domestic_engineer
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Posts posted by domestic_engineer
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@ClemsonDana and @daijobu Did you do all the levels of poetry? While we continue to use the grammar portion (now finishing ML1), I only did the first three levels of poetry. How are the upper levels of the poetry strand?
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3 hours ago, Bambam said:
I will take snacks and extra drinks. The real problem is ... bathrooms! I also like to stop every couple of hours and get out and walk (so I'll be able to move when I finally get wherever I'm going), and usually I'd stop at a mall/WalMart/Target and use their restroom and walk around. If the weather is nice, I'd use a park. It may be too hot/humid for much park walking except very early, and I'm not into wandering around stores/malls to get exercise lately!
There are no crazy ideas when brainstorming, right?!?! Maybe cemeteries? Obviously, it'd provide a place to walk around - hopefully with shady parts. And the larger the cemetery the more likely there'd be a bathroom. And I'd imagine they are frequented less than most public bathrooms. On one of our travels when a baby started wailing, we took the closest exit off the interstate and stumbled across a small, Civil War cemetery. Legs got stretched, baby got calmed down, fresh air entered the lungs, and history was learned!
Also, maybe post your route here and the boardies can help you find secluded places to take breaks.
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- Plan for and take a big vacation in February (what a friend does) or even late January to beat or delay the onset of the February doldrums.
- Make day 100 of your school year be the last school day of December. This happened by accident one year, but I found it to be oddly satisfying.
- Create a J-term (January term) where you do something different, academically. unit study or problem based learning or all-the-topics-that-got-pushed-aside.
- 6/1 scheduling - six weeks of full-strength school and then 1 week off from school, excepting for the first term which I prefer to ramp up, adding a few subjects each week.
- advice from someone else that I've yet to implement - do something creative (preferably lasting, like scrapbooking or knitting) for 15 minutes each day.
- Give up on keeping a house clean. (eye roll)
- When DH committed to cooking dinner 1 day/week, it was a big help, but of course that's not something 100% within our control. Also, as kids age and take on the responsibility of cooking a dinner or at least helping make lunches for the littles is a big help.
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7 minutes ago, Little Green Leaves said:
By "thin" I mean that the grammar books look like something my kids would treat as a picture book and would want to devour in one sitting, so I'd either have to hide the book from them, or else let them at it and then drag them through rereading and applying it.
Yes, it’s possible this will happen. And I think that’s part of the authors intention. The author believes grammar is to be joy not a drudgery. So I think he’d be delighted if his audience stole the book away. 🙂
The Practice book is the one that is truly the key, I think, to teaching the kids. The grammar book is meant to front load all the information in a short period of time. But then throughout the year on a daily or every other day basis, the child interacts with those grammar ideas in short spurts by doing the practice book.
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21 hours ago, Little Green Leaves said:
I'm feeling stingy about the price,
Price is a definite drawback to the program! I’m able to justify the price only when I calculate the price per kid. If I only had one child, It would be a hard sell.
ETA: the used book market can be a little hairy to navigate with all the different printings. Books printed more than 8-10 years ago are definitely not worth buying. But for printings and reprintings within the last 8 years, I don’t know how much value was added in each reprinting.
if you can handle iBooks, you could buy discounted iTunes gift cards to bring the price down even more.
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I’d argue that the grammar books go deeper into grammar at an earlier age than most other curriculum. Or perhaps more accurately, the books teach concepts to my kids that *I* never learned in my education. (My prime example is that by the end of town level, the student will be able to distinguish between infinitives, gerunds, and participles.)
The grammar books do not have a lot of repetition within the year. It doesn’t spend weeks talking about compound subjects or compound sentences like I had in elementary school. So perhaps that’s what makes it “thin.” There’s no drill-and-kill.
The writing portion is my least favorite component, but I think it still has some merit. It gives a macro view of writing that other books don’t. Personally we read those books for the big picture idea, but we also supplemented for the nitty-gritty, hands-on aspect of writing. (Killgallon was my favorite supplement.)
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27 minutes ago, JIN MOUSA said:
- GOOD bobby pins are a must; I like these https://www.amazon.com/s?k=metagrip+bobby+pins&i=beauty&ref=nb_sb_noss_2.
What makes a good Bobby pin? They always seem to skip out and never hold a thing in fine hair.
I’ve learned I was using them upside down, but even with reorienting them, they still seem to slide out.
Teach me, please.
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Yes, you could get by with just the teacher’s manual, especially for the island level. However, when I tried it with Town (Or maybe it was voyage) level, I found myself covering up a lot of things with post-it notes so that the child can answer the questions and “discover” the principle. And then as you get higher up, you end up both crowding around 1 book and by this time the kiddo is physically larger than when you were doing Island level. I found it annoying to be craning my neck all the time. So while it’s possible to just buy the teacher’s manual, I found it to easier and more comfortable to each have our own book.
Likewise for the practice book, you can make do with the teacher’s manual. But I prefer buying the student book so that (1) it can be independent and portable when I need it to be and (2) I think it gives the kid a sense of accomplishment to make it through a physical book (our curriculum for other subjects does not have a workbook component so this is the only place my kids get this aspect).
Just some observations from someone who’s BTDT ......
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1 hour ago, WendyAndMilo said:
have you tried imslp.org?
Yes! So much is on there!!!!
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47 minutes ago, kristin0713 said:
What exactly are you looking for? Like teaching piano to kids? Songs or song collections? I buy music books on amazon both for pleasure and instruction, and individual sheet music downloads on sheetmusicplus.com
yes. Every time I buy a music book (for enjoyment, for instruction) through Amazon, I wonder if there isn't another place to find them. I'm currently in the market for instruction for music composition.
I've bought from Half Price Bookstores when I have time to browse their shelves, but that isn't a reliable source.
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Any ideas that would complete either of these analogies?
- Analogy A = books:Amazon.com :: music books: _______________
- Analogy B = books:thriftbooks.com :: music books: ___________________
music books could be sheet music or instructional books.
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Notability has spell check if you type in your annotation. I doubt it has it if you write your annotation.
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2 hours ago, KungFuPanda said:
I get my large storage containers at the pet store. They’re food grade, seal well, and are easy to open for scooping. I tend to use the 10lb ones and they have handles that make them easy to get in and out of the pantry. The larger ones have wheels. I stole this idea from a pastry chef.
Do you dump the food directly into the bin or do you put the bag of grain into the bin? In other words, does you grain touch the container?
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- Christian Liberty Press
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Visual Latin
you’re pass the “learn to read” stage, right?
you could also search here for content that used to be on CurrClick (Miquon used to be on CurrClick but now seems to be nowhere. Sentence Family used to be available there, and I don’t know if you can find it elsewhere as a pdf)
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SCIENCE:
- Pandia Press
- Be Naturally Curious
- American Chemical Society has middle school curriculum (free)
MISC:
- Scholastic has many of their teacher materials as e-books that come as a plain PDF (unlike Critical Thinking Co.)
- Simply Charlotte Mason
ELA:
- Rooted in Language
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7 hours ago, lulalu said:
Yes I have searched. Most seem to be lists of free. I really want to know what all is in pdf format.
So, to clarify, you're looking for PDFs from major curriculum publishers? (Or like Beast, where the entire content is online?). Because there are lots of "homegrown" ones too, like ....
- Ellen McHenry
- Barefoot meandering (Wayfayers & ELTL & Quark Science)
- Brookdale house publishing
Another idea .... check past threads for when people were trying to decide what to buy from the "Ultimate Bundle" sales each May .... oh, those were the days of being overwhelmed!
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LANGUAGE ARTS:
- Treasured Conversations
- MCT books (as iBooks)
- KISS grammar
- Syllables Spell Success and other reading helps
- Don Potter's website has lots of resources
- Alpha-phonics via free membership to this site
MATH:
- Ronit Bird
HISTORY:
- Biblioplan
MISC:
- Evan Moore has lots of their books available as e-books. (A subscription to their service may be more cost-effective, depending on how many of their products you use).
- Likewise, Critical Thinking Co. has e-books, though I hear that they aren't the easiest to use.
OP, you might also search for posts by @Hunter as she's been collecting educational pdfs.
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Buy unlined paper, and if you end up needing the lines or dots, then print those onto the unlined paper. How's that for an ambivalent answer?!?
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14 hours ago, Matryoshka said:
You might like the Staples Arc planners. They come with preprinted planner pages, and you can also buy different formats, and you can punch pages you print yourself to add to them if you want something else. They also sell larger rings if you want to add more pages than the default size the planners come with.
I wanted a recipe book I could add recipes to, and used this. I bought some of Arc system rings that Staples has, along with the cheapo punch that only does a few pages at a time (they have a more expensive one that does more pages at once). Hmm... on their website I only see the expensive one now... but still way cheaper than a Proclick. I bought a planner just for a sturdy cover and tossed the planner pages it came with...
Then I bought a ream of paper and made my own book. I can take pages in and out and rearrange them at will. It lays flat and can be folded back like something spiral-bound. Handy.
Levenger has something similar, but I’d imagine that it’s probably at a higher price point. Their binders went on a huge clearance once, and that’s what caught my eye.
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44 minutes ago, JHLWTM said:
I thought about having one bound at Staples with a spiral binding, but then I can't add or remove pages.
I've done this, and it's surprisingly easy to un-bend either the top or bottom of the spiral with a pair of needle nose pliers, unwind the spiral from the pages, un-collate, re-collate, wind the spiral back in place, and then re-bend the one end. The tricky part is predicting ahead of time what kind of pages you'll need to get hole--puunched, if you want to avoid a trip back to the store. I had some blank sheets of paper punched with the hope that I could print on them at home, but I never needed to do that (It wasn't a planner so there was less of a need to swap in/out.)
Comb bindings would also be easy to blind/unbind at home (no need for pliers). It would lay flat as a 2--page spread but not as flat when folded back on itself.
If the pre-populated assignments are what's driving this project, you could put the assignments on mailing labels and just stick them on a standard planner.
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@Ktgrok I was wondering if you've used the phonographix yet with your DD. if so, what are your thoughts on the program? Thus far I'm appreciating Abecedarian's reading program (short A and B1) and wondering about spelling in the near-isn future for my dyslexic kiddo.
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2 hours ago, easypeasy said:
Will definitely give consideration to packing Ourselves and sending it home via UPS. 👍
Be sure to check UPS rules about insurance for the shipping process and who packs it. IIRC, UPS storefronts (with the copy machines and mailboxes) won’t ship things unless THEY pack it themselves.
If she’s present to do the sign in, can she escort movers up to her room and supervise their packing/moving? So she’s present but doesn’t have to do the hard work all by herself?
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https://treasuredconversations.wpcomstaging.com/2020/05/06/back-in-business-sale/
For all the mobile users, you might not have noticed that @8FillTheHeart's siggy changed! 15% off until the end of the month, too!
ETA: Congrats, 8!!!!
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33 minutes ago, Ktgrok said:
Which begs the question, how are the majority of places using this test doing it?
It seems the intial packaging and instructions said it COULD be used with the viral transport media. it was only after customers complained it wasn't working properly and the FDA got involved that they changed their mind, and changed the instructions. But by that point, people already had the tests materials, had trained their techs, etc. And once you've done a test a bunch of times, you don't keep re-reading the instructions each time. I'm sure they sent out an email alert or whatever with the new instructions to people that bought directly from them, but that stuff can get lost in the shuffle. So it isn't just that people didn't follow the directions. The directions were wrong when it was sold.
The test can be used in two different ways. In one method, a swab that has been rubbed against the nose, throat, or the area deep in the back of the nose is inserted directly into the ID Now platform, a toaster-sized machine. That approach is still seen as effective.
But the FDA cleared the test to be used in another way: The swabs could be put in a liquid solution — known as “viral transport media” — and tested, which is the standard way for processing many other kinds of tests and usually allows samples to be stored longer.
In a letter sent to health care providers Wednesday, obtained by STAT, Abbott said that the test should not be used in the solution because it could lead the test to give a negative result when a patient is actually infected. The company said it will work with the FDA to change the language of the product’s package, and intends for changes to be made by the week of April 20.
The letter says the issue was discovered as the new customers conducted validation tests.
Well, I'm glad they are doing validation tests, and I'm sure an article like this will bring attention to the changed instructions!
Burnout Busters—What’s a treat or thing you do to make sure you keep up stamina during the school year?
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
I can't believe I forgot ..... chocolate!!!
Forcing myself to go on a nature walk with the kids is always a good reset. I say 'forcing' because if I'm nearing burnout then I've either got my nose to the grindstone of school .... or my nose in my phone avoiding work.