Thanks! She's read the Macaulay, which was one of the things that spurred her interest in anatomy. I hadn't known of the other books, and will take a look.

... composing limericks.

Thanks for the tips and links. I need to get my hands on these and check them out.

Thanks! Will check it out.

Wait ... I can do this.... . . . A limber young bato from Buffalo At limbo excelled - he could shuffle low. When señor so well-built Did his moves in a kilt The unveiling produced a kerfuffalo.

I need anatomy help for Middle Girl. We are alternating TOPS and Nebel, but neither has much (any) anatomy. These are my guidelines for my Ideal Anatomy curriculum or book or whatever. What would you suggest? 1. MG is very science-y and understands the ideas quickly. 2. Ideally it would include anatomical drawing (or be easily adapted to include such) - The Anatomy Coloring Book is too advanced for her right now, though I could see working parts of it in if necessary. 3. I have zero biology background, so I can't put together something myself very easily. 4. I'm a Christian but would really really prefer a secular curriculum. Apologia is both anti-evolution and dull, both of which rule it out for me.

Excellent! Middle Girl just finished Asimov's Breakthroughs in Science and pronounced it The Best. Book. Ever. Here's the Kirkus review: "In the lucid and information packed style that has rendered the author outstanding in the juvenile science field, Isaac Asimov describes twenty-six men and the moments at which they reversed the course of scientific thought. From Archimedes to Robert Hutchings Goddard, these men accomplished a major breakthrough by establishing original and hitherto unrevealed laws. And from these laws the course of science assumed a dramatically new direction. Embracing every area of science, this is a readable text which should interest even the most reluctant student, and is therefore recommended to school libraries."

Google yields 144,000 hits for kerfuffle, and 15,800 for kerfluffle.* As a descriptivist, I am forced to conclude that kerfluffle, while as yet nonstandard, will soon be an acceptable form of the word. One or two more heated WTM threads should do the job. . . . *1,070 of those hits were from forums.welltrainedmind.com.

I haven't seen Excavating English. Tell me more. I have been using Understanding English Grammar, and combining it with some second-hand A Beka grammar teacher's guides in a useful way. UEG doesn't have much in the way of practice sentences, so I've been cherry-picking from the thousands of sentences in A Beka. I just read them out to Middle Girl and we do our grammar work orally, which actually helps a lot in disentangling it from orthography. (It also allows me to re-word annoying sentences.)

Briefly: At least in the Island series, the grammar is the outdated 19th-century approach of defining "parts of speech" by the meaning of each word, stuffing words that behave quite differently linguistically into the same category for the sake of maintaining the arbitrary eight (six? nine? I can never remember) "parts of speech" despite the nonsensical grammatical results. In the poetry book, he makes absurd assertions about phonology, and doesn't seem to understand differences in British or pre-19th century pronunciations and modern American pronunciation, leading him to find near rhymes where the rhymes are perfect. I no longer have the books, so I can't cite specific examples. I've seen a lot worse for hs English curriculum, but for the money, I would have liked accuracy and some nod to the last century of linguistic understanding.

If you have a background in linguistics or poetry, you may find yourself throwing the books against a wall.

Great Girl starts at Big State U. this morning. She's living at home and biking in, just like the last year when we "high schooled" by letting her sit in on intro courses with consent of instructor, and she did her other homeschooling in dh's campus office. Nothing has changed, really, except the hefty transfer we just made from our bank account to Big State's coffers. I packed her a lunch as usual, kissed her goodbye, and off she and dh went on their bikes. Why am I so very sad then?

Agreeing with Bill, except that we started Key To with two second-graders with no ill effects. Also, it sounds like you like the 'thread' aspect of Miquon. Key To is basically the same. We start it when a child is on the fifth Miquon book, and begin with Key To Fractions and KT Geometry simultaneously. We add in the other 'threads' (KT series) when the time seems right. Basically we follow the European model of multiple concurrent areas of math, continuing this with AoPS; after finishing KT Algebra, we started Middle Girl concurrently with AoPS Prealgebra, Algebra, Geometry, Counting, and Probability, and are progressing through them all slowly, taking a break from one when we hit a wall and going to another. We kept up arithmetic (i.e. number-crunching speed and accuracy) for both girls, as a completely separate subject, through the Key To series and through AoPS (or "proto-AoPS" in Great Girl's case). IMO that's a necessary supplement to the math of both KT and AoPS.

So much of this confusion lies at the feet of the shepherds of the Church. Half a century of pastorally avoiding hurting the feelings of divorcees and Protestants by refraining from teaching Church doctrine, and implying or saying outright that Vatican 2 changed all the rules. Through the mid-20th century, Protestants and Catholics alike knew that the Church wasn't going to recognize your marriage if either of you was a divorcee with a spouse still alive. If you married a Catholic, practicing or not, you knew that the Church wouldn't accept your marriage unless you were married in the Church, and would barely tolerate it (you would be married quietly in the priest's study) if you didn't convert. Everyone knew that if you didn't really mean "till death do you part" when you assented to it, or didn't see children as part of your future, the Church considered you to be agreeing to concubinage, not entering into a valid marriage. Now nobody knows those things, and when it all turns ugly and messy, and the Tribunal tries to gather up the pieces and sort them out, nobody is happy. [\rant] ETA: Wow, killed the thread. Maybe this is why people IRL seem to edge away when I start expostulating.....

Sorry, on re-reading, I sounded pretty hyper-sensitive there. Too many years of avoiding women's retreats for just this reason, I suppose.

Fellow Catholics, please stop confusing 'valid' and 'sacramental.' I have a personal stake in this, as my marriage is valid but not sacramental. My children are legitimate, and I am a Catholic in good standing, my marriage blessed by the Church. 'Valid' just means 'really existing.' An annulment declares that there was no marriage at all; that is, the "marriage" was not valid (never actually existed). It has nothing to do with whether the marriage was sacramental. 'Sacramental' means the real, valid, actual marriage was between two baptized persons, and is therefore a sacrament. It has nothing to do with validity, civil marriage, legitimacy of the children, acceptability by the Church, or annulments. I married an unbaptized person, with the Dispensation of the Church, according to Church canons. My marriage was blessed by the assisting priest. It is a valid marriage, but not sacramental, as dh is not a Christian. When Catholics talk about annulments declaring a marriage "not sacramental" as if that means the marriage is nothing and the parties can remarry at will, it's a little painful. So please stop.

1. No. Marriage is a natural good, and not limited to Catholics. Christ taught that it was instituted from the beginning of Man's existence. 2. No. The children of a union which was believed by one or both partners to be a real marriage are legitimate. 3. Yes. An annulment isn't a divorce, but a juridical pronouncement as to a marriage's validity at the time the marriage contract was entered into. If one party entered it with the intention of not remaining faithful, then no marriage was formed (because the person would not have been intending "marriage" but something else). But later adultery doesn't retroactively make it not a marriage. 4. No and yes. The wife wasn't blindsided by the letter; the Tribunal would have contacted her and asked her side of the story. Many people prefer not to cooperate, and then the Tribunal does the best it can with the evidence it's able to obtain from either party, from other witnesses, and from public and Church records. None of this is to deny that the mass granting of annulments isn't a scandal.

We have a lesson tree for Middle Girl - an oak drawn on a foam board, with velcro-attaching leaves for each lesson, each color-coded branch being a different subject (math, languages, etc.). The reading branch has green leaves, but finishing a book gets you the coveted Gold Leaf, which stays up the rest of that day and all the next. Wee Girl has a lesson flower with petals and cute bugs. Finishing a book gets The Smiley Sun. So it's not so much extrinsic rewards as it is having your achievement recognized. ETA: Oh, I see it's lesson books. Well, that would be rewarded with a Solemn Procession, either to the curriculum storage shelf or to the recycling bin.

Middle Girl used Crazy Eighths, which basically is the usual kids' card games with a deck made of notes on the staff. It only took a week of playing card games for a little while each day for her to get them all down. It helped that she was trouncing Mommy by the end of the week.

Interesting. All the on-line samples could be one on their own; I'd wondered if some pages required the Guide. Thanks. Blondeviolin, thanks for the tip. I'll take a look at MEP. Wapiti, I'd wondered about the focus on skip counting too; none of my girls ever skip counted - we just don't teach multiplication that way.

I don't want to imply that I'm looking for a curriculum. Dh, when he does his "Daddy Math" time with the littles, makes up a lot of problems and games. The BA practice books look like a good source for them. We don't need a resource for teaching the concepts in the first place. When Beast Academy first came out, he and I looked at it as a possible fun supplement. We were very turned off by the format (forgive me, and of course YMMV, but comic-book teaching is one of the things we homeschool to avoid), and the guides didn't seem to differ greatly from how we already teach math. Except it's cartoon monsters saying the words, instead of Mommy or Daddy next to you. But I hadn't seen the Practice books until recently, and wondered if anybody had used them as a supplement, without the Guides, and if so, whether they thought it was worth it. But it doesn't sound like anybody has.

Hmmm. Food for thought. i don't feel we need the teaching from the Guides - it seems to be pretty much what dh and I teach at that level, and I think we do it pretty well - it really is just more fun ways to practice the math that we're interested in. But we really like to do the teaching ourselves. I wouldn't say there's anything "wrong" with the comic book format inherently ... it's just a visceral dislike of the format for learning. Anyway, I'll ponder before I order. Thanks for the input. Y'all are great.

The comic book format of Beast Academy is a hurdle I can't get over, but looking at the sample pages, they don't seem to be in that format at all (other than annoying cartoon creatures at the tops of the pages), and seemed to have interesting games and problems. Has anybody used just the Practice books, without the Guide books?

Ah. I may well have just misunderstood you. I missed that you were talking about older adults.

What does it even mean to teach arithmetic without mathematical concepts? When a child is no longer repeating the words "one two three four five" as a parroted chant and is actually counting, he's grasped that each number is exactly one greater than the one before. Each number name maps onto one unique number of objects. One number, zero, counts no things. Numbers apply not just to apples but to oranges and bananas as well. These are all "conceptual mathematics." When people talk about "New Math," they often seem to mean teaching that makes these concepts explicit at a level appropriate to the child's age. I don't see anything wrong with that. In the Seventies, "New Math" sometimes seemed to refer to a sort of cargo-cult pedagogy whereby the mere vocabulary of mathematics was trusted to make the concepts underlying them apparent: thus endless worksheets that asked students to "Find the union of the set of red fish and the set of blue fish" rather than just to add the red fish and the blue fish together. Silly, but not harmful. What I do find harmful is deciding in advance which children are capable of understanding mathematics and which will simply be made to memorize math facts. OP, I'm assuming that's not what you meant. But I don't think mathematical comprehension requires extraordinary intellectual gifts, and I do think all children should be given the opportunity to try to understand. Not because we need more people in STEM careers, but because mathematics is the language of the universe, and we all deserve a chance to join in the conversation as we are able.