my sensitive almost 6yo had a serious problem until recently with war, slavery, etc. i have tread very lightly in those areas. but now she is much better at dealing with these ideas in a historical context. i would say avoid anything that your child would find disturbing until they indicate they are ready.

including academic specific book buying- $200 - $300. i only have two kids, age 3 and 6. actually bump that up another 50-100 per year for library fines. ha! that doesn't include classes . . . including all classes, activities, camps and sports we are looking at about $6000. holy crud! i have never added it up that way before. ha! don't tell dh or he will decide that maybe we can afford private school. luckily my mother has chipped in about 1k so far this year. don't make me calculate my gas spending or i may have a heart attack.

Disclosure- We only homeschool, all of the instructors I interact with have my dd for no longer than a few hours a week. I would speak with the teacher and be pushy, then follow up with e-mail frequently. Volunteer in the class, this will help you understand the teachers, the classroom dynamic and let the teachers know that you are willing to try to help things work. Get whatever accomodations you can for any exceptional needs through the school. BUT I also would speak with my child and let her know that as long as she is a part of the class she has to follow the guidelines and do the work. Letting a child turn in doodled on work when you know it isn't permitted isn't sending a good message or helping the student/teacher relationship. Learning to to do the job in front of you with enthusiasm regardless of your distaste for it is a valuable lesson. Children who walk on two legs and eat with a fork are assimilated. I don't think that assimilation is bad, we are social animals and need to be able to function within our groups. The ability to assimilate to a situation you have no control over changing is a good one. Your daughter can't choose another class on her own, and if she has to continue with public school she will need to be able to adjust to new instructors every year for the next decade.

I am inflexible in what I require my daughter (6yo) to study. I have educational goals for her that need to be met. That said, I have already switched and dropped curricula, and anything outside of my required subjects and sequence is quite flexible. I also realized that I can't determine how fast or slow she will progress. For our family reading is a must. Lessons for about 15minutes a day, moving on to reading one story a day, moving on to reading 20 minutes a day, building up to 60 minutes a day. Right now we do suggested reading, eventually we will do required reading. Math is a must. Solid foundation in arithmetic in early elementary is a must. I also require daily counting practice. we started with counting by ones, then counting down, then 10's, then 5's, then 2's, etc. Math takes about 20 minutes, counting about one minute. Languages are required. 30 minutes a day for Chinese, Spanish and Latin. Grammar is required. Right now dd gets grammar through Lively Latin. Geography is required. We use a world map and a globe. Sometimes we pull out a book to read on an area or country. This takes anywhere from a few minutes to half of an hour 5 days a week. Handwriting is required. My focus is quality over quantity. If she copies three words wrong it isn't going to destroy her to have to rewrite them because the whole lesson was only eight words long. Memory work. One poem read twice a day until memorized. Again, quality over speed and quantity. History and science are required, but I let her gravitate to topics she likes. For both we are looking at an hour a couple of times a week and sometimes that doubles up as reading time. We will do a more structured study in these areas as she ages. Work ethic. DD has to do any practicing, homework or projects required as part of an outside activity. We stretch our week out over 7 days. While I know I am inflexible in academic goals, in real life we are quite laid back. My requirements allow dd plenty of time to follow her own interests, she adds in and takes off subjects to her schedule we keep posted on the door to the school room. This also allows her to do more of something if she likes, or spend half a day comparing the sizes of acorn from trees in the backyard. Testing- we are planning to do standardized testing once a year. Most of what we use at this age doesn't have testing built in, but you can find curricula that does.

i really can't justify 7 hours a day, 5 days a week so my kid can do cool school stuff half a dozen times a year. or so they automatically have a group of 24 friends. that would mean giving up time spent with the few dozen kids dd already calls friends and at least half of her extra curriculars and trips to see family in the middle of february and spending 2 hours eating lunch and staying up late to stare at the moon, etc. not to mention the fact that i can meet her needs academically at her level in the amount of time other kids spend getting ready for school and riding on the bus. and some kids don't like dress-up. mine does, so she does it all of the time, but wouldn't love as much being told what to dress-up in. it is nice having the flexibility and time for kids to create their own cool activities. and you can pick and choose extras based on what you and your kids like. on pop culture, eh, my kid gets more of that than i like sometimes but that is part of hanging out with other kids. i am able to avoid extremely bad influences, but even homeschooled kids talk about icarly and justin bieber.

things that will cause fear or depression. reproduction, anatomy and health not censored at all.

i would wait a year to declare him K, why not give him the extra year before calling it official? i don't know how reporting goes in your state, but even if he knocks out K work if he is taking a little more time to catch on to a skill your state considers 1st grade or even 3rd grade there is no pressure because you have that time built in. and i don't think you would be penalized ever if he ends up accelerating.

dogs are omnivores, they can easily adapt to a large range of diets. cats are biologically carnivores. most of the things that are in commercial animal food are not things dogs or cats would eat in the wild - the ingredients or the form. most of it is the eqiuvalent of feeding them junk food, it fills them and keeps them alive and even has been fortified with all of the nutrients that they need. i don't know any animal owners that would continue feeding their animals food that was harming them. i have used vegan and not vegan food with my pets. i have one cat that can tolerate only vegan kibble or high meat content canned, he will also do raw but the other cats won't and i don't have the stomach for that sort of thing. they thrive. my dog can so far eat anything, vegan kibble works great for him as do unattended peanut butter sandwiches or the contents of a trash can. i don't think the trash can diet would last for the long term, especially with all of the broken glass from the dishes the cats knock over. :D so we put the trash out of reach now. giant pandas are also biologically carnivores. it's a funny world.

i started doing it naturally later.

because a classical education is not just vocational training, and a child really can't decide that they are NEVER going to write a novel or a sonnet. if my child knew she was going to go into glass blowing professionally i would think that was wonderful but still require algebra and grammar. maybe because i am mean, but really because i am not going to allow my juvenile child to close doors that my future adult child would have to struggle to reopen.

Monarchy terry jones Medieval lives terry jones barbarians life of mammals life of birds i have been wanting to watch "her name is sabine" but haven't yet.

i don't think they have to, i think spelling rules help more with cementing basic spelling than they do with more advanced spelling. that said, some kids like to know them. i am not really sure what a natural speller is, no one is able to spell until they have had some exposure to the language they are spelling in and to my mind i think the type and amount of exposure is the key to spelling success. anyway. my dd who knows most of her spelling from speaking, reading and asking how to spell words really likes to learn spelling rules. she thinks it is really neat and loves in general to learn more about language and how and why it works.

based on the alternate spellings in the wikipedia article, i would think it is like "lyle, lyle crocodile". that is the only way i can see saying "lisle" like "liele"

these are all things that both my almost 3yo and almost 6yo enjoy, though they use them in different ways/at different levels: magnetic pattern blocks mighty mind castle logic royal rescue marble run

beading, sewing, woodworking, physics, chemistry, percussion, keyboarding, violin, recorder, square dance. you could do blanket making and donate the blankets. fleece is easy enough. my almost 6yo has wanted to find a hawaiian dance class ever since she saw lilo and stitch :) ha! but if you do have a parent who has a culture specific art they could teach, that would be neat. in general dd likes things where she learns a new "trick" or produces something.

this "rule" you all keep pointing out just establishes that multiple spellings for the /er/ sound exist but not when to use which. seems a nice reading rule, but a pretty lousy spelling rule.

dd liked to reread stories when she was learning to read to show off new skills for aunts, uncles and grandparents. i wouldn't force a reread, but if you want to encourage it you can have someone your child admires request a reading.

even if my child could read dickens at age 7 i would be more comfortable handing her a copy of playboy. i really would need a child with an understanding of the time period and who i could first have a very frank conversation with about anti-semitism, sexism, prostitution, caste systems, murder, christianity and domestic violence to assign dickens. i can't imagine being ready to do that until those sorts of topics already started entering her radar, maybe age 10 at the earliest.

we started spanish exposure first then added mandarin chinese, both before K. the study of these languages will become more formal in first grade with writing and grammar. if we had not had access to native speakers we would have waited on these. my plan is to start latin with dd in first or second grade, once she has moved beyond needing copy work to write sentences. i imagine this will help her spelling, vocabulary and grammar. i have no idea where ds will be with english by first grade, he is almost three and not yet reading more than a few words in english. i won't start latin until his english is strong, whatever age that may be.

we do six days a week, but they are short. dd is so young i think that frequency is more important than duration. we also take off whenever i want. this is our first year, but my plan is to do three 10 week sessions a year plus one week for portfolio review and testing. then we'll use the rest of the year for a mostly child directed type of learning. we can't give up foreign languages or math for the summer, those i will mandate but on a light schedule. i am so glad i don't have to count hours.

wanted to update- this is working for us now and we LOVE the spanish. dd is able to use it on her own. it is like rosetta stone with grammar explanations and a more traditional progression (starting with useful conversation). you do have to monitor your own progress more than in rosetta stone, i have to remind dd that the goal is mastery not getting through the lessons quickly.

my kids go to chinese school on saturdays and they learn to read simplified chinese as they learn conversation. my son is almost 3 and my daughter is almost 6. i don't think it interferes with english learning at all. my daughter also takes spanish, she does sometimes get confused when trying to read spanish, because the alphabet is the same but the sounds are not. it still isn't much of a problem but it is more of a problem than it is with the mandarin.

we paid dd. ha! for real, she wanted a way to earn money for a toy i told her santa wouldn't buy- the dora links doll- and i told her $ .25 per book. she ended up getting grandparents to match, so she cleaned up. she had been reading for awhile and we were whizzing through 100ez but she didn't love the books on her reading level and would get horribly upset when she got something wrong. and if there was too much text she was intimidated. the terms were that it had to be a book she hadn't yet read. i asked that she read one book or section of a book a day. she LOVED to read the books on skype to family members. the cap for earning was $60. when she got to $60 and we went to the store the doll was on sale and she decided to use the left over cash to buy a book! and i can't say i have ever read anywhere that kids should be paid for reading, it may even be advised against. lol but it helped her focus on something other than the reading. and now, a year later, she can read what she wants and she does, all of the time.

we are doing HWT cursive. she wanted to do cursive now and it turns out it is the solution to her horrible reversal and letter formation problem. i am hoping she can come back to print in a couple of years and go through it systematically.

including reading?? that makes a giant difference, reading is one hour. we knock out everything else in about 2 hours. math, spelling, handwriting and grammar are about 30minutes of that. i can't do a system with filler assignments, even if they are fun. dd likes bares bones. she can come up with enough fun stuff to do without me assigning fun.