Wee Girl is selectively mute, and it's almost exactly like what you describe (keeping in mind a 6-year age difference). If she will talk to a therapist, I would go that route. Most people assume she's just shy, but we've figured out that she isn't - actually she's pretty outgoing - but she dreads the expectation to speak, and so acts in a shy way. With people who know her and don't expect her to talk, she doesn't behave shyly at all - she just doesn't talk. Purely social speech (thank you, please, etc.) are the hardest for her, I think because there is so much social pressure to produce these utterances. There aren't any useful studies of selective mutism, but anecdotal evidence suggests that behavioral therapy has good outcomes.

<Lurches from the grave, brushing phonemes from shroud> Mom2Es, All I can proffer is that my children weren't confused by starting out with "nouns are the kinds of words where you can show there's more than one by adding -s." Of course they were quick to think of exceptions (men, children, sheep), but that they could come up with counterexamples showed that they had correctly grasped what a noun was. The next step was to explain that a noun is the kind of word that you can put "the" or "some" in front of to make a complete phrase (I don't actually say "phrase" at first, but something like "a little saying that doesn't sound like something's missing.") That takes care of mass nouns, though my girls had already figured out, and informed me, that some nouns don't have plurals. You see that between -s plural form and preceding article, you have a way of looking at nouns that looks primarily at form and distribution rather than primarily category or meaning. This is how a linguistic (what I've been loosely calling "structural") approach differs from the traditional approach to grammar. And it's why, for instance, when Lewis Carroll tells me that "all mimsy were the borogoves," I know that borogove is a noun, despite having no clue what the word means. (Similarly, I know that mimsy is an adjective, though it creates no descriptive idea in my mind at all.) <shambles back into grave>

We separate arithmetic and math, but I wouldn't consider 4 + 2 and 43 + 20 to be different concepts; they're both addition, and I wouldn't move on to the latter with a child who was struggling with the former. I suppose if the latter were part of a lesson in place value, and the child was focusing on the idea that 4 tens and 2 tens uses the same arithmetic as 4 beetles plus 2 beetles, then I would just tell him that they made 6 tens. We often help out with the arithmetic in a math problem so that the concept being taught isn't derailed by "brain blinks."

Agreeing with regentrude; but I had gathered the "more math chat" etc. was referring to homeschoolers particularly, not to American math education in general. My apologies if I have misunderstood.

For Advent, we try to maintain a peaceful, recollected, and anticipatory atmosphere. We avoid sweets and parties, particularly during the fast days of Advent Embertide (the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after St. Lucy's Day) - quite a challenge when everyone is having their Christmas parties! St. Nicholas' Day makes for a nice "intermission" in this "waiting for Christmas" period. We do put up a tree - turns out selection is pretty thin if you wait till right before Christmas - but don't decorate until Christmas Eve, when the children decorate it. We have a Jesse Tree for remembering salvation history, a crèche sans Infant Christ (who appears of course Christmas morning, at which time the Magi start wending their slow way toward the crèche), and an Advent wreath for evening prayer. We use red candles, lighting another one at each Sunday's First Vespers, and pray the collect for that Sunday, followed by singing the antiphon "Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum/ Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorum." On the Golden Nights, we sing the 'O' antiphon for that night. On Christmas Day the revelry begins, with the help of all the lovely discounted Christmas delicacies at Central Market (last year we scored a foot-tall chocolate Santa on a donkey for a few dollars :D), culminating in a Twelfth Night party with traditional food and drink, the music and entertainment provided by guests and children according to their various talents.

Sounds like the psychologist was wise enough to recognize a mother's wisdom in homeschooling. :).

What is 5HTP? (We're not considering medication at this point, but I like to think about the future.)

Happyhomemama, It was an idea I got from another parent. A special notebook for stickers and some highly desirable stickers, awarded liberally for any verbalization in situations where the child can't usually manage it. Wee Girl can speak easily to other children or her parents (oddly, the only grandparent she speaks easily to is my dad who lives a state away, but he's like the child-whisperer of New Mexico and has always had some vibe that makes small children want him as their best friend) - so she knows she can get a sticker anytime she talks to other people. The idea I think is that the desire for the immediate reward might outweigh the anxiety long enough to get a little verbalization going. But we'd had a long dry spell where even the stickers wouldn't do it, and I've been getting a little anxious myself. She'd be all psyched up to try speaking, and we'd practice potential conversations, and then she'd collapse and hide her face against me when the moment came. So today was a huge surprise.

:grouphug: No advice either, though commiseration with the difficulty of medicating an extraordinarily thin 9-year-old.

There is something about being able to come here all excited about my child saying "thank you" and having people understand what a Big Deal that is that's making me tear up dreadfully. Thank you everyone for letting me share that with you. :grouphug:

Well now, I was agreeing with you up to this point, but we've always separated "arithmetic" from "math" in our household, and it's very successful. Arithmetic here means increasing speed and accuracy in computation through practice problems of gradually increasing difficulty. So for instance learning how to divide, how division relates to multiplication, fractions, and slope, etc. are part of the math lesson; and while math moves onward, the arithmetic lessons provide practice in division problems, eventually including techniques for division with multiple-digit divisors. It neatly solves the problem, we find, of children being able to grasp mathematical concepts but not yet having the stamina for large or complex problems involving those concepts. But then, we are guilty of loving New Math and Back to Basics and any kind of number fun we can lay our hands on around here. Our math is even fuzzy when the cat plops down on the paper.

Well, we chucked MCT and are using a cobbled-together structural grammar curriculum (don't ask). So for us direct and indirect objects are extremely easy: (1) if a verb has two objects (ditransitive verb, though for now I just call them "two-object verbs"), the first is the indirect object, the second is the direct object; (2) you can stick "to" or "for" in front of an indirect object, and you will then feel a need to move it behind the direct object. Linking verbs are verbs like be, seem, appear, etc. that have complements giving more information about the subject. (We leave linking verbs alone for quite a while as they can be hard to intuit, and there's no pressing need to identify them at an early age; I just point out where they occur, we think about how the verb itself doesn't give much information [e.g. "get" in "He got sick" versus "He got the prize"], and we move on.) Which is, I suppose, another way of repeating the previous advice to wait until older if it isn't clicking now.

My 4th grader got 15 8/21 in 63 seconds. Not counting the time it took her to pause and ask if she was "allowed" to write out the computations underneath or if she had to do those in her head. :confused: Death to calculators.

First an apology to Mary Ellen - I haven't checked in for a while, and missed your question about other selectively mute children. And I suppose I was feeling that we weren't seeing any progress. Well today Wee Girl must have felt it was time. I dropped her off at her Montessori class (2 hrs, one morning a week - last year she needed Middle Girl to be in it with her, this year she is all about doing it herself), and there was a new assistant instead of her beloved Miss Vicki, to whom she would actually speak a few words. I was running late and there was no good opportunity to talk to New Assistant about Wee Girl's inability to talk. When I picked her up, she told me with great annoyance that New Assistant had insisted she must wear her name tag, even though she had told her twice that she didn't like how the pin made holes in her nice dress. I asked a few questions and confirmed that she had managed entire phrases with an adult she doesn't know. I was just blown away. (Of course there's still the issue that New Assistant couldn't understand her speech, but one issue at a time.) Then in the afternoon, we dropped off Middle Girl and went to hang out at the nearby library and do some reading and writing lessons. All our pencils were dull, and I asked her to stay while I asked the librarian at the desk where the sharpener was. Suddenly she jumped up and announced she would go ask. I hid my scepticism and told her that was fine. Mommy, come with me. Sure. Mommy, will you ask instead? No, but I'll help ask. (Tears, paralysis. Back to our seat.) No, I do want you to help me ask. Do you want to practice here first? No, I just want to go ask and you help me. (Off to the desk.) Me: We're looking for something. Librarian (to me): Yes, what are you looking for? (Silence. Puzzlement. Subtle gestures of Mommy's head toward Wee Girl. Librarian cottons on.) Librarian (to Wee Girl): What were you looking for? Wee Girl (tiny voice): ... pencil sharpener... Mommy (mouthing words): PENCIL SHARPENER. Librarian: Oh yes! We have two pencil sharpeners.... Anyway Wee Girl was ebullient, jubilant, exultant in her victory over fear. As I dug out the long-neglected sticker book for speaking-reward stickers, she plotted her next librarian speech act. She considered and rejected "goodbye" on the grounds that we would then have to leave. I suggested I might have to use the bathroom, and she pulled me over to the desk for a repeat of the odd little dialogue with (thankfully) a different librarian. This time when the librarian couldn't make out the whisper, she repeated it more loudly. Please understand that in all five years of Wee Girl's life, she has never managed to speak directly to a stranger at a desk or counter. Then her tour de force. Her most anxiety-provoking verbal situation has always been purely social speech such as hello, goodbye, thank you, you're welcome, excuse me. (My theory is that it's her sensing the social pressure to produce these.) So we go to check out her books in the usual silence, and the librarian gives them to her saying "thank you" - and Wee Girl says, clearly and at normal volume, "Thank you." :party: As we walk to the van, she asks "So how many stickers do I get for that? I am so happy tonight.

Maybe Apple got tired of the complaints that their iOS6 mapping app doesn't have a street view, and are trying to do a quick and cheap patch. Point-and-shoot camera sounds about right.

Middle Girl is head-over-heels in love with Shelley. She's spent the morning with "To a Skylark" and "The Cloud," announced that Shelley is the Best. Poet. Ever. and squealed with delight when, flipping through my old college Collected Poetry of Shelley, discovered that he was the author of "Ozymandias." She plans to spend the day with old Percy Bysshe. I feel like I can die happy now. This makes up for Great Girl and her silly STEM major. :glare:

Put in your retainer. Use things for what they're made for. Eating snot is not attractive. Because knowledge is better than ignorance. The cat is not lonely.

Labelling isn't good enough, though that may be the intent. The Supreme Court upheld the 'ministerial exception' in Hosanna Tabor, but a court would look at what, if any, training and duties lie behind the title of pastor or minister. You can't just exempt yourself from labor and employment laws by slapping on a title. My understanding, though, is that churches have much more latitude for hiring or firing based on religion. So you couldn't refuse to hire a disabled church secretary but you could refuse to hire a secretary for not being of your religion.

From my experience: 1. New things unsettle old things. (This seems to apply to math, too.) A new grammatical structure causes, for a while, the previously understood grammar to unmoor in the brain after a while, it all settles again with the new thing in place. 2. Some Latin grammar is harder than others. 3. 10 is very young for Latin. Not criticizing; I have my 9-year-old studying Latin. Slowly. But extreme youth can mean not just going more slowly, but sometimes covering things in a different order, or to a different extent. 4. We like to alternate periods of vocabulary acquisition/study, combined with translation, with periods of grammar acquisition/ study. Each helps the other. YMMV.

Fall weather on its way here! A cold front's coming in tonight, which is expected to drop the temps a good ten degrees ... into the mid-nineties.

I'm not sure exactly what these comments mean, nor why this old thread should suddenly attract two new commenters with a very similar style. But if they mean that women have traditionally covered their heads in worship in order to keep hair out of their face, or to increase facial beauty, and that women who now choose counterculturally to worship with their heads covered are only doing it as a formality, then I must strongly disagree.

I finished reading Verne's Around the World in 80 Days to Middle Girl. It was fun, though we had to have some discussion about the depictions of Hinduism and Mormonism. Unfortunately I saw the twist ending coming (I think it was the second time Passepartout refused to adjust his watch for the time zone), which made the final build-up excruciating. But Middle Girl loved it.

Done. You'll see the change in the next edition.

My dictionary gives the Portuguese bufalo as the source of "buffalo," so I'm going to permit the -alo on the grounds that my young man's mother was from Rio. Also his name is Kiki and he would walk un kilometro for el karaoke. :D

But ... but ... the meter....