No to stories that aren’t worth reading - there’s too many GOID things out there and not enough time. That being said we have found both the Junior Great Books series and Jacob’s Ladder useful in developing critical thinking about reading all while reading things worth your time (and discussing things worth discussing - higher order thinking). Also, we discuss during family read aloud. I might ask if they know a word or if they’d like a definition (or say I don’t know a word so I’m looking it up), or ask questions about cause and effect, whatbis being alluded to, where else have we read of something similar, who does this character remind you of, etc. it’s very organic but it also is much more like what people really do when they read.

She does not want to go back to school. We have cut ipad out now to only if she has to go to an on-site meeting and I can’t have her underfoot if workers. She plays soccer but we are off season. I plan to get her back into swim at the rec center in the next session. She does group violin class once a week, and once a week homeschool group (1 hour) plus the odd group field trip. There is gym and dance and martial arts but our town is in a growth spurt with lots of young families and there’s a wait list for most things ? except music theater which she doesn’t want to do. We might go back to parkour if we can swing it in our schedule.

Thanks for the book series suggestion! I will look at them. She’s an emerging reader - currently reading Frog and Toad stories. She hasn’t yet got to the point of reading for pleasure, but maybe with the right books. My older three are all 2e, and though elementary years were a lot of chaos surfing they were all highly driven to read, do puzzles, experiment with things. I could turn them loose with things and they would take off! This one is a great average student, and our days are a lot more peaceful than with older siblings, but she is not very driven academically. We DO have a Gma and Gpa not too far away. I might be able to convince them to take her for an afternoon once a week. But, I KNOW they will just turn the TV on and give her otter pops and chocolate milks while they do other things ? At least that’s what happened in the past, even if I sent a workbook or a book to read together.

So she did half day K last year, and asked to homeschool this year. She doesn’t want to go back to school (even with all the crazy that has left her working alone a lot). It would be nice to have all the school activities, but I think it best we don’t put another big change out there at this time (we are moving soon, new neighborhood, new church, etc). Thanks for the reassurance. I guess I know she’ll be OK academically. I suppose I’m more concerned that I’m not attending to her, and her siblings aren’t available to her, and I can see she’s lost a little bit of her sparkle. I do sometimes put on audiobooks - thanks for the reminder! - and we work side by side on things, but that is not quite the same as working together on things. Maybe I should stop insisting that our limited time together is working on math and reading/writing, and instead make it all the fun stuff? I haven’t done Morning Basket with her in a month ? But maybe THAT should be the essentials for the next few months and let Math and reading/writing go? And she is now asking for the iPad all the time - age’s trying to fill her needs with the screen and that is not a good habit to indulge, especially in a growing mind. I don’t let her have it all the time, but every time she asks I feel the mom guilt.

Thanks for the suggestions! We don’t have a Boys and Girls Club, or a Y or anything. It’s a smallish town (30k) with nothing else for 50 miles. And the homeschooling community isn’t very strong. I do teach a little homeschool once a week with two other moms. It’s only an hour, but we hang out afterwards for a while. Perhaps I will look into a nanny or a grandma day (if she can handle it - she gets exhausted easily and my SIL using them a lot for backup day care).

Ok, I have done homeschooling while moving, homeschooling without partner (deployments), homeschooling with a newborn (and a deployment, oi!), homeschooling through extended temporary housing, homeschooling while some are in public school - each time we didn’t do a lot but we got in the essentials and they were free to explore interests. But, we are currently building a house and school for my youngest is just not getting done. We aren’t building it with our own hands, but we are doing a custom house (without the help of a designer) that is requiring lots of on-sight trouble-shooting, trips to showrooms, pouring over catalogs (I’m the type who researches a ton before decision making - who knew there were so many things to consider in toilets!), conversations with the builder... it is usurping my entire decision making capacity, and most of my time. DH works shift work and isn’t often available to help. I have one kid in full time public, one takes 2 classes at school and 3 online (only has English with me, but still needs supervision/redirecting), one who is 3/4 time at the college DE (the rest at home, but she’s dealing with some heavy emotional stuff too and needs lots of time/support), and then the youngest who is entirely homeschooled. Currently three have outside music lessons, and three have outside church youth group activities - we cut all sports and drama. I don’t feel like anything else can give. So, I am not desperate - this is OUR choice to build the house and I am grateful we can do it, and I feel a little guilty even posting this because there are plenty of people out there going through much harder things, and not by choice - but I need some suggestions? reassurance? My youngest is a lovely child, cooperative and positive, but she’s lonely and not learning much because I’m so busy. Her next closest sibling at home during the day is 13 year old brother, and he’s pretty much doing his own thing. When all my kids were younger and big life events happened the three school-aged oldest had each other to play learning games with, to read to each other, to even just play cooperatively together. Youngest has had far too much of “educational games” on the tablet or “educational shows.” They’re all solitary things. ? I guess maybe this is a vent? An admission of guilt? I don’t know, but if you have any suggestions on how to meet her social and learning needs for a few more months until we’re done I’d love to hear it.

I do, but subtly. There is a difference between wh and w when I say it, but not a great deal. I try to pronounce it a bit more distinctly when reading aloud to my kids. There are also a few words I am more intentional about pronouncing the sound with, such as whale, white, and whittle.

He probably would be fine reading the text. I will put out there that the labs are one of the main reasons to choose RSO Bio2. They are conceptually strong but mostly simple and accessible. Omitting them takes out a good portion of the learning. Not all, but a fair amount.

Singapore does a good job of taking number sense and teaching strategies directly while using that number sense. There is a complement of workbooks (regular workbook, Intensive Practice, Extra Practice, Challenging Word Problem’s [if you can find it]) for practicing the skills. My math-intuitive kids did well with Singapore (they also used BA, RS, Miquon, and AOPS at various points).

My 7 year old is reading Frog and Toad. My oldest at 7 was reading all the Warriors books. And The Hobbit. My DS at 7 only read encyclopedia entries (with lots of pictures) - refused all fiction. My middle dd at 7 just wanted Berenstein Bears. They are all doing great. Finding reading materials can be hard, especially with precocious readers who may not have the maturity for some harder books. Some of My Best Friends are Books is a nice guide for helping precocious readers along. Good luck finding something!

I agree that choosing a philosophy from the beginning is not the best advice, but like you said / to read lots of stuff - I think reading about homeschooling philosophies and using them as a starting points is probably a good place to begin, and learning styles. That isn’t to say you WAIT to do anything until you’ve figured it all out (ha! nothing would happen. Ever) but that you start doing something (eg a routine of daily events, start with some shared literature, etc) while you work on finding out those bigger questions. And that’s what i usually tell people - start with routine, some basic 3Rs, all the while ingesting ascmuch information as possible so you can determine how you’ll get to where you want to be. I hate trying to answer the newbie questions like “We just pulled them out of school. What do I do now? Which curriculum do I use?” because it is too hard to answer those questions without context.

I love gaiters for moving through wet brush, to keep snow out of my ski boots/socks, but I’d take muck boots for daily PNW work outside because they also insulate and they clean up easier than gaiters Edited terrible typing mistakes ?

Eclectic is hard for me because it sounds like taking bits and pieces from different styles, where I feel my approach is a whole different animal than anything else. Even if I used other styles to inform what we do at home they aren’t staticly intact ports, arranged like room featured in Dwell. They’ve been melted down a bit, molded and reshaped. So I don’t know what the term is... ? For simplicity in conversation I tend to explain it as a classical bent, but child directed, and darn near unschooly in the younger years.

White board helped a lot when we were working together.

Lots of good stuff here. It took getting my kids into challenging math that required them to write things (can’t do it all in their heads) to make it evident they needed to write. AOPS prealgebra did this für my oldest (even though AOPS uses very “neat” Problems as far as computation goes), and Beast Academy did it for my next two. The only thing different from this post I would suggest is trying graph paper - it helps my kids keep their work organized better (the oldest two have very sloppy writing/issues with fine motor).

It was much to parts-to-whole for my kids. So much so it seemed almost authoritarian (ie “do this now and don’t ask why). My kids definitely do NOT work well that way. We had better success with LTOW and then adding in some other writing forms using Writer Source 2000/Writers Inc.

I don’t think there’s an app, os, or monitoring service that can keep out a driven screenager. It will ultimately have to come from either 1) internalized limits/self control, or 2) parental oversight (which might include taking it away entirely). And sometimes #2 is the only way even though #1 is the goal. It’s such a monsterous mess of helpful and harmful that I wish we would all just ban them until their brains matured.

A prayer for you, your son, and the providers! And just ((((hugs)))) because I can just imagine who emotionally fraught the whole thing is and you need to know you are a good mama for taking this hard step!!

It takes my DS a lot longer! My oldest did well that way. DS is beginning his first class next month - he will at that point only do the class work. The thing with Alcumus is that if you have really mastered the material Alcumus doesn’t take that long becUse it is adaptive. DS takes longer because he doesn’t have it down as solidly.

My sister just raves about this to me as well! We don’t have glass shower doors (because we have very hard/high Fe water), but she was excited enough about how well it did she called to tell me.

We have always bought used cars, and of the 9 we have bought over the tears 5 were from private parties. We had good cars on every purchase, and a better price point through private party. I think we have faired well because we have chosen reliable, long lasting vehicles. My last vehicle purchase was a ‘97 land cruiser with 150k mikes on it and they run well beyond 300k. We actually have had 4 - one had the wiring harness fried from being reversed jumped, one we bought in AK and a second in AK as a “parts car” (I sound so redneck but it was cheaper to buy $1500 parts car than get two body parts shipped up to AK we needed after a fender bender). The parts car ran like a top! When we moved back to the lower 48 we sold both to a good friend, and after three years without a cruiser I really wanted one again so we got #4. By the way the two cars in AK both still run great! We also had great luck with two Pathfinders from the 88-95 series, and our Subi was the best for 10 years before it got t-boned (everyone in the car walked away unharmed). My point is, know the car you want and it’s longevity! Then go looking for it. Use KBB or Edmonds or another service to check prices. Pay for the unlimited Carfax for a certain time period so you can check to see if the vehicle has been in any accidents or was ever totaled. Get a pre-purchase inspection from your mechanic. Good luck!

My ADHD kiddos, who are also very global, detested WWS because they couldn't see the big picture. We use LTOW. It is different, in that it is focused on persuasive writing and critical thinking instead of general academic writing/reporting, but it does a good job of going from the specific to the general and back again. It gives specific tools, but gives them in context. We have to use other things for report writing, but if you've ever heard something called the persuasive principle you can see how all writing is a form of persuasion. Anyway, they don't love LTOW but oldest did well with it, and DS is doing ok (we just started), and they are learning from it. They may never love academic writing. They would much prefer to write fantasy stories… But LTOW reaches them so much better than WWS.

We do the book problems, solutions/teaching, exercises, then get the topic in the green on Alcumus.

Some morning basket things my 7 year old likes: Where’s Will (Shakespeare play summaries followed by a two page spread hide and seek of the play a la Where’s Waldo) Mindful Kids cards (deck of 50 mindfulness short practices) I Heard Your Feelings cards (deck by eeBoo to gently discuss being attentive to other’s feelings and how to handle/interact with others after noticing their feelings) Children Just Like Me (photo-heavy spreads of kids from around the world with what they wear, eat, play, learn, etc) Aesop’s Fables (we have the Milo Winter version) Read Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (fun assortment of poems curated by Jack Prelutsky) The Story of the Orchestra (book and audio CD about the instruments of the orchestra and different composers) Memoria Press’ Art print cards Just finished My Father’s Dragon (and the two sequels) and just started Mary Pope Osborne’s Tales from the Odyssey. Odyssey chapters are longer, but My Father’s Dragon has nice short chapters. All my kids have loved these books! ETA: Once Upon a Time Map Book (fairytale’s and other stories’ worlds on a map, with a narrative of directions through the map, which is a fun and gentle way to learn a map key, cardinal directions, coordinate grid, etc) Come Look With Me (series of art books to work on picture study, artist bios, and art appreciation)

That was not my experience in military healthcare. I went to 42 weeks and a questionable level of remaining amniotic fluid they were willing to have #1 induced. She was 9lb 1oz. It was a 12 hour labor, epidural complication and had to be removed so unmedicated delivery. Next two went over by just a few days, unmedicated, *fast* labors and delivery (one was within 2 hours of entering the hospital and the other was about 45 min). Recovery was so fast. Last one was induced at 41 weeks, and it was also unmedicated but it was a longer and more uncomfortable labor than previous two. Contractions on pitocin are brutal. Last one was 9lb 2oz baby. I was actually surprised they were talking about induction at 41 weeks, but she would have been quite the big baby had we waited longer. So, maybe areas (and the military, though geographically spread in reality functions as an “area”) of the country/world have different standards.