I need American History that will work for K-3rd grade. I have 9 kids in that ability range, but most of them have special needs and English is not their first language. Heavy reading and writing are out. Audiobooks are great. Video options are also good. The biggest thing is that it has to be very easy to implement. The more prep time I need to dedicate to it, the more likely it is to get backburnered when things get busy. In the past we have done SOTW audio and the coloring pages for everyone. For the more advanced kids, they have read extra books from the library and written occasional narrations on what they read. We have the Liberty's Kids DVDs, but we need something that goes through more than just that time period. We have Amazon Prime, and I can justify adding another streaming option if there is something good available. Thank you!

It isn't doughy or clumpy? Whenever I put the pasta in too early it gets weird and mushy.

I need to shout this somewhere! Our family has been rocking it for the last few weeks! Core subjects done without complaint! Extras done with interest and enthusiasm! We have had great, awesome, involved conversations making connections between different topics. Wow! This is why I love homeschooling! We have had our rough patches in the past trying to find our stride, but I am so thrilled right now. I love this time with my kids!

We went over why we have leap years and my kids are requesting special foods. My 5 year old was extra cute because he kept mixing up the name. "Can we have bamboo shoots? Hopping is like shooting because things shoot up in the air and come down. So bamboo shoots for the hop day please?"

They go in the sink until that is full, then they go on the counter. Soooo many dishes in this house!

Is there a good app or program or website to keep records this way? An actual homeschool program might not be what I need. I want to be able to upload and tag images by child name and subject. Some would be general photos of the kids doing work and some would be scans of math or language translations. I'd prefer to be uploading the photos instead of storing them on a drive or computer or tablet. I'd also like to be able to type in simple things like reading lesson numbers. So during the day I want to be able to snap a photo of my kids doing their life skills type work or doing hands on projects. I want my kids doing more advanced work to be able to scan their completed math work so that I can find it later to correct it. (Why do my kids finish a problem set and then promptly misplace it?) And I also want to be able to jot down which kid has finished which lesson in which curriculum. That part I've been doing in a notebook, but that gets misplaced sometimes too. (So my kids probably got their habit of losing things from me.) Is there something quick and easy that can do this? Maybe some kind of a blog would even work, but I don't want uploading the images to take ages.

Ack! I was trying to click on the thread and it somehow made me vote on it. Sorry! Can you make a rule that separates the unkindness from them liking or not liking the food? Like it or not, eat it or not, complaining is off the table? Maybe make a big batch of pasta and sauce in the beginning of the week and they can reheat that instead for breakfast, lunch or dinner? If they complain or speak unkindly about what you have cooked they can apologize and redo the correct way to respond.

I love how the consensus is to let the crazy loose! These are mostly things that are okay at room temp, at least for the week before they are consumed. Storing on the bus during the summer would provide us with precooked fruits and vegetables. ;) The basement and garage are both a little too accessible to mice or bugs with the way this house is designed. Laundry room is attached to the pantry where the canned goods are, but no space for produce. I like the different cubbies and shelves. Washable would definitely be key because every now and then they need a wiping out.

I feel like I've really mastered the art of large family shopping. Great meat prices at the restaurant supply store, certain items from Aldi, toilet paper and diapers at Sams, bread from the bakery outlet. Great prices on cases of apples and sweet potatoes and bananas at certain stores too! But I struggle to store the cases of produce. We go through a case in a week, more or less depending on what it is. Where or how do other large families store these foods? We have a small pantry space but it's better suited for canned goods than fresh foods. I thought about adding a storage rack in our breakfast nook but I think a stack of produce boxes gives off that "crazy family with a bus" vibe. Especially since you can see our bus out that window!

UPDATE: We found a cover school that let us register them below high school grades and knows that they are not currently working for a diploma. If we want to address that part of it later we can, but right now they are legally enrolled at the lower grades which is enough for our purposes. I just realized re-reading this thread that I didn't hear back from the county DD board. I will have to call again and try to get ahold of someone. When I found a school that would work for us my brain filed the whole task away and I didn't notice that I never got an answer. We did find a cool resource for teenagers who aren't being served through the schools. They are private and their only requirement was that they weren't getting life skills services at the local district.

So funny that I posted the same thing right after this! Yes! Chinese buffet for the win!

We have 9 kids and the teenagers can eat a ton. Going out during lunch to a Chinese buffet is practically perfect. It also means that we can get everyone food right away. Otherwise some of the kids are hungry and cranky and worn out before the food has even arrived. Lunch is cheaper and usually less crowded which is helpful. Sometimes we do subway or fast food, but I hate that some kids will be disappointed that we buy big orders of fries and nuggets instead of happy meals. I'm not sure why that is. No one is entitled to happy meals, ya know? But I don't want my kids to feel deprived because of their siblings either. So we like to do buffets. We don't all go out to movies. A couple kids will go at a time to a movie they will enjoy, but it's too hard to find something for everyone. There was a second run movie theater that had really cheap tickets where we used to live. There are some ways where I feel like the kids do miss out because there are so many of them, but there are other ways that I feel the number is an advantage. We will get something big and awesome (for our budget) for everyone to share at Christmas. We went to a place with pony rides and I joked that it would be cheaper for us to buy a pony. That kind of premise, although teens are probably a bit old for pony rides!

Mine is bright blue, but it's ancient. Nearly six years old, I believe. It was the only color in stock to replace the phone I had broken. That one was black. I can't believe I can remember that!

I don't want to risk any copyright issues by posting images here, but there are so many great examples if you do a google image search for dog bite warning signs. Showing eye whites, licking lips, flaring whiskers, etc. My heart nearly stops when people repost videos of kids playing with dogs who are displaying clear signs of wanting to be left alone. These are the kinds of scenarios where people say they happened out of the blue but there were signs.

Yes! I was going to say that there is even an IEP page addressing extracurriculars and accommodations for the student to participate in them. I would bring it up.

I was wrong. It was a rat. It had been avoiding all of our traps, but I must have scared it out of hiding when I was sanding the floor. No more noises, no more chewed wood. Hopefully our improvements in the cleanliness of the environment will keep any more from showing up.

We just moved into a new house. The former owner told us there was a rat and had been putting out rat poison with no luck. Okay, not ideal, but we will fix the problem. We put out traps with no success. But now in the last couple days I have found huge chewed up places. There is no way a rat or a couple rats could have done that in a night's time. I used to raise and breed them, and there is just no way. So the new theory is squirrels? I have seen small squirrels in the yard. I'm not sure what the species is here. They aren't big fox squirrels and they don't look like the big eastern gray squirrels, but maybe gray squirrels are smaller here? Is the squirrel theory possible? We had them in an attic in a different house but this is in the crawl space below the kitchen. We are sealing things off and we will be calling an exterminator if this doesn't get solved soon.

We have been having trouble since at least October. They missed delivery dates for things we needed for Halloween. Shipping before Christmas was slow too. I have been really disappointed with their shipping speeds. I think I made the same comment that is coming up here. They are padding the front and back of their shipping with an extra day. Yes, I checked the correct shipping speed and things were from Amazon, etc. They just stink right now. It is faster to go buy things myself now, when I had been ordering from Amazon to avoid making a dozen stops on errand days. They are getting fewer orders from me.

Thanks everyone! I'm working on some emails to see what cover can handle this best. Lenient is looking better, but we will be enrolling kids past compulsory age. I am really, truly, not worried about a diploma for my 4 oldest. Life skills would be nice, but I'm not worried about it. Their history is so far outside of the norm that any program that would stick to requiring a life skills diploma and not accept them otherwise is not going to flexible enough for their needs. They spent their lives in institutions. Not orphanages, but mental institutions for children and adults with physical disabilities and developmental delays and psychiatric patients. I don't want to blather on about it too much, but we are working on so much in terms of life experiences that a diploma is a box I'm not worried about checking. They've also only been educated for the last year and a half, so it doesn't carry the same emotional significance that it would if they had started in kindergarten. I will let you guys know what I hear from the covers and from the state/county!

There is also a blood test for TB, Quantiferon Gold. The regular skin test can give a false positive. One of my kids had the vaccine when he was younger so he will react to the skin test but everything else is negative. I don't know if the skin test can have a false negative. If you aren't aware of any risk factors for TB then it is probably unlikely, so I wouldn't outright panic.

For Ohelizabeth, we aren't in Ohio anymore. We actually did get IEPs for them but we couldn't find any local providers for that scholarship. That's neither here nor there though. Apprenticeships are way beyond our scope. I will be over the moon when my 15 year old learns to tie his own shoes. I didn't include him with the teenagers, but my 12 year old is nonverbal and just learned to sit independently. I do like the idea of working backwards. Unfortunately with the way we move so frequently, the requirements are different everywhere. Here it looks like they can request educational records but there is no listed requirement for completing through 21. In our county in Ohio the waiting list for county services was over a year once you turned 21. Because of their history and the fact that they have only received a year and a half of any education, we haven't been planning to transition them in the next few years. We are working on too much lost ground right now. It is probably why looking forward is so hard! Okay, typed that now getting to Lecka's post! Moving again is a strong possibility but without knowing where it is hard to make that call. The 15 year old we will continue reporting for the next couple years anyway, but yes, it will be a while before he is 21 and a lot could change in that time. I need to find out if and how I can report them as homeschooled high school students while they are learning basic addition. Everything I am finding says they need to be completing high school level work to submit their credits, but that just isn't happening. Maybe they can be enrolled in the cover school as a lower grade.

For most of the last ten years my husband has driven an hour to an hour and a half each way to work. This house is 15-20 minutes each way. We just gained two hours a day with him. We were so used to him being gone that we didn't miss it at the time, but it is nice to have him here more. It isn't an impossible commute, but it will start to wear on you both if other negative factors start creeping in. One extra time thief for us living in the country and him commuting in was that my husband ended up doing a lot of shopping and errands on his way home. It was more convenient than for us to make a separate trip to do things, but it also meant he got home late even on days when he was done early.

I'm looking for pros and cons of continuing to report my teenagers as home educated. They are 18, 16, 15 at a beginning reading and arithmetic level. (Their levels are due in some part to neglect, but neglect from before we adopted them. They have special needs in addition to that neglect.) We are going to keep teaching them. I'm not sure when we start making unnecessary work for ourselves by filing for them past compulsory age. In Ohio we needed to show to our evaluator that they were making progress at their ability level. Not a big deal so we were planning to continue until they turned 21 and were past the age they would have been eligible to attend public school. The cover school here in Alabama is looking for high school level material, which frankly is beyond them. Maybe we can say they are a lower grade? The 15 and 16 briefly attended public school and would be in 6th and 7th by the grades we had them placed in there, but we will still run into high school years in the next couple years. Reasons to continue reporting include tax status, possible eligibility for other programs (we aren't in any at the moment), ability to return to school if we desire to send them, what else? Right now traditional employment that would require a diploma is not on our radar. Possibly a special needs work program in the future, but not right now and I don't know if those require a diploma. I also have some mixed feelings about awarding a diploma for them at the level they are working at, although I know they could have received one if they had continued to 21 in the public school system. Is it recognition of achievement of a certain level of skills or does it mark a continued display of effort? That's a different topic though. What are good reasons to call them done on paper but continue to educate them in our home? The cover school cost includes all of our children so we aren't paying extra for them, but generating their records and fitting their work into credits is time that could be better spent actually educating them. I'm not sure if calling them high schoolers fits the letter of the law here or not for home educators. (Something I need to look into more.) I'm not truly worried about it, but I don't know if listing them could open us up to more scrutiny if there were an issue with the local school board or CPS. Am I just making more work and trouble for myself? Should I continue to file for them as they pass the compulsory age?

Oh man. We just moved into a new house and there was definitely a homeless person nest in the crawl space behind the basement wall. It was old but we made sure to seal it off after we emptied it out. Thank goodness for our five dogs and new security system.

Does your son never get a glass of water at night, or anything similar? I would want it fixed too!