I did and will write mostly fantasy, some sci-fi, some horror (just short stories for that--I don't like horror enough to take it more than a few pages). But I have NO time now--working full-time on opposite shifts with dh, homeschooling, and finally finishing up my creative writing degree with an unrelated class (so no writing there). I don't even have time to read, much less write. :(

Ack! Dostoevsky, garbage??? Be still my ringing ears ;). Dostoevsky is the best. I had an entire college course on just his works. Crime and Punishment is fabulous--Dostoevsky is great at work on the human psyche.

So does she have a "nice personality" or is she a raving psychopathic liar? I can't imagine any decent person just randomly claiming rape out of the blue with people she wants to adopt her because her own home is so horrible. :confused: That seems way over the top, personally. I'd just (forewarn dd so she can give a heads-up) set her down and tell her that you're happy to have her over at your house during the day, but she has to follow the rules of your house when she's there. The rules are ___________. Keep them simple so you can remind her later if you have to. Basic stuff like we don't touch stuff without asking, do foul language, etc. Remind her once or twice and if she keeps doing it, politely ask her to head out for the day but she can come back tomorrow if she can remember the rules of the house. And if there was a boy the same age whose father was going on a drunken rampage and wanted a safe place to sleep, you bet I'd let him stay over--in a sleeping bag on my bedroom floor or with a hidden baby monitor out though ;) or I'd send dd to another friend's house for the night.

Oh yeah, Life Is Beautiful :). Valkyrie was alright but it might be over the 8-yr-old's head. Lots of plotting and theoretical what-ifs and not much action, lol. Depends on your 8-year-old.

Dh is a big WWII buff but none of his choices would be appropriate for children. I am hopeful that when Truth and Treason is finished, it will be a great selection. It's about Helmuth Heubner and his two friends, all teenage Germans who fought the Nazis from the inside, listening illegally to the BBC and printing/distributing newsletters of what was REALLY happening in the war. Eventually they were caught, arrested, tried, and sentenced (executed/concentration camps), but they never regretted it. The last living member of that trio came and spoke to our Honors Civ class in college :D. Amazing stuff.

ETA: The new school-then-play schedule and mystery basket instead of all the subjects went GREAT. We just had reading/scripture, and went over history while we ate a snack, and dd played Starfall for half of her playtimes :lol:, and the "question" basket was such a hit that although I had just one "?" on the schedule, dd came back and asked to pick out a subject again 3 more times. Listened to French songs and played on french4tots, painted for art, etc, all just pulled out at random. Oh, and then we did a little bit of phonics. Not overwhelming at all!

Ah, okay. :)

Wow, glad you guys had fun with this one :lol:. I think for me, it comes down to the fact that it's just not a good fit for us now, and I don't want to pay more to buy the 2nd resources for later. I can buy the OSS and DK again if I want to, but I think A&TW has to find a new home. Interesting about Sonlight though--I was considered that for 1st as well....

I used it when *I* was in 8th grade, for algebra. I don't remember much :lol: but it had a textbook and math is my worst subject and I did fine, so it can't have been *that* bad ;)

I keep wanting to unschool until middle school and go classical, but then I'd probably change half of the curriculum again (I have curricula but I used it as a framework to structure my own schooling anyway :tongue_smilie:.)

I'm an English major and former editor and I still don't remember half the terms :lol:. I know what is right and how it is all supposed to work together, but I can't remember the names for the life of me. I couldn't tell you what a past perfect tense is for the life of me but I guarantee you I use it correctly. So I guess if I could only remember some of it, I'd rather remember the function than the name, but it is embarrassing and I have no idea how to fix it :glare:. (My college grammar course was mostly theoretical on modern language and grammar evolution so that didn't help me remember the terms any either, lol.)

Dd was 22.1 at her 2nd checkup yesterday. And she is probably stronger than her 4-year-old sister. She has sensory seeking SPD and runs/climbs/jumps/stomps alllllll day long. Tiny but all wiry muscle! Luckily we're all scrawny and the doc's gotten used to it I think :lol:

I have horrible time management myself and I use my cell phone's schedule with alarm--it has a "snooze" set for 5 minutes so when I get distracted it goes off again :lol:

(dumb question alert :lol:) So... what's the point of WP Animals & Their Worlds? I got it for dd Pre-K, but it's so far over her head right now that I don't think we'd use it until 1st. And by then we'd have to add history, math, phonics, foreign language, scripture, any science experiments, culture, etc. It seems like it's just reading about animals, with some conceptual science and basic art. That seems more like a unit study idea than an entire curriculum set up for a year, at that price. Am I missing something, or did I just not realize what I was getting when I bought it? :confused:

We are working on that right now. We just started school Mon. Since I work and they have some extra-curricular activities, we only have about 4 hours at home on the short days and packing it with all 8 subjects in HOD LHFHG was making it almost constantly "school school school" and dd wasn't enjoying it. So tomorrow we're going to try a new schedule. I made a little picture chart of our day :tongue_smilie:with eat, playtime (she doesn't respond well to school immediately after breakfast, even if it's something she enjoys), reading, play, history or science, play, mystery (we have a basket with cards for art, math, French, ASL, ABCs, scriptures, cooking, etc and she draws one out), play, and phonics. Each school section only takes perhaps 10 minutes, but if I try to do several back-to-back dd gets upset and tries to leave. If she gets playtime mixed in, she does school stuff like Starfall during playtime :lol:. On our extra-curricular-free days we might draw an extra card. I want to try and do scriptures/verse over breakfast, but haven't tried it yet.

Thanks for this! I've been trying to figure out how to design my own--the unschooler in me just won't work with a plain boxed curriculum :lol: and I am changing 70% of it. For some reason it was so hard to make any sort of written plan myself. (The scheduling part of my brain doesn't work, I swear.)

We do listen to DVDs in French sometimes, but we're still at the it-makes-no-sense stage .:tongue_smilie: Thanks for the advice so far everyone--it's what I was doing a little bit already but I'll keep it up/step it up!

:bigear:

I have no idea. This is the "ahead of grade level" board and dd was reading at 3, so I figured she qualified :001_smile: but I have no interest in testing her (or any of my kids) unless they want to be tested. I think my parents tested me ages ago (upper end of mildly gifted---awww, I'm only sort of special :lol: because I'm quite average at math and that brings my score down on the rest) and it hasn't changed how we went about things with me, I think. They just tried to do whatever worked best, and so will we. Dd2 has SPD so I need to figure out how she learns first....

We have the LittleTouch LeapPad but she won't play with it--no DVDs yet. I'm not really looking for sit-down instruction for right now, just planning and seeing what's out there for next year. (Before last month I wouldn't have guessed she *could* learn like that :o and I certainly don't expect her to keep up that pace!) That vision therapy sounds interesting--she really does ONLY learn from moving pictures right now. (In fact, she rather flips out if she can't watch a DVD or some kind of moving picture, and we don't even have cable TV or watch very much:confused:). I'll ask her OT about it next week. :)

Yeah, so after two days she HATES the OPG and doesn't want me to open it :001_huh:. She just wants to read her Nora Gaydos readers, and she liked the plain ol' worksheets better than the OPG. Eep. Maybe I'll read up on the rules myself and just crack that WP back open....

Terry Prachett, and I second the Anne McCaffery

Dd2 has SPD/sensory seeking (okay, they won't label that young so she just officially has "severe sensory issues" :tongue_smilie:). She has had a hate on for books most of her life (screaming and throwing them if you tried to read one or even open one with her). She does not "pick up" learning just from her environment, like from reading or watching dh and I or her sister, etc. I have discovered recently that when she learns, she is a very visual learner. She did learn her entire alphabet, upper and lower, in two weeks with her Signing Time letter drills (speech delayed, mostly signs). Before that she had not said/signed a single letter, ever, with the methods we used with her sister (alphabet song, books, posters around the house, etc). She also likes Starfall.com. Very visual/active seems to be her learning style. Is there a phonics program/reading program that suits her style of learning? I'm getting tired of her pointing at the computer and yelling "A! E! M! Z!" over and over until I sit with her on Starfall, lol.

Has anyone used Lyric Language?

Woohoo, "free" is my favorite word :lol: