If one computer on the license is going out of commission and will no longer be used, you can install Office on the new computer, no problem - a call to Microsoft will get you a license key if you need it, but you might not need it.....I didn't when I installed recently on my new computer, which was online at the time and the old computer was no longer online.

I think the term you're looking for is "acolyte"?

:iagree: One of the reasons why we can do as many field trips each year is that we have a science center membership ($65 for the year) which has reciprocal privleges at the ASTC science centers; a children's museum membership ($125 for the year) which has reciprocal privleges at ACM children's museums. Many of the other museums we go to (history, anthropology, art, etc.) are donation admissions, which I'll make a small donation when we go. The zoos have special discount days - sometimes free days, the botanical gardens have free days, and lots of other venues offer discount admissions - you just have to keep an eye out for the coupons and/or special days listed on their calendars.

Typically if I need to see a doctor, my wait is less than 5-minutes - BUT - that's because I take first appointment of the day or first appointment after lunch.....or if neither are available, I'll also take last appointment of the day and then call before heading over to see how far doc is running behind so I can arrive to be seen within 10-minutes of arriving. When I was having to see the maternal-fetal specialist during my pregnancy last year, I scheduled all my appointments that I knew I'd need at the first appointment, that way I had first appointment all throughout; I coordinated those appointments with the OB to follow and that meant I was his first appointment of the day and I had a note on my chart that if he was called to a delivery, to call me so I'd know and not arrive to sit and wait, but could re-schedule over the phone for a time he'd be available. Only once in the pregnancy did I get a call he was in a delivery and re-scheduled to later in the afternoon.

Not counting special things we'll do while on vacation this coming year, we're averaging five field trips a month. One is to the monthly homeschool days program at the science center; since that's a trip for us, I also plan us going to something else that day in the city of the science center to make the drive worth it (ie. zoo, children's museum, history museum, botanical gardens, etc.) - so we actually get a two-fer on that day a month. The others are once a week things I find to do that are more local to us - be it a program at the local museum, a visit to the capitol, or a play, we do something each week that's local and a field trip. I don't count going to the library as a field trip....and this year I have only once a month on the calendar for library since we have a lot of other things planned and I need fewer books from the library this year than I did last year.

Without a doubt. DS hates manipulatives and absolutely won't do anything with them - he's now in SM 2B and we haven't used manipulatives since I realized he hated them. What I do sometimes is ask him to explain his thought process in new concepts, to hear how he is arranging things in his head (or on paper or whitboard) so I know he's got it correctly. What he does enjoy is showing me things on the white board - with lots of different color dry erase markers.....that's his "manipulative" - showing things in different colors, much like the textbook illustrations.

I have to agree that "fun" is subjective - what's fun for one, might not be for another. That said, I think I strike a balance for DS - there are some things he has to do that he'd not say are 'fun', but lots of other things we do that he finds extremely enjoyable, engaging and fun. At the end of the day, I think what matters most is that I really enjoy what I do and that comes through, even with the things that aren't necessarily fun to do, but need to be done.

Well, DH is a doc, so you could say we're a bit phobic about docs (seriously!) - I use my OB/Gyn as my primary and the baby had a pediatrician for the first four months (just like DS did), then we moved him to the family doc that also is our DS's primary (really for chart reasons - kids need a doc with a chart just in case) and DH's primary (since DH obviously can't use my OB/Gyn!).

If she'd previously felt the baby moving, I'd suggest a trip to the ER to check things out if she's not feelign movement and has a feeling something isn't right - intuition is a big thing in my opinion! She actually doesn't necessarily need something with caffeine - just something really cold and possibly sweet (like orange juice).....then lay on her left side with her belly (section between hip and belly button) on the mattrass - that should help her feel movement if the baby is turned or if the placenta is forward. The other thing she can do is "jolt" the baby with a very loud sound - they'll do that too if she goes to the ER if they need to get the baby moving more.....she can use any sound, just has to get close to her belly and be really loud and then pulled away. There are lots of reasons why someone might not feel movement - fluid levels up (not good, but it happens and can be monitored), placenta placed in front, baby moving but not hitting the uterus hard, etc. I hope things turn out okay!

Our dining room serves as our schoolroom, so I picked up five two-shelf bookcases to run along the long wall in there: Shelf 1: Language Arts; Phonics on top, Spelling, Writing and Grammar bottom shelf. On top are readers we'll do throughout the month. Shelf 2: History - first shelf is SOTW with living books we'll do throughout the year; bottom shelf is geography and social studies type books; On top are a box of history flash cards, Professor Noggin Ancients Game, and a small pile of living books we're doing this month. Shelf 3: General reading - lots of books from all genres that are in or just above DS's reading level - I pick and choose from this each month what books we'll read and rotate the books all year. On top of this shelf we keep markers, crayons, a pen-pencil cup, dry-erase lap board, dry erase markers, a cup with scissors and do-dads and the dry-erase eraser. Shelf 4: Math & Science - the bottom shelf is the math books, along with story books about math; first shelf is our science books. On top of this shelf are the books we'll be getting to later as the year progresses that I don't want lost into the shelves! Shelf 5: Kits and supplies - lots of science kits, science supplies, more art supplies, etc. On top of this shelf we keep various things - right now there is a model of a plant cell, a model of an animal cell, a jar of powdered snow, a dissection kit and a model of the solar system. On top of the buffet I keep projects in progress and to one side a pile of reams of paper. Everything inside the buffet is actually for the dining room should we have company and need to eat in there - I can swap that out and swap whatever is on the table into the drawers. My table is huge (seats 12) so that's where we keep what we're working on daily - each subject has a pile toward the end of the table, then the rest of the table is wide open to work on. We also keep a pen-pencil cup on the table, another dry-erase board, cup of markers, eraser, two scissors. To the side of the room I have a huge basket of books for the month that we pick and choose from throughout the month for storytime. I keep four chairs at the table, two others are to the side of the room. I'm placing a small desk by the windows so DS can move his computer into the room this year (it's in the kitchen at the built-in desk currently) and he'll inherit my old printer in there too. In my office I'll have the modem to allow access (or deny) access to the internet since we're still closely monitoring his internet ventures! My office, which is across the foyer from the dining room, has more books, my desk & computer, a printer in there for me to use and filing cabinets to store work from previous years. I also have a supply cabinet in there for arts & craft supplies, more science supplies and manipulatives (that we now don't use, but when baby-DS is ready, I'll have them for him). In the office I also keep my books about homeschooling, teacher's manuals (if I have them), DVD's and other general items. In the laundry room we have a huge shelf with games that we play, some educational, some general play. Downstairs we have a fairly large shelving unit that we bring books down to when we're done with them (out-grown usually) and another cabinet where I move textbooks and workbooks that we're done with that I can use for baby-DS when he gets older. Even with all that - we still wind up with HS all over the house and generally take an hour or so each week to go find everything that should be in the dining room and get it back in there!

Ds voted red

General outline of the years until graduation from high school, but planning in detail is annual for the most part. Some things I'm fairly certain we'll do over the next 3-4 years, like SM to 6B, SOTW through grammar stage and likely through logic stage, I'd like to do Story of Science in the logic stage....other things, I still don't know for sure because I want to see where DS is and stay flexible.

The private school here - midwest - is around $13,500 a year. I was reading about a company in NYC that charges parents $18,500 to help them apply for private preschools and schools in NYC - just to help them apply! There is a private preschool in Manhattan that cost something like $22,000 a year - how crazy is that?

:iagree: I can't recommend highly enough the Nora Gaydos books - they are what really got DS's attention and desire to read up.....in addition to the little books available, we're now also doing the Read It-Write It- Draw It books available and DS, who likes drawing and art, is really, really enjoying them too! Another thing that might help is to read books to him that are a bit above his ability - Flat Stanley, Roscoe Rules, etc. - but don't read it through....just a chapter at a time, that he has to wait to continue going, or......could try a bit himself? That approach has worked with DS too - that he wants to keep going, but tomorrow, ..."unless you'd like to give it a whirl, I'll sit while you read to me and help with any words you don't know".....that started to get him motivated to try more and helped a lot too!

I'd shop around before hitting the purchase button. That and I'd look at everything you're buying - what do you really need and what don't you need? What can you wait on? What is pressing now? First question - are both dc doing the same SOTW? Will you be reading it or will you listen to the CD's? Second - are both ready for Writing with Ease, or could you wait on that until next year when they're both ready? Same with FLL - are they ready for it now or should you wait until next year.....or even later in the year to start, so you can wait to buy or look for sales? One thing I've found helps is to cart things on Amazon, into the "save for later" area of the shopping cart - it's amazing how often what I have placed in the "save for later" cart then appears in my deals for the day at some really good prices. Right now on Peace Hill Press's site, the "everything pack" for SOTW 1 is $66 - that's for the paperback of the book, the activity book, and one extra set of student pages in the activity book and the test book - not bad, right? Except on Amazon the paperback book is $9.41, the activity book is $20.97 and the test book is $10.97 - so $41.35....better, but only one copy of the student pages with the activity book. What about the book at Amazon $9.41 + the test book $10.97, so $20.38.....then from Peace Hill Press buy the activity pages (unless you really, really want the rest of the book saying how to do them) for $9.95 (or PDF for $7.95).....now you're looking at 30.33-32.33 and you're ready to go. If you have a kindle (or other kindle capable device) you could get your cost of the book down to $8.95 with the kindle version. Almost all the books you're looking to buy are cheaper right now on Amazon.

We have to do 1,000 hours a year in MO - one of the reasons we've already started the year. Of the 1,000 (as noted above), 600 need to be in core subjects, the other 400 can be electives & PE. Meeting the requirements isn't at all difficult, but we do need to stay aware throughout the year of just how much or how little we're doing. That said, I schedule us for class hours and have figured out how much is reasonable for DS to have to do for each subject in a class hour - he is well aware that if he gets the work done before the end of the time, he's done....BUT....his work has to be neat, it has to be complete, and it has to be at least 90% correct (ie. math) - sloopy, incomplete or too many errors and it's back to do it again. If he hasn't finished in the time I have scheduled, we stop and move on, completing the work the next day rather than continue unless he's really into whatever (usually science stuff) and really wants to keep going. When he's loving something we're doing, I don't stop just because the class hour is over - but I do stay aware that we'll still need to do other things and make a judgement call if we go over by a lot of time - either stop us at some point to move on, or decide we can do the other things the next day. For July 1 - August 14, I have just 60 hours of school work scheduled plus 40 hours of science camps, so 100 hours. When I add on DS's twice weekly sports as PE, that's another 15 hours and he has a couple of programs - one art, one history that he's signed up for that's another 15 hours - so by the time we ramp up the schedule to full-time, we'll already have met 130 hours for the year, making the rest of the year that much easier to do since I'll need to schedule about 4 hours a day if we take 8-10 weeks off during the rest of the year through June 30th if we include really light work on some vacations (ie. reading & math) which we usually do anyway.

Welcome to tweaking until you find what works for you! I've gone the gammut from uber-planning to taking it as it comes, to recently finding my nice middle-ground. I've found that for some subjects it's really impossible for me to plan the whole year out, to the day, or even the week - like math - because DS will go in fits and spurts and totally throw whatever I planned out the window, especially when he's on a math tear and just moving ahead at the speed of lightening! So for next year (well, now it's this year) I spent a good month figuring out just what will work for me and for us and what I came up with is... First I did plan the goals for the year - for each subject, what do we need to cover and a best guestimate around when in the year we'll hit our "milestones" as we go. I did that because for some things, I want to plan a field trip, or we'll actually be on a vacation somewhere that I can tie in something that's there and not here. For each major area of subject lessons, I also have listed the books I'd like us reading along with the curriculum (ie. what living books go with what chapters of SOTW, what math stories go with what he'll be doing in math, same with science, etc.). From the list I have checkmarks next to what we own, an "L" next to what I need to reserve from the library, and a "B" next to what I'd like to buy so I can remember in the weeks leading up to the subject matter to make the purchase if I haven't already found it for a good price. In addition, on each subject list, I include the projects and activities, as well as field trips or programs I want DS to do when we get to various lessons. They're fairly long documents - but I think I've gotten everything in each subject for the year in there, it's just not by day, week or month - just the order we'll do things and what I'll need to round out the curriculum as we go. Rather than set them into a daily schedule, weekly schedule, or even a monthly schedule, I'm keeping each subject as its own "list" of what we'll go through in the year, that I can cut & paste into the monthly schedule as I go through the year. With that 'monthly' list as the goal for the month, I then do try to break it up into the next four weeks - each week onto a page, with check boxes next to each line item to check off as we go along. I keep all four sheets together, that way if we're running ahead on something, I don't have to make adjustments and re-print, I just keep checking as we go. Once I have my four weeks laid out, I print them and set up the subjects materials into folders so I don't have to go searching for things as we go. All living books for the month are moved into the reading basket we have and any books we're done with are moved back to the bookshelf so we can still read it again, but it's not a priority book. I'm only on our second week doing it this way, and so far, it's working out nicely - I don't feel pressured to get everything done in a day because it's on the day's plan.....if we're getting ahead in something, like history, that's okay, I can fill the gap with other things later in the week and just skip history or plug ahead if we want to into the materials for the next week, which is in its own folder to grab and go with. Since I have to record hours, I maintain a separate datebook that I just list the subjects and time in each day as we end the day - at the end of the month, I'll tuck our lists for the month into the planner so I have that as what we did each week for actual lessons since I just record in the datebook the subject and the time, nothing more.

I don't know if I qualify as an uber-planner, but I do plan some things, mostly books and projects to incorporate into the curriculum we're using. I don't really consider dividing up the chapters into weeks/months (goals) to be planning, but do consider it planning when I look through the material and have to decide what else to include, to go along with what we're going to be doing, or where we'll be with another subject to tie things together. An example - when we were doing the first couple of chapters of SOTW 1, I picked books I thought DS would enjoy for our bedtime stories - each one I chose was chosen because it was tied to the chapters (The First Dog, The One Blue Bead, You Wouldn't Want to be a Mammoth Hunter, D is for Dinosaur, and The Cave Painter of Lascaux). In addition, during the couple of weeks we also we did lessons on fossils, the development of tools and fire and our projects included making cave paintings in the cave diorama we made, the activity book pages, history pockets and going out to attempt to forage some wild berries...along with watching a selection of videos throughout the time we were doing the chapters. It was a lot of fun and DS really enjoyed it all, so did I! I have learned though that trying to figure it all out a year in advance is, for me, way too much to do, so I tend to do my planning in spurts, a month here, a month there - taking notes as I read here and then checking things out that others have done too....then making up what I'll do with DS that I think will work for us. We just started our year last Friday and I pretty much know what we'll be doing between now and October - sometime in August or September, I'll tackle the rest of the year (2011) and so on through the end of the school year. The only thing at this point I have "planned" out for the entire year is our basic outline of what I feel we can get to, chapter wise or lesson wise, each month....but the finer details, I do those over the school year as I go.

If it's out there, I haven't found it....LOL I do know that Khan Academy has videos for Singapore Math though, starting with 3A. RS4K also has their Chemistry pre-Level 1 available through iTunes.

He might actually be a right-dominant ambidexterous - I am - I found out when I was young, I'd broken a finger on my right hand and couldn't use it and my science teacher realized I was writing with my left hand, taking notes, without any issues. I didn't realize until recently that letter reversals are also tied to ambidextrousness and that I apparently did it when I was younger (until 8-9) as per my mother, who told me when I was telling her about DS's letter reversals and that he realizes when he looks down at the paper after he's written the letter backward/reversed (b for d, 3 for E) or mirrored (m for w). For a while he was reading in reversals too, but that has stopped and now it's just on paper he sometimes does it (will be 7 in August). Practice, practice, practice is what helped me (said mom) and that's what seems to be working for my DS - lots of practice using whichever letters he reverses at the same time......for example, if we're working on b/d....he'll practice B b, B b, B b, the D d, D d, D d (keeping the capital and lowercase together to remember which is which).....then bat, ball, dog, dud, base, date, deer, ball, etc. Just about four lines on paper a day, but it does help!

I certainly hope it's possible to do both in a year since that's what I have on our plan! We're moving along with SOTW and that's what I consider to be our history lessons, our "social studies" is Geography (US & World), US History, and Government (US this year).

That's what I'd suggest - we have DVC points, so I've had to do the multiple call thing to get the answer I want with making reservations...perseverance pays with DVC! That said, if she still can't get the reservation, you may want to reimburse her for the points for the third person who can't go - just ask her how many points the third person was and her maintenance fees and offer to reimburse her that if none of your dc go!

I consider myself really lucky - after baby-DS was born, DH suggested we hire a pt nanny so I'd have some help and uninterrupted time to do homeschool with DS (or have mommy & older DS time); part of her hours is one night a week where we can get out on a date -OR- attend a function we need to....so it usually works out that we have two dates a month and two business functions (sans kids) and the kids are home with her until we get back! I love, love, love it!

Most martial arts classes for children aren't about self-defense until they hit puberty and their bodies are better able to do the moves necessary. That said, rather than something like tai quown do (sic) or karate, maybe you can find an instructor for jujitsu that teaches protecting oneself from injury rather than offense? My DS recently started a jujitsu program designed for kids and it's great - the instructor works to teach the kids what to do if they get into a playground scuffle - how to fall and not get hurt, how to roll away, how to get up quickly and get into a defensive posture (or RUN like heck).....it's not martial arts like most classes, just ways to protect yourself from getting hurt if you're pushed, if you fall, etc. and DS likes that (he didn't like the other two classes we tried).

I use both... iPad for our calendar of activities (calendar goo app), with sharing between me, DH and our pt nanny. That way we can all add to it, make changes, move things around, and know who's doing what with whom and when. Our nanny also records her hours each week (daily) on it under a separate color tab which makes it easy for me or DH to pay her every two weeks without having to remember her hours; before doing it this way, she kept a written record, but often had to go back and remember when she left or arrived, where now it's just log on and make note as she goes, right from her iPhone (same app on her phone, synchs to the calendar). Printed things though are sometimes important - DS for example really likes to have his reading progress chart on paper, he likes to put his stickers on it each day he does his work and watch the stickers accumulate. Same with his chore chart - each day he likes to add his stickers as he completes tasks....on the iPad it just wouldn't have that same "look and feel" for him.