I bought an ebook form Scholastic during one of their dollar days sales called Power Point Made Easy . My twin 8th graders are using it as an elective this year.

My husband and I are seriously considering a long (4-6 mo) family adventure/vacation to New Zealand next year. He seems to be very interested in the Otago region of the South Island. Any Kiwis or Aussies of the Hive (or anyone else for that matter) have any opinions or suggestions? Thanks. :001_smile:

I am using these books by Syl Sobel with my lower-mid elementary age kiddos this yr. The Declaration of Independence , How the US Governmnet Works, The Bill of Rights, and Presidential Elections. I found each of them on Amazon for around $5-$6. You can see inside many of them there too. Each is around 35-40 pages and is recommended for grades 3-5. For my 8th graders, I am primarily using icivics.org materials. :001_smile:

I agree, they're pricy. My 7 yr old just flew through the first book. Although she really liked it, I don't think she learned much from it. Maybe some of the later ones might challenge her, but I don't know that I want to spend $16 a book to find out. I may look at the table of contents of each book, if possible, and skip to one that looks like it would cover new material for her. I wouldn't bother at all, except she really liked it and wants to keep going with them.

Do you have to do the test, or is something important riding on it? Because if the test is optional, I would ignore a low computation score due to speed. There are so many more important things to worry about in this world. In real life, people use a calculator for the sort of questions that get put on a computation test at this level. At least, I do --- Do *you* do your tax return calculations by hand? __________________ This is exactly what I told my daughter. It's always nice to hear someone else say the same thing. Thanks.:)

I have 2 rising 8th graders who just finished their pre-Alg course. They did well enough, but I am concerned about their retention. Although they certainly learned a lot this year, I feel like they only understand certain topics at a very superficial level. I was thinking that maybe I would take the summer and maybe the fall semester reviewing things and looking at topics from different angles, so to speak, before beginning Alg I over the second semester of their 8th grade year. If I do that, Alg I will most likely spill over into 9th grade. I really like and understand math myself and just feel like if their foundation for higher math isn't rock solid, they may run into problems later on. Am I doing them a disservice for college entrance if they don't get to Calc in high school? Should I just move forward and expect deeper understanding to come with age and experience? They are not math lovers themselves at this point, so I am concerned about moving ahead to more difficult topics killing any chance for their opinions about math to improve. I guess I'm trying to decide if my desire for deeper understanding to the point of complete mastery beyond that chapter's test is reasonable. Do your kids remember topics learned well past the time when they were first learned? In other words, can they simply handle certain math problems from chapter 5 even though they are now on chapter 12? The amount of times I have seen blank stares looking back at me when discussing a topic I KNOW they knew at one time is disturbing. It makes me think that if we stretched out the material and dealt with each idea a little longer and a little deeper maybe the blank stares would cease. Thanks for sticking with me through such long ramblings.:001_smile:

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My dd (rising 8th grader) took the CAT test online and scored below average on her math computation section (39%). She said the time ran out when she still had nearly one third of the questions still unanswered. When I looked at her raw score, it looks as if she got nearly all of the questions correct that she did answer. I know it is not a math facts issue, as we have done timed games with these and she is fine. I think she just took too long to think about each problem. All her thought processes were right on, just too slow. I reassured her that this is the first time she has ever done a test like this so now we have a benchmark to work from. Does anyone have any recommendations on how we can improve her computation speed beyond just math facts. Any test prep workbooks that may be helpful to use as "timed" worksheets to practice with over the next year? I'd like to not have to reinvent the wheel if possible, but I suppose I could just come up with problems out of my own head and make my own.:tongue_smilie: Thanks.

I have 2 rising 8th graders. I am beginning to think about coursework for high school. I would love some BTDT comments from anyone who has used FLVS (Florida Virtual School). How did you use them? For which classes? General impressions? Any information would be more than I have now.:001_smile: Thanks.

I have 5 out of my 6 kids (the 6th is only 2yrs old) doing history and science together whenever possible. I divide my week into 4 days by dividing apiece of paper into 4ths. The things we do together get written across the top of each section then I just list each child's individual activity labeled with their intials.

I have just finished working with my 7th grader ds and I feel like I've just gone 15 rounds. First, we are using Winning with Writing and are working on the persuasive essay. His position is that smoking is a nasty and dangerous habit, so no one should smoke. He came up with a few well thought out details supporting his position, but his essay in general is very weak. He has written in complete sentences and his grammar is generally fine, but the composition itself leaves much to be desired. Here's a little taste of how it went: ME: This is a good idea here but I think the sentence itself is too vague. How else could you word this to make it sound more specific? DS: I don't know. ME: Let's make a rule to no longer use the words stuff, things, good, or bad. DS: Then I got nothin'. ME: Do you remember what a metaphor is? DS: Yeah. (he then correctly defines one for me) ME: Can you think of a metaphor that might be appropriate here? DS: (After much pause) No. I then find myself leading him along with MANY open ended questions that eventually get us to a better sentence with regard to word choice. When we are finally finished with the essay rewrite, he says to me, "Mom, I know it sounds better now, but I don't know how to come up with these kind of sentences myself. I need you to help me think of them. My brain is just empty." I really feel for him, because I know he is trying. How do you help you child edit and improve their writing without essentially rewriting it yourself? I could never just ask him to work on improving sentence A or sentence B on his own. He'd just sit there blankly for hours. He understands concepts like sequence words, metaphors, similes, hyperbole, alliteration,descriptive words,strong verbs, etc. He can pick them out of things he reads, but to ask him to then come up with some in his own writing, is like asking him to jump the Grand Canyon.:confused: Advice, anyone? Thanks.

I have boy/ girl twins who are almost 13. (Boy, do I feel old!) I still get the "Are they identical?" question All. The. Time. My kids just look at me and roll their eyes when it happens. My son thinks we should just start answering "yes".:001_smile:

My dd is a rising 8th grader. She has been turned on to meterology lately and has begun talking about maybe pursuing broadcast meterology as a career(I realize she's only 12, but she's very excited at this point). She just completed Pre-alg, and did just fine. I would guess her to be a B+/A- student, but she complains about not being good at math and math being too hard almost daily. I know that if her interest in meteorology continues, she is looking at a couple of years of Calc and calc-based physics down the road. Have any of you had children who complained about math early on but got "turned on" later in high school? She is not really math intuitive, and I certainly have never heard her say, "Yea math!".:) I will do everything I can to make her math learning as rigorous yet achieveable as possible, but I wonder if this will be an uphill struggle for her the whole way. She is a science nut, however, but again, we haven't really done any advanced science that requires any significant math yet. I am a math lover and have always been, so I am in uncharted waters here. I really can see her having a great career in this field, so I am hoping that the interest continues. Someone please tell me that they have had kids who were once like my dd but went on to have great success in advanced math and science!

NOAA has an online curriculum here http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/ I don't know if it might be too advanced for what you want, but there are some cool easy experiments found throughout.

For my 8th grade twins Lit next year: Call of the Wild Johnathan Livingston Seagull Flowers for Algernon The Giver Biography of their choosing a dozen or so short stories a dozen or so poems They'll most likely read another 5 or 6 non-fiction titles for civics and science. I decided to include short stories for the first time next year. Usually we read 8-10 books for Lit and another 5 or 6 for history/science each year.