It's good to see these books in a thread discussion. They ought to be on some hypothetical list called "Best Homeschool Bargains." Entire pre-1960 sets not infrequently show up at Half Price Books for about $10.

Yes, this. Dd-almost-3 was diagnosed as apraxic, as she didn't even babble by age 2. A great therapist from Easter Seals helped us work with her to get her to communicate in some way other than pointing-and-grunting, and told us off the record (the day before she retired) that she thought a huge disparity between comprehension and expressive ability was the reason she wouldn't even try to speak and why she had horrific self-injuring tantrums. Using the techniques the therapist recommended (some signs, picture cards, etc.), Dd started to speak, and the torrent was unleashed: 10-20 word complex sentences and, soon after, reading. I'd be very interested to know if someone has done some research in this area. It sounds like several people have had the same experience. Did other people with late-talking, early-reading children see raging and self-destructive behavior before the talking appeared?

We say the table blessing in Latin ("Benedic, Domine, nos...) about every other dinner, and in Eastertide, we sing the Regina Caeli as well. And of course the Mass responses that are frequently in Latin in the vernacular Mass (the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei) are good to learn by heart. The advantage of these prayers is that they're used often, so they're reinforced, and practical.

My family were ex-pats in the U.K. when I was 11, and I was mortified to be given all my assignments back because nobody could read my messy American cursive. So I quickly learned the nice British style of linked letters, and use that to this day. My dd14 has always struggled with fine motor control and can barely print legibly. I notice lots of other mathy kids her age with the same issue, incl. my dh (who doesn't even bother writing notes on students' papers, since they can't read his writing; he types them up and staples them to the back). My dd7 has always had great motor control, so this year we did Peterson's Directed Handwriting--the great handwriting program with the world's worst teacher guide--and she has the most beautiful cursive now. People ooh and aah that a 7yo can write so beautifully. My Mom commented, "That's just how the nuns kept trying to make me write!" :D So I have her write all her assignments in swift, beautiful cursive. My dd14 just touchtypes everything, like her dad.

San Francisco Boy by Lois Lenski. A homeschooling friend from China found it especially valuable for her daughter as part of a lesson on Chinese immigration to the U.S.

The late writer David Foster Wallace reported that, any time he or one of his siblings committed a grammatical error, vocabulary error, or other solecism, his mother would cough, choke, and generally pretend to be dying from the pain of having heard it. Though he thought it was a pretty severe way to teach her children standard English, it seems to have done its work. You could try it. :)

Dd says both translations are fine. Literally it means "most," but it can mean "very" in sense that stresses the adjective. We can use "most" this way in English, too: "She is a most famous woman." If you trust the word of a teenager.:)

There are reasons for providing kids with material at a rich, challenging level--even one a little beyond what they're really capable of--besides trying to accelerate them. One is to show them what riches await; another is to keep them comfortable with the idea that they can often enjoy something without comprehending it completely. This is why we read Shakespeare verses to elementary school children, and why my dh helps a young child figure out how to construct a Pascal's triangle. At the dinner table we discuss subjects at various levels, and those not quite grasping the discussion are expected to eat and listen (a more comprehensible discussion will ensue for them). My oldest was expected to learn several prayers in Latin by heart long before she understood the grammar that made each phrase say what she knew it said but couldn't translate; the youngest is doing the same now. And we pick evening read-alouds with vocabulary at the challenge level of the listener; some words or phrases are asked about, but generally they are still used to not getting everything. We don't "push" (much); but we like to spread out the adult menu before them sometimes and let them taste a bit. This is the same thing we all do with babies; we talk to them at levels far beyond their comprehension, and they aren't surprised nor frustrated by not understanding everything. Until they get into school, and are carefully kept at an "age-appropriate" level for each subject.

Not all the math in the standard ps sequence is taught at a certain stage because it requires all the math that came before it. For instance, we started both our older dds on algebra, such as it was, as soon as they could add and subtract (at that point, even children who don't know how to "multiply" or "divide" can find double or halve an amount), by using scales with colorful gram cubes, and playing games where you have to figure out how to re-balance the scales after adding to, subtracting from, doubling, or halving what's in one pan. After a while you start concealing some cubes in a piece of paper, and the child has to figure out from the operation how much is hidden. Etc. Our kids also start fractions very early, but my dh teaches them as a graph-paper game called "Who's the Fastest?" where fractions are first discovered as rate/slope. Later they're re-introduced as division, and finally re-re-introduced as fractional parts of a whole. I do want to point out that all of this is my dh's idea; he's had a bee in his bonnet since grad school about the nonsensical order that math is taught in. He claims it's taught in the order it was discovered, not in the order that makes the most sense. I just implement it as I'm told, like a good wifey.:glare: In return, I get to implement my unorthodox ideas about teaching literature. :D But anyway, the point being that there's a lot to question about the conventional order of teaching math. And the nice thing about homeschooling is we can experiment on our children with the assurance that if our theory flops completely, we just put aside that idea and try something else.

I am so sorry. Many prayers.

That's okay. You can atone by continuing to train up your young mathematicians in preparation for brilliant and satisfying, if underpaid, careers as analytic philosophers. :D

:confused: Maybe I need more coffee ... He wouldn't argue against those things, because he agrees with them. Is it possible you read "dh agrees" as "disagrees"? That would be the sort of thing I'd do. :)

My dh teaches philosophy both to university students and to little kids (ours). Two resources he uses at the pre-K through elementary age are Mitsumasa Anno's Hat Tricks (which I mentioned on a thread on the K-8 board) and Gareth Williams' Philosophy and the Young Child. Hat Tricks, like all Anno's math books, starts at a very simple level: a man has a red hat and a white hat; he puts one hat on the reader and one on a little boy in the book; you can see that the little boy is wearing a red hat; which hat are you, the reader, wearing? And it gets incrementally more complex from there, as the reader has to make a series of logical deductions. Williams' book is about how to discuss topics of philosophical interest to children in ways they can understand, often making use of children's literature. For instance, in The Wizard of Oz, the Tin Woodman explains that he became tin because he had a series of accidents in which he chopped off first one leg and replaced it with tin; then the other; then arms; then torso and finally head. There are many questions of personal identity here: is the Tin Woodman the same person as the original woodcutter? If not, at what point did he become not the same person? Why? What makes a person that person and not some other person? Etc. It's not a textbook, but instruction in how to help children think philosophically. P.S. to Bill: my dh agrees with your assessment of The Fallacy Detective.

His math books are: Anno's Counting Book [counting] Anno's Counting House [counting; addition/subtraction] Anno's Three Little Pigs [also Socrates and the Three Pigs] [combinatorics] Anno's Hat Tricks [intro logic; my dh uses this for his honors logic course!] Anno's Magic Seeds [geometric sequences] Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar [also Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jug] [factorials] Anno's Math Games Anno's Math Games II Anno's Math Games III [incl. Cartesian coordinates, left/right, proportions, measurement, place value, maze theory, functions, & many more; if I were at home I could be more specific for each book] The two counting books are far and away the best introduction to numeracy I have ever seen; my pre-verbal dd would hitch herself over to me several times a day and fling Anno's Counting Book on my lap for yet another "read" (there are no words in it). Counting House is wordless and numberless, and just in beautiful pictures with the kind of interesting detail little ones love, shows how every time a child leaves one house for the house on the opposite page, you count one less in the first house and one more in the second. The Three Pigs is at the other end of the math spectrum, and I admit to having been quite lost by the end. But the beginning is accessible even to elementary age children. My teenager loved it. Socrates is a wolf whose hungry wolf-wife, Xanthippe, wants to eat the three pigs who live in the five houses nearby. But Socrates needs to think about where those pigs will be sleeping, and how many possibilities there will be, and it turns out a lot depends on his starting assumptions.... I have no favorites. Get them all. And my dds say they are so essential. :D

We have three levels of math going on at one time, which we call Daddy Math, Mommy Math, and Arithmetic. Daddy Math is the exciting concepts you get to do with Daddy in the morning or evening, whatever he thinks would be most interesting to that child at that point: Pascal's triangle, or a few Mathcounts problems, or a Sam Loyd puzzle, or some basic probability perhaps. Basically it's math at a level at which the child couldn't solve problems, but can begin to grasp or at least glimpse new and exciting things. For our oldest, it became sitting in on math courses at the local univ. and getting extra tutoring from Daddy. Mommy Math uses a proper curriculum. For the middle child it's Key To... right now; for the oldest, it's actually done with Daddy (I got a 3 on my Calculus AP, so dh is handling it). Basically it's math at the child's "real" level: what she can sit down and do problems in by herself after we discuss the lesson. Arithmetic is just that: practice in number-crunching, with some tips for doing it faster and more accurately. There's no new math here. We use Standard Service Arithmetics, from the 1920's when there were no calculators and 3rd-graders had to do timed drills with problems like "678x9=?" without copying the problem onto their paper. So three different math curricula (if you can call dh's eclectic mix of math sources a "curriculum") because we believe each child should be working at different levels simultaneously.

Ooh, I see they host the world's only music and philosophy festival! I wonder if I can convince dh that he has a professional duty to visit.

As above, not systematically, but for daily free time for a while, often as a treat for the end of math lessons. More beloved however were the much tougher Sam Loyd puzzles.

What are the very best (say, top 3) G. A. Henty books ever printed, especially those not available in reprint? We're temporarily residing in Scotland, and visiting Edinburgh Saturday discovered some incredible used book stores, including one that had an entire bookcase of old Henty books. I didn't recognize most of the titles, and despite being cheap in a relative way, in another, more accurate way, they weren't terribly cheap. But if I ever want to obtain an otherwise unobtainable Henty, our next visit to Edinburgh is the time. (I did seize Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France by A. J. Church, with gilt binding and gorgeous colored plates. I can't wait to start it as a read-aloud.) :bigear:

Among the other excellent OOP but findable books mentioned, try Texas and the War With Mexico from the American Heritage Junior Library.

My oldest does her work in dh's office, where she has her own desk and computer, and can focus without deciding to go play with her baby sister, distract her 7yo sister (and herself, of course) from her work, and pick a fight with me. Angie I feel your pain. That's why last semester I required dd14 to spend every day on campus w/ dh, and this year she's "hacking college" for half her courses (must start a thread on that, to see if we've just lost our minds with this idea) and doing the rest under dh's tutelage or by correspondence. I cannot, cannot, cannot be her teacher anymore. Or one of us won't survive her teenage years. My 7yo does her work anywhere she wants on her little clipboard, unless it has to be done at the computer. That way she can bring her clipboard right to me instead of shouting across the house in the middle of dd2's diaper change that Mommy must come right now. I keep my red pen in my pocket.

Great replies. We also find the approach of leaving out the last word, then last words, etc. of each line, verse, or phrase to be a useful approach to memorization. I find it important, too, to make use of memorized material in daily life. Poetry memorization is important to our family, and we have a rhyme or poem for everything: a child who says "I don't care" gets to hear everyone else recite spontaneously "Don't-Care didn't care/ Don't-Care was wild..."; we recite "The gallant Welsh of all degrees..." when I serve welsh rabbit; etc. The oldest will offer a few verses of relevant Shakespeare from time to time, in the hearing of her little sisters. Bible verses and psalms are of course appropriate at various times. (I like, "Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity." My oldest prefers "Provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.") When what you have memorized becomes part of the fabric of going about the day, and not just something that's being memorized because the lesson says to memorize it--and most importantly the child grasps that, for parents and older children, memorized material is part of a grownup's expressive vocabulary--"learning by heart" becomes a normal and joyful thing.

I edited out some stuff that I thought would be illustrative but ended up being just braggy. There's a lot of truth to that. I was actually quite math-phobic--was good enough at it but avoided it scrupulously in college--but married a mathy guy who showed me how much fun it really was, when not ruined by the standard ps way of teaching it. I would never knock the rods out of someone's hands (metaphorically speaking, nor literally either), but my kids were just annoyed by manipulatives, and we found Miquon to be an absolutely stellar program even without the rods.

Bill, Forgive me for going a bit off-topic here, but having read so many of your posts, and realizing your math experience with your kids is so very, very similar to my dh's and my experience with ours... I need to ask if you are aware of the Mitsumasa Anno math books. If you aren't, forgive my presumption, but you need to get them. Math Games, Math Games II, Math Games III, Anno's Hat Tricks, Multiplying Jar. The Three Pigs for a few years down the road. You may have to search; they're OOP. You clearly understand the need for conceptual building blocks and acquiring a deep understanding of the structure of math. This is what the Anno books are for. Most of them involve no numbers at all, but introduce concepts ranging from place value to factorials to functions to combinatorics. Snuggle down with the child, discuss one page at a time until you reach a page that doesn't quite "click," then go on to the next game. Eventually they'll be able to go all the way through all the games. And when they first encounter in their math text, for instance, f(x) = x^2 +1, they'll say "oh it's just like the Anno two-way machine game!" Forgive the long and presumptuous aside. But I haven't seen you mention Anno, and it horrified me to think you might be unaware of these books.

Junior Mastermind. Introduces some of the kind of thinking that will be needed later, but doesn't involve arithmetic. Anno's Math Games, I, II, and III. "Games" in a less standard sense, but still math games. Also Anno's Hat Tricks.

We started using Miquon when our oldest was 3. Never bought the rods. Skipped the pages that used them. Never bought the Annotations; we thought it was pretty obvious what each page was getting at. Dd-now-14 loved Miquon, dh and I loved Miquon; dd1 flourished mathematically and dd2 is doing well too. Surely we can't be the only ones who didn't find the Cuisenaire rods to be the True Heart of Miquon? Anyone else who thinks it works just fine without? (Edited to remove Too Much Unnecessary Information)