:lurk5:

I want to help my almost 11 year-old learn how to spend time with God, cultivating her prayer life through journaling, reading the Word, etc. I've browsed online but a lot of the books don't have samples or even reviews, so I'm hoping to get your recommendations. It's important to me that this is not a "character building" book nor a devotional book of stories, but a tool for building a personal relationship with God. When I was young, my mom worked at a Christian bookstore and she gave me what I think was called Quiet Time Notebook by Becky Tirabassi, which I enjoyed using and it helped lay a foundation for my time alone with God, which although I haven't been totally consistent with that throughout my life, and the "format" is fluid/changing depending on the season of life, at least gave me the idea for that time and how it could be structured so that it had the potential to be rich and meaningful, developing intimacy with the Lord. Unfortunately that particular resource is no longer available - I'm going to look at Tirabassi's other works, but most of them look geared toward adults.

Let's narrow it down to say...the ones we might see at a zoo in North America? I mean penguins are a pretty significant animal, especially to children :p ...so I wondered if there were any others like that which got left out. I put my kids on the mission to find out, but I kinda was hoping to compile a cheat sheet here, if I could :coolgleamA:

We used A Beka for my workbook-loving 4th grader last year, and it was decent, but now in fifth grade, we've been using R&S, and it's definitely a better program. My daughter also seems to enjoy it more than A Beka.

That's one of my favorites!

We, too, use CLE Math and are very happy with it, but when I tried it on my third grader a couple years back (for similar reasons as yours), I wasn't satisfied with it. It didn't seem thorough or rigorous enough. Then I used A Bekah for fourth grade, and it was better for the workbook type format, but now in fifth grade, we've been using Rod and Staff, and it's turned out to be the best of the bunch.

We finished the third and final book in the Apologia Young Explorers animals series and we're reviewing this week before we start the Anatomy and Physiology book next week. I asked my fifth grader to write a research paper on one of the animals we covered...and she mentioned that we never studied penguins (!), that they weren't in any of the Apologia books. That got me wondering what other animals weren't included in the ark...er, series ;)

I'm going to try Food Rules, the Illustrated edition, which has the lovely artwork of Myra Kalman - it's an abbreviated version of Pollan's original book, but apparently also an entity unto itself. I'm actually using it as supplement to our study of the human body, with Apologia's Exploring Creation: Anatomy and Physiology.

Just being outnumbered (gender-wise) is enough to create friction and there's really no easy position (birth order-wise), although an oldest boy with two younger sisters sounds ideal since it eliminates the competition factor (or mostly, I'm guessing) and provides the big brother to look out for his younger sisters / set an example. I have heard, though, that boys who grow up with sisters (especially if at least one is older) tend to understand women better :)

In addition to personalities, I think it may also depend on the age difference, since there's a bigger gap between your oldest and youngest (in both of your cases). Mine are 4.5 years apart, whereas the girls are 2.5 years apart, and my younger two are 22 months apart. I also sense that my oldest and youngest are more alike, so they butt heads vying for leadership/control, whereas my middle child is not assertive like that, though she holds her own. With the Myers-Briggs (I'm an MBTI practitioner), that translates to my oldest and youngest both have judging preferences - they may even both be SJs (sensing judging) whereas my middle child I'm pretty sure has a perceiving preference and her temperament is like mine, NF (intuiting feeling). Not much has been written, though, about sibling dynamics and personality types - it's mostly all focused on birth order.

I have two daughters, ages 10 & 8, and a son, age 6. He is really struggling with his position as last born, particularly with his oldest sister. Our middle child is the typical peacemaker and tends to get along well with both her sister and brother. Our oldest and youngest are constantly competing, usually instigated by the youngest (who, birth order-wise, is the oldest/only boy, so I know that's a big factor). They like to tease and provoke one another, though our oldest won't admit it and our youngest is always making up reasons why "she" started it. Other times, it's definitely boy against girls, with our youngest feeling like the odd man out, but it's usually because he's tried to assert himself with his sisters, and too aggressively so. This has been going on since he was about 3 or 4, but it shifted somewhat as he entered first grade this past fall, and he seemed to be getting along better with our oldest - whereas she used to just want nothing to do with him, they were finally playing together and she was reading to him, and things like that...so although now there are times of everyone enjoying each other, it's always punctuated (or ruined) by the other dynamic. Any insights, tips, hope you can offer would be much appreciated!

Totally understandable! The Keirsey temperament sorter was the first assessment I ever had and it nailed me, although back then (during college), I tied on E and I, but after reading through both descriptions, I knew was the INFJ. I own Please Understand Me II and it's a good tool as well - his derivation of the four temperaments from the Myers-Briggs - NT NF SP SJ - is really insightful and can also be helpful in determining a best fit type, especially when your MBTI results don't match your self-selected type - my job as a practitioner is to help people sort that out, as well as understand the 8 functions that every four letter type expands into - we all have the same ones, but we just prefer to use them in a different order, e.g. INFJ = dominant function: introverted intuition; helper/auxiliary function: extroverted feeling; hobby/tertiary function: introverted thinking; inferior function: extroverted sensing. The remaining four functions are subconscious (that's where it gets really interesting!).

Keirsey is actually a spin-off of the original personality typing system, the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), created by a a mother and daughter (incidentally, homeschoolers!), using Jung's theories/research, to help place women in jobs during WWII and to contribute toward world peace (through self-understanding and understanding of others). It's the most widely used personality typing instrument in the world. I'm a certified MBTI practitioner and an INFJ so I love this conversation, which I'm totally relating to - in fact, you can find evidence of this angst with order & perfectionism in several threads I started this semester :) Also, I run the INFJ Christians page on Facebook.

Thank you - it's nice to know someone understands!

I can relate to all of this, down to the cats :)

Guess what happened? I went to bed early! :lol: After I had put away a bunch of laundry, I felt totally depleted of my physical energy, and since I had turned off the computer, I had no easy outlet for my mental energy...I gave up, went to bed at 10:30, read my Bible and the Book of Common Prayer until 11ish and then passed out. The funny thing is that my outlook on the mess/chaos was much improved by a good night's sleep :) Now I've made my peace with tackling the house in shorter bursts until I'm blessed with a longer one during the day. It also brought out my real issue - too much time online - so I've decided to ration my screen time. Primarily it will be when the kids have theirs and a portion of the evening, not right before bedtime.

I'm turning the computer off momentarily, drinking green jasmine tea, and working until I get too sleepy...

I couldn't have anything else going - I'm no good at multi-tasking. I'm thinking about pulling a half nighter instead, so I can catch a few winks before I have to drive, since that's a very valid concern.

Thank you. This gives me courage to try it. Maybe even tonight since we have co-op (I'm not teaching) and park day tomorrow and I could probably stumble my way through all that and then take a nap when we get home in the mid-afternoon.

This isn't stuff the kids have let pile up - that's mostly confined to their bedrooms which I'm pretty good about keeping them on top of. This is more stuff I just need to put away and organize. It's like a deep de-cluttering to give a fresh start, but it's overwhelming me because all over the house and I'm the kind of person that needs a big chunk of time to sort it and put it away properly. I'm slow and methodical and a decade of motherhood + 3 kids + 2 years of homeschooling hasn't changed that. I can't concentrate during the day when everyone is around me and there are so many distractions. I'm also thinking of moving the computer to our bedroom closet upstairs to make it less accessible...or at least it would be painfully obvious and not sustainable for me to escape and be cloistered there throughout the day :lol:

I keep toying with the idea of drinking coffee all night and organizing stuff (piles, files, books, laundry, etc.) while everyone sleeps? Has anyone done this, and if so, was it worth it?

Thanks for brainstorming with me - RootAnn & Alte, you've brought up some good points and helpful suggestions. I'm going to give the schedule I posted a whirl and see how it works (so far the kids haven't been complaining about the work - it's just me that's tiring out) over the next month. After Thanksgiving, the co-op transitions to just an hour since we end our classes and just have practice sessions for a Christmas program we perform at an elderly residential facility. I am open to bringing back Saturday morning or using it as a make-up day if we don't get it all done during the three-day marathon, but right now our house is in chaos and I have a lot of paperwork to complete (attempting to refinance), so I'm toying with the idea of just taking the next week off to catch up and then schooling Mon-Wed of Thanksgiving week (since the co-op doesn't meet). However, I don't totally trust myself to use the time wisely (thinking about turning our bedroom closet upstairs into a computer room so it's not so easy to access!), so I'm not sure whether to take the risk. I'm also the coordinator for our homeschool group which involves a lot of online communicating. I'm not complaining about any of this (I love it all...except the detail work), but I really need to get a grip on time management, or as I'm calling it these days, the liturgy of life (blog post written in my journal, but alas haven't had time to transcribe it yet - how ironic is that!). Oh, and the idea to alternate science and history is brilliant, but we don't school year round (kids have vetoed that and I'm kind of with them for the time being), so we wouldn't be able to finish ancients and life science if we did it that way. We just completed our first four year rotation of everything (though we did skip physics and only did a semester of chemistry, in order to be somewhat interest led - i.e. more with nature, animals), so we're on track to do it again and I have no intention of straying from that.

Thank you all for sharing your schedules and ideas - I will definitely return to this thread as I continue to try to come up with the best system. Alte Veste's and Stm4Him's approaches resonated with me the most, so perhaps if I share a little more detail, they (and others) could address my issues. I, too, have more energy (physical and mental) in the morning, so it's better for me to work on content/group subjects at that time, but I find that back to back history and science is too much reading and discussing at once. I can't alternate days because we have a 3 day schedule - crazy I know, but as you can see below on the spreadsheet, we have co-op one day so that eats up what would be our 4th day (though I use part of it for skill subjects - it's not a good time for content because I'm packing lunches and getting stuff ready). I've tried doing school on Saturday when my husband works, but it doesn't allow us to prepare for our sabbath, and that's something we're learning is super important to our well being. I've also tried doing school Monday morning, which is part of our weekend, and that just feels like we don't get enough of a break as a family, plus it means having to prep on our sabbath. Prior to this year, we've pretty successfully done the 3 day week, but now it's more intense...still, I'm not giving up on it unless we can't make it work by the end of this semester, at which point we might (very reluctantly) decide to take the spring semester off of co-op. UPDATE: kids have vetoed that, so our only alternative would be to reinstitute Saturday School. So my main issues is that our history (SOTW) and science (Apologia) involve me doing a lot of reading aloud, which is something we all enjoy, so I'm not willing to stop that, but it does take a lot of time to get through it, as well as do the narrations and notebook stuff, while assisting my oldest in doing her independent research for history (she likes being part of our SOTW reading, so after I finish that, I have to get her set up, then come back to the younger two to do questions and narration). For the skill subjects... they all love math (CLE), and my older two work very independently on that, but it's my weakest area, so I can't put it too late into the schedule or I get frustrated too easily when they need help. Despite all of us being very language oriented (and me being a writer, or maybe because of it), the subjects that require writing tend to be the most energy consuming - so WWE/WWS and history (narrations, research). I can't handle them back to back but if either one is too late in the schedule, we're too fried to patiently work through it. Sometimes it's this way with the Apologia notebook as well. Grammar for the younger two require more from me since we use FLL. My oldest is pretty independently doing R&S. Spelling and handwriting aren't problems but they also aren't very crucial, especially for my older two who are advanced (they are way beyond grade level in Spelling Workout). Latin is a mixed bag - I have to teach them each their lesson (one is in LC1 and the other in First Form Latin) but then they tend to work independently on the other days. Logic is barely happening, but when it does, my oldest tends to breeze through but very begrudgingly. My trouble with that, though, is that it didn't come with an answer key so I have no idea how she's doing! I thought I tracked down an answer key online but it turned out to be an older year :tongue_smilie: Here is the latest revision of our schedule which I will be testing this week: 2012-13 Homeschool Daily Schedule by literarymom, on Flickr Oh, and the rest time is non-negotiable. It's what keeps this introvert sane! (also, it's part of the Well Trained Mind way)

Also, if you have children in different grade levels, are they (for the most part) studying the same subjects at the same time or not and why? This is our 4th year homeschooling, but with bringing my youngest into our academics (albeit gently as he is a young first grader), I've been struggling with juggling three rather than just two children, since this year school year began 2 months ago. I've edited the spreadsheet umpteen times (EDIT: added latest incarnation below) hoping to achieve the best flow for the kids and for me - I'm even thinking of googling how to get optimal brain performance in case there's any research out there that help me get us into our groove :lol: We are WTM'ers so part of the issue is that my oldest entered the logic stage, but I'm still trying to have us do the same subjects at he same time (mostly) because that just feels more cohesive to me, even when the kids are working individually. 2012-13 Homeschool Daily Schedule by literarymom, on Flickr

That sounds smart, but I decided to do things the hard way :lol: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showpost.php?p=4238163&postcount=7