I've tried copywork--actually we recently threw over LLATL which she hated for PLL which she loves, and which has a fair amount of copywork--but somehow it doesn't help. I'm fairly sure she doesn't copy the words, but reads the sentence, then turns to her paper and writes the sentence, and somewhere in the processing the words transmute. The letters that were before her eyes have no impact on the letters that appear on the paper.

Really, neither. Since we began hs'ing, I've never ceased to be put off by how both Protestant and Catholic hs'ers try to "Christianize" or "Catholicize" subjects. Strategies range from putting random Bible verses on math worksheets, to using sentences for grammar study that tell the story of persecutions, to studying only/primarily art with religious subjects ... and don't get me started on history. :D The Venerable Newman--soon to be beatified!--took a much different approach to integrating the disciplines of an education. I would urge reading The Idea of a University (you can get a little sense of it here in a lecture by the formidable Alisdair MacIntyre). I follow my own grade-school version of this by (a) living as Catholics, not in the very self-conscious way that I feel is promoted by curricula that slather on Catholicism as a kind of frosting; (b) teaching catechism as a subject at a young age; and © teaching theology (or really leading the student to books and teachers that can do so) at high school age. For the rest, I let the math be math, etc. Hope this made sense.:)

Dd7 is a reasonably good speller for her age, but where she makes errors, she cannot be corrected. She regularly writes (for example) 'onely,' 'squeril," and 'wallk.' We study them, she writes 'only,' 'squirrel,' and 'walk' when examined on the words ... and the very next time she uses them in her writing, she's back to the exact old misspelling. It's as if in her little mind there's the 'spelling test' way of writing them, and then there's the way you write them when you want to actually use the words. She was an extremely early reader--learned everything as a sight word--and now while she understands phonetic rules and word patterns, I think the misspellings have burned into her brain visually. Do I keep these, and many similar serially misspelled words, forever on her list? Or do I leave it for a while and see if a little maturity helps? She's still very little.

:iagree: Our faith curriculum looks very much like this. The most central aspect of it is being involved in a parish that lives the faith seven days a week, with lots of community involvement: benediction, adoration (including children's adoration, which has catechetical elements), processions, retreats, service to the poor, rosaries, May crowning, OF and EF masses, posada at Christmas, etc. Dd14 has had a better "religious education" from helping at the SVdP office and doing 2 hours of groundskeeping work Saturday mornings--in the company of mature Catholics--than any textbook would have given her. That said, we do use the BC and OQFH catechetical series as OLV does (plus My Catholic Faith in between them). Have you looked at the ones from Ignatius Press? I use them for dd7 and for my CCD class. They're quite beautiful.

It's been absolutely wonderful. The weather has certainly been cooperative, the local people have been kind and helpful, the girls have been astoundingly well-behaved for all being crammed into close quarters without their usual friends or amusements, my dh has really liked the lectures and conferences, and I think I'm losing weight from all the walking (though the discovery of scones and Cadbury's is offsetting that a bit). My favorite moment so far was approaching Loch Leven castle on a tiny ferry, with the mist lowering, the pheasants fluttering about, and the captive Mary Queen of Scots walking the walls in my imagination. For our last week here, we plan to zip up to the Orkneys and see the prehistoric buildings and carvings and the puffins (dd7 is planning to take one home in her suitcase ... should make going through customs interesting). Then, home to 100+ degrees and a coastline covered with oil....

Slightly OT, but it's a testament to the people posting on this thread that it's reached two pages with charity and restraint. Usually Medjugorje discussions in otherwise sane Catholic groups are like vaccination discussions in hs groups, or spanking discussions in parenting groups. I dreaded even clicking on the thread. Pleased! :001_smile:

Thanks for all the good ideas. I'm going to bounce them off my dh and see what our combined brain thinks will be most doable. Oh why can I not stop buying books??? And why am I married to a man who says "Don't worry; one more book won't make a difference"??

Aaaaaaigh. That's exactly the sort of thing that's making Waverley take weeks to read. I'm so glad our landlady here is English. She translates for her Scottish husband.:D

The Enormous Crocodile was a favorite first chapter book for dd14 and dd7. It's short, pretend-scary (but not really scary), and has a lot of repetition--nice for early readers. Our local bookstore has a copy of The Eejits, which is apparently The Twits translated into Scots. I have no idea what the audience for that book is supposed to be. I think I will have to obtain some copies before we leave.

:bigear: Oui, pour nous meres qui ne parlent pas francais bien.

My girls are 14, 7, and 2. The teenager is a great help with the baby, and I wish I'd had my 40+ year-old patience and experience when the first one was born. (Though baby all-nighters were easier in my twenties....) The downside is, what with my having gone gray early, and the 14yo looking a few years older than her real age, a startling number of people, seeing dd pushing the stroller, have felt free to announce "Your daughter and granddaughter are lovely!" or "Do I see three generations?"--always with a huge smile. Grrrr. I nearly bit the head off a border cop at the TX/NM border when the guy peered into the van and said "Ma'am, these your children and grandchildren?" Of course it's worse for 14yo dd, having all these people think she's a teenage mom!

Our time in the U.K. wraps up in a few weeks. Incomprehensibly, we have somehow acquired a large number of books at the wonderful bookstores in these parts, and are now trying to figure out the best method of getting them home to Texas. In theory, we could take them home for free as checked baggage, as we came with only three checked items for five people; but we limited baggage because one of the people is two years old and, far from helping carry the suitcases, one of the parents or the teenager, at some point in the bus-train-airplane connections, inevitably has to carry her. This would be the cheapest option. A less back-breaking option would be to ship them. Has anyone had experience shipping books from overseas? I really don't want to lose these. I've never quite recovered from the USPS destroying a box of my books and then having a postal employee tell me it was my own fault for shipping them book rate. :glare: Advice welcome.

:lol: My dh wants to join your cult. He'll distribute pamphlets with AMC problems, too.

Our (still somewhat tentative) plan for our 9th grader for the Fall semester: Physics: Fundamentals of Physics Math: Calculus review in prep for AP Latin: Aeneid German: Oklahoma State Univ. online English: British Literature Logic: Modal Logic PE: Fencing Programing: Java in prep for AP

My dd7 progresses through it at her own pace, memorizing (more or less) the material as we go. I used to turn up my nose at the "rote memorization" way of learning one's catechism, until I actually had to teach CCD and found that children who had covered (e.g.) "sacraments" every single year couldn't even begin to tell me what a sacrament actually was. Now I'm of the theory that (a) you learn it by heart; (b) you learn what it means; © you deepen your understanding as you go. We follow with +Morrow's My Catholic Faith, which is based on the BC. Underdog, Thanks for that link. I must look into that.

This may be a little late--I just got back from mass here in Scotland, and I think it's morning back in the U.S.--but I'd answer with a big, It depends. We are of course obliged to attend Mass, and deliberately skipping it, as I tell my CCD students, is a serious thing. Here in our little Scottish town there aren't many Catholics--one priest covers three parishes and a chaplaincy--and many people have to walk miles to get to mass (this morning, in the rain). But we read that the early Christians attended mass daily, some of them putting their lives in danger to do so, and the inconvenience of once a week seems less inconvenient. :) That said, the Church has always recognized that we are weak human beings, and we do what we can. The care of small children has always been understood as an adequate reason for being unable to assist at mass, and that sounds like your situation. Travellers who find themselves unable to assist are not obliged. With regard to being in the right mindset ... Yes, we ideally ought to be recollected, penitent, joyful, and fervent. But Jesus comes to us as we are: and isn't that one of the beauties of the Real Presence--that Jesus is coming to us, flustered and distracted and irritable as we may be feeling? If your family life has just made it not feasible to attend, then that's your situation--offer it up to God, lead your family in a prayer of Spiritual Communion, and try again next week. Meanwhile, you might think about, and discuss with your husband, practical steps that would make mass-going less hectic for everyone. I bet he'd like you spiritually nourished and not frazzled. :) God bless you sister.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24gardner.html "Martin Gardner, who teased brains with math puzzles in Scientific American for a quarter-century and who indulged his own restless curiosity by writing more than 70 books on topics as diverse as magic, philosophy and the nuances of Alice in Wonderland, died Saturday in Norman, Okla. He was 95. ... Mr. Gardner also wrote fiction, poetry, literary and film criticism, as well as puzzle books. He was a leading voice in refuting pseudoscientific theories, from ESP to flying saucers. He was so prolific and wide-ranging in his interests that critics speculated that there just had to be more than one of him." Gardner introduced many people to math as a fun, interesting window onto the universe; my dh and dd14 were both fans of his and are grieving his passing. If you had a favorite Gardner puzzle, share it here.

But it's so easy! George the Third said with a smile, "Seventeen-Sixty yards in a mile!" Then just do a quick multiplication by 3 in your head. :D A double mnemonic that gets you the length of a mile, and King George III's year of accession to the throne. We use an older textbook series for arithmetic (as opp. to "math"), which expects you to learn bushels, pecks, and rods as well. I don't quiz heavily on those.

Two suburbanites (from the same suburb, actually) who couldn't get out of the 'burbs and into the city fast enough. After all, "civitas" is the root of "civilization." :001_smile:

Thanks for all the suggestions! I will be forwarding them on.

My dh, who keeps his books admirably organized, convinced me to take a day and list all my hs-related books by series & also chronologically, and then he uploaded the list to my phone. So if I'm at Half Price and see a book I want, I can check quickly to see if I already own it; and if I'm studying a period of history with a child, I can glance at the book list for that century/decade and see if there's something the right age level that would fit in well. It's brought an end to discovering I have the same book twice, and to finding a book on my shelf that would have been great if I'd remembered it.

With middle dd we use the Key To series, and concurrently we use Standard Service Arithmetics. The former is for math at her level; the latter is for practicing arithmetic--not so much "drill" as techniques for developing speed and accuracy in number-crunching. In addition, she has "Daddy math" time with no curriculum but dh's brain.

I don't have first-hand experience with Singapore, so maybe someone else can respond to that ... but for measurement, the makers of Miquon also have very good and affordable series for math in different areas, including English and metric measurement, called "Key To...". Regarding money and time ... those aren't really math subjects, so it wouldn't disturb me not to have them covered by a curriculum. They're just skills that involve the ability to add and subtract, and can be taught in a day when a child needs to know them. People have managed for centuries to count coins and read clocks without any math education whatsoever. YM, as always, MV.

A question from a friend. Her 8yo son is in private school. They're Orthodox Jewish, so I suspect Henty might not be what she's looking for. My girls didn't have the same reading tastes as her son, so I didn't have any great suggestions. Anybody else? "Have you thoughts on appropriate historical adventure fiction for ***'s age? He's just not quite ready for the swashbucklers like Sabatini and Dumas, or probably even R.L. Stevenson. There seems to be a lot of appropriate fantasy adventure for the age, like Joan Aiken, Narnia, E. Nesbit, etc., but he really wants to read historical fiction--preferentially about knights. I know there are story series but can't think of any specific book authors. [A friend] recommended Hardy Boys, maybe. What do you think of G.A.Henty? I know he's popular among home schoolers, but are they actually any good?"

Ha, figured it out. There was a different thing I was supposed to click on.