In addition to the suggestions above to read The Well-Trained Mind, I suggested reading The Well-Educated Mind. It's for high schoolers/adults who are interested in giving themselves the education they never had. It's pretty eye opening once you see the deficiencies in your own education.... Good luck in your decision!

If you're open to homeopathy, Bellis Perrenis is a great remedy for this. It's a cousin of Arnica but works better for deeper stuff rather than surface.

I'm Muslim and am following the threads and making some changes. I doubt that constitutes "following Circe" but I'm getting a lot out of it. I read an article somewhere about how Muslims are heading to Jesuit schools because a lot of the education is like the old classical Islamic universities. There are quite a few people working in the U.S. to try and bring back Islamic classical education but it's going to be a long road. The Catholic model is a good one to follow for us. Here's some text from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_contributions_to_Medieval_Europe#Classical_knowledge just to give an idea of where I'm coming from:

Well isn't that special. (Said in my best SNL church lady voice.)

Well, I think it's a great idea. If you just had holes or needed review, I would suggest something else. But if the approach you've been using doesn't resonate with him, I think you should try it. Invest in 3A Guide and Practice and see what happens.

Check Raley's/Nob Hill Foods/Bel Air in the Bay area. Ours has the pickup.

I also like Wildflowers and Marbles. I've taken a few ideas from there, such as little containers to make my supplies more accessible and getting fun scissors, which are a big hit with the kids. Fly on the wall? There have been various times I'd like to be a fly on the wall of various posters' homes. The people here do so much amazing stuff but it can be difficult to convey in text and I'd love to see some of it in action. There's beauty in competence. I'm hoping some of the more experienced homeschoolers will start blogs or Youtube channels or teach classes at some point. Even if my kids were graduated by then I would sign up!

I would move ahead with Singapore and periodically return and see if he can do the mental math. That gives him time to get caught up developmentally and also allows review. SM has so many methods and "tricks" that my DS, who has no trouble with mental math at the relevant time, gets stuck if we go back and review it later because he can't remember some trick from that lesson a few months later. I wouldn't worry about it; just put a sticky note at the last successful one and swing back every couple of months and try to move ahead.

Ruth, you've been a big help :001_tt1: but I'm also a bit depressed(?) because it turns out I don't know many of the answers to your questions, despite spending so much time with my kids. I've done my best to pick curricula I thought was rigorous with the idea that if they were just used to rigor they wouldn't realize it was "supposed to be" strenuous. Then I've just done the next thing and checked boxes. This hasn't been without merit and comfort that we won't have huge gaps, and they are often engaged, but I just feel it could be so much more, you know? I feel like my work is in pillars (see I like structures!) and they don't touch or cross enough and generate a real learning environment. I don't know how they learn best, I know which topics they struggle with or find easy. I'm operating at a more basic and lower level then the level of thinking required to answer your questions. The grid is probably a bad idea on the whole, and I don't actually have a desire to use it. If it could be considered an intermediate step I'd rather leapfrog over it and make a bigger change; I just don't know how to do it. I'm going to have to stretch outside of my comfort zone and try some things in faith. I wish I were more creative and less "square" about these things. (The analogy I can think of is that when I played an instrument I practiced and practiced classical music and was very good at playing all the notes I needed to when I was supposed to. But when people improvised music or played more syncopated jazz I couldn't fathom it. Or jam bands; yeah, I'm not going to be in a jam band. :) ) I've been fine with my tendencies because they only affected my own life; now I feel I have to do something different because my kids are not like me and I'm doing them a disservice. It's difficult to find the balance between "being true to myself" and stretching myself to make things work better for my kids. I feel like I've derailed the thread. May I take your postings above and copy them into a new thread? I am finding your feedback invaluable but I feel guilty for doing this on the Circe thread. :blushing:

So in both a literal and figurative sense, I could make a grid with the skills going down the side and the content across the top and add the work into the intersections? Using the Economist example above, in the intersections of the column "Current Events Content," with the rows "Reading Comprehension Skills," "Critical Analysis Skills," and "Oral Presentation Skills," I could write "Read the Economist and give a presentation about a controversial subject." Is that right, at least conceptually? ETA: I wrote this before reading your second post. Trying to digest that now....

:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug:

I'm sorry you're going through this. :grouphug:

I think this is where some of the "teaching from rest" (as discussed in the Circe threads) comes in. If you have a strong vision and conviction of how you want to do things than you can let these things roll off you better and avoid the pendulum and trends. (Not that I'm there yet *at all*, it was just a connection between discussions which popped into my mind.)

Congrats again to all and I have another question I should have asked in my previous post. Did you have any personal experience with Latin yourself, before teaching your kids? Thanks.

Ruth, thank you so much. (Didn't we used to have a "bow down" emoticon?) I would like to see some examples of the planning, if it's not too much trouble. I am confused about the content goals. Using math as an example, we're using Singapore and Beast Academy. DS enjoys both of them, but it's true I chose them based on larger themes, such as "going deeper" and "Asian-style math." Are those the content goals? Or do you mean I decide I need to cover fractions, decimals, etc because I think that doesn't really narrow it down much as all the curricula cover the basics. The same applies for phonics, spelling, etc. Or am I not getting it? I can be really dense about these things, plus I'm a box checker.

Does anyone mind sharing the paths they took to get to such nice results? Did you start with Lukeion? Or did you do prep with other materials at younger grades? (I understand this took a lot of diligence and hard work, I'm just wondering if people tended to take the same routes or different ones, if people self-studied or took classes, etc.)

So, any ideas for the reason schools are dropping the ball for 3-4 years? (I agree, just wondering why.)

Your DD is on fire! :party:

I'm Muslim and was thinking of wearing it over a long-sleeve tee and jeans.

After everyone on the boards buys this, will it be the new denim jumper? :drool:

I think I had Sweet Pea. It was yellow and lime green, with a banana seat with a pea pod on it.

Yes, it's hard to reconcile. For example, just a bit from her Caring Bridge site: That does seem hard to fake. I'm wondering if some of these were necessary and others were not but were performed based on her lying? Or maybe they were not all done in actuality but she said they were on her blog? Maybe it had to do with how she was managing their at-home care, pain killers, and medication? Or maybe it's legit. I would feel terrible for her if it was. :svengo: The "re-homing" is probably a crime if it they can't find the papers of the new guardianship or whatever legal steps she should have taken. Possibly also the witness tampering if she told them to lie, even if she was doing the right thing and has been wrongly accused about the abuse.

But when you rob a bank, you come out ahead unless you get caught. Was she able to raise enough funds to cover the costs of having these children in total? I'm thinking of food, clothing, utilities, medical costs not covered by insurance, gas, hotels, etc. She could raise enough to complete the adoption, go to Ukraine, etc, but what about the next 15 years for those girls? It doesn't seem like a very good scam to me, especially considering the amount of effort involved. Plenty of financial crimes are easier than this. It feels like some weird mix of scamming and attention seeking? Maybe it started as attention seeking but then she found she could get money as well? I found it interesting how irritated she was with that other mom who was getting attention for her sick kid. Was that projection? Sorry, just thinking out loud here. Rereading the Trent quote, it sounds like he left the door open for her desire for attention and not just money.

Wow, this is just crazy, esp. the part where she accuses another mom(?) of trying to get attention for having sick children. Is this an outright scam or is this some sort of mental illness? Both?

I've had those night too. Last night, though, I had a fabulous dream in which everyone on the boards checked in about where they live and we all lived in my town! :party: