This is a timely thread for me. My dd who is just finishing Gr3 is working on Horizons 3 Book 1 and I tested her on Singapore (as I wanted to use some of the supplementary materials) and she can't do the 3A placement test. :001_huh: I have really liked the way Horizons teaches, but I am now having to rethink things. She still needs to try the Singapore 2A test, but I think she is somewhere between there and 3A. I am going to get Singapore 3 and work through it. Still, I am also aware that she is covering work that would be mostly in Gr4 here. Nikki

We don't even have shops that open after 6pm, or on Sunday, nor Daylight Savings, so expecting up to date slang of us on the west coast is a bit unfair. Don't they bring the updated slang list over by camel every other year or something?:tongue_smilie: As Hannah says, some phrases are familiar to me as a South African, while there are plenty of other new ones. I especially love how many people here describe badly behaved kids as "feral"! 5 years in the Middle East left me wishing I could see the world of Arabic women from the inside. The shallow me would love to be an Israeli woman - the curly red or dark hair and olive skin that so many are blessed with is simply gorgeous. They even manage to make a drab army uniform look attractive. I'd be happy to be transported to anywhere in the Middle East or Mediterranean for a week.

Dd8 made one for her toddler brother using squares of Thomas, Bob and Cars fleece. She loved doing it - easy and effective!

I got a boy after 6 years of girl. What a shock! She was/is very outgoing, independent, adventurous, but it pales besides him! 1) He cannot learn "No" by hearing it - the number of times I had to remove the soggy mop from the toilet before we resolved that one. And the number of unrolled toilet rolls! 2) A toilet obsession? Putting things in, washing hands in, flushing repeatedly... 3) Finds pee-ing fascinating - in the garden, toilet, shower, bath, kitchen bowls, ice-cube tray, plant pot, we've seen it all. 4) Much more blood and injuries. 5) He learned to make himself burp very early, and thinks it's hilarious. 6) He never puts something down if he can throw it. 7) He never sees a stick without wanting to hit something with it. 8) He never sees a stone without wanting to throw it. 9) LOVES trains and cars and buses and trucks. Loves playing in my car. Everytime I get in the car I have to switch off hazards, indicators, wiper 10) I have to add - he has to be involved in any fixing that takes place in the house - screwdrivers are like magnets to him. AND he thinks I (all women?) am incompetent in this area - I do it, Mommy". I love having a boy! Nikki, Mom to dd9 & ds2(nearly 3)

Miss the lesson and she loses allowance / gets extra chores to pay for the lost lesson? I imagine it would only have to happen once or twice... Short term loss for long term gain, perhaps?

I took my Mom to a cooking demonstration by Claudia Roden for Mother's Day years ago. She was lovely, and the dinner afterwards was great. I have her Mediterranean Cookery. I'm very tempted to get the one under discussion here.

We added 3rd grade in Latin, and worked through Beginning Outlining, but both have been fun. I have also expected more reading. I do expect a jump for 4th grade (January 2010) - that's partly about more writing, but also about me selecting material with greater depth, particularly in English and Maths.

To me this always seems like a symptom, rather than the solution...like a frantic groping for meaning when life feels empty. I think many of us feel that homemaking and homeschooling should be fulfilling, yet it isn't, so we try to add more layers to the task we're already undertaking (homemade yoghurt/ homemade bread/ home ground flour or the very familiar ongoing search for the "perfect" curriculum). My instincts tell me that this is where one might most successfully look for fulfilment, but it's much harder. It requires a change of focus to the self (which can be uncomfortable) and the practical side of carving out space for self in the midst of homeschooling and homemaking feels nearly impossible. Of course, this relates to my feelings about my life - won't apply to everyone who feels disenchanted with life.

We're very happy with ours. They have a good water efficiency rating, which was important to us. Ours has a setting for a half-full dishwasher, but we only ever run it full. The buttons are on the top side of the door, so "tuck away" when in use - great if you have little ones with fiddly fingers in the house. I should say that I might not be the most objective respondent. This is my first ever dishwasher, and after a year we are still very much in the honeymoon phase. I (heart) my LG! Nikki

We loved the book choices, but I also never got into the activities (dd was 4). Personally I felt that, although the books were perfect for her, the activities were too advanced / not designed to interest her age group. Could this be an issue for you? Do you have enough time to research and replace activities? If your son likes worksheets or online games or hands-on crafts, you might be able to find something that covers the same information (or area of information) as the FIAR activity, but that appeals to you more. Then you're covering the bases, but in your own way. It's what I'd do, but I can also see that it might be too much work.

We're stretching MPH 3/4 by adding science kits, and doing poster/lapbook type work.

Were they keeping this a secret? I was even on the site pricing things the other day, pricing things, and never saw it. I am soooooo happy! I use the AG selectively, so this will definitely save me money, especially as we add a huge chunk for overseas postage. Here's another "secret" - if you have lost just one of your SOTW CDs, you can get a replacement for just that one disk! I've heard that this happens to some careless people ;-)

Oh dear. We're going to be busy! From my side, we'd have to cover Dutch, Swedish and Irish while dd also "inherits" German from dh. Those are in addition to the English ancestry which dominates on both sides. And we'd better throw in Afrikaans too, from my more recent ancestry. It's an interesting perspective, though. I can't speak for everyone, but I'd love dd to learn 3 languages, in addition to English: one ancient, one widely-spoken modern language, and one language using something other than roman characters. We've started with Latin, and will gently add some Arabic in January. I'll leave the other choice completely up to her, hopefully based on a country she finds interesting and would like to visit one day. Nikki (who followed the ancestral example by meandering her way to Australia from South Africa, via the Middle East).

Thank you! I just heard about this programme on Wednesday! Does the programme include songs to learn on the keyboard? Nikki

I don't want to simply be plugging the programme we use, but Horizons Math worked well for dd when Singapore didn't. Your "by the end of the unit, she never wants to see another problem on that topic again" describes how my dd felt! Horizons is colourful and fun, and is a spiral programme - new topics are introduced incrementally, and each 2 page lesson has 6-8 different topics in it. I am actually planning on adding some Singapore back in this year, just to make sure she has a proper conceptual grasp of maths that will cross between programmes (if that makes sense).

We have tended to re-arrange chapters in a particular SOTW book to make it chronological within regions. So, we read all the Egypt chapters together, all the Rome chapter, all the China chapter etc etc. It's not perfect, but might be what you need to do to bring in lapbooking. Otherwise, do a minibook or two per chapter, then take a week to review, complete extra minibooks and assemble the lapbook when you reach the last chapter on a particular region?

We got some odd bits and pieces narrated too! Do you ask questions first, then do the narration? Leading questions might help to bring the most important facts to mind. Dd9 doesn't tend to be succinct in her narrations, and really wants to put in the "trivia". Something else you might look at is History Scribe - the basic details of an event are typed at the top of the page, with space for the child's narration underneath. That way the facts will be recorded along with the "trivia" for review. I didn't find a very good overlap between History Scribe and SOTW, so you might just want to look at samples and do something similar for yourself. We have just worked through "Beginning Outlining" by Remedia Press, and it has definitely helped dd see the main idea in a work. While full outlining might be a logic stage skill, I think being able to pick out the main idea / ideas is pretty useful for the younger kids too. I reckon you could work through Beginning Outlining orally if you wanted to get your dd focused on the main idea, without going into the details of formal outlining. Nikki

Definitely! They still haven't e-mailed back, and I'm still checking every hour. I am also ordering their Philosophy for Young Thinkers... Nikki

We're mostly every other night here too. Sometimes less often, sometimes more often.

Oh my goodness! Thanks! I haven't read any reviews, and probably wouldn't have gone at all, but we have free tickets for next Friday, and I was going to take my nearly-3yr old for his first big screen movie. Guess I will ask a friend to look after him...

It's even worse here! I'm overseas, so waiting for them to e-mail me a final postage figure (can't be done automatically) and then I still have to wait for 2 or 3 weeks. I'm checking my e-mail every hour.

Thank you both! Off to order the basic package. Yippee - the first actual commitment for January's Grade 4 curriculum. Nikki

All the glowing reviews of MCT have decided me, but I have a few final questions: 1) Do you use the full or basic homeschool package? I would really, really like to save money, but when I'm told that I will "eviscerate the Socratic design of the implementation" by doing so, I do worry just a little! 2) Do I need an additional writing programme? 3) Sorry if this is a silly question, but what about punctuation? Is that covered? If not, do you learn through osmosis or cover separately? Edited to say: OK, I see punctuation is convered in the writing component of the second level. Thanks, Nikki

That's exactly what I thought when I bought HO1 for Middle Ages. I just couldn't get what it was supposed to be offering that SOTW+AG didn't already offer. But I will look at HO again for Logic Stage, based on what I hear here.

Most western expats in Oman were (men) in the oil industry. Dh is a telecoms engineer, not in oil/mining. Most expat wives don't work. They do drink a lot of Starbucks coffee, though :001_smile:. Women that do work tend to be in the nursing, teaching or beauty fields. There were obviously some downsides to living in the Middle East - no libraries, few homeschoolers (dd was in an international school) come to mind - but it was amazing to be living in the midst of such a different culture, and meeting people from all over the world (60 countries at dd's school, 15 languages spoken in a class of 20 children).