Thanks for the ideas everyone! I think we'll stick it out at least for a bit longer and see if things improve when the subject matter is more interesting to him (although I asked him the other day if he thought that was the problem, and he said, "no. I've never liked it, remember?" Umm, yeah, I remember, but you didn't used to CRY about it, either, kid). I don't have a problem with it being challenging for him or with needing to help him through it; but I do worry about how intense his frustration and anger with it has been the past few weeks. I don't want to turn him off of writing, particularly since he DOES enjoy writing in the right contexts. I was looking at IEW the other night....I wonder if that might work well with him--he's a very systematic kind of kid; he likes order, he likes concrete--outlining might appeal to him. He's also very visual, and I wonder if the extent to which WWE relies on auditory stuff is a problem for him.

Hmm...you might be on to something there. Looking back, I think he did have a harder time with the history selections in WWE2. He's not a big history buff, by any means. I'll talk to him about it tomorrow, and we'll see how things go next week when we're finished with Paul Revere. I'll ask him if he'd prefer to write them down himself, too.

DS8 just finished WWE2 and we're on week 4 of level 3. It's not going well. Dictation is fine (I usually have to read it several times, but he doesn't get frustrated with it), but the narration has been a mess. I can't put my finger on WHY it's so much harder for him than level 2 was (not that he loved doing level 2, but it wasn't nearly so frustrating for him). I don't know if it's the transition to reading the passages on his own or the difficulty of the passages or what. Today we read a passage about Paul Revere, and he had to look back through the text to answer nearly every single question, and then I had to hold his hand through putting together a summary. He's getting more and more frustrated and miserable. So now what? I'm not sure what this mental block with writing or, more specifically, with narration is. He's a very strong reader (he's reading the sixth Harry Potter book right now, for example), his spelling is good, other language arts stuff is not a problem for him (he's halfway through FLL 4). He also spends hours and hours writing stories outside of school work. He's working on the 5th installment in a very long saga about dragons. And when I have him do narrations in other subjects, he does fairly well. I have him write those himself instead of dictating, and I wonder if that's part of the difference. I wonder if there's just some kind of basic incompatibility between him and WWE. I like it a lot, but maybe it's just not a good fit? Advice, please? Anyone had similar problems, and what did you do about it? Any programs that might work better for him? I'm intrigued by Writing Tales or Classical Writing, but I don't know that he wouldn't run into the same issues with those.

Not everyone gets a good signal where they live. We don't. We might be able to with a roof antenna (might--we have pretty thorough tree coverage here), but I'd rather pay the $10 a month or whatever for basic cable than do that. Also, we get a discount on our cable modem because we have cable, so it doesn't really cost anything (I think...I haven't looked at the bill closely in awhile). We have no football watchers here...the reason we don't go completely cable free is LOST :) If I wanted to free up time for reading, I'd be much better off getting rid of my computer than TV ;)

I've only had AS 1, but this was my experience with the notebooking pages, too. From what they said on the site, I expected a lot more of the creative type pages, but it was mostly just extra reading and coloring.

Our boys are getting a geocaching kit for xmas this year--a GPS, book about geocaching, and a few trinkets to trade...and then I'll probably print out some clues for caches close to us to get them started, too.

Before having kids, I tended to have more/closer male friends than female ones. I used to say I was kind of like Elaine from Seinfeld. When I was first married, my best friends besides DH were definitely men. Once I had kids, I just stopped having a lot of contact with potential men friends on a day to day basis, so things have shifted, but not out of any kind of conscious choice or anything. I kind of miss having more guys to hang out with, even though I love my women friends.

They should be fine into the teens as long as they're in an enclosure that blocks the wind. We have ours in a little hutch that's open in the front--last winter it got down to 8 or 9 degrees a few nights; we just hung a tarp in front of the opening, and they were fine.

We got wooden train tracks for my just turned 3 year old last Christmas. This year he's about to turn 4 and he's getting the playmobil pyramid (his request). Having two older brothers makes his tastes rather mature...he also wants an ipod nano (he's NOT getting one, though). He's getting a set of Citiblocs: http://www.citiblocs.com/ to share with his 6 year old brother, too. When I look around the playroom, I always realize that various kinds of blocks get played with much more than anything else in our house.

Can't you just save the files for later on your computer?

okay--I think they have it fixed now!

okay, it's up now, but the things aren't free....they say everything's free, but then when I put something in my cart there's a price by it. Am I missing something, or is it not working right?

This is the link: http://www.currclick.com/cclick_blackfriday.php but there's nothing there! It says to check back in 0 minutes....????

Ours is up!

Given that there are already shortages of teachers in critical needs areas and in "less-desirable" (read: poorer, either urban or very rural) school districts, I'm not really sure how simply making it more difficult to become a teacher while leaving in place the same compensation and working conditions for teachers once they graduate would help. I think this is backwards. It's relatively easy to get into teaching because most people don't want the job. First you make teaching a more desirable profession, THEN you can demand more from the people you hire. The whole premise of the thread, after all, was that intelligent women don't WANT to become teachers anymore. And if, as several people have argued, teacher salaries are actually really awesome, WHY don't more people want to go into teaching? My husband's a teacher, and it's not because of the money. He took a $20,000 a year pay cut to go into teaching, and that was coming from job at a non-profit (i.e. the pay cut would have been a lot bigger had he been coming from a corporate job). Teacher salaries are better than working at McDonald's, yes, but compared to the vast majority of other jobs that require the same level of education (all teachers have a bachelor's, and most have advanced degrees), they're quite low. They also don't offer the same opportunities for advancement as other jobs (unless you go into administration, which a lot of teachers don't want to do, because then they wouldn't be teachers). And the amount of BS teachers put up with from all sides (students, administrators, parents) is really maddening. I wouldn't be able to do it. I wouldn't want to do it. And lest anyone question my husband's IQ...he was a math major, not an education major ;)

I like this one: http://www.toomanychefs.net/archives/001437.php I found it by searching for a recipe that imitated Stouffer's ;) It uses metric measurements, so some conversions are necessary (unless that's what you normally use, that is!)

I have 3 boys, almost 4 to 8. Their group present this year is a geocaching set--a gps, a book about geocaching, and then I'm going to get some stuff from the dollar store for them to use as trade items.

So back when teaching was one of the only career paths open to women, more smart women went into teaching? Well, sure. So the answer is what? Close off most career paths to women again, so that the smartest ones will have no choice but to become teachers? Or, umm, maybe we could make teaching a more valued career path so that it would attract more highly qualified people? Feminism didn't only happen in America, after all, so I'm not sure how valuable this can be for an argument about the decline of American education. Is there a similar decline in IQ scores in other countries? I'm skeptical about the conclusion, but even if I weren't...I guess I'm having trouble understanding what they're trying to say....is it bad that women started going to college and entering the workforce because this led to a decline in American education? If, indeed, the strength of America's pre WWII education system depended on women who would rather have entered other fields becoming teachers, then that seems a bit...problematic to me. I bet we could get more highly qualified teachers by rounding up all the smartest MEN and telling them they could either become teachers, nurses, or maids, too.

We're doing American history this year, and we like trains, so I'm hoping to find a good book we can read together about the beginnings of rail travel or something along those lines. Kids are almost 4, 6, and 8. They like pictures :) Any ideas?

I bought a Nordic Trac from Sears for around $700-800 almost 7 years ago, and it hasn't given me any trouble.

What about the Magic School Bus chapter books?

Thanks, Michelle! I think I'll probably hold off on that one until warmer weather, in that case. And maybe until I find a fish tank at the thrift store!

I'm thinking of buying it, but I'm wondering how exactly it works....I'm assuming I have to get some animals to observe somewhere? Are we supposed to catch things outside or order things or what? The primary appeal of the kits for me is the whole not having to get materials together thing, so if it's going to a giant pain to find critters (or if it's the wrong time of year and I should wait for spring), I want to know before I order. While I'm at it, anyone used any of the other Science in a Nutshell life science kits and want to tell me which ones they liked or didn't? Or life science kits from other companies you'd care to recommend? Thanks!

We bought bikes for ourselves, because (well because we wanted them and also) 10 years is the aluminum/tin anniversary. So they had to have aluminum frames :). It would have been lovely if our present to ourselves could have gone along with a weekend biking trip without the kids, but that wasn't in the cards. We did go on a weekend biking trip WITH the kids a few weeks after our anniversary, though, and that was nice, too.

What about attending the state university but then working (before school starts and then part time while she goes) so that she can live on campus? I went to a big state school, and my experience was that the "atmosphere" was whatever I made it. It was big enough that I had no trouble finding friends with common interests, even though there were also plenty of people who I didn't fit in with. I also graduated with no debt, and I'm reminded to be grateful for that over and over again when I hear about friends my age struggling to make ends meet (even when they make far more money than we do) because of student loan debt. I went straight from grad school to having kids; not going to back to work wouldn't have been an option for me if I were trying to pay off loans. But at the same time, I do think there's a lot to be said for living away from home for college, at least if that's what you want.