Ho ho. Our post-partum curriculum both times was Me: Finished that book? Great. Here's another one. Let Mommy nap now. Dh: Want to play math?

Thanks. I guess it's still HA for us.

Oh thank God. I thought "Hive appliance" was another of these salacious euphemisms that are so popular around here.

The important thing is to just start playing with it and having fun. When dh and I used Miquon the first time through, 13 years ago, we had nothing but the six books: no Lab Annotations (didn't know there was supplementary material), not even Cuisenaire rods (the store that carried the books didn't have them, and Great Girl hated manipulatives anyway). We would just sit down on the couch with Great Girl and say "I wonder what we get to play next?" Nearly always, a glance over the page made it obvious what they were trying to get at. I'm sure all the other stuff and time spent in preparation would have made it go even better, but we didn't have the stuff and never prepared and it was still successful and great fun. This afternoon, Great Girl got her AP Calculus BC score in the mail: 5.:party: (Sorry, forgive the brief Mommy brag.) Anyhow, I credit Miquon with that 5. :D

Mango Greek? Tell me about that. 4th-grader Middle Girl is halfway through Hey, Andrew! Book 5, which isn't that great but was the only thing on the market a decade ago when we were looking for primary-level Greek. Is it Attic Greek? Do you like it?

Got Great Girl's scores in the afternoon mail. Dh hadn't mentioned to anyone when they were coming, especially not to Great Girl, and I'm guessing that's because she and I both tend to get very stressed about these things; she is off fencing at Nationals in LA, with her toughest events today and yesterday, and dh almost certainly didn't want her thinking about her APs. Anyhow, they went well: 5s for Chemistry, calc BC and AB subscore, and Physics C (Mechanics). The Mechanics exam was really rough - she wasn't even able to finish it, and she said she wrote nonstop at top speed - so she's pretty pleased. I'm most pleased with her 4 on German Language. She took OSU German 3, hated it, and just stopped doing it halfway through (without mentioning that fact to anyone). :tongue_smilie: We made her finish the course, but that was after the AP. What she was doing was having German conversations with a native-German-speaking friend of mine, and immersing herself in Rilke with a facing literal translation. Because she loves poetry and hates correspondence-course busywork. Yeah, the little-known Rilke AP preparation method. You heard it here first.

We skip the more difficult of the challenge problems with Middle Girl. ("We" not because I'm feeling royal, but because I use two AoPS books with her, and dh uses two others.) We check off problems as we go, and occasionally go back and try one of the challenge problems that had been too difficult for her earlier. Meanwhile, we use Alcumus for additional problems in each area, as well as the tons of old math competition materials we have on hand. And dh will if needed just make up problems for her to work on weak areas. Among all these, we find we have plenty of problems for Middle Girl to work on; it's not necessary to force her through advanced competition-style problems that she's just not ready for.

When I read the collected letters of Flannery O'Connor, I was amazed at how poor her spelling was - and yet she was one of the great American writers of the last century. I guess her editor kept busy.

Middle Girl, rising fourth-grader, misspelled her own name recently.:eek: So that sets the bar pretty low.

Avoid TERC and EM. Those are curricula people homeschool to avoid. Check out Miquon and AoPS. Bill will be here in a minute to tell you all about them.:D

Did you have any temptation to just not comply? Speaking as a fellow Texan with those none-of-the-gummint's-dang-business instincts. This is the sort of thing that makes Texas homeschoolers not want perks or privileges from the public schools, no matter how nice it may sound. We keep our hands off their tax money, they keep their hands off our curriculum.

Dh is one, and it's true, his hours are much lighter and more flexible. The trade-off is really low pay, a very late start to your earning years, and incredible competition to get even those jobs. Like many schoolteachers, dh has a second, part-time position over the summer (when he doesn't get paid otherwise) with a different institution which takes him out of the country for a big chunk of each summer. You do have the security - if you're lucky enough to get a tenure-track position and aren't a starving adjunct with no benefits or job security - of tenure. Or at least you used to, until universities (I'm looking at you, SUNY Albany) figured out you can get around tenure by just abolishing entire departments within the humanities. UVA attempted it just recently and fired the university president when she held her ground and refused to turn a major state university into a trade school.

Outsourcing! Yeah! Wee Girl: Choir Catechism (with an amazing Montessori catechetical program) Middle Girl: Choir Piano French Great Girl: Everything. Off to college!

My great-great-grandfather was the governor of one of the desert territories. I've been in the 500-year-old governor's mansion, and its thick adobe walls, wraparound portico, and breezeway construction keep it nice and cool. Don't know what the commoners did. :D

Well I feel better now. And yet, kind of worse.

Art. I don't even know what teaching art should look like. With the result that Great Girl never really learned much about it. She was ecstatic to discover in freshman orientation that she'll be able to use a History of Classics course for her mandatory art credit.

No, I don't think it would have to be both. I've done the lice-treatment thing on our whole family, and on one child with especially thick hair I failed (!!!) to get all the lice killed on the first round of treatment. If I'd been forced to send her to school, she would have been there with live lice. Further, all over the counter treatments, as well as all the 'smother' treatments, kill only live lice, not nits. It is easy to miss nits in nit removal. Missed nits will hatch. That's why all treatments call for 2-3 rounds of treatment, spaced out by the lice life cycle. So when even the treatments contemplate that there will be live lice present in the hair within days after the initial treatment, and yet schools say those children must be in the classroom, I refuse to declare the children's mothers to be at fault for reinfestation. As a general rule, it seems uncharitable to impute vice to those who fail to succeed in the world, whether in ways great or small.

In our ISD, it's not an excused absence to keep a child home for having head lice. I'd think the inability to keep infested kids out of the classroom would contribute more to recurring infestations than the purported Lazy Mothers.

I've been glued to the legal blogs all day. Say no more. :D ETA: It's not that I'm a completely negligent homeschooler; everyone but me and Wee Girl is out of town, so I have a lot of blog-reading time while entertaining the little one.

Not all in one year; just done concurrently. They're paced differently. Dh does geometry and/or counting in the mornings before leaving for work; I do algebra in the afternoon; and the prealgebra is mostly for fun and going a little deeper. That last AoPS will be wrapped up soon. I spent three years in the UK school system, which was long enough to be disabused of the idea that it makes sense to do only one area of math(s) at a time for a year before learning anything in a different area.

:lol: Gotta love Housman. Malt does more than Milton can.... Here's

Longfellow's Excelsior. Even Bullwinkle Moose had to parody it.

Agreeing with wapiti. Middle Girl started AoPS Prealgebra, Algebra, Geometry, and Counting concurrently last year, after completing all the Key To series, including algebra and geometry. She still finds AoPS a challenge. Btw, you can use Alcumus for AoPS review questions by setting the topic to whatever you want to review.

:grouphug:

Unfortunately, also dead.