When did this become a thing? I'd never heard of putting it on pizza until I started doing foster care and most of the kids we've had have demanded ranch salad dressing on pretty much everything including pizza. Is it a generational thing? Regional? Socioeconomic? Am I missing out on something delicious?

In order to meet CC standards, our local district has had to dump TERC Investigations for math and switch to something more mainstream. They've also ditched their previous whole language non-textbook reading program and gone with something more balanced and traditional. In our community, CC has raised academic standards and makes me far *more* willing to have my kids attend public school.

Look into Megawords by the same publisher. We like Apples and Pears for spelling.

I had preschool aged kids while working on a PhD and found it impossible to be both the student I wanted to be and the mother I wanted to be. I had them in daycare until 6 for a while and used an au pair for a while, but it was still pretty near impossible. Perhaps if you had a more flexible or humane program... Or a spouse who could help out... But I had neither and hated how many evenings and weekends and birthdays and holidays I missed.

When I did teacher training years ago, there was a theme running that we could teach "critical thinking" instead of teaching content and that it was somehow a more efficient way of educating children. The idea was that history and science are dry boring facts, but that teaching critical thinking would be inspiring and engage the brain and produce smarter kids. I remember thinking it was kind of like they were proposing a diet pill instead of the hard work of actually getting fit. So in my class I was expected to give the students fun little logic puzzles for them to work on in groups and I did. And they were fun -- but I always felt like my teaching professors had missed the point. History and science are themselves inspiring and involve engaging the brain and making connections. I have studied logic in grad school and don't feel the need to teach it to my kids other than having spent a day or two on logical notation and truth tables, and some basics of logical fallacies in writing. It's not that it's useless, it's that there are so many awesome other subjects too. In fact, every academic subject I can think of is worthy of study and offers benefit to a child's educational development. We teach history to understand the world by looking at the past - looking for patterns, for reasons why larger events happened, history teaches how to think about ideas in a context of time and place. History involves big thinking and surely has applications in understanding present and future events unfolding. These are skills for a lifetime. Science is also not just trivial content, we teach science so that our kids understand how the entire world works. When you study science you are learning how ideas can be tested - that you can ask a question and devise an experiment and set up controls and have evidence pointing towards an answer. Science teaches that the answers to research are constantly being built upon by generations of a scientific community. The study of science drives technology and health and surely is worthy of study. But then again, every field is seeking to understand the world by understanding one part of it. Sociology can help our kids understand how the social world works -- how we create society and are molded by it. Studying psychology could help your child understand emotion and behavior and perception. Studying philosophy helps you to have an understanding of truth, knowledge, reality itself, these are huge important questions too. It just depends on what your priorities are. There are many paths to becoming an educated person and you don't have to study logic if you don't want to.

Ellen McHenry!

Of course I discourage clothing not appropriate for the occasion or weather. I certainly don't send my kids out to the shop in a bathing suit or to the pool in dress up clothes. I think it's my job to guide them towards knowing how to behave and dress in social settings. "Quirky" is one thing - it's perhaps interesting and cool and about an unconventional style. But that's not what I'm usually up against. Without guidance, most of my kids (foster and bio) would prefer matted unkempt hair, flip flops, dirty clothes that does not fit. Fine for camping, not okay for civilized life. I'm constantly sending kids back to change shirts and put on real shoes and brush their hair. I can't see how I 'd be helping them by allowing them to dress like nobody cares for them. As for unusual behaviors, I guess it depends on the situation.

If you like historical cooking, we made jugged hare from a 500-ish yr old recipe and it was surprisingly delicious!

To be clear though, it wasn't a Concordia staff member. It was a school field trip to the camp and the school brought their own instructors with them. If anything, I thought CLV was a little to overly cautious about safety; perhaps it is in response to that incident four years ago?

There are many ways to becoming an educated person capable of critical thinking. The study of logic is not a requirement.

Yes!! At my sub-standard Christian school, they used permanent ink markers and scissors to cut out complete stories to censor the lit books. It did have educational value though... I spent hours at the public library uncovering the stories and lines of text to find out what was so offensive.

I don't think a child can be too young... He just won't learn if he isn't ready. Learning to read is really all about the child and has little to do with teaching at all. Point him in the right direction (star fall, between the lions, alphabet books) and he might catch on. Or perhaps more likely, he won't. In which case just wait a bit. He'll get there in time.

We were told not to worry if they came out... just put them back in or wait and come in the next day the office is open... no big deal. Also, the turning of the screw is pretty easy.

We enjoyed galore park SYRWL Maths after Singapore. My daughter did book 2 following SM 6b, so you might start at book 1 after SM 5b. It had a nice mix of different topics of middle school math and was not intimidating like some pre-algebra books. After book 3, algebra is a breeze!

Not HS credit, but my dd went to a 2 week french program this summer at the Concordia lac du bois site and loved it.

I think the need for kindness and gentleness in an ideal teacher decreases as the grade level of the student they teach increases. But, the need for intelligence and strong academic skills increases as the grade level of the student increases. Kind college professors who are not intelligent and academically rigorous are nice, but useless. High achieving academics who are unkind should not be near a kindergarten or first grade.

I did a fifth year multiple subject teaching credential in the evenings through an internship program and found that it was very much a waste of time. What I wanted were practical tips and advice for addressing classroom management problems, making interesting lesson plans that engage the students, meeting standards, grouping students, talking with parents and administrators, etc... That is, I wanted practical instruction on the vocation of teaching. What I had to sit through instead was a year of classes taught by people who had not been in the public schools for years, did not understand our population at all, did not recognize the standards and testing burden we had to achieve. It was like the entire department was yearning to be a real academic field, so they did their best at trying to pull other fields' latest theories into a pedagogical context without truly understanding the point. They adored using jargon unnecessarily, as if to create the feeling they were truly academics. They all had what they saw as progressive and new ideas (promotion of whole language, constructivist math, etc...) that were unrealistic in the current schools, but they promoted them with activist zeal while entirely losing sight of the purpose of meeting students' academic needs. It was hard to focus on my students when being asked to jump through absurd hoops.

You could photocopy the practice and test at the back of the booklet and have him do several problems a day from different books. Or you could use the "Math Minutes" review books.

I'll just put another plug in for Foerster. My daughter dislikes math but tolerates Foerster. The word problems really are very good. They're challenging, but the author leads you through them step by step. We go through the lesson, working the problems on a white board, then do the 'oral practice', then I have my daughter do a selection of the problems (usually odds, but all word problems). Usually the final 5-10 problems of the lesson are a mixed review. She's good at manipulating equations and factoring polynomials and such, but word problems are tricky for my girl. Foerster is helping.

I've got a 6yr old party boy and a 12 yr old snowflake. First time performing on pointe!

Hanna Anderson carries knit jeans and other soft pants. My 10 yr old loves them.

Horrible history and science have been favorites here.

I have a 12 yr old Francophile too. We did SYRWL French last year, but her tutor quit mid year and I don't know French. She finished the year with duo lingo, but I don't think she felt she learned much. Over the summer she went to concordia language village for immersion French. It was pretty awesome, but just two weeks. She learned the most there. Now she's trying her first online class at online g3. I am skeptical that the one hour per week (plus homework) is enough to make much progress. I add in extra work, but not enough. She needs conversation practice. At the rate she's going, I'd anticipate a few more years in first year French!

With my daughter I read a book called "Dude That's Rude!" I found it was helpful to have specific, direct advice. Also, She had an easier time accepting suggestions about behavior from a book than from her mother.

I do a month unit on grammar, then sentence construction/writing style, then essay writing, then literary analysis and writing literary analysis papers. Finally we'll do a test-prep unit prior to taking a required standardized test. I've attempted doing it all consecutively and have been overwhelmed. Also, I try to align English and history, so there are some literature readings and author studies throughout the year.