. He also loves watching the bird feeder and animals of all kinds (we live in the country so it's not unusual to see deer and other animals wander through our property). He enjoys anything you call a 'science experiment' and asks lots of great questions that lead to some pretty advanced conversations about history and science topics. He watches bits and pieces of documentaries we watch and has some pretty amazing retention even when he doesn't look like he's paying attention. None of my kids at 4 years old would have been able to spend 90 minutes doing what most people consider to be school work, as in sitting at a desk paying attention and doing written work. Most of the time, my 4 year olds are doing well to spend 10 - 15 minutes doing something school-y several times throughout the day, for a total of maybe an hour a day when you add up all the little increments.

Dh and I have talked about this many times. But always come to the same conclusion. Our life experiences thus far, the good and the bad, have made us who we are today. We love each other and our life together, how ever mundane it may seem to others. If we changed our lives, we wouldn't be the same people. I'm not saying this is the case of the OP but I often wondered what it would be like to live a different life when I was married to my ex-husband. It was a bad situation all around and he was abusive in many ways. I always wondered if things would be better if things had gone differently. But in my current marriage that is healthy and not abusive in any way, I don't constantly wonder those things any more. I am happy where I am and have come to realize with without my past experiences, I might not be as happy and content with my life as it is now. That said, I would love to travel again, I did travel a lot in my younger years. Dh and I have talked about having an RV and traveling for months at a time. I would be content with just traveling and having no home base but dh wants somewhere to come home to when we get tired of RVing. When my kids were younger and I was in the thick of raising them, it seemed like a pipe dream but now that there are no babies or toddlers and some of my kids are full fledged adults, it is getting easier to see that these dreams could become reality. As much as I think I would have loved living that lifestyle with the kids, I'm not sure I could be content with myself and the life I was providing for them if we were constantly transient. In short, I may daydream about a lot of things, but I am truly happy with my life as it is.

Is your signature up to date? I would say math for all 3 school age kids could be done in 90 minutes or so. Another 90 minutes to do WWE/WWS and ETC/OPGTR with all 3 kids. That leaves an hour to get lunch made and eaten and then get ready to go to your activities that start at 1:00pm. And that is with no distractions and cooperative kids which is rare that those things happen together on the same day when you have 4 or more kids. When my older five kids were little, I would either need to make cold lunches before school starts or give myself 90 minutes at least to make and eat lunch and get everyone ready to go. Starting an hour earlier may help or listening to history as an audiobook in the car on the way to your activities. For the 3r's, I would dedicate at least 30 mins to each child for each of the 3r's to account for distractions and uncooperative children. If they are cooperative and there are no distractions, they get the extra time to do what they please. And some days 30 minutes isn't even enough to get through a lesson but that is where I have to decide if I'm truly teaching the child in front of me or if I'm trying to meet some kind of outside expectation or if it's distractions that are preventing us from reaching the goal.

We are on a very tight budget due to dh being on disability. But we still use Logic of English and it is worth every penny but I've found ways to make it less expensive. First, I don't buy the bundles. There is no way I could afford to put all that money out at once. I just buy what I need when I need it a la carte. For example, here is the Foundations A kit which is the most expensive at $160: What is Included? Foundations A Teacher's Manual - I bought the PDF version which is almost $10 cheaper Foundations A Student Workbook - I bought the PDF version which is $3 cheaper and I can re-print pages for extra practice if necessary Basic Phonogram Flash Cards - made my own printable flashcards so I could make notes on the back that are relevant to me 1 deck of Bookface Phonogram Game Cards - made my own and honestly we use these as both flashcards and gamecards most of the time 1 deck of either Cursive or Manuscript Phonogram Game Cards - same as above Phonogram Game Tiles, Edition 2 - made my own and magnetized them so we could use them on cookie sheets or dry erase boards Phonogram & Spelling Rule Quick Reference - printed out the relevant pages of the teacher book to refer to when I need them. Spelling Analysis Card - same as above Rhythm of Handwriting Tactile Cards - I made some with glue and salt but we honestly don't use them that much, you could do tactile finger tracing so many different ways, even just writing it on the dry erase board and then erasing it with their finger using the same motion Rhythm of Handwriting Quick Reference - didn't buy, didn't feel like I missed it, all the instructions are in the teacher book Student Whiteboard - we had a lined whiteboard already that we use but you can get one at the Dollar Tree, hasn't phased my son in the least that the lines on the white board are a little different than the lines in the workbook. (dotted middle line instead of solid) Doodling Dragons: An ABC Book of Sounds - bought used on Amazon but honestly we skipped it often. I think it would have been more useful if my son had been 4 or a young 5 when we started instead of almost 6 So altogether, I spent just under $50 up front for the pdfs of the teacher manual and the workbook, and then no more $20 buying the Doodling Dragons (I want to say it was less than $10 used) and the cardstock and contact paper to make my own cards and tiles. Plus I could spread the cost out so it wasn't such a big hit all at once. I worked out of the PDF of the teacher's manual for a long time just on my phone or on our tablet or sometime I'd just have him come to my computer desk to work so I could see the manual on my screen. This semester, we are in level B now, I printed out the teacher manual 4 pages to one sheet of paper and put it in a binder. I can still read everything but less paper consumed (we have HP Instant Ink which I highly recommend. We don't have to worry about printing, even in full color) If you don't want to make the game cards, which honestly they were the hardest to make only because I'm a perfectionist and I don't own a laminator so I used contact paper to "laminate" them, you could buy those when you are ready for them to help spread out the cost. You don't need them until I think it was almost half way through level A. Same with the phonogram tiles (which by the way also come as a pdf if you want to print your own). After the first level, the other levels of foundations are less expensive and they have split them up now so you can by each level as a bundle if you want so it's less expensive. I still just buy the pdfs because I prefer the option to reprint workbook pages as needed and the option to have a digital teacher's manual. Oh and I get the pdf of the readers and print them myself when the readers come separately (they are included with the workbook for level A) I hope this helps someone who would like to try LOE but is on the fence due to the expense. We love the program and it is my new favorite phonics/spelling program. It is absolutely worth every penny but if you can't stomach spending that many pennies at once, you can do LOE much less expensively.

Looks like they are just having some server issues. Some pages load for me but others do not and the connection is being reset by their server repeatedly. Are you looking for a specific book or just wanted to browse the website in general?

I'll add in that we are gamers and while I've heard of Fortnite, I only have a cursory knowledge of the game because it is not a genre of game that any of us are interested in, middle schoolers included. Same with Pokemon. My kids and my husband all have varying levels of obsession with Pokemon but it just truly does not interest me so other than overhearing a little here and there, I am blissfully unaware of much else about it. I knew I was different too growing up and felt like adults didn't understand me and I couldn't relate with kids my age. I still struggle with it honestly. I remember going through a brief period of trying to figure out pop culture and why these things interested my classmates but I didn't ever figure it out, lol. It all just seemed so inanely boring to me no matter how I tried to look at it. Probably much the same way my classmates thought of my interests lol. I also remember, just as the boy who wrote the article describes, being told what to say and what to think and even more so what not to say. Not being as extroverted as the child in the article, I just retreated to my books and elaborate self-initiated projects. If the internet had been around when I was a child, I probably would have spent hours learning everything I could as well. Personally, I think the child did write the article. The asynchronous mix of child-like writing and thought process and the little spurts of insight just cannot be easily replicated by a non-PG adult.

I'll let you know when I figure it out. My parents gaslighted me; my ex-husband gaslighted me. I really thought I was the crazy one for a long time. But something in the back of my mind nagged at me, I knew I wasn't remembering things wrong or inventing my own history like they said I was, they were just projecting their guilt on me Then, even once I broke free of all of them, I had the same problem as you are, thinking it must not have been as bad as I remembered and that I was making mountains out of molehills and maybe I really was the bad guy in everything like they said. It has been eight years since I cut ties and five years of weekly therapy sessions and I still struggle with it frequently. I'm getting better, slowly, but there is still a long road of recovery ahead of me. One thing that has helped me is my current husband who remembers clearly the stories I have told him and some of the things he witnessed. He is able to give me a reality check some times and help me have confidence in my own perceptions and memories. Also, I journaled A LOT during my divorce about both the divorce and my childhood. If I really need a hard reality check, I go back and read those journals. Even when my memory plays tricks on me, seeing my own words about what happened and how it made me feel at the time is reassuring when I'm doubting my sanity. I'm not sure one can completely recover from narcissistic abuse especially when it occurred over the course of a very very long relationship (15 years with my ex-husband and until my early 30's with my parents). Narcissistic abuse may not always leave scars but it does leave a stain on your mental health that will always need maintenance to keep it in check. It's always rough when I have to miss a therapy session for whatever reason. And it compounds when one week becomes two and two becomes three... I hope your therapist might be able to squeeze you in somewhere so you don't have to miss so many in a row. :hugs:

Full of what? Full of busy work and worksheets? Full range of topics? Full of experiments? Full of fun? Mystery Science is great, we use it a lot as part of our unschool-y elementary science. If we were in a situation like a new baby in the house or some other life event that caused us to need to put a lot of things on auto-pilot for a while, I would absolutely use just Mystery Science and other interest-led science exploration and have no qualms whatsoever about the quality of their science education. Elementary science should be about explorations and curiosity, not paper trails and mastery. Your kids are still very, very young in the grand scheme of things. Even your oldest child still has almost 10 years of schooling left to master science. There is no harm in having fun with science now and many would argue it would be the best kind of science education for her age. You know what I remember from public school 3rd grade science in the late 80's? Dissecting owl pellets and raising meal worms in baby food jars. You know what my 20 year old son remembers from homeschool 3rd grade science? Raising caterpillars into butterflies, dissecting an owl pellet, making soap and a series of physics experiments we did from a TOPS unit. Neither of us remembers a single book or worksheet from third grade science that we completed.

We are also BW followers but not strict adherents. Other than ideas I adopted long ago when I first read TWJ, we aren't strictly doing any Brave Writer products right now either but I still consider myself to be doing Brave Writer style language arts. I still remember the first time I read TWJ and thinking, "This is exactly what I've been wanting to do, what I've been trying to do, and feel like I'm floundering. Someone finally wrote a guide book on how to implement language arts the way I always thought they should be implemented!" I've never actually used JID/PW/FO. The basic ideas are all presented in TWJ for you to implement as you see fit. I've looked at them all many times but in the end, I always feel like I've got a handle on how to do this things from TWJ and I don't need the extra hand holding from the other products. So it really just depends on your personality and how confident you are as a teacher on which product you need. If you would rather have someone spell it all out for you or if you don't have enough confidence in yourself yet to take someone's ideas and make your own plans, get JID/PW/FO. If you feel boxed in by using someone else's plans no matter how loose they are or if you are the type to always tweak everything to the point that it doesn't even feel worth it any more to try and use someone else's plans, get TWJ and just write your own. Oh, ETA, I've never liked Julie's ideas for spelling so I've always used a separate spelling/phonics program and just used some of her ideas for extra spelling help.

The only thing I would add to Farrar's post is that you can use one part but not the other parts. You can use just the Arrows/Boomerangs as part of your language arts program and use something else to teach writing. You can use just JID/PW/FO and use something else for copywork/dictation/literature/grammar. You can use just the Brave Writer lifestyle activities to enrich your language arts program and never use any of the rest of Brave writer. You don't have to use all the components of Brave Writer, they work well together but you can use just the parts that appeal to you as well.

Yes, but he would count the dots one at a time rather than make groups of ten. He has seen the idea presented in many ways and he can do it if he is walked through it but the next time we try a multi digit problem, we end up starting all over again walking him through it. His brain just isn't ready to fully absorb and apply the concepts which I'm not worried about, he will get it when he is ready to get it and then he will take off with it. He only just turned 6 so I'm in no hurry for him to get it. I really just want to know if the Beast Academy 2 expects the child to know how to add and subtract multi-digit math problems. I know on the level 2 placement test, there are multi-digit problems for the child to solve but I have also heard the placement tests are harder than the content in the books so I was just wondering if anyone who has been through BA2 with a child in K or 1st could give a heads up on whether a child should be able to add and subtract multi digit problems before starting.

One more thing... When kindergarten teachers are working with small groups of children for guided reading or math lessons, the rest of the class is typically working in centers. Try looking up "kindergarten centers" on Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers to get more ideas for activities for your kindergartner.

Busy bags that work on fine motor skills Quiet books Playdoh with work mats Engaging tablet apps that work on pre-k or kindergarten skills (Starfall, Duck Duck Moose apps, Khan Academy Kids app) Engaging tv shows that work on pre-k or kindergarten skills or tell age appropriate stories (Wally-Kazam is a favorite here as well as Leap Frog phonics and Math Circus videos. The World of Peter Rabbit on youtube, (not Peter Rabbit and Friends from Nickelodeon) Gigglebox fairy tales on youtube, animated story books from your library's digital services) Don't forget headphones if tablet or tv time for the younger child will distract the older children

Still doing a little bit of changing and feeling things out with my last little kindy this year so my plans for fall aren't set in stone yet. We will more than likely be in Logic of English Foundations C or D by fall. We are working through B right now but we school year round so it just depends on how quickly he progresses. We had to take a detour in January that I wasn't expecting when he started to struggle so we stopped and just reviewed. He loves copywork so he is doing more than is asked for in LOE. I usually just let him pick a sentence that he likes from whatever he has read or what we are reading aloud. I've thought about getting the MCT Mud Trilogy to just go through together, but I'm not sure if I want to start now or wait until LOE starts introducing more grammar. Just haven't really thought through what I really want to do here yet. Wendy just reminded me about Grammarland so now I have to decide if I want to do MCT or Grammarland..... Math.... I love math and so does ds. MEP is one of my favorite math curriculum of all time but it was just feeling like such a drag this last go-round with my youngest child. So we've hopped and jumped and tried a bunch of different things this year trying to find a combination that feels like a good fit for both of us. I want to give Beast Academy a go with him, it wasn't available when my older kiddos were little so we've never done it before. Right now, we are doing Miquon with Life of Fred Apples as a supplement which seems to be a good match for him right now so we might just continue that until I feel like he's ready to start Beast Academy. He he can skip count from here to tomorrow by almost any number. The common ones like 2, 5, and 10 he can do without help, the others he can do it but he needs a 100s chart to help him keep track but he does it without help from anyone else. He knows his single digit addition and subtraction facts and understands place value pretty well (even told me as he was playing a place value game a couple of weeks ago "I'm kind of a genius at this (place value)." lol) and is even starting to figure out multiplication on his own but every time I try to introduce multi-digit addition or subtraction I get the deer in the headlights look no matter how I try to introduce it. Could I start him on Beast Academy Level 2 if he has seen the idea of multi-digit addition and subtraction but doesn't seem to understand it yet? He just turned 6 last month so he will be 6 1/2 by fall so we will start Form 1B of Wildwood Curriculum but I will be modifying it as needed. He is already an awesome narrator, probably from hearing it from others since he was little, so we will probably swap out some of the stories for others. I love Charlotte Mason but I don't like the heavy emphasis on biology pretty much to the exclusion of all other science in the early years so we will supplement with lots of read alouds and experiments from other science subjects.Mystery Science and Aumsum science channel on Youtube will definitely be some places we will pull from. We will continue learning ASL which we have all been learning since he was a non-verbal toddler. (He has childhood apraxia of speech and while he has graduated from speech therapy for now after 4 years of weekly speech sessions, it is expected that he will probably need more speech therapy in the future.) Despite his shortcomings with speaking English, he has been learning French by his own choice. He is enamored with all things French for some crazy reason. We have been using Muzzy and Dino Lingo videos from the library this year. I recently bought the Cherrydale press book on French so we will start that soon too. So I think we will continue with both ASL and French for first grade. I'd like him to start piano lessons next year, most likely Hoffman Academy. He's just not ready right now and if he doesn't show signs of readiness for it next year, it will wait until he is ready. He really wants to learn to ride horses with the goal of getting his own horse one day so I'm hoping by fall we might have the arrangements in place for him to start learning how to ride but that is still way up in the air. Until the planets align, we might just have to wait on that. He gets plenty of time running around outside and got a huge outdoor trampoline for his birthday as a big gift from everybody so he gets plenty of exercise.

That Reading Like a Historian curriculum looks awesome! Thanks for sharing that!

Four of my kids are righties and two of my kids are lefties. (All parents and grandparents are righties in case your were curious). My older kids' great uncle scolded me and insisted that I needed to "correct" my lefties less they be doomed to a sub par life by being left handed. My honest opinion is that is a silly position at best and harmful at worst. The vast majority of people, in my experience, are hard-wired to be dominant with one hand or the other. This isn't a flaw to be corrected or something to be controlled any more than you can control whether your child is an introvert or an extrovert by nature. Some people are naturally ambidextrous, some people can teach themselves to be ambidextrous, some kids show their handedness from infancy or toddlerhood, some kids take their time, sometimes well into elementary school, experimenting with what feels most comfortable to them. All those scenarios are normal.

I'm not much of a movie or tv watcher but dh and the kids are. We have Prime for the free shipping because we have to order so much living in the middle of nowhere, the Prime streaming is just a perk. We love most of the young kids programming on Prime and we have additional subscriptions to Noggin and PBS kids through Amazon streaming. All of it is totally worth it for us but we don't have any other TV service where we live, just what we can stream online. We have Netflix because it is free with dh's phone service but he is the one who watches the most on Netflix. At the moment he is watching Youtube how-to videos which is another service we use a lot. He was watching a documentary a little bit ago, not sure if it was on Netflix or Youtube.

What does his overall pencil grip look like? Is he using a tripod grip or some variation of it? When you say he has hypermobility in his thumbs, do you mean he has a hitchhiker's thumb? Does he have hypermobility of any other joints or just the thumb? Is he pressing too hard on the paper as well? Does he "engrave" the paper and any sheets below it when he writes? I don't know of any exercises to do for hitchhiker's thumb. I have it and most of my kids do too. It really doesn't affect how any of us write in and of itself. If you could describe his overall grip some more or show a picture, it might be easier to suggest ways to help correct a too tight grip. When you say handwriting is a chore, what exactly is difficult about it? Does he not want to do it? Does he say it hurts or makes his hand tired? Is he still learning to write his letters or is he past that and doing copywork or his own writing? How long has he been formally writing for schoolwork? How much writing does he do for school or how much are you expecting him to write? Does he do any writing of his own accord outside of schoolwork? One possible way to help could be to share the pencil with him for writing assignments outside of handwriting practice. Basically, if the point of the written work is not to practice handwriting, you write some or all of it for him or do it orally. Six year old boys in general are not known for their fondness of written school work. Kneeling or sitting on his bottom on a pillow at the coffee table is fine if you don't have anywhere else to do school work so long as he is comfortable. Will he sit and play at the coffee table the same way with cars or legos or draw? If he is comfortable enough to do those things for any length of time then it's fine for school work. We don't currently have a dining room table or a coffee table so my 6yo sits on the couch and does his written school work on a tv tray or a lap desk or a clip board, whichever one he wants to use. While he was learning to form his letters, I made him sit at the tv tray for that schoolwork but once he could reasonably form his letters, I let him choose where he wanted to do his writing.

Caffeine is still used medicinally. When my dh had a spinal tap done, he was to drink a highly caffeinated beverage every six hours if he developed a spinal headache from the procedure. This was in the patient instruction paper as he was released from the hospital and when we told the nurse that we don't drink caffeinated beverages, we gave up caffeine 2.5 years ago and haven't looked back, she told us that if he developed this headache, he needed to get that caffeine in his system. Caffeine is also recommended to be taken along with many headache medications and some migraine medicines actually include the caffeine in the pill. Of course many people also use caffeine just for the energy rush and in an attempt to force themselves to stay awake. Not sure if that is what you are looking for....

Me neither. I think copyright laws have become beyond silly in some instances.

Unfortunately it depends. It not necessarily just when a work was created. It also depends on when the author died, when the rights were last renewed and by whom and if the rights were purchased from an author's estate before they expired if they died before the rights expired. If I remember correctly, there is a huge debacle, possibly still being fought, over who owns the rights to Winnie the Pooh. The Milne family I believe had them after his death and Disney claims some right to it as well. I don't remember if it was ever properly settled but I know there was a huge deal made of it at one time that might draw out how long until the work is public domain.

I had the same mild prescription for nearsightness from the time I was 12 years old (but I probably needed them years before that, I'm just really good at compensating for my vision which makes getting the prescription right very difficult and probably explains why I passed vision tests until I was 12) until I had my 4th child. After she was born, when I was 27, my eyesight changed but only in one eye. They have slowly gotten worse over the years, my left eye is weaker than my right still, but it is still considered mild. I have an astigmatism in my left eye as well which is corrected in my glasses but not considered bad enough to warrant toric lenses when I wore contacts. Dh is legally blind without his glasses and one eye is weaker than the other but I don't remember off hand which is weaker. I was always told that it was unusual that both of my eyes had the exact same prescription for so long.

Sure. I started with the recipe from Pioneer Woman and tweaked it to our liking. Slow Cooker Refried Beans In a very large slow cooker (I believe mine is 7 quart) combine: 2 pounds dried pinto beans 1 large onion, roughly chopped 8 - 10 cloves of garlic, smashed, pressed or minced 2 tsp salt (this sounds like a lot but trust me) 3 - 4 partially cooked bacon strips or a generous spoonful of reserved bacon drippings (I always save bacon drippings, making sure to scrap the good brown bit from the bottom of the pan, in a container in the fridge specifically for making beans so I don't have to cook bacon when I want to make beans. You can use other oils or fats if you want but animal fat, with the browned bits, works best in my experience) 1 - 2 tablespoons cumin (yes it's a lot but again trust me) 1 - 2 tsp smoked paprika 1 - 2 tsp black or cayenne pepper, depends on how hot you want them (tip: go easy the first few times, you can add more later if you need to) 14 cups of water or beef or chicken broth (definitely use broth if you don't use animal fat. If you use regular broth, you might omit the salt and add it in later as needed) Stir to combine and cook on high for 10 - 12 hours. That is not a typo. You are adding dried beans and they need the high setting for a long time to rehydrate and cook. Low will not work trust me I've tried. I hate soaking beans before using them because I don't usually have enough forethought to do it the night before so I've never tried it. You may be able to adjust the cook time/temperature if you soak them before adding them. When they are done, I use a wire mesh strainer to scoop them out of the crock pot and into my mixer bowl; beans, garlic, onions, bits and all. Save the liquid in the pot, you will need it. If you want ultra-smooth beans, put them in a food processor or high powered blender. We like them from the stand mixer which makes them smooth enough to spread on a tortilla or tostada shell but they are what I would call "homestyle" beans with very small chunks. With the paddle attachment, mix on medium speed stopping every now and then to check the texture and flavor. Add the reserved cooking liquid, a little at a time, to adjust the consistency. Add cumin, garlic powder, onion powder, pepper, paprika or salt to adjust the flavor/heat to your liking. If it is too salty, you can add small amounts of sugar to adjust it and remember to use less salt next time. These keep really well in the fridge or the freezer. To reheat frozen beans, thaw on the counter or run under warm water until it can be broken up into pieces. Put the beans in a pan and warm over medium heat stirring occasionally. Add small amounts of broth or milk to create desired consistency while cooking if needed. ETA: Forgot to mention, on the seasonings, really go easy. They will taste even stronger the next day so error on the side of bland if you don't like strong flavors when you reheat leftovers. You can always add more later but it is difficult to impossible to salvage having added too much.