I’m certain I will know some people within days. We had a superspreader event (confirmed Omicron) recently and each day’s case numbers are approximately 50% greater than the previous. But our public health people said we’re at capacity for testing now so I expect we won’t know the true numbers going forward. Hospitalizations haven’t risen yet, but if the entire province is exposed within the next 3-4 weeks, well…. The people here are highly double-vaxxed with mRNA, but kids only got the chance to start the series 2 weeks ago, and boosters are currently available to over-60s, immunocompromised and health care workers. I firmly support prioritizing the most vulnerable, but I feel like we’re a little behind, and case numbers are rising so fast there is really no time to do more.

Recent hits: ULAT for French, at least for one kid, other one I’m not sure about at the moment. AOPS Prealgebra is going better than expected for my oldest, and she’s steadily going through it. Middle School Chemistry from ACS is also going well, as is the DSD exam prep at the German Saturday School. Tried and true: Virtual trip around the world, reading books and watching videos from every continent, and Beast Academy for the younger two is still going fine. Reading practice with them reading Harry Potter out loud. Still working about once a week on math operations with place value counters for my youngest. History with SWB’s books. Misses: CAP’s French for Children B starts moving way too fast about halfway through the book (too much verb conjugation without enough practice) so we’re doing extra review and videos from Francais avec Pierre (all speaking in French with subtitles). But we’ll add the book back in once the new verbs are solid, so it’s not too dire.

We do German and French instead of Latin. German in particular has lots of grammar concepts to learn that don’t occur in English, and French has Latin roots. We’re currently using a mix of CAP’s French for Children and the ULAT for French, and the local German Saturday school plus my native-speaker partner for German. I don’t know Latin myself, and it has far fewer speakers than these two modern languages, so they made more sense for us. Latin is, in my mind, an “enthusiast” subject, so I think it would be great for those who want to but I can’t really imagine most people considering your kids “less” if they didn’t do Latin, especially if you substituted with something like grammar, roots, or modern languages.

@wendyroo, thanks so much for recommending ULAT. We’ve been spending time on this twice a week since September, and it is working out really well for my two younger kids. They practice with each other. The hand gestures do help to give cues without speaking English, and the frequent listening and speaking practice is really good too. It’s a great program.

She’s older enough that I thought we had already added the necessary offset time for the AO booklist. I may try your Christmas Carol suggestion with her and also her 10 and 7 yo siblings, thanks!

I think we’re going to switch to Pride & Prejudice and see if that is more enjoyable. We read and enjoyed Lorna Doone recently, even though it took months. It also had a fairly graphic murder of a toddler by the Doones, though, that I cut out for the most part. Our current literature theme is English lit written between 1750 and about 1850, so these ones are old books although we do read lots of newer ones as well. We’re not using AO as a curriculum; I’ve just looked at their booklists from time to time for ideas. I thought at this point that I had waited 4 grades already, but oh well! Thanks for the reinforcement that this really just wasn’t a winner right now. I did read the murder scene and it made me feel sick- no way that’s suitable for right before bed for my 13 yo. Thanks for the heads-up on that! She is fine with switching books. Maybe we’ll read a synopsis so she isn’t left wondering. We haven’t tried Plutarch, though we’ve done a fair bit of Shakespeare. However, it’s been Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, not Othello. She’s fine with the level of the language but the content hasn’t worked. Maybe a different Dickens another time.

Maybe I should pre-read the murder. I knew it was there but not that it was graphic. Sikes’ repeated abuse of Nancy has already turned up. I don’t think she is that into the story. She finds it really grim and heavy, especially right before bed, which is our only reliable reading time. We are still reading it, but I think we could just agree to abandon it. Move on to Pride & Prejudice, or Gulliver’s Travels, or even The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I’m joking on the last one, kind of, but it didn’t seem darker. Some of the same themes… I really don’t understand why Ambleside Online has this in the elementary booklist. It seems to me to be completely inappropriate. But maybe I have sensitive kids.

At this point, I’d definitely recommend going with the story you like. But maybe it gets better… I’m reading Pickwick Papers on the side myself, and it is much lighter, even though the main character ends up in jail and the courts are unjust.

Update on Dickens progress following discussion on this thread: currently about a third of the way through Oliver Twist with my 13 yo (read aloud). And it is grim, grim, grim. Between the child abuse and anti-semitism on every page, we’re not sure we should keep going. For anyone that has read it with a young teen, does it get better? Or should we bail out now?

The local adult complete beginners Saturday School class uses the Hueber Schritte International textbook and it is German only with no glossary. So is my daughter’s Cornelsen Prima Plus textbook. She’s planning to take the DSD1 exam this year. I think it might be common. They try to use pictures to get the ideas across. After a series of presentations, I can also imagine that most of the kids were just tired and wouldn’t have taken in any more. That could be a fairly intense class, even if it’s short. Hope it improves for you!

That’s wonderful, so glad it worked out!

I think the usefulness really depends on if your main mental model of division is that x/y means you are splitting x into y equal groups and the answer is how many one group gets (which is what I use mainly), or that it means splitting x into some number of groups of size y, and the answer is how many groups. If it’s the second model, then repeated subtraction could be quite useful and intuitive. If it’s the first model, it’s not much help at all.

zombie 🧟‍♀️… though an interesting question

True, the butt-kissing scene is in there…I was wondering if I should include a warning about that. It didn’t seem like my kids thought about it all that much, though, just to the potty humour extent of being super gross. In terms of language, Ackroyd’s version is less appropriate, but like you noted, quite a few of the stories have questionable scenes.

My kids really enjoyed a comic-strip style version by Marcia Williams that we read last year. I’m currently making my way through Peter Ackroyd’s prose translation, though this is definitely not appropriate for elementary children!

In my previous post, in addition to time, I have found so far that it takes putting in limits & consequences, enforced as supportively and calmly as possible at that time, over and over again over that time while their brains sloooowly mature and then over time it gets better, not that it is simply a matter of waiting. It's just that the limits don't immediately become internalized by kids, so it also takes time. It's especially not a matter of just waiting when you are sacrificing your own self-care to the point that you can no longer do things supportively.

@WTM, it sounds like you are taking lots of positive steps, and I really hope this will start to bear fruit for you. Best wishes for improving your family situation successfully in the longer term. The pandemic seems to me too to have been really hard on support relationships, so I hope this will also get easier. I had a time a few years ago when everything parenting seemed insurmountable, but it has gotten a lot better since and my kids' development seems to help enormously in that, as well as talking to myself differently and making more time for self-care (not baths, chocolate or wine, but daily gratitude exercises, physical exercises, and more sleep). @Not_a_Number, don't lose hope at this point! With one of my kids, 9 was the worst year of all, and she too is not a people pleaser and at that time was very prickly and just pushing against everything all the time. I've seen amazing development in her over the past 4 years, as she works out what she needs or wants and now makes realistic plans to do it. The increased ability for her to do the things she wants to has really helped, and now we get along quite well. That doesn't mean we won't have another period of difficulty in her teen years, but 4 years have done wonders and we are solid for now. You've got some time before 13 and yours could follow a similar path. At least, I hope this will get easier for you too!

Hmm, interesting, this might be a useful clue as to how well BA will fit a given kid. I’m definitely curious about how they’ll approach level 1. It makes sense to me to have a consistent program all the way up, hopefully it’ll have lots of place value.

Yes, it could be they see it as something more structural than playful, if that’s what you’re getting at. My kids are more into puzzles than I am.

Mine all got an introduction to jigsaw puzzles with their grandmother, who gave them jigsaws for their birthdays several years in a row and then did them together when she came to visit. It sounds like your girls probably do see different things in math than primarily puzzles. But it’s not like people have to be puzzle-motivated.

Maybe, but mine like jigsaw puzzles, sudoku puzzles, crossword puzzles, riddles…so the pattern is clear!

We have used it as the introduction for quite a number of concepts, and for some of them it’s worked well, but in others we hit big roadblocks. My kids all like puzzles, though, I believe more than yours do. I have been (over the past 6 months) supplementing/preparing with more basic concepts earlier, which has been very helpful. Unfortunately, though, I can only work on one thing at a time, so if I put a push on French as planned, I know extra math will fall off the table…I wish I could do all the things!

I tried the first lesson with the two kids, with mixed reviews. He goes through the lesson, and then through the activities in the video. I’m not sure if he does this for all the activities or just when he’s explaining the different kinds of activities. If he keeps that up, do you get your kids to watch him do it and then do it themselves, or just do it themselves and check the video of the activity if confused? My 10 year old found it too repetitive, but I think it was also that he couldn’t understand very much yet. Also, do you find the timers useful and get your kids to time themselves? I really like that ULAT is so focused on verbal French. I think CAP’s French for Children is good for understanding grammar but not so good at listening and speaking and that’s a hole in my older child’s French ability. Thanks, @TheAttachedMama, this does make sense as a strategy and I’ll have a look at Paul Noble’s materials. We could definitely do this, thanks for the idea. I found the Julie et Sami books too, and I see what you mean about the grey for silent letters, that’s clever.

I got that impression too, that level 2 was the beginning. My kids are all older than this now, but I’m really curious how they will do level 1.

Thanks, @HomeAgain, I’ll have a look at both of these. Is Art de Lire story-based? ETA: Phonics focus would be really suitable for my 10 year old. He needed quite a bit of phonics instruction to learn to read English, and he really liked the clear rules. We are in Canada anyway so shipping wouldn’t be too bad. I need to start the younger two on French so that they can communicate with the francophones in our province. ETA: How far does Getting Started go compared with Art de Lire?