What has your experience been so far with FLL? I'm a big MCT fan, but I also think, generally speaking, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. My son did 3 levels of FLL and started the 4th, and I found that he really wasn't retaining it well at all. I think for him it was too easy to sort of game the system and figure out the right answers without really understanding why. We've had a much better experience with MCT, but that's just us.

IIRC, the intro to the activity book for SOTW1 specifies that SOTW1 is for 1st-4th grade, SOTW2 is for 2nd-5th grade, and so on. So it's actually your 1st grader who's outside the suggested age range :). I'm doing SOTW1 with a K, 2nd, and 4th grader this year, and it's working well. I'm still struggling a little trying to find the right amount of extra work for my 4th grader, but I think by next year I'll have it down.

Is that allowed? :lol: DS9 did a bit of (Lively) Latin last year, but we were trying to do Spanish at the same time, and, basically, I came to the conclusion that I could do one or the other well, but not both. My own background is in Spanish and we have access to tutors who are native speakers. So we dropped Latin and have been doing Spanish relatively intensely (all three kids are now in outside Spanish classes, we're doing Puertas Abiertas, and my oldest will start Galore Park's Spanish whenever I get around to ordering it). My intention was to get a good, solid start on the Spanish, keep it going, then add in Latin in 5th or 6th grade and maybe one more language in high school (and hope it doesn't feel as much like spinning plates as it sounds ;)). I'm having trouble getting excited about Latin, though. Honestly, I'm more interested in Greek, and I suspect it might appeal more to DS, too (although, truth be told, he wasn't/isn't particularly resistant to Latin). I am convinced that Latin is Good For You and that it does all sorts of amazing, wonderful things to brains. I am not necessarily convinced that it's the only path to those wonderful things, however. So....can I do Greek first, with the possibility of adding Latin in later? Is there a reason not to? I am completely open to being convinced one way or the other on this, so....convince me!

I just went to the English department's website and read some of the faculty bios.

ooh! And they have a guy there who's written two books about Eudora Welty; yeah, he should totally go there ;)

I have no personal experience with it whatsoever, but I just checked its English graduate program's ranking w/ US News and World Report, and it's ranked #58, in a 5 way tie with schools like Boston College and (my college!) the University of Georgia. I would guess that means it's a respected enough department to attract some impressive professors and that anyone who's willing to work for it can get a very good education there (IME with big state universities, people can also skate by and graduate without really taking advantage of what's available to them). For whatever it's worth, I am very pleased with my English major experience at my #58 school and had no trouble getting into grad school.

Yep. I did McRuffy for awhile with DS4. When his reading took off, we switched to ETC + readers.

I've only looked a bit so far, but there's a children's museum, a zoo, and a science center. and a park with "the only curved, cantilevered pedestrian suspension bridge in the United States," according the city's official website. I guess we can't miss that ;)

Any food place that sells fountain drinks will give you free cups of ice water, too. I'd bring the stroller. My 4 year old actually refused to ride in one this year, but I really wished he would. Both of my older kids were happy to jump in a stroller any chance they got at that age. When are you going? It's never a bad idea to have at least a loose touring plan to follow, and it's pretty much essential if it's a crowded time of year. I like touringplans.com for that; a subscription is something like $10-12 for a year, and it's definitely worth it. Read up on how to use fastpasses!

I'm pretty sure we're going...we're about 3 hours away, so we'll make it a weekend trip; DH will probably take the kids to see the sites in Greenville for a lot of the time while I go to the convention.

sparkling water, constantly. I buy the Kroger brand, which is around $2/12 pack, and drink like 3 or 4 of them a day. Sometimes I put packets of True Lemon or Lime (little packs of concentrated lemon or lime powder--no sweetener), but usually I just drink it plain.

I'm ridiculously excited about Epic Mickey, and I don't even play video games. I'm just excited on behalf of my kids, who are, I think, getting it from their grandmother.

We almost always eat at Chick-fil-A when we do fast food (lately we go a couple of times a month; we go through phases when we go more often).

My kids have played with Nerf guns a few times with my younger half-brother and sister, and I was thinking of getting them some for Christmas. This my first foray into any kind of toy guns. I just did a search for Nerf guns on Amazon, and I'm a little overwhelmed. How do I figure out what to get? I envision them playing with them outside in the woods, mostly. I don't want to spend too much money. They'll be 5, 7, and 9. Help?

Sometimes we plan to do school when DH is around, but it rarely actually happens. Like other posters have said, we start when he starts, which is a week before the students, so we have a few extra days to play with (he has 4 furlough days this year, but we actually did 2 days with him home his planning week). He's a math teacher, and I'm not mathy at all, so I'd love it if he had time to do all the math with our kids, but there's really just not time. He usually tutors after school, so he doesn't get home until 5 or 6, and by then the kids want to hang out with him and play, not do a math lesson. He is doing a math club for my oldest son and some other kids this year, and he does piano lessons with all the kids on weekends.

I'm not up to date on this right now (i.e. I don't know if it has changed with the unemployment rate), but when DH started teaching he went through an alternative certification route, and it was pretty simple. I don't know how it's different if you're coming from another state and already have certification there, either. But he had a degree in math, not education, and had never taught before. He took a couple of tests, and they threw him in classroom immediately with a provisional certification. He did a mentoring program to get his regular certification, which, honestly, was more doing some paperwork than anything else. He never took a single pedagogy class (well, he has now, but that was to get his gifted certification, not his regular teaching certificate). It's entirely possible things are different now that unemployment is high; they'll generally only hire someone with a provisional certification if they can't find anyone they like who's already certified. But I would imagine it's still doable for teachers in high needs areas.

...and I hear you. I won't pretend that having more time together as a family was not a factor in deciding DH would take a big salary cut to start teaching. His schedule during the school year is very hectic; he leaves the house at a bit after 7 so he can be there early for students who need extra help. On a typical day, he tutors after school and gets home around 5, then often goes back out to tutor again (for extra money, which is the only way we can afford to live reasonably on one teaching salary) after the kids go to bed at 7:45, then comes home at 9:15 or so and grades papers or prepares for class the next day. He coaches the math team, so several Saturdays a year he's gone all day to a math tournament. But we always know there's a break coming up, and that's a nice feeling. He doesn't complain about his salary or the extra work he does (much, and certainly not on facebook), but my point is that it's a trade-off. If he didn't have a lot of vacation time and decent benefits to compensate for a lower salary than he could make elsewhere, he wouldn't be teaching. Most teachers wouldn't.

...and I'll tell you one thing my husband the dedicated public school teacher would never do: he'd never put on Mythbusters and call it science so that he could neglect his students in favor of arguing on a message board. Nope. He wouldn't. :lol:

I'm not saying they're not; I'm just saying that teachers aren't paid a "yearly" salary, technically; they're 10 month employees. I see working over the summer when you're technically not even working for the school district as different from putting in extra time during the school year. But it might be a semantic distinction, and I might just be feeling cranky today ;)

When my oldest was that age, I used to say that he was the most cynical person I'd ever met. He's still a glass half empty kind of person, but he's better than he used to be, at least.

No it's not. Teachers are contracted for 190 days (give or take, depending on the state). In some states paychecks are spread over the year or teachers can opt to have them be, but they're paid for 10 months.

perhaps, but that was only one example. Until the economy went bad at least, just about every subject except maybe English and social studies was considered "critical needs" in Georgia and subject to special incentives and alternative certification routes. Special ed, foreign languages, math, and science. And, of course, anytime you have a school district that is less desirable for whatever reason (it's rural or it's urban, basically), attracting teachers is a problem.

and yet, even Georgia was having so much trouble attracting math and science teachers that they approved a special salary incentive for them a couple of years ago.

Less heated now. I think there's a breakdown of logic at work in suggesting that teacher salaries and benefits are TOO generous for the work teachers do when, even in this economy and with the unemployment rate today there are shortages of teachers in many areas. It doesn't make any sense. If we believe in the internal logic of the marketplace at all, shouldn't it follow that a job that pays very generously would have no trouble attracting plenty of highly qualified people? Perhaps the answer is that actually teachers do work very hard for not a whole lot of money. Yes, other people do, too. And they complain sometimes, too.

I think teacher salaries in Georgia are pretty competitive (with other states) given the cost of living here. Certainly we have better benefits than many other states (in a lot of states, teachers get no health insurance benefits for dependents, for example).