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Rivka

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Everything posted by Rivka

  1. If the books were series fiction, you might be able to find them here: "Girls Series Books 1840-1991" http://special.lib.umn.edu/clrc/girlsseriesbook.html
  2. I may be off-base here, but I wonder if there could be sibling issues involved. If selflessness is such a strong trait in your oldest, and something you really notice and encourage, your middle might be trying to carve out her own space in the family as being very different from her sister. The book Siblings Without Rivalry has a long section about how easy it is for siblings to wind up taking on labels/roles in the family: "the smart one" vs. "the popular one," "the athlete" vs. "the musician," "the good one" vs. "the bad one." The book has concrete suggestions about how to help your kids out of those boxes. I grew up in a family where we all knew which "one" we were, and Siblings Without Rivalry gave me a lot of food for thought about how that affected our family relationships.
  3. I completely agree. If you are concerned that your daughter is inexperienced with city dangers, talk to her about sensible precautions such as parking in a well-lighted area and being careful of how she carries her purse. Otherwise I think it is an excellent first-date plan to drive yourself and meet in a public area.
  4. Oh, how awful. I am so sorry. People say the stupidest, most horrifying things when someone is experiencing a tragedy or a loss. I think they're trying to distance themselves from having to face how awful it is. But, you know, it is EXACTLY THAT AWFUL. I'm sorry that you have to face what you're facing *and* unhelpful responses at the same time. You don't have to hear people out just because they're trying to be helpful. As soon as you can tell what road they're starting to go down, you could say firmly "Please stop. That is not helpful to me." You don't have to explain why. You don't have to bring up atheism and put yourself at risk of them trying to save your soul. You can just be a broken record: "Because it just isn't helpful to me. I don't want to hear it." In my experience grief is just something you need to grit your teeth and ride out. The only way out is through. It's helped me sometimes to go someplace quiet and beautiful outside and try to remember that I am one tiny part of an immense connected universe - that I may be overwhelmed with pain and fear, but I'm not all that there is, and there will be plenty of world left when my pain and fear are gone. But then, you know, other times I've just wound up lying on the floor crying a lot. There really isn't any way out but through. I'm not an atheist but I don't believe in an interventionist God that could change your baby's chromosomes, or a heaven with little angels in it. I will be hoping like hell that your baby's all right, and failing that I will be hoping that you find strength and peace within yourself, that you're able to be gentle with yourself and take care of yourself, and that the people you love will circle around you and hold you up.
  5. I agree with the recommendations for Eight Cousins and Little Men. Obviously none of the Alcott children's books are going to include "adult" material, but Old-fashioned Girl does have a more mature viewpoint.
  6. I slice them up and broil them for 3-4 minutes and then put them in quesadillas or other Mexican food.
  7. Uh oh. Am I supposed to be sweet? Is FIAR... wholesome?! I may be in big trouble here with my curriculum of choice. :lol: FIAR as we're doing it is less about sweet cuddles on the couch (we try, but the baby objects when I cuddle the big girl) and more about running around like kids in a candy store, going crazy over all the cool stuff there is out there to learn. I see where you're going with the sweet thing, though, and it's possible that I am secretly sweet but in denial about it.
  8. Alex, age 5: Put Me in the Zoo by Robert Lopshire. Colin, 16 months: demanding multiple re-readings of Ole Rissom's I am a Bunny. My last book was Georgette Heyer, The Unknown Ajax.
  9. If I were a kid who wanted to participate in the food fight, but didn't, what would this teach me? That I should've gone ahead and thrown food, because that way I would've gotten the fun AND the punishment, instead of just the punishment.
  10. But not all children will see a social worker, and a "teen pregnancy youth group" is probably a little late to address the issue of sex. Do you really think that an 11-year-old (or an any-year-old, really) having sex is not a medical issue? Is it purely a moral problem, with no potential consequences for the child's health and safety? Really?! I would say that an 11-year-old having sex is at serious risk of medical and mental health complications - and that very much makes it the child's pediatrician's business. You invoke personal responsibility as a justification for why experts should not inquire. But 11-year-olds - particularly the ones whose judgment is poor enough that they're having sex when they're barely pubescent - don't have such stellar abilities to understand and predict likely consequences that it seems fair to put it all in their hands. "Oh, you've got PID and now you're infertile? You should have thought of that before you had early sexual contact and didn't bring it up spontaneously with your doctor. Too bad, but it's no one's fault but your own." Or is it the parents' personal responsibility? That doesn't seem fair to the kids either. If their parents are in denial, or insufficiently vigilant, or so morally rigid that the kids are afraid to tell them what they're doing, or unengaged, or absent, or self-righteous enough to believe that only "bad" kids will have sex, should that preclude the kids' right to adequqte health care? What a high price for kids to pay, just for not having the "right" parents.
  11. FIAR is great, but I'm not sure I would do lapbooking with a kindergartener. Unless your child has much better fine motor skills than mine (which is certainly possible), you will probably wind up doing all the cutting, gluing, and writing for him. We don't do mini books with FIAR at all. I do use some full-sheet-size supplemental materials with my daughter, like maps and coloring pages, and we three-hole-punch them and put them in a binder along with the art lessons, etc. Remember that although here in WTM-land it seems like people mostly use FIAR just for K-1st, the program is designed to go until age 8 and many people use it even further. So our kids are at the young end for FIAR and expectations need to be adjusted accordingly.
  12. What sad stories are coming out of this thread. In my Unitarian-Universalist church's Coming of Age program for 13-year-olds, the kids are taught about high-pressure evangelism and how teens are targeted by their friends - often via invitations to events which sound social but are not. The lessons are supposed to arm our kids so they know what is happening and what their options are for handling it. It sounds like we need to develop some kind of materials for elementary-age kids as well. Ugh.
  13. FIAR really doesn't take that much time, especially if you row conversationally don't fiddle around with all those tiny lapbook components. We're using FIAR as our main kindergarten curriculum and it probably takes us half an hour most days. Maybe more if we're doing a really fun project, like the time we built a city with blocks and chalk in the basement (to learn about city resources and services), or if her interest is sparked and we wind up reading a bunch of supplemental books.
  14. Read it to get a feel for the program. You may also want to use some of their ideas for games and activities. A few things to keep in mind about Miquon: - You're not supposed to work through all the workbooks in a linear fashion, completing every page. In the original Miquon classrooms, they had lab sheets available on a variety of topics and the kids had free choice of what to work on. They had to bind them into workbooks to publish them, but you can - and should - definitely give your child the opportunity of moving around in the books. For example, we're working simultaneously in Orange and Red and moving back and forth between various topics in both books. - With Miquon there is more emphasis on being able to compute math facts than on memorizing math facts. The First Grade Diary makes it clear that kids are supposed to have the opportunity to use rods or other manipulatives to figure out problems until the kids themselves decide to let the rods go. A lot of the lab sheets are aimed at helping kids figure out patterns of how numbers relate to each other. I make sure to model many different ways of figuring out math facts my daughter doesn't yet have memorized. Sometimes we'll use rods, sometimes I'll draw a number line for her, sometimes we'll use our fingers, and sometimes I'll help her discover patterns: "Let's see, you know four plus FOUR, so four plus FIVE must be..." She's definitely memorizing facts through repeated exposure to these strategies, but she's also gaining a deeper understanding of how numbers fit together and how to tackle a problem.
  15. I'm glad to see that we're not the only ones who are starting in the summer! We are having a fantastic kindergarten time with Five in a Row. Enjoy your first day!
  16. It's nice to see another summer starter! We started kindergarten two weeks ago and are having a great time. Enjoy your first day!
  17. My daughter really loves Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggie books. They are quite easy, and the humor and illustrations are wonderful.
  18. I have a kindergartener, so we get a lot of value from the Magic School Bus, Between the Lions, and Reading Rainbow episodes. I've also found some good science and social studies videos. The shows are all very thoroughly indexed - it's nice to be able to just quickly find a little clip about giraffes or whatever, instead of having to wade through longer material to find what you want to show. A lot of their videos have, shall we say, marginal production values. They're the kind of corny, badly-acted movies we used to watch in elementary school. But I've also found some great things. It takes sifting - unless it's a show you know (like the Liberty Kids series or Magic School Bus) you can't just grab something and assume it will be good.
  19. I hire a pediatrician to take comprehensive care of my children's health. It doesn't bother me when he asks questions about safety (bike helmets, avoiding sports injuries, medication storage). It doesn't bother me when he asks about behavior issues. It won't bother me when he asks about mental health issues or, as my kids get older, sexual/reproductive health issues. It's part of my children's comprehensive health situation. My husband and I teach middle school sex ed through our church. Every one of the kids in our class comes from a wonderful family with loving, engaged, aware, involved parents. There are still things the kids don't want to tell, or ask, their parents. There are still things the parents aren't aware of or aren't ready to think about. I think it's wonderful when parents help their kids form connections to other trusted adults, so that the NORMAL desire for increased privacy and separation from parents, as children get older, doesn't leave them without adult guidance and information. I feel honored that these other parents at my church trust me to be a source of that guidance for their kids. And I chose our pediatrician with the same issues in mind, even though it will be years before my kids are at that level.
  20. My husband condensed his schedule so he can be home one day a week with the kids. It is WONDERFUL. He really puts his own spin on lessons. :001_smile:
  21. I might be offbase - I don't know Horizons at all - but I think that being able to do 39+2 by "counting on" or using a number line is a valuable skill that is separate from, and comes before, column addition with carrying. I have a K'er too, and we do a lot of mental math of this type: 44+2, 100+1, 53+3. I really want her to grasp the concept of how addition works, and that it works the same way when large numbers are involved as it does when you can reckon up the sum with Cheerios. I don't want to introduce the algorithm of right-to-left column addition with carrying until I'm sure she understands the underlying concepts - at which point she can benefit from using the algorithm which makes things easier and efficient. I've seen too many kids approach questions like 39 +46 as if they're two separate math problems, 9+6 and 3+4, which just happen to be written side by side. They know they're supposed to go from right to left and add, but they don't really have a firm enough grip on place value to understand how the numbers truly fit together. Also - and this may be a tangent - is left-to-right addition really a bad habit? I use right-to-left on paper, but I always use left-to-right for mental math. I'm much less likely to make a mistake that way.
  22. Not at all! Here it is. Africa: My Rows and Piles of Coins by Tololwa Mollel (Tanzania) Bintou's Braids by Sylvianne Diouf (Senegal) The Butter Man by Elizabeth Alalou and Ali Alalou (Morocco) Middle East: Silent Music by James Rumford (Iraq) Southeast Asia: Monsoon by Uma Krishnaswami (India) The Firekeeper's Son by Linda Sue Park (Korea) Central & South America: Mia's Story by Michael Foreman (Chile) Cocoa Ice by Diana Appelbaum (Hispaniola) Calling the Doves by Juan Fillipe Herrera (Mexico/California migrant workers) Native Americans: Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Leitich Smith (contemporary, Creek nation) Buffalo Song by Joseph Bruchac (historical, Nez Perce and Salish nations) I tried to focus as much as possible on stories told by people within the culture or with a close connection to the culture. I also tried to mostly include realistic contemporary books (rather than folk tales, for example), and books that have a genuine story plot rather than books that just exist to showcase another culture. I've got links to all my books on my blog, if you want to save yourself the trouble of typing them into Amazon: http://tinderbox.homeschooljournal.net/list-of-book-lists/adding-world-cultures-to-fiar/ Some of them have unit studies already available for them on homeschoolshare.com, which may work for you straight out or as a basis for adaptation. I'm slowly putting together lesson plans for myself; so far I've done them for Jingle Dancer, Monsoon, Cocoa Ice, and My Rows and Piles of Coins. If you wind up deciding to use any of them, I'd be happy to share my notes/plans.
  23. :iagree: I've picked out a set of FIAR-style books covering Africa, Central/South America,Southeast Asia, and Native Americans, and I'm in the process of putting together lesson plans for them. I love the FIAR teaching method, but I didn't want to disregard half the world!
  24. I like Steven Kellogg's picture book version, probably suitable for ages 3-8. He's written and illustrated several retellings of American tall tales - we also have, and enjoy, Pecos Bill.
  25. Make "math cards" by removing the face cards from a regular deck of playing cards so you just have A-10. Then play tens concentration: deal the cards into rows, face down, and take turns turning over two cards. Instead of looking for a match, as in regular concentration, look for two cards that add up to ten.
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