Can you use fewer words? I want to keep my family from nut exposures and I didn't have the extra hands that were required for liability reasons for the art class.

We humans are social people, which means we do look to others to see what we are supposed to do (or not do). I don't think there is a way to unwire that tendency. I could say nothing, impose no judgmental consequence, listen patiently to all the woes of a mom with a career, be the perfect SAHM friend, but just my existence of doing what I'm doing is a message. People "hear" it and it makes them reflect on their own choices, to defend those choices or regret them. And it works just the same for me when my dear career-mom friends participate in life with me. Their choices make me reflect on my choice.

If you can't make a general observation, it gets kinda hard to discuss it at all.

Here's what being a SAHM in a world of not-stay-at-home looks like: It looks like scrambling for weeks in advance to find anyone, anyone who will watch your four children while you go to the hospital to have baby number 5 because every. one. you. know. works. EVERYONE. Here's what being a SAHM in a world of not-stay-at-home looks like: It looks like essentially losing your friends everytime somebody else goes back to work. Yay for them, but can I just say it has happened so many times to me over the past 18 years, and I ought to be used to it, I guess you could say I'm prepared for the reality of it, but it is painful. And it's always made just so much more fun when I get the phone calls about watching their kids because I am the last one still at home.

Individualism is a lot of work. One has to constantly reinvigorate the internal fires behind those personal choices because there isn't much external support. If you wanted to be a SAHM/W and you saw many others taking that path, you could easily lean on the collective "wisdom," and proceed with your desire. It's not an arduous decision. It works the same way for deciding to send your kids out into the neighborhood to play. If all the folks on the street do it, if all the folks in your town do it, you just don't stew over it. But if you are the only one, or one of few, the decision making process is supported only through internal energy. Which, quite frankly, is just harder. I'm not saying it's bad to make that choice for oneself, I'm just saying it takes more effort.

American culture places a high value on individual choice. Being a SAHM/W is a valid choice because we love our choices here in America. Because it isn't a popular choice though, I can't use bandwagon demographics to support my choice. Perhaps to many I'm like the triceratops in the Enormous Egg, an oddity who consumes way more grass than the museum can afford.

I think this thread may be helpful for you. http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/586969-concerned-about-paganism-and-teaching-young-children-mythology/ Great thinkers have wrestled with your question. You are in good company. My thoughts about the issue are posted in the thread linked above.

Homeschooling herpetology at our house means that today during Writing and Rhetoric, I had to ask DS9 to please remove the skink from his book and put it back into the container. It also means that we have had unintentional free-range skinks living in the house and a baby box turtle that got "lost" for a couple of weeks. YMMV

Someone please tell all those folks hawking video products about proper golf club grasp that it doesn't matter. I'm telling you, the earth was hit by some alien-handwriting-grip ray-gun about 1980 because people born before then seem to be able, by and large, to properly grasp a pencil and the poor dears coming after seem frequently doomed. But maybe the crazy-grip-rays were just aimed at America. It would be fascinating to find out if students in other countries don't struggle so much. I can't think of one person I know over the age of 45 who has a strange handwriting grasp.

Myths for kid readers (other than the Rylant book I previously referenced) didn't make much sense to me or even seem that valuable until I read the real thing--Greek tragedies, Odyssey and the Iliad, Beowulf, and The Epic of Gilgamesh. Listen to Sir Ian McKellen read the whole Odyssey and THEN decide whether or not introducing the Odyssey to the kiddos is worth your time. I find myself teaching the stories much more enthusiastically now that I have an appreciation of the full versions. The other thing that tipped the hat in favor of me teaching those stories to my kids is that I received some education on the ancient cultural norms of honor/shame/patronage/kinship. An honor/shame culture is very different than my culture, so much so that I had a tremendous barrier to understanding and enjoying those ancient stories. The other thing that helped me was that I read essays from folks who loved the stories and gave good reasons why I should want to try to love them too. Their enthusiasm was contagious.

SO it was you that I got this advice from. :) And the "Reading in the Brain" book.

Kids continue to flip letters, write in mirror image, etc. for a while. Six is still pretty young. :) Kids can go through periods where their eyes' ability to focus changes, like my boys. It's not an easy read, but if you can get "Reading in the Brain," by Deheane, I think it well demonstrates how complicated reading is for little ones. Now that I have a better understanding of how people learn to read and how they read once they are fluent, I feel less anxious about my slower-to-learn readers and more resolved about continuing on with patient, careful instruction. I think a good approach is to educate the educator first :) and then think about how best to teach the kiddo, which is slightly different from how we sometimes approach the bumps in the road--first worry, then a little internet googling which brings on a tinge of panic, then trying to get kiddo tested so we don't mess them up, then trying to find the right curriculum/technique to address the issue. It is hard with the oldest children, too, because unless we have previously been a classroom teacher, we just lack the experience of watching kids learn over time, each on their own time line. Or at least that has certainly been a humbling experience for me. :) I think that skipping lines when a kid is six or seven or eight is part of the package of learning to read.

I can't answer the question about whether she has tracking problems, but I do know a best practice to ameliorate is to have the student place a card in the line ABOVE the text she is reading, not below it. I'm embarrassed to say I cannot remember which teacher told me to do this with my kids, but I know it works. Also, I have two of my six (they are 9 and 10 years old) whose eyes are in an adjustment period--sometimes their focusing mechanism goes wonky. The optometrist says they will outgrow it.

I have six kids--7 to 17--so i'm stretched between all levels. With the youngest children, we use the book as a storybook and as a springboard for narrations. I print out coloring pages from the activity book and check out recommendations from the activity book lists for supplementary read alouds. For the good readers (2-5th or 6th), we use SOTW as both a history text and for reading instruction. Because we read it aloud together, I find it is a great way to work on fluency and vocabulary. I ask questions for reading comprehension; we do the mapwork together and I have them use the SOTW tests as a reading comprehension check. I also appreciate the written question at the end of each "test." It's all open-book, not a test. We supplement always with books from the recommended reading list and also add in informational reading from an encyclopedia on many of the chapters. I also like to play the audio book in the car, even if we have read the chapter. Hearing Jim Trelease pronounce the names and places correctly is helpful. For my middle school children, I have used the book as a text, they did outlines from it or from an encyclopedia like SWB recommended in the WTM, the encyclopedia pages were always assigned; on the second pass through I made sure that my 5th grader was doing the tests. At this age I also had the student keep a detailed time line. We would also be reading Great Books from the time period. My two oldest kids are very strong readers so I graduated them up to HAW or HMW when I thought they were ready, but the two kids just under them in age have not been as qualified and I felt that SOTW was a great choice for them. I've done Ancients three times now and I haven't gotten tired of SOTW. If anything, reusing SOTW and the activity book and WTM (with their really wonderful recommended-reading lists) has made me a better teacher of the subject. I didn't find that reteaching the history spine once every 4 years was dull. I found rather that our continued reading of Great Books better informed my understanding and I enjoyed the history more each time we went through it. Occasionally, I have felt slightly embarrassed that I could "forget" so much in between cycles. Rah, Rah for the harder books, but to be totally honest, sometimes it is just that much more information to forget to remember. KWIM??

http://theanonymousot.com/2013/03/22/when-to-fix-a-pencil-grasp/ I'm just offering up this link because it is such a thorough look at grasp. I think it gives a good perspective on why a kid might not have a good grasp, that is is worth fixing, or when you can not worry.

I'm on our second round with SOTW cycle; I get so much out of it as an adult.

To be fair, I haven't heard calls to abandon the instruction of teaching handwriting altogether, it's just that because the general view of it has slid into an "expendable personal utility" many schools and homeschools alike don't require kids to learn to handwrite neatly or hold the pencil properly. Common core doesn't make the instruction of cursive an objective at all. Students still learn to print, of course, i would just say that in general, the idea of "penmanship" is fading. Unless, of course, you are a student at my house.

Math word problems often repeat familiar phrases--now how much, more than, how many would, etc. For a couple of my children who were slower gaining reading fluency, I found that repetitiveness helpful to them.

Congrats :)

I want to make a general observation that our culture, which values individuality very much, has a blind spot for how our personal preferences can impact others. For instance, we can teach handwriting as a utility that one only does for himself (and thus it can be done in any style, quality, or skill) or we can teach handwriting as something that can give light and beauty to self AND others, because the handwriting is legible or even lovely to look at. In the end, though, I think that the tradition is worth keeping because a discipline (like penmanship) of practicing a skill, and the aim of beauty is both useful and rewarding for the individual and the society. This cultural/educational establishment debate over penmanship is actually helping me think about some of the other areas that I am making decisions in--i am now asking if I am blinding myself when I make other educational decisions based primarily on utility.

I read the transcript a couple times and then read the linked article by the main subject of the interview, Anne Trubek. She tells in her article how her third grader experienced great distress because he had so much trouble forming letters. Her advocacy to drop penmanship instruction comes out of that experience. She researched the history of handwriting, finding that the idea of seeing individuality in penmanship is a comparatively new cultural appreciation. Then she says not to be misled by any research on the positive benefits of handwriting if the research was funded by a company that has a vested interested in selling handwriting materials. Here is a quote from that article in Good magazine: "This is absurd: I am a college professor and a freelance writer, and the only time I pick up a pen is to sign a credit-card receipt. Let's stop brutalizing our kids with years of drills on the proper formation of a cursive capital "S"-handwriting is a historical blip in the long history of writing technologies, and it's time to consign to the trash heap this artificial way of making letters, along with clay tablets, smoke signals, and other arcane technologies." Her basic argument is don't bother teaching it because kiddo won't need it and learning it is too hard. She cautions against trusting research in favor of penmanship; however, I have not seen a body of evidence demonstrating that penmanship is wasteful. Just think of all the districts, states that have agreed with this general line of thinking. Poof! Just like that, the teaching of penmanship is relegated to the back, back, back burner. I'm not going crazy here and saying that schools don't ever teach kids how to form letters--they do some of that. I had two of my kids in public school. It's just that what I saw was that even in the beginning grades, the children were not encouraged to learn a standard letter formation, or how to hold a pencil properly. Sloppy writing wasn't corrected. The school didn't have an agreed upon penmanship style or curriculum. I've read some of the research on pencil grip--whether it matters or not. Quite frankly, I've found it hard to untangle. But whether or not Janie can write nicely while clubbing her pencil, it still looks absurd and she can't see what she's doing as well. If she decides to be a surgeon or a painter, will she need to learn how to hold an instrument correctly? Or do they tell surgeons it doesn't matter how you hold that knife? What is so unreasonable about teaching kids that there is a lovely, correct way to hold a pencil? Would these same grip-clubbers let their kiddos run off to sports camp and hold the tennis racket, baseball bat, hockey stick just any ole way the mood struck them? Coach says, hold it like this, kick it like that. And that's the end of that argument because we shall keep practicing until you are able to get strong enough, automatic enough to enjoy the correct grip. I'm guessing that's what many parents say about sports, but don't apply the same reasoning to holding a pencil. I would like for educators and policy makers to spend much more time thinking before making major changes like this. You drop something basic that millions of people learned to do and you drop it before you really understand the value of the skill, and then it takes years of research to prove to people the skill actually was valuable, and then you have to figure out how to get the skill back into the schools, of course now being taught by a generation of teachers that can't hold a pencil properly. I love homeschooling. I do. I love being able to say, we shall learn how to write legibly! and I do not have to consult a principal, superintendent, and the state board of education to do so. I can say, learning cursive is not a burden, it's a joy. It's good for your reading ability, it's good for your writing ability, it's good to learn how to do a fine motor skill and do it correctly, it's beautiful to look at. It's wonderful for you to learn how to perform a skill that you can use for your whole life long. I'm pushing back against a world that doesn't like for kids to do anything that requires them to conform to a reasonable request like legible, neat handwriting and holding a pencil with a standard grip. I'm pushing back against ugliness--ugliness in how you hold a pencil and ugliness in how you write. I'm pushing back against the notion that just because we use keyboards frequently that the keyboard is somehow inherently better. I wish I could sign off in cursive...hahahahahha....but I cannot, because, of course, I am using the keyboard to type this. :lol: :cursing: :confused1: :nopity: :tongue_smilie: Wake me up in 10 years and let me know if Anne Trubek and the Cursive Stoppers won the day.......

Have a kid master one-to-one correspondence. (lay out a series of something like Legos and then see if the child can repeat the sequence) Have a kid master letter formations. Then work on words. Then work on spacing between two words. Then learn to spell words by dictation. Then learn to spell two words put together-- sad cat Start to add in sentences for copywork using letters the kids are proficient at forming and some words that they can encode (spell). The cat sat on the mat. Use simple sentences to learn the basics of how every sentence works--All sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark. This phrase from First Language Lessons is a mantra at our house by now. :) When the kiddo finishes a sentence lacking one of those essentials, I will start to say, "All..s..." and the kid is cued to look for those two important things--the capital and the punctuation. Once a kid can do those things reasonably well, then that seems a good time to move on to copying sentences that are more challenging. At this point, one can begin to introduce simple grammar concepts, such as how to use commas. Ann, come to me. I have a bat, a ball, and a net. The way I see copywork, the point of it is to allow a little kid a way to practice basic grammar-writing-punctuation skills with a lot of hand holding. If I want the littler kids to enjoy the feel of good language, I will have them memorize a lovely poem or sentence to say out loud; I don't find it helps them much to copy a sentence until they can read it and spell most of the words independently. I think handwriting is very important. This tactile act of putting letters on paper is just great for the brain. Learning to hold a pencil and use well it is a fabulous skill. There are so many nerves in the tips of the fingers--more so than just about anywhere else in the body. Those nerves can tell the brain a lot. Yay for handwriting, as far as I am concerned. :) Here are some pro-handwriting links: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/16/cognitive-benefits-handwriting-decline-typing http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001475_2.html http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00567/full http://www.donpotter.net/education_pages/11gth.html http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/ http://www.ldonline.org/spearswerling/The_Importance_of_Teaching_Handwriting I have loved using Handwriting Without Tears products and teaching techniques with my kids. The program was designed by an OT; the program lays out how to teach a good pencil grip by beginning with small items--pieces of chalk, crayon and short pencils. The program emphasizes learning the letter strokes by using large hand motions--air writing. Making big letters in the air is proven to help kids learn to form the letters properly. We say specific prompts in forming the letters. Where do you start your letters? At the top. Let's make a "d": magic c, up like a helicopter and back down. HWT made me a better teacher of my children because of the scripted prompts for letter formation. HWT also emphasizes quality over quantify, which I found valuable. We weren't going to make 10 letters, just 4 really nice ones. The program also promotes self-checking by always asking the student to compare one letter with the original.

What I found out is that the parents can live a whole life without making good plans for the end and the children who love them become the back up plan by default, they end up sick and unable to care for themselves, they do not want to go into a nursing home, but hate living in your house while you help them. In a culture that cherishes independence above all else, we make gigantic messes of dealing with our lives at the end when, at some point, we will have to be dependent on others. Please read "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande. And proceed very carefully if you think you can homeschool kids with high standards classical style education, somehow maintain income from a free lance business and take care of stroke/dementia patients in your home. And still manage to have any kind of healthy family relationships.

Your short term memory only has so many "slots." If you are having to fill up your short term memory with how to form a letter correctly, you won't have enough slots left in your working memory to remember the next letters, or the whole word, or have the space to think about how to spell a word, much less an entire sentence from something you saw up on a chalkboard or up on another page. There are a lot of skills that have to get to "automatic" in order to do copywork. If a kid can't read well enough to know the word and remember it, she will have to see a word, take it apart into letters, remember the letters, know how to form the letters--and all of that takes a lot of visual back and forth between her paper/slate/chalkboard and where ever the original copywork is printed. Just think about that. Another scenario is that she will read the copywork, and then be trying to do spelling and correct letter formation at the same time OR she will have to know that she needs to look back up at the words to be copied because she doesn't actually know how to spell them. Then, at the end of all that, she needs to remember to look back over the work that was to be copied and use skill to check her work against it. Copywork is complicated for the beginner.

Seems like there have been plenty of answers to the question about teaching young children, but I would like to leave a few links for further thoughts. For those who do want to understand myths a bit better, I found that Cynthia Rylant's retellings were very helpful to me in appreciating deeper truths, seeing symbolism in the Greek myths. It's a lovely book for children. Beautiful Stories of Life. I had been assigned Beowulf in high school and college and found it pretty dull stuff. In teaching it to my older children this last time, though, I relied on some guidance from J.R.R. Tolkein's important essay on Beowulf, "The Monsters and the Critics," and I found it rather exciting. Hoping that the article quotes him correctly, here is G.K. Chesterton on fairy tales: The God of Men and Elves: Tolkein, Lewis and Christian Mythology And here is St. Augustine, from his Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick. In the midst of a section expressing regrets about some of the theatre he attended and some of the books he regretted studying (including some on Manichee beliefs), he writes this to God: "At that time where were you in relation to me? Far distant. Indeed I wandered far away, separated from you, not even granted to share in the husks of the pigs, whom I was feeding with husks. How superior are the fables of the masters of literature and poets to these deceptive traps! For verses, poems, and 'the flight of Medea' are certainly more useful that the Five Elements which take on different colours, each in accordance with one of the Five Caverns of Darkness--things which have no reality whatever and kill anyone who believes they have. Verses and poetry I can transform into real nourishment. 'Medea flying through the air' I might recite, but would not assert to be fact. Even if I heard someone reciting the passage, I would not believe it. Yet the other (Manichee) myths I did believe." The question of the value of a Christian studying myths has been taken up by great minds. Apparently, it is a good question!