Talk to any public school teacher and they will tell you the same thing. They have the same frustration of watching their students mark wrong answers on standardized test for material they have covered all year ad nauseum. The only difference being that their jobs might be at stake. Testing doesn't test knowledge per se. Testing tests how well one can take a test. You can find literally thousands of articles and studies that say over and over again that standardized testing does not give an accurate measure of student knowledge or teacher competance. It is just the most convenient way to test massive numbers of students and obtain tons of data but it says nothing about the usefulness of the data collected. Not all data is useful data. Testing shows how well a child did on one given day. They could have been distracted (thinking about something other than the test would be enough without external distractions like noise), they could have been nervous (could she sense you were looking over her shoulder or watching her?), could she just be getting burned out and need a brain break before continuing to test? I remember thirty or so years ago going outside for fifteen minutes between tests during standardized testing to get up and move around for a while so we were less likely to burn out. So does that mean that our test scores might be higher than a school who cannot or does not do that? Is it fair to compare the scores of students in these situations? The rules regarding how the tests are administered attempt to ensure that every testing environment is more or less the same but you cannot always plan for every factor that might increase or decrease a child's test score.

I don't think you were aiming this at me or anything but I just wanted to say that I wasn't saying children should trust every fearful instinct they have or that they shouldn't be taught the difference between casual social interaction and stranger danger. Some people just have less need for human touch. My youngest son is one of those people. From the time he was an infant it was obvious he had a clear limit for being touched and cuddled. He is 5yo and still has a clear limit for how much touch he can handle. He may very well be on the spectrum, I don't know for sure at this time but I never want him to feel as though he is in the wrong for not wanting to be touched by anyone, including me. I even had to learn to ask him if he wants a hug when he is upset. If he is just wanting to be listened to, giving him a hug without asking him first can cause him to lose it and escalate a situation that didn't need to be. Sometimes he does want a hug, sometimes he doesn't but I respect his boundary and whether or not he feels like giving or receiving a hug.

It's not the fact that she asked for a hug that bothered me. People do that a lot these days for many different reasons, some are benign and others are more nefarious. But just asking for a hug isn't the part I take issue with. The OP's child was obviously uncomfortable from the beginning of this woman's exchange with him, the reason why he was uncomfortable is neither here nor there. He was uncomfortable and declined this woman's request (if you could call it that, I know people don't usually mean it this way but "Where's my hug?" particularly from someone I don't know or know well feels belligerent to me). It should have ended there. She should have respected his boundary and asked someone else for a hug but instead she kept on trying to find a way to cross his boundary. She has no idea why this child is uncomfortable. He could have been a victim of bullying or abuse, he could have been autistic, he could have been a child with generalized anxiety for any number of reasons, he could have been out to get a treat and spend some time with mom after a bad day. This woman had no way of knowing why this child was uncomfortable with her request or whether or not she was causing him emotional distress beyond what most people would feel it that situation. I find it disturbing that the other parents taught their children that their child's feelings and boundaries were less important than the adult's request in this situation. It is a scenario that I saw/see played out again and again in many different ways in southern culture and I have never cared for it. It is not impolite or disrespectful for a child to have boundaries. Even if the adult doesn't understand the child's reasoning, they need to respect the child's boundaries the same way they would another adult.

I didn't grow up in the south but I have lived in different parts of the south for most of my adult life. I would have been irate. Her actions are so not ok on so many levels. The shift supervisor would have been notified that someone is making me and my child uncomfortable in their store and if nothing was done about it, the police would have been called and a letter written to the store manager. Forced or coerced affection is not affection, it's harrassment at best and non-violent assault at worst.

It is a skill that just takes time and practice. The typical age range for being able to identify beginning, ending and medial sounds is 5 to 7 years old. So she's still on the young end of that range. Some kids pick it up quickly, for others, they can practice and practice but it just won't click until they are a little older. It is very typical for a child to be able to identify beginning and ending sounds long before they can identify medial sounds. They are just harder for our brains to hear sometimes. Just keep practicing and "break" lots of words apart and then "glue" them back together. I'm sure it will click for her very soon.

Agreed that is probably still pretty normal at 7yo but I would keep an eye on her and help her remember to write them correctly. Does she have a way to remember which way they go, chants or visual cues? Does she still write them backwards when she has a correct model to look at while she writes? If she had a number line in front of her while she did her work to refer to while she wrote her numbers, would she still write them backwards? If the answers to all those questions is no, then I'd say she proably just needs more practice to get the look and feel of the number cemented in her head. If you've done all those things with her and provided her unlimited access to a model to copy and she still writes them backwards, then I might be worried that it was something more serious than age appropriate reversals.

Build Your Library Year 0 or Guest Hollow Geography Curriculum could be worked for a five year old as well.

I never taught the alphabet song either to any of my kids. We just started teaching letter sounds from the time they were toddlers. Nevertheless, all six of them eventually learned the alphabet song on their own by the age of 5 or 6 without me teaching them or singing it with them. Even my child who couldn't hear anything properly until he had tubes placed when he 5 years old learned the song without being taught or purposely exposed to it. Just as a thought experiment, how long do you think it would take you to match 26 foreign symbols, such as Mandarin or Sanskrit, to 26 different sounds and know them out of order if they were only presented to you in a certain order until you knew them in that order? Some people would be able to do it more quickly than others but most people would struggle for a while to recognize them out of order. Most of us don't remember a time when we didn't know our letter sounds so it can seem strange when a child struggles but if you can put yourself in your child's shoes by trying the thought experiment above, it can put their struggle into a context you can more easily understand.

When DS#1 was born 20 years ago, they believed him to be 6lbs or so and they didn't expect me to go so fast since they had to break my water because I had had a small amniotic leak for several days and it was my first L&D. All total, from breaking my water to delivery was only 6 hours. He ended up being 8lbs 9oz, the doctor commented while a med student stitched me up that if they had thought he was that big and that quick, they would have done an episiotomy. Instead, I had a 3rd degree tear. I kept telling the post partum nurses that something felt wrong down there during my 3 day hospital stay as a first time mom (going home 24 hours after birth wasn't a thing yet in that area). The nurses checked my stitches several time but said they were fine. After it all healed, there is a little tag of skin that didn't heal together. That is what I could feel post partum. Eventually it desensitized and I don't feel it now but it is still there. And I can still feel the ridge of scar tissue where the tear and stitches were. Thankfully, 5 more natural live births and one 20 week still birth later, I never tore again. I had a couple of tiny fissures with each one except the still birth but nothing that required any kind of special attention nor hurt as bad as the tear with my first one.

Does she have her text book she can look at that explained this type of problem to her and how it expects her to solve it? That is where I would point a 4th grader to look first. If there isn't a textbook with her math program, I would assume since you said she hasn't learned exponents and cube roots yet, that it wants her to factor 64 to get the answer. I would guide her by asking her what do we know about volume and what do we know about cubes and what do we know about the number 64. We should know that volume is length times width times height and that a cube is a 3-D square. Since it is a square, all the sides are equal. With that information we know that we are looking for one number that multiplied by itself 3 times will give us 64. If she knows her multiplication facts, she should know, nearly instantly, that 8x8 is 64. And that it is an even number So we now know we are looking for one number multiplied by itself 3 times is 64 and that 64 has the factors 8 and 2. With that information we can greatly reduce the amount of numbers needed to guess and check or we can factor. If we factor, we can proceed two ways. We can factor 8x8 and look for triplets or factor 32x2 and look for triplets. Either way will get you the same answer. It's just which ever path looks easier to her. That's how I would guide her. But I would let her supply the information about the problem and let her do the factoring. If she was just really really stumped, I might model for her how I figured it out or use a different perfect cube number as an example and show her how to solve it and then have her apply that knowledge to her problem.

Since you can buy the pre-printed workbooks in black and white, I'm going to say printing in black and white is probably fine.

I also think phonics is absolutely the way to teach reading but I would never call someone else out for teaching differently than me. I like the examples that Xahm gave of how she would have handled it differently. I probably would have responded similarly to the way she did. I don't think letting a child enjoy books before they can read leads to word guessing. Forcing a child to read a word which they have not been taught the phonics rules to be able to sound it out can lead to word guessing. Teaching a strict whole language approach can lead to word guessing. But I think the other mom, while well meaning, could be going a bit overboard just based on her comments to you and her son's reaction to your daughter's claims to being able to read. If they shouldn't be allowed to handle and read books before they can read them, should I also put blinders on them when we go out of the house so they don't try to "read" store signs or other environmental print? If I catch my kids guessing, I stop them and explain the rule that applies to the word they are guessing at even if we haven't yet covered it in their reading lessons. No harm, no foul. My kids range in age from 20 years old down to almost 5.5 year old. I was the one that taught all but one of them to read (second youngest son learned in public school, long story). My currently homeschooled 5.5yo is an emergent reader but he's coming right along.They all learned to read, some as late as 9yo and the youngest any of them learned to read was age 3. None of them guessed at words excessively as a result of being allowed to explore books on their own before they could read.

It would depend on the international school. They have their own rules more like a private school. Most international schools I've had contact with though welcome homeschoolers but have their own rules for placement. International schools, almost by definition, are quite used to having students come in at varying abilities and different schooling backgrounds. Many expats have homeschooled at some point in their travels if they are the type that move around frequently. None that I know of had an issue with enrolling a student in an international school when an opportunity to do so arose.

We had to have structure from the time my second oldest son was an infant. That boy thrives on a predictable schedule and his world falls apart without it. So for him, school just kind of fell into the same kind of routine. He liked to do the same things in the same predictable order every day. My other kids didn't need that much structure We could be much more laid back and just have a list of things we needed to accomplish for the day and do them in whatever order suited them that day. I would just allot a set amount of time for things that needed one on one time with me and most of the time I would let them choose if we did math or phonics or language arts or what ever else still needed to be done during that time. Then we would cross that off the list and do the next thing. Even in middle school, I would just give my kids a list of the assignments they needed to get done and they were responsible for completing them in any order they wanted as long as they were done by the deadline. I tried a few times to institute more rigid structure, like math from 9am to 9:45am, science from 10 - 10:45am, but that never worked out for us. I always felt like I was watching the clock and when we found a rabbit trail that caught their interest I couldn't bring myself to say 'ok time to put that away. It's time for the next subject.' We homeschool so that we can chase rabbit trails and being too structured seemed to get in the way of that so other than having my second oldest do the same subjects in the same order everyday to satisfy his need for predictability, we never were terribly structured and we were still able to get everything done most days.

Should I register with my state even though we will only be stateside until November? Do you have a legal residence in the state you are thinking of registering in? If not, I wouldn't bother. If it is ever brought into question while you are in the states, I would just explain at that time that you live abroad and are only on an extended visit to the US and will be returning to your home abroad on X date. That's what we did when we lived abroad and visited the US or anywhere else for that matter. How should I keep records so that if ds ever attends a b&m school he can? My kids enrolled in public school when they were middle school and high school age, the schools didn't even want to see our homeschool records. If this is your only reason for record keeping, I wouldn't bother. I keep certain records just as a memory thing. A few samples of work from each subject, my older kids did lapbooks so we kept those, pictures of any field trips or projects that couldn't be kept like science projects, and make a memory scrapbook of it. Do you keep up with standardized testing to keep records of progessing learning? Nope, work samples work just fine for this purpose.

Reading-rewards.com looks interesting but you need a paid teacher account to make book quizzes. You can just log minutes for free though. That's sad that Book Adventure is closing. My older kids all used their program when they were little.

Eighth graders in public school can be all over the map too. Some have completed algebra 1 already and others are just finishing up pre-algebra going into 9th grade. Still others may still be struggling with basic math and need pre-algebra in 9th grade. Those same students could be all over the place in writing and reading too. Some are ready to tackle early college level novel reading and essay writing while others struggle to form a coherent paragraph and read grade level material. Not all eighth graders are on par with each other no matter how they are schooled. That's why there are usually 3 or 4 different levels of basic math and English that a student can enroll in. Some will take remedial classes, some will take A-level and others will take honors or another track to AP level classes depending on their skill level in that particular subject. I think eighth grade graduation is less about academic completion and more about celebrating the fact that these "children" are now teenagers. They are on the edge of childhood and entering young adulthood. They are entering a new phase in life and the graduation is less about what they have achieved academically in most cases and more about celebrating how grown up they are becoming. Same thing with kindergarten and preschool graduations. It's not about academic achievement. Kids that young are even more all over the place than 8th graders. It's about celebrating them growing up and becoming a "big kid" and going on to big kid school. I also think, in the homeschool community, it can be a little bit about making sure the kids don't feel like they are missing something by being homeschooled or to prove to family and friends that worry about the kids "missing out" that they don't have to miss out on things like that just because they are homeschooled.

We like card games around here. Uno (and all the variations like Uno Attack) Skip-bo Exploding Kittens Phase 10 Cribbage Hearts Rummy Spades Pinocle Slapjack ERS

Confessions of a Homeschooler has a calendar notebook that we use. I don't use all the activities but we do use the calendar part. My son loves the days of the week song to the tune of the Addams Family. You can find it on Youtube. I just throw it in the mix with other songs I have playing during the day. Super Simple Songs, also on Youtube, has a months of the year chant that we use. We just treat days of the week and months of the year as some of the very first memory work we work on so we recite them each day until they are memorized and then rotate them for practice just like any other memory work.

Me too, but I also wouldn't oppose telling an 18yo legal adult they have to work and pay for things on their own or going to school or otherwise furthering their education if they are going to live in my house rent free. A child gets to live in my house rent free regardless and I would not force them to work in addition to school. They can work if they want extra spending money or work experience but I wouldn't force them to work.

On the one hand, 20 hours a week is the cap for most college work-study jobs. Those hours are typically worked around the student's class schedule in 2 - 4 hour chunks several days a week. So I don't think 20 hours a week is an unreasonable number by any means. However, I would never discourage a child from academic or musical pursuits to fulfill work hours. They will be an adult in the real world for the rest of their lives, they only get to be a child and able to pursue their dreams with reckless abandon for a short time. No harm in introducing the real world before they have to live in the real world but there is no reason in my opinion to force them to live in the real world before they are no longer children. My opinion would be different if he were 18, but he's not. He's 16 and still a child by legal definition.

As a teenager, I lived on the outskirts of a metro area and then we moved to a semi rural area in another state. Neither had public transportation nor was there anywhere within walking distance worth going or safe enough to walk to (narrow county roads with no sidewalks). I never felt like I was limited by where my parents would drive me. If my parents couldn't drive me, I could ask a friend or their parent for a ride to or from whatever it was. And when my parents did take me, we often took friends who needed a ride with us. My parents didn't arrange these rides for me, I did and so did my friends. Being able to find a way to get where you want to go, in spite of parental availability and lack of public transportation is, I believe, a form of maturity and independence as well.

Obviously some probably do because the OP said in her original post that there is a morning class and an afternoon class. Those that do go to that afternoon class might work in the morning. At least he cared enough to ask to make sure he was planning to attend the correct one. My ex-husband refused to attend most of the kids' graduations and such because he knew I would be there and he's not allowed to talk to me. Any time we did end up at the same kid events, I purposely avoided him. I have a restraining order on him that says he is only allowed to speak to me about the kids in text or email because he cannot control himself when speaking to me. I've had to use those texts and emails as proof that we still need that restraining order 7 years after our divorce. That's a sign of a bigger problem.

School at home, to me, is more how someone thinks about education than anything else. But of course, how they think about education directly influences how they homeschool so it kinda crosses over in that way... IME, school at home have strict schedules and textbook/workbook heavy curriculum. The idea is that the child will trudge through each one sequentially and come out "educated" at the end of the year, pretty much exactly the same way they were educated in public school. There is often the idea that one must be taught to learn anything. They only see educational value in the educational, school-ish activities. Activities that aren't traditionally considered to have educational value cannot have any capacity to lead to anything educational in their opinion. They really struggle to think outside the traditional education box. Of course this is just my experience. When I first started homeschooling over 15 years ago, I too had trouble thinking outside the box and seeing the absolute freedom that truly homeschooling provides. I think for a lot of people, they already feel like they are stepping outside the box by homeschooling and feel the pressure to prove themselves to mainstream family and friends at first so they think by imitating the school, they can accomplish that.

My five year old LOVES the guy the does the videos for Art For Kids Hub. We just watch the free videos but are seriously considering figuring out a way to get him a subscription. That guy is seriously talented at being able to teach children how to draw. I wish he had been around when my older kids were little. Mark Kistler was a favorite of my older kids. We have several of his books and bought a subscription to his website when the older kids were little.