Homeschool Buyer's Co-op has hit 30% off, so it is already better than the Kogi sale. Join in! Emily

Maybe not much more time, but a cheap box can be so much cheaper. I priced the ingredients for one of my children's birthday cakes and was floored. Emily

Probably going to use MM for 5th and 6th after RightStart E. We started the placement test today, just to verify! Emily

Funny... my mom loved uniforms because it took all struggle out of getting dressed. Do have used uniform sales, though, for the parents to resell to one another.

I don't know how you can develop a reading list for a 4-year-old. My kids developed reading skills at such different paces and had totally different interests. I feel like a young reader needs to be interested in what they are reading about and successful. I couldn't have made a list a year ahead of time for my 6-year-olds with any success. Now, if you're talking about read alouds, that is different. FWIW, my 7-year-old is a much more confident reader than my 9-year-old. She was reading Little Women yesterday. I would never have thought of scheduling that in advance. If I had planned books for her based on my son, it would have been useless and possibly harmful. When she took of reading, she was like a rocket. I couldn't have foreseen it. Emily

I'd like Latin to be done well in elementary, maybe starting 3rd grade. I'd like math to be treated with respect, and teachers to have in-service in how to teach math well. Oh, make all the teachers read Liping Ma's book on math teaching. So many elementary school teachers are afraid of math. Science could be put on the back burner, but whenever it was done, it should be done well. Do a yearly science project with a yearly science fair. Have monthly classroom science competitions, but don't let elementary science take over school time. Emily

Listening in, but, your kids are super young!

Awesome! People ought to still have mortgage burning parties - it is good for the culture! But my parents feel they can't tell their friends they have paid off their house as their friends are up to their ears in debt. :-( Emily

I want to clarify - in jr. high, I really wanted to be like my peers and, from what I knew, they all hated their parents, so I wanted to hate mine, too. Then, in early high school, I got "dumped" by my group of friends and went through depression. What happened then was I no longer cared to be popular, which, to me, required rejecting my parents. I think we had the foundation of a great family and a strong family culture of love and having fun together. If such a culture hadn't existed, maybe I wouldn't have wanted to be part of my family come high school, maybe I would have just looked for a different rebellious group o friends. I think it could go either way - maybe it is homeschooling, maybe it is the flu in your house (right, you posted someone was sick?), maybe it is the lack of sunlight, maybe there is something you can tweak in homeschooling. My son and I have some power struggles that I regret come evening and am trying to work on. I could see those being problematic if we don't work on them. Emily

We have one of those spell-it-every-time last names. MIL even was told, when a secretary for a family business, "Can you imagine anyone marrying into that name?" So, our children have traditional-no-need-to-spell names. (No need to pronounce, either.) Andrea drove me nuts - Ann-dree-uh? Ahn-dray-uh? - Ahn-dree-uh? I knew one of each of those in college and had a hard time remembering who was who. Emily

I fought (yelled, screamed, etc) with my mom from 12-14 then was her best friend. Emily

I'm a total language geek and used to learn language while driving. I would do Pimsleur for the 30-lesson program and then, when I felt like I wasn't absorbing anymore, spend a week or two with MCT. They are totally different approaches and can complement each other.

The key is to live where DH can commute on el or Metra to work, since you can't park downtown. :-) Energy2c - are you actually in Chicago? Emily

Never thought of this. My dad had this problem in the 60s after going to school in England - they were going to put him back a year and make him take 5 years for high school. Instead he went to Swiss boarding school and graduated in 3. Things haven't changed, have they... Emily

Tammy, One more thing - Midwesterners are *so* friendly! We lived in CA for two years and had the hardest time making friends. For goodness sake - I was raised in CA for 15 years, so I should know the culture, but it was so hard! Within 2 weeks in Chicago I was running into more people I knew that I did after 2 years in CA. Where we live in Chicago, there is a culture of thriftiness, too, which is lovely. People who buy expensive strollers are likely to apologize for it ("I really needed something that could handle these sidewalks"). It isn't rare to have confusion while leaving a friend's house because no one can remember which coat is theirs vs. which coat they donated to a thrift store but that is now being worn by a friend. (That has really happened at least two times... and then the instances with shoes...) It is such a breath of fresh air! Emily

Hi Tammy! We moved to Chicago (as in the City) about 18 months ago and bought a house here last June. I am happy to answer questions you have about living and homeschooling here, but I'd rather do it privately as Chicago is *very* segregated into neighborhoods and once I reveal my neighborhood, it is like telling you what small town in Iowa I live in! We lived all over the US previously, including CA last. PM me and I'll give you the lowdown. Emily

My sister had a friend from India named "Preti", pronounced "Pretty". My mom thought it was a joke when the girl introduced herself...

My mom was told, while she was raising us, "You really ought to be either Jewish or Chinese," because of her parenting philosophy. I think a Jewish friend said this. My sister and I went to Caltech and my brother is working on a PhD at an Ivy League. Emily

Good points, Tsutsie!

Hi all, My friend may be in the position of homeschooling her children next year. She lives in the USA but is a non-native speaker. They don't have a bunch of money, so the curriculum needs to be cheap. She also isn't the type who will spend tons of time doing prep or researching curriculum. What would you recommend for her? She will definitely have a 1st grade and may have 4th and 5th graders at home with her, too. She leans play-based, but would probably be OK with a get-it-done curriculum that left time for play afterwards. Rod and Staff? Emily

These are some great ideas. I went to start lentil soup for lunch, couldn't find lentils, made pea soup instead, and realized I need a quick dinner tonight so I'm no better off than before. Maybe I'll make quesadillas with two cans of beans or sardine sandwiches. I think I skimped on yogurt yesterday (definitely less than half a cup) and I just dipped the apples in PB, so It can't have been much protein. Emily

That's what I thought at the time, too, but I felt super-nasty all afternoon and didn't feel good again until eating about 4/5 of a burrito at Chipotle - beans, brown rice, cheese, pork, lettuce, tomatoes. Then I realized something had been funky! Emily

You can email VP to get more samples, if that'll help. I wrote them an email complaining about how terrible their website is wrt samples and they told me I could have any I liked for the asking. Also, they are making a new website. Not sure when it'll be up. Emily

I need to get lunch under control! It needs to keep us satisfied until dinner with only one snack. I hate PBJs, but am willing to eat them once a week. I felt terrible yesterday until I ate a satisfying dinner and then reflected on how icky my lunch had been - bagel, some yogurt, half an apple, and a heaping spoonful of peanut butter. Of course I wasn't nourished! Any lunch ideas that don't take forever? Ideally I'd stock up once a week on the ingredients. Emily

Did you get concerned because the class was bad or because you heard the teacher didn't have a math degree? If the quality of the class is bad, I'd be worried whatever background the teacher had. You shouldn't need a math degree to teach jr high math. Some of my worst math teachers had great math backgrounds, and my friend's husband is an excellent jr high science teacher, although he was an art teacher for 20 years before the art program was cut. Emily