Hey, I like fluff; I just like old fluff.

Just wishful thinking, and curiosity, and a desire for discussions unrelated to the CV. 🙂 I keep my Amazon wish list mostly to keep track of books I want to buy if I can find them cheap enough, and to remind dh about when birthday/Christmas rolls around. It's been added to a lot during Coronatide. Manga is totally in. Comfort reading is the best thing. "Twaddle" is a banned word in BaW, or ought to be. We read what we read. Those all sound like necessary homeschooling materials to me. Also that bottle of wine you mentioned. Wish I'd known you needed Builders of the Old World; I'd have sent my unused copy!

Friends, Jeff "Santa" Bezos, now the world's wealthiest person at more than $183 billion, clearly intends to purchase all of our books off our Amazon Wish Lists. I mean, he kind of has to at this point, right? So what books are on your wish list that you'll you be receiving from the Amazon truck this month? Also: Mid-year is the perfect time to join the Book a Week thread. Avoid the New Year's rush! Remember, you don't actually have to read a book every week. Here in July, the pressure is totally off to make it to 52 by the end of 2020. Not that 2020 is ever going to end. Reduced subscription fee for former members, whom we all miss sadly and would like to see back. What I'll be getting from my pal Jeff: Eugene Francois Vidocq, Memoirs (any English translation) Edgar Allen Poe, Essays and Reviews (Library of America edition) Hans von Grimmelshausen, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (Penguin) Eugene Sue, The Mysteries of Paris (Penguin) Elmore Leonard, Four Later Novels (Library of America) Dashiell Hammett, Crime Stories (Library of America) Raymond Chandler, Later Novels (Library of America) Joseph Shaw, The Case for Liturgical Restoration Gerard de Nerval, Selected Writings (Penguin) Henry James, Novels 1903-1911 (Library of America) Henry James, Novels 1896-1899 (Library of America) The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (Pevear trans.) Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Penguin) [forthcoming] Breece D'J Pancake, Complete Writings (Library of America) [forthcoming]

I often have oatmeal with a few pecans and raisins, but half the recommended serving (bec. I'm a small person). Or a boiled egg with lots of hot sauce, mmm. Or plain Greek yogurt. Or a banana if I'm literally running out the door. Large amounts of coffee before, during, and after.

Oh it's definitely in my own self-interest. Wee Girl has been so desperately lonely that last year I signed her up with a hybrid school; she loved being with other kids, but learned nothing in class. They're reasonably close in level, except in French and Latin (which I can accommodate) and already in the same chamber music quartet. And she's a fundamentally good, bright kid from a nice family. Fingers crossed for waiving testing.

Yes I've had about all I can take in one lifetime about the Heroes of the Alamo. Not that I don't enjoy Texas history -- I just finished a long biography of Charles Goodnight. What brings this on is that I'll likely be homeschooling one of Wee Girl's friends next year (to the delight of both girls). Mom is from a country where nobody doesn't send their kids to the excellent public schools, and wants me to cover the 7th grade material from the ISD's scope and sequence. I've said (gently) that I'll just be teaching the material I'd planned to use for Wee Girl for 7th grade, and Dad seems fine with that (after making sure I wasn't using Creationist science). But I want to soothe poor Mom's anxieties about not covering the Official History Topics.

Is there any reason a student homeschooling for 7th grade, but returning to public school for 8th grade, needs to take the 7th grade Texas history course? Specifically, will the student entering 8th grade be in some way required to have taken it? Will it be tested on at any point in TEKS or STAAR or whatever the test is these days? And assuming the answer is "no" all around--which it obviously is--can anyone give a link to something official-looking, for the reassurance of anxious parents?

@melmichigan, sorry about the added Covid stress. Awful, the not knowing. @mumto2, very cool! You're a literary godmother. @Æthelthryth the Texan, having dh start going back to his office to work (shhh...) has helped. Any chance you can boot out some family members?

If he's ready to move up from 19th-century grammar rules, you might check out the free lesson plans at the Exploring Language website. They're not exactly open-and-go, but they're so far the closest thing to a linguistics-based grammar curriculum for K-8 that I've found.

Yes we happened to be reading the Comets one before we drove out to see Neowise, and at the end he talks about how much better we are at determining comets' orbits here in 1973. It was very informative! Did you know there's a thing called the Oort cloud that's chock full of comets? Oh you did. I didn't.

Scribner School editions. These were published for US schools in the '60s and are mostly American literature. They have the best study guides. The tricky thing is finding them; they were never reprinted, and most booksellers don't tell you if their copy is the student edition or not. I've accumulated most of them over the years and if you're interested I'll post the list and tips for how to locate them. They are worth their weight in gold. Also, the Junior Great Books series have study guides. The older ones are harder to find the study guides for, as they were thin booklets that often got separated from the sets; but the more recent ones have study guides that are real books and so survived better. Not all American literature, though.

For middle school, we use a combination of TOPS Science units and the Isaac Asimov series "How Did We Find Out About...". (The Asimov books are a low reading level, but full of things most middle schoolers* don't know.) The Nebel/BFSU books looked so good, but I have zero science background and didn't understand most of the concepts and we were all just frustrated by them. But my friends with science/engineering backgrounds tell me they are the best thing ever and their kids love BFSU science. *ETA: Okay, most of my middle schoolers. Or maybe just me.

All of mine have used Artes Latinae, Dr Waldo Sweet's structural linguistics approach to teaching Latin, which teaches English grammar simultaneously. Both grammars are (IME) much easier for students with this approach.

nm old thread!

Not me. "We keep our hands off your tax money; you keep your hands off our curriculum." The day we start getting anything from the state will be the day the draconian testing regime that drives so many families to homeschool will be inflicted on us.

Yay for negative at least! I was gamely persevering in gardening in the mornings and evenings when it cooled down to the low 90s, but then the city announced finding West Nile in their mosquito testing two blocks away from us. So we are all supposed to stay inside in the mosquito hours when it's bearable to be outside. So now we just furtively run the sprinklers in the wee hours when the Water Cops aren't about, and see what survives.

About 2/3 of the plants we put in during the spring established root systems well enough to survive the drought period, and one of those was the new tree, so I say A+ to the garden. The St Augustine grass is like hay ("dormant", yes that's it) but will come back. Yesterday I saw the Water Cops cruising the neighborhood -- a sure sign of summer. Lots and lots of reading this week, all of it for homeschooling, with the only arguable "book" finished being the Brian Friel play Dancing at Lughnasa. We will watch the Meryl Streep movie based on it, because I am a conscientious homeschooler.

Yeah I think I agree with everything there. The confusion is terrible, people need to make plans, and some people are already swooping in to make money off of the chaos.

Okay, I'm looking back at the announcement, and I see where the confusion is coming from. The AG said, in a letter addressed specifically to religious schools: "The Governor of Texas rightfully identified access to 'religious services' as essential services, which must remain open even when other aspects of our communities must close to mitigate the spread of the virus. The Governor also exempted religious services from the state-wide masking order, but strongly encouraged houses of worship to require masks. Additionally, when the Governor issued orders applicable to public schools, he expressly acknowledged that private schools and institutions have the freedom to make their own decisions." So the headlines ran this as "religious schools may stay open even if schools are closed down." Taken verbatim, the AG looks like he's saying that private schools in general can't be shut down. But the media (correctly I think) assumed that in the context -- addressing religious schools, and his other comments being about specifically religious institutions -- he meant private religious schools. Surely this is the only thing he could have meant, because otherwise he'd also be saying that "private ... institutions have the freedom to make their own decisions" -- and he can't possibly mean that, or bars, restaurants, etc. wouldn't be subject to shutdown orders. What's your take? ETA: I think it's certainly true that, as you say, under the current "let the ISD decide" regime, all private schools are immune from shutdown. But the state (and I presume cities?) could at any time say "all schools closed, public or private". And in that case, the AG's statement seems to say that private religious schools would be exempt.

The law tends to be more interested in the fact of the situation rather than the wonderful new name they come up with. There's no way the Gov is going to exempt private schools. It would be a massive transfer of funds to private schools, in the red state where public education is most broadly supported, and it would be generally (and rightly) seen as putting the whole burden of education during Coronatide on the backs of the poor, while the wealthy and middle-class opted out.

To clarify: not online. In person.

Last I heard, only religious schools were exempted; not so much because "hey let's let the virus spread amongst the religious" but because the recent Supreme Court case seems to require exemption, and I'm guessing the AG advised the governor accordingly. ETA: I actually emailed THSC to ask if they were affiliated in any way, and sending them a link to the FAQ page.

Dunno ... I've been whispering Proverbs 3:24 into Wee Girl's ear since at least that age. 🙂 Maybe someday it'll take! On the topic: our NextDoor features lately a for-profit company encouraging parents to sign up for their "learning pods" (for a fee of course). In reality, under state law what they're putting together are unaccredited private schools, which will be subject to the same shutdown orders as any other school. But they insist that these aren't "private schools," no, they're just groups of families coming together to form "something like a nanny pool," except they'll be hiring an educational professional to, um, tutor. You might think that there were possibly some legal issues to pay attention to, but apparently the plan is to get a membership with the Texas Homeschool Coalition. It's homeschooling, no it's a co-op, no it's a pod, no it's something they don't have a name for but it's really exciting and innovative.

I put all the pens, pencils, highlighters, etc., etc. into a big basket, and forced everyone in the household (dh included, and me) to extract the dozen items they wanted. And I threw the rest away, without the slightest effort to determine if they Brought Me Joy.

Still to do: - Discover vaccine so social activities can restart and pool can open. - Organize English seminar - alas, on-line - and offer it to parents. We flip our school year, taking more of a break in November-December when the weather is bearable and the holidays are in swing, so we're well into the 2020 academic year now. But we're running low on the school supplies, which go on sale about now, so time to mask up and make an HEB supplies run.