Is the textbook a consumable product as opposed to the workbook? Are both textbook and workbook necessary? Or is the textbook just illustrations of what to do (stuff I could probably figure out and teach on my own) while the workbook is the practice stuff?

What basic subjects should I include in our first grade plans? For Math, we are doing Singapore Math Primary 1a+b Phonics and Grammar: BJU Spelling: AAS1 Music: piano lessons PE: we live on a farm where the kids run free, so exercise is not really a concern Language: Greek (still deciding on the curriculum) Geography: general map studies and map skills at this point with various resources I already have on hand. History/Science: should I bother with actually purchasing history and science curricula for first grade? It seems like we can probably discover history and science stuff on our own without locking into a curriculum yet. I have tons of books and resources we could tap for this. Am I missing anything important?

Wow! The list of poetry and reviews for each in that post is AWESOME!!! Thanks! I had been looking at a couple of those books and appreciated your perspectives on them. So helpful, thanks!

I'm wondering about books of poetry for young children. I'd like a nice anthology of classics. Not just nursery rhymes and sunday school songs since I can get most of them online. I'm talking about the good classical poems that will give the children a foundational appreciation for poetry. My children are very young: the oldest is not even 6 years old yet; so illustrated poems would be great for helping them become engaged in the experience of each poem.

Thanks both of you! That gives me somewhere to start.

A friend of mine is really struggling with how to handle her son who was diagnosed with Asperger's two years ago. The condition is apparently minimal and so her son is not eligible to receive much help except for special education classes. She has little support from her husband (I think he is struggling with it as much as she is and is retreating from the problem in his own way) and virtually none from her son's school. Her state is ranked 48th in support for autism, so you can guess how much help she's getting from her community. Her pastor has little to no experience with such things and doesn't seem to really understand how to counsel or help. I'd love to help her out by at least directing her to Christian autism support services that can be found through an online community. She is so discouraged and seems as if she is shutting out as much of life as possible a result of the depression that the whole experience is causing. It's really affecting her other two children as well. I'm sure all of this is very normal, but so hard to go through. It's tearing at the family and if they don't get help soon it will only get harder. I can't help beyond communicating with her since I live out of state. Where can I direct her for help?

Thanks! That gives me a little bit of an idea what to expect so I can fit it into the budget for the month. Actually, $5 for coil binding isn't as much as I expected. We'll see what it is in my area.

Do you guys make your own lesson plan books and have them bound? I have finally got a lesson plan format that seems to be workable and want to have it bound as a full planner for the rest of the school year. I don't know what kind of cost I'll be looking at and I can't find anywhere that posts their prices online. I assume it's pretty subjective based on the project specs, but I'd love to know what your experience has been.

Thanks!

My son is five and has a good handle on recognizing 2 digit numbers, building them on the abacus or with tally sticks etc., and saying them correctly. However, when he is asked to write them out, he generally reverses the order of the digits. Is this a place value problem? A left/right tracking thing? A reversal problem? He's really young, so I don't want to get all worried for no reason. I'm just wondering if this is normal and how to address it.

It survived the washer?!!!! Woah! That's some pretty good advertising. Thanks! I'll start looking at Sansa players then!

I'm still in the dark ages. I do not own an mp3 player. In fact, we are kind of strict utilitarians about all our technology in that we only have the basics we are absolutely convinced will be valuable to us and not just a drain on our time or budget. So, my cd player is probably about 10 years old and on its last leg. Our DVD player is strictly the one that came installed in our computer. We don't even own a television at all. We have a tape deck that was given to us so we can make use of all those cassettes my mom got rid of when we kids left the house. . . . yeah. You get the picture.:001_smile: Well, as my children are old enough for audio books, I'm starting to re-think the value of an mp3 player. Frankly, audio books are cheaper if you download the MP3 version rather than buying the cd and having it shipped. Sooooooo, I'm in the market for an upgrade. I am absolutely dizzy looking at all the options for mp3 players out there. :001_huh: Here's what I want: I am not in the market for fancy bells and whistles. I think what I want is something that is reliable and somewhat durable since it is for my children's education and will get used A LOT in many different places. I don't want it to shuffle my book chapters about. I want it to be easy to organize. It needs to be either rechargeable with a fairly long battery life OR can be plugged into a wall outlet and USB port for a power source It needs to be able to hold about 2 -4 GB worth of info at a time. I need to be able to plug it into both my car and home speakers. It would be really nice if I could record my children's favorite books myself so they can listen to me "read" to them even when I'm busy. And most of all, I need the price tag to be reasonable. I don't want something that is priced to break tomorrow, but I need to be able to convince DH that this is worth stuffing into the budget in the next few months. Now I know lots of you are totally computer savvy and up on all the techy jargon; but please keep in mind that I am blissfully ignorant of all the terms and abbreviations that go into describing electronic devices. I won't have a clue what you are talking about if you don't tell me about it in very simple words. :tongue_smilie: TIA! I'm looking forward to the responses! :bigear:

These are great ideas, thank you! I found a few of the selections you have mentioned at our library. I put them on hold online, so hopefully I can check them out for the kiddos in a couple days. Yay! I'm loving the ideas so far!

I want to get audio books for keeping my can't-read-yet little K-level and younger boys occupied with something more wholesome than TV while I steal a few moments a day to get some uninterrupted work done around the house. They LOOOOOOVE audio books. But I'm not interested in putting $$ out for books that are politically driven, philosophically screwy, or otherwise just brainless listening. I would love to hear your suggestions for twaddle free, wholesome audio book lists. Secondly, if you know of a good source for finding the audio books at a good price, I'd be all ears. And finally, I know there are some good children's radio series available online too. I'm interested in sites that put those out as well. TIA!!!

:ohmy: I will never complain again!!! Hats off to you!

Funny, but I've been trying to get better about this too. I am trying to put a banana, orange slices, apples, raisins, grapes, or berries on everybody's plates at least for lunch and dinner. Everyone gets lots of broccoli, green beans, and salad in our house . . . because I like them. But with the high prices, fruits have been more haphazard. I'm not quite to the point that we completely "eat a rainbow" of fruits and veggies each day. But we're getting better. As a rule, I usually serve a banana at breakfast; baby carrots, oranges or grapes, and some apples slices at lunch; and a good sized serving green veggies at dinner. We should probably be getting more blue/purple veggies. But the best source for this seems to be berries which are sooooo expensive most of the year. I try to make sure they get too is onions and garlic. It's so healthy to eat onions and garlic. Plus, they make a great seasoning and help reduce dependency on salt.

In our house the laundry load works out to about 2 - 3 loads of laundry per person per week. With 5 in my family, that works out to between 10 and 15 loads a week. No really. I'm not kidding. Sometimes we get by with a low laundry week of 8 loads, but this is an exception. Granted, we complicate things in that we have to do a load of cloth diapers every other day and one load of rags per week since we use rags instead of paper towels to save $$$. Plus, DH is a farmer and gets REALLY dirty each day, so re-wearing clothes isn't an option for him. Same story for my three boys who love to play in dirt and work alongside their Daddy. Thankfully in the summer, clothes are much less bulky and I can accomplish more in fewer loads. The kids do help, but they are young and I can't raise my expectations too high in this department yet. So I'm just wondering: is this normal? I should probably just grin and bear it, but I'm in the mood to let myself complain a little. :D :lol: So, what's your story? How many loads of laundry do you generally do per week per person in your family?

I make lots more food than we need on purpose. I serve the dish and then wrap up the rest for the freezer so that by the time I serve it again, it doesn't feel like leftovers. I feed my kids leftovers for lunch often. They don't know the difference and I feel like it's better than throwing PB&J at them every time they sit down for lunch. At least this way they get some variety. Also, try supercook.com or allrecipes.com! I use these sites regularly to help me revitalize leftovers and whittle away at the pantry to keep from letting things go bad. Allrecipes has a generator that helps me find recipes for specific types of dishes with the ingredients I want to use in it while letting me exclude items I don't have in the pantry or just don't want in that recipe. This is helpful since DH has some very specific food aversions that are common in many dishes. This feature helps me weed those recipes out immediately while still finding the type of dish I'm looking for. I make my meal plan around what we already have and need to use up this way. So I can enter pasta and cream cheese as the main ingredients and exclude any dish that uses diced tomatoes since DH doesn't like tomatoes. I get very specific lists of recipes and can choose based on reviews and ingredients that look interesting for my family. What I love about supercook.com is that I can use the database there to keep an extensive list of all the items in my pantry and it generates recipes for the things I can make with what I already have on hand. It also generates a list of grocery items that will be necessary if I want to broaden my recipe options a bit. I find I don't have to buy as much as I thought at the grocery store when I use this list since I can make lots of variety with the stuff I've already got in the kitchen. Also, I can highlight certain foods that I especially need to use up before they go bad and get recipes that use those foods specifically. It's a great tool!

It may be nothing. My older two didn't crawl until later. My third was a concern for a while though. For him it was an issue of low muscle tone. He didn't crawl until a year old and didn't walk until 19 months old. He is 28 months old now and only just learned to walk the steps instead of crawling them. He is very wobbly and holds the rail tight with both hands yet. For him, the low muscle tone is not severe. They say it is hereditary, but we have no family history that I'm aware of. Just a fluke, I guess. He's brilliant besides that. No signs of autism or developmental delays of any sort besides large motor skills. Fine motor skills are very refined for his age. If it is a severe condition, it is usually diagnosed in the first year. Early intervention is available if needed. My son has gotten past it on his own.

:iagree:

I would like to know who comes up with these "average" ages and how they figure them out from decades and centuries ago? I mean, who kept the records? What class of society did the records represent? What were their occupations? What were their ethnic backgrounds? What varieties of foods were available to them? What percentage of these stats were affected by genetics? Who actually told their doctors what ages they started developing breasts? In the 1830s, weren't people a whole lot more reserved about such things? Plus, they did after all wear a whole lot of clothes that would've hidden breast development more than the thin, cling fabrics we wear now that make early breast development so much more obvious. And well visits were not common. It was more about going to the doctor when you were sick, but not when you were well. So, who's to say it's really what was normal? Is there really enough evidence to come to these conclusions? I'm not saying they are wrong. I'm just saying the science, as presented in this article, has a lot of gaps. So far, I'm not convinced one way or another. I will say that those of you who are saying thin or fat is the reason for early puberty is not what the author of the article was saying. He said, "low nutrient diets". You can have a low nutrient diet that results in skinny malnutrition. Or you can have a low nutrient diet that results in obesity. And you can have a great metabolism that hides that you have a low nutrient diet over all. So nobody's solving anything by quoting your weights and heights at any given age. It would be more helpful to consider what kinds of foods you ate on average to compare it to the theories presented in the article to see if it holds water.

Pardon my ignorance, but I don't see this abbreviation on the sticky. What is PR1 and PR2, etc.? Thank you!

Awesome link! Thank you!

P.S. if I'm using AAS as my spelling curriculum and teaching it along with our phonics program, will it be necessary to supplement with a sight words list? Or will the sight words be dealt with in that curriculum eventually?

I found a list of sight words to teach along with the regular phonics lessons, but was surprised at some of the words that were included in it. I understand teaching the recognition of words that don't follow pronunciation rules like "he" and "who". But why would words like "at" and "big" be considered sight words? If it follows phonetic rules and shouldn't be a problem as far as sounding them out, why drag on the drill by adding these words to the list? Is it just a matter of how often the words show up in reading making it necessary for the children to recognize them at a glance? Won't that just happen naturally after a little while of regular reading exercises? Seems like a very boring drill without much purpose to add all the words that are common but follow the rules? Am I way off on that?