My oldest does both. She started Latin in 3rd grade and Spanish in 4th. She has not had any confusion with studying two languages concurrently (I, on the other hand...:lol:). So far it has worked for us, I just have the rule that new languages aren't started the same year. So my second child will be starting Latin this fall (her third grade year), and in fourth grade she can choose to start studying another foreign language.

I am not sure how much help I will be since I haven't used it at the levels you are asking about (we are starting 3rd and 5th next month), but I will try to offer you some advice based on the 3rd grade TMs and what has been said on the MP forums. First, at the early levels your child should be able to slowly decode the books in the lit packages, but it is perfectly acceptable to take turns reading the selection or let your child read the first paragraph and you finish out the selection - the point is to practice reading aloud daily, not to torture or frustrate your child. And second, the lit workbooks are not meant to be completed in full - the TMs say to just do what you have time for and feel is necessary for the child, and up through at least the 3rd grade the child/class formulates an answer to one or two of the comprehension questions aloud, the teacher writes it on the board (using correct grammar and punctuation), and then the child copies it into the workbook. They are most definitely not supposed to go through the workbook and complete every page on their own; it is meant to be a guide to oral discussion and a chance to practice formulating/writing complete, correct sentences. And the classes at HLS don't ever get around to the extra activities, they are just there in case a homeschooling family has the time.

I have never used it nor seen it in person, but my impression from looking at the website is not favorable. When I was in college, my biggest frustration was collaborative writing assignments - the other students seemed to have mastered the art of writing excessively about nothing, for pages and pages. This curriculum seems to teach that skill. The fourth grade writing sample is atrocious, and one that I would not have accepted from my daughter last year. If I crossed out every sentence that was unrelated to the topic of the paragraph or was a repeat of the prior sentence, it would be a one-paragraph paper instead of just over two pages long. Honestly, I would rather receive one solid paragraph than 2+ pages of this...drivel. It looks very scripted and easy to implement, but the end goal seems to be long papers with very little actual content.

I wanted to bump this thread up to say a huge THANK YOU for mentioning the insomnia. We knew our daughter had behavioral reactions to red food dye, but we never connected it to her insomnia. The girl has rarely slept through the night for months now, and we were just about at our wits' end. We were trying to keep her from eating/drinking anything with the red food dye, but we weren't overly vigilant about it...but for the past few days (since you posted this) we have checked everything before she has eaten or drank it, and she has slept through the night every night except one night (after she had an orange popsicle, go figure!). Honestly, this is the most consecutive nights she has slept through the night since she was about four (and she is eight now), so again, THANK YOU!!!!!!!!

I use Homeschool Tracker to do exactly what you described. I decide how many days a week I want to do each subject and then schedule that subject (but not the chapter or pages). Each day I can see what subjects I have scheduled for that day, and I input each lesson when it is completed and delete it if it didn't get done. So if I want to do English five days a week, I schedule it for M-F, and each day it will come up as assigned. When I do it, I just put in the completed lesson number. If we have an unscheduled appointment or something and it doesn't get done, I just delete it and there is nothing to reschedule and we aren't "behind." At the end of the year I have a digital record of what was done that year. Like you, I don't have to keep records, but I choose to do this for two reasons - first, to cover my hiney should anyone ever have reason to accuse me of not teaching my children, and second, to have a record so that I can look back and see what I used with each child and what a realistic pace for that curriculum was.

She has made it no secret that she has been trying to pay off debt using every online means possible, including numerous affiliate programs. I noticed a while back that the majority of her responses to threads looked like this: OP: Has anyone used program XYZ? Bloggermom: (affiliate link) is a popular program with a good reputation. Other good programs are (affiliate link), (affiliate link), and (affiliate link). Kudos to her for finding a way to earn money, but I look to other posters for advice (and if I am curious about any of the programs, I click on links from posters who are upfront about being affiliates - especially if they are affiliates because they use and like the program).

My kids were younger than yours, but I got my BA while homeschooling. I wasn't homeschooling yet when I started, but when I completed my degree my older two kids were in 1st and 3rd grade, so I homeschooled for a good part of it (and had a baby). I went full-time and the majority of my classes were online. I just did school with the kids in the morning and did my own schoolwork in the afternoons (and sometimes my reading in the evening). I guarded the time I had set aside for the kids' school and my school and let nothing take precedence over it. It was not easy, every minute of my day was busy, but I did it. So you can, too. :001_smile:

I called her first and left a message, and when she had not called back after a while I posted here since I knew there were dog experts here who might be able to tell me what typical behavior of that breed is at that age and whether this was something that could be helped by a professional (basically I posted here out of curiosity's sake). Of course I planned on taking the advice of the professional who performed the assessment on the dog. She called me back shortly after I posted on here the first time and came over immediately. I am taking her recommendation to surrender the dog to animal control and let them know everything.

I had an animal behavioral specialist (or whatever you call them - she works professionally with dogs) out for a visit and she said that based on his observable behavior and body language she recommended that he be surrendered to animal control; he was way too aggressive and my children were not safe around him. Lesson learned. In the future I will just invite her along to check out any potential dogs.

We just got a seven month old catahoula/heeler mix, and after two days it is apparent that he is not good with children at all. I got him on craigslist, and that is the first question that I asked his previous owner - and they lied. He is great with my 9 yo, but every time my 8 yo and 5 yo make a move, he nips at them like they are getting out of line. And now he bit my 8 yo - she turned and walked across the room, and he ran after her and bit her on the leg! He did not break the skin, but he did leave a mark. My question is this - is this something that we can train out of him? If he were a full-grown dog, I would get rid of him immediately, no question. But he is still young, so if this is some type of herding behavior or something that can be trained out of him, then we will keep him. He is very, very trainable - we have trained him to obey several different commands in the short time that we have had him. But if this is a personality/temperament issue, I want to know so I can find a home for him where there are no small children (he is excellent otherwise, he doesn't even bother my cat, which I thought would be the biggest problem).

There wasn't much out yet at my Walmart, but I did stock up on 17 cent spiral bound notebooks. That's the lowest I have seen them in my area in two years.

We don't do any crafts or lapbooks for school, but my kids can go through a glue stick in the blink of an eye. They come up with all sorts of creations that need glue all day long - dioramas, paper dolls, textured pictures (cotton balls, dried leaves, etc.), greeting cards...the possibilities are endless. I don't know where my kids got the crafty gene (it sure wasn't me!), but they got it good! :lol: (I buy glue sticks instead of glue bottles because they are all over-gluers. And they will go through a roll of tape in an hour, and tape is much more expensive than glue sticks.)

I could have written the bolded above. Same examples, even. I keep waiting for my dh to actually get sick so he knows what it is really like. I think that is the problem...he doesn't get sick. I don't think he has run a fever once in our entire marriage.

That is patriarchy, and what the author is trying to speak out against. The Bible does not say *anywhere* that man is to require obedience from his wife or that he gets to claim the final say on anything because he is the husband. The Bible says that wives are to *choose* to allow their husband to follow his wishes (instead of, say, selfishly demanding that their own wishes be followed). Men aren't to - and can't - demand it from them. Men are never told anywhere in the Bible to claim any sort of authority over women. God knew that men and women are both selfish by nature, and in order for a marriage to work, wives are instructed to let the husband have his way, and then men are promptly told that every decision they make had darn well better be for the benefit of their wife, even to the point of sacrifice on their own part. Mutual submission - the most ignored verse in the entire Bible (Ephesians 5:21).

:grouphug: I'm sorry. I just recently earned my BA (through a combination of traditional and online courses) and I noticed that the majority of the students in my classes would stop submitting their coursework and participating in (online) discussions halfway through the course. And it wasn't just in community college...the same issue was there in the four-year college I graduated from. It completely boggled my mind. I never thought about it from the perspective of the instructor, though. I would feel very discouraged if I put in that kind of effort and the students just slacked off and eventually quit. :grouphug:

We are going on our sixth year here (counting my oldest's K year), and no, I am not excited about or looking forward to the upcoming school year. I have all the shiny new books, and they hold no appeal whatsoever. I like what I chose, and I feel that we will be able to accomplish my goals with minimum stress and a reasonable amount of time each day, but I am not looking forward to it. I hit burnout really bad this spring and I have not come close to recovering from it. Who knows, maybe when I shop the back to school sales next month the excitement will appear....

Anyone else sharing toys and school stuff? No. What's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours. Science foe 6th grade Early adolescence is really a time to be developing a closer relationship with your child, not taking sides against him or her (and especially over a non-issue like science). Mummy: Chicken or Orange? Hmmm, I don't believe that I have developed a taste for mummies, so I will just skip the appetizer tonight, thanks. Would "Writing With Skill" be overkill? While I believe that "writing with competency" would be satisfactory for most educators, I don't think that shooting for a higher mastery of the subject could be considered overkill, no. 男子驾车被埋雪中二个月存活 吃雪保持性命(图) وأنا أيضا، لديها العديد من المحافظ مصمم جميل للبيع وهمية

I think it takes some children a while longer to learn how differentiate between the two letters. My oldest child never had trouble with them; my second child still struggled with them in second grade. I spent most of the year asking her if it could be made into a capital "B," and if she said yes then she knew it was a lowercase "b" and not a "d." When she finished up second grade this past May (and turned eight, as well) she was no longer pausing when she encountered a "b" or a "d" when reading aloud and did not have to ask me which it was. Based on my own limited experience, I would not be concerned about a child who was having trouble distinguishing between "b" and "d" at the age of five. That is not to say that I would not be working on learning the difference (daily!), but I would not be worried about it.

I just looked over the grade 5 Language Arts sample, and the index leads me to believe it is on par with R&S grade 2. The writing looks to be closer to grade level, but the grammar topics only get as difficult as subject-verb agreement and using adjectives as modifiers (covered in R&S grade 2). There is also some phonics included (spellings for the long "e" sound, words ending in "ow"), and phonics lessons should conclude long before grade 5. The spelling may or may not be on par with grade level; the sample lesson says that the words on the list for that day are all closed syllable words ending with at least one consonant (the example word given is "dad"). Lesson 167 made me pause, though: :confused:

They do correlate to Hewitt's book. Mr. Miller links to the Conceptual Physics book that he is referring to on this page. These tests that you linked to are not the tests for his class that uses KB (those tests are located elsewhere on this website).

On his links page he has a link to the website for the Conceptual Physics textbook that he is referring to, and it is the one by Hewitt. You did nothing wrong. :001_smile:

Go to Victoria's Secret. They will discreetly measure you in the dressing room and give you styles you prefer (like non-padded) to try on. They will give you a card with all of your favorite styles marked on it so you can go home and buy the ones you like on clearance at their website (or wait for a good sale). And the bOOkshelves last for-ev-er. I have never had one fall apart, wear out, or have a wire poke through. I am sure that since I am done having babies (and nursing) I will eventually wear some out, but I haven't yet. And they are sooooo comfortable.

Yes, I do. She is eight. She does the exact same thing...I start to correct her or ask her to do something, and she flings herself on the ground and wails so loudly that she can't hear a word I say. If her siblings do anything that she doesn't like, she shrieks at them (and usually smacks them as well, which doesn't endear her to them). She is also incredibly impulsive. This is not a matter of poor or lazy parenting. I have worked harder at parenting her than my other two children combined, and I still do on a daily basis. I remember an occasion when my oldest was two years old; we were at a gathering with some other people and a friend of my daughter's (also two years old) flung himself to the floor in a huge tantrum, wailing and thrashing about. My daughter never did anything like that, so I felt a bit high and mighty about my parenting skills since my child would never do anything like that. Boy, did that come back to bite me in the rear 1000x over with my next child! :lol:

What ages are your children? Unless I misread her signature, LaughingLioness's youngest child is the age of my oldest child. Logistically, I do not have the extra time that she does, so I can't compare what I do to what she does. She does not have young children getting into everything, making messes in every room, getting into fights, needing help finding socks, needing help getting a cup for a drink, needing help reaching the toilet paper, needing help using the microwave, etc. That stuff takes a lot of time every day! I imagine in four years when my youngest is nine that we might have time to do all the fun classes and stuff...until then, I am just trying to get through each day with my sanity intact. And maybe smiles on the kids' faces. All the fun extras will come when they are a bit older.

Even at the grades you listed it is quite easy - kindergarten only takes minutes every day, and 2nd grade shouldn't be more than two hours daily. I try to keep it at an hour per day per grade. By the time the kids are old enough to need a considerable amount of one-on-one time, they are also working on things long enough that you can teach the younger one while the older does independent work. This year I would teach my 4th grader her math lesson and then she would leave to work on it as well as her spelling, daily mental math, penmanship, logic, and writing. By the time she was ready for her grammar lesson, I was done with the 2nd grader's lessons for the day (except for science or history, which they did together). It will work itself out year by year, you will see. You are only adding on a little time each year, so it really isn't as bad as it seems. :001_smile: