About $100/year per child. I've got thirteen years' worth of curriculum now; I don't find a need to spend much more. This doesn't count tuition for outsourced lessons, nor non-curricular books.

IANAL, but I assume all this activity is in reaction to Employment Division v. Smith, which arguably knocked the legs out from under Yoder (the case which gave us the constitutional right to homeschool). The Smith opinion explicitly said it wouldn't undermine Yoder, but the passage in which it did so appealed confusingly to a sort of hybrid rights analysis which quite a few actual lawyers involved in this sort of thing think would be seen as mere dictum (i.e. comments by the Court that aren't binding law) were a homeschool case to come before the Court again. Short version: It's not at all clear that Yoder still gives us the constitutional right to homeschool. So HSLDA is apparently trying to enshrine Yoder language into state constitutions. So that when California (for example) gives another shot at outlawing homeschooling, and we all realize that the conservative justices who voted for Smith aren't going to vote our way, there will be state law to fall back on.

This thread is the first time I've ever heard of a Baccalaureate (in this sense). Most churches around here have some sort of recognition event for graduating seniors among their congregants. This is especially meaningful in parts of town where the graduation rate is low, and the seniors get to be examples and models to the other kids in their faith communities. This Baccalaureate thing doesn't sound nearly so pleasing.

David Wilkinson, Not Between Brothers. http://www.amazon.com/Not-Between-Brothers-David-Wilkinson/dp/1893448096

I have an inexcusable prejudice against graphic novels, but I'll take a look at those suggestions.

Going to check those out. Thanks!

Nice idea. I might even have Great Girl skim it and tell me where the big advances have been. (My science incapacity fortunately wasn't an inherited characteristic.) Thanks!

Oh, I missed that.

Music. And I do outsource it.

Oh boy, another evolution thread. ;) A straightforward question, for those who have more science background than myself, which would be nearly anyone. Middle Girl is reading the battered 1964 "Evolution" volume from the Time/Life Nature Library series. She's following the genetics discussion pretty well (thank you, Isaac Asimov). This is the only book on evolution for her reading and comprehension level I've ever found. Query: Have there been advances in the understanding of evolution, natural selection, genetics (I know we know a lot more about DNA now), such that 1964 just makes the book too old? Or is it probably good enough for a science-y ten-year-old who's following it and enjoying it? ETA: My degree is in English literature. Talk to me about science like I'm an idiot.

We have the old Olive Beaupré Miller Book House volumes, and my girls have always loved its children's version of Spenser's Faerie Queene. So I have many times been forced to read, with a straight face, about how the Redcrosse Knight sallied forth, followed by the fair Una, seated on her snow-white ass.

My understanding is that that's the case in scientific use, where the significant figures indicate greater accuracy; but mathematically, 0.1 and 0.1000 are the same number.

Load up on Google books! You can get all the volumes of Olive Miller's magnificent Book House set, plus everything by Alfred Church and Padraig Colum. Those alone are almost all the literature a child needs for K-8. I round it out with a tab kept opened to The Baldwin Project. My girls think of my iPad as The Endless Wonderful Book Machine.

Schooled in Central Texas in the Seventies and Eighties. No mention of evolution in elementary school that I recall. In high school biology, the teacher skipped the evolution chapter, pleading time pressure to get through the book by the end of the year. My best friend's teacher told them to read the chapter themselves and write a short paper explaining their views on evolution (most of her class, including my friend, took an evolution-is-false POV). This was a school district in a heavily Southern Baptist county during the takeover of the SBC, and there was general fear that the school board was about to be controlled by religious conservatives and that jobs might be at stake. I can't say whether there was any basis to that fear, but we all knew the reason for the cold feet. My MIL taught elementary in that ISD until ten years ago. By the time she retired, she had been required to stop teaching her usual unit on mythology, due to parental complaints about teaching about false gods, and was no longer allowed to mention Halloween. ETA: Yes, all this is one of the many reasons we homeschool. I now live in the county immediately south of the one I grew up in, and the ISD here, I'm assured, manages to be just as insufferable (in the other direction) as its neighbor to the north. It's like they feed off each other. A plague o' both their houses.

Bury it and sing an Agnus Dei over the grave.

And yesterday was Mary Wollstonecraft's birthday - writer of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, married to William Godwin, and Mary Shelley's mom! Almost done with Plato's Republic. For fiction reading, I'm on Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, published by NYRB with its companion story Gambara in a new translation. I've been very pleased with the NYRB republications, particularly their children's books. Speaking of which, Middle Girl read and loved The Bear's Famous Invasion of Sicily (though not the NYRB reprint but the one with the reader's companion by Lemony Snicket). This is not a book for every child (read the Amazon reviews first), and I wouldn't suggest it for the younger set. Snicket's reader's companion is a pitch-perfect parody of the wretched comprehension guides that turn so many good children's books into plodding exercises. Middle Girl was delighted by both Buzzati and Snicket.

Our parish doesn't have any ministry for special needs as such, but one thing I'm grateful for is that, while we have a well-developed and sometimes annoying bureaucracy, the diocese has an explicit policy exempting special-needs children from all bureaucratic requirements for religious education and sacramental preparation. And parents determine for themselves if their child has special needs. The sheer practicality of this general exemption is worth a hundred gestures of welcoming.

So that you can read Latin.

I think I want you to be my kids' teacher. Well, if I weren't.

It seems to me that we start with inhuman (i.e. not designed for human children) conditions - huge schools; enclosed, echo-y cafeterias; crowds of same-age children unaccompanied by older children or adults; too-short times to eat; little or no time for free play and exercise - and then fix the inevitably resulting problems by inhuman measures. We like to eat lunch on a blanket out on the grass this time of year.

I'm just envious, even now, of you popular girls. :)

Somehow I grew up in Texas and missed this (our geeky little circle didn't do homecoming). Found an article on the phenomenon that reads like it's from the Onion. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/25/us-homecoming-mums-texas-idUSTRE78O2Z420110925 ------------ Sidney Heath, the girlfriend of Hagerman's oldest son, James, recently received the crown jewel of Hagerman's mums. A front and back mum sandwiches her body and is attached to a dog harness for strength and comfort. "I absolutely love it," she said before a homecoming game in Southlake, Texas, on Friday. "I wanted it be big, and it is really big. It may be the biggest of any this year." ------------ Pamela H., I have to confess feeling relief that, as homeschoolers, we don't have to do such things!

When I've had a misprinted/misbound book, the bookseller has just provided me with a replacement copy. I presume they get reimbursed by the publisher or wholesaler. Would that be a quicker way of getting the pages for you?

There are people of every classification who decide that they enjoy being aggrieved, and that this perpetual sense of grievance dispenses them from the normal rules of civility with regard to those against whom they bear that grievance. Weighing the validity of their grievances misses the point entirely. In their own eyes, they are justified by the treatment they've convinced themselves they've received; or, they've been on the receiving end long enough; or, it's healthy to vent; or, the time for tolerance has passed. Singly, they're just jerks; in groups, they can revel in their jerkiness and feel it to be a virtue. The internet is, of couse, awash with such people.

Today I finished Middle Girl's read-aloud, 8. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. I deserve some sort of extra credit for (a) reading all 479 pages out loud, when (b ) I really dislike Dickens. ---------------- His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed and lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him. "If you hear in my voice - I don't know that it is so, but I hope it is - if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!" She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a child. "If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that ---------------- ... and so on. If that child wants Oliver Twist, she's on her own.