This looks like a good list. One thing though...I don't understand why Winnie the Pooh is listed under 9 & up?

This is why I went from unschooler to school-at-home seven days a week. Self-directed means being obnoxious and extremely difficult to live with for my DD. A brief period of concentrated academics each morning does wonders for her personality. Dance helps too, but at not yet seven the three classes a week she already does are the maximum available. As PPs have said; quiet time with challenging books and "work" are also useful. When things start to get difficult I ask DD if she would like a job or if she'd rather go & read x.

Oops the title should read World War One and or Two.

DD 6.5 recently asked to learn more about each of these. I need to find resources that are more focused on the political machinations than the realities of war, firstly because she's quite sensitive but also because I'm almost certain that is what she is more interested in. She recently read a Horrible Histories book on the Stuart period and it was both too childish in style and not in depth enough, hence posting here. Engaging books & websites might be best as I also have a testosterone filled three year old who does not need any encouragement.

Yay

Oh, I'm so sorry. I know how important these groups were for you & your DD. FWIW my DD would much prefer that to art if she were there.

Yes, DD's formal school time (1-1.5 hours each am) is "easy". Still somewhat accelerated (most curric we use at this time is aroun 3rd grade level for a 6.75 yr old, some higher and then there's SSL which makes her laugh because it is so easy but she loves it) but definitely easy. This is partly because the main reason we do formal sit down school is for behaviour management. We started as unschoolers & I still feel that the majority of DD's learning comes from her own explorations, it's just that she functions better and is much easier to live with if she gets that time each day. She uses that time more as a space in which she practices and solidifies what she she has already learnt.

This may be a ludicrous question, but does anyone know of a children's movie featuring Cromwell? Could just be set in that time. DD's interest has been piqued by something we've been reading & it's coming up for movie night at our house so I was hoping to follow the rabbit trail but I can't find anything.

Yes, my DD watched all 50 plus episodes by 4.5 - on VERY limited screen time. It helped fill a need in her while I was dealing with baby number two who walked before 11 months & has been a cyclone since then.

Completely agree with this. Well said :) My 6.75 year old is similar. She doesn't like the live portion of mathletics but funnily enough she quite enjoyed the races on EPGY when we did that. These days we do a few minutes daily of an iPad app for drill. Sometimes Splash Math but most often Numbl. I've just downloaded the one mentioned above, I think she'll love that. Numbl is excellent for addition facts. It gives you what looks likes a calculator keypad (although you start with multiples of some numbers) and a target number at the top, you press numbers on the keypad to add up to the target. If you go over it beeps and you start again. They quickly learn to be creative and not just press 9 for 9 as each time you use a number successfully it disappears & the aim is to get rid of all your numbers as quickly as possible. So if you press 4,3,2 instead you are ahead. You can play two player or single. My DD has been enjoying beating her own times in the single player version lately. I don't hold her back conceptually because she isn't as fast to memorize. I think that use will help memorization and even now she is starting to see that memorizing a few things would be helpful to her in using maths the way she wants to.

I don't see a problem with it although I wouldn't use the SOTW resources in that case as they are designed to be appropriate for older and older children as they progress. Personally if I did that I would start in our local area. For instance when were most of the buildings in our town built? Why? Was it when it was founded or later. If it was later, when was our town founded & why? Where did those people come from? Who was here before them? What did their lives look like? Etc

I don't think you are doing a disservice. Automacity will come with use anyway. We are in the same boat, having finished with SM 2 but I'm waiting a few more weeks to order BA since shipping is so ridiculous to here and we are at the expensive start of the year when extracurricular fees are due. We're taking a detour through LoF elementary & I'm not at all concerned about DD's memorisation. She can skip count easily by all of those anyway.

The picture schedule is a good idea. I have nothing useful for you. Reading that have me flashbacks & I am thanking my lucky stars that my child like that was my eldest. She is still similar but at six she can at least logically accept that if I said we will do it after x y z, then we probably will. ETA I did start hiding the odd really parent intensive thing when she was three so I could attend to the baby. Shameful but I had newborn mam brain.

Eek! Put a mattress on the floor. Yes, as a PP said - how long until he climbs out of his crib? Those extra fence things just make it look extra dangerous to me - extra height to fall from & more stuff to get tangled in. I'm sorry you had to go through the bone scans & all the questioning.

Currently DD 6.5 is doing: Homeschool drama class Violin Piano (added in this year) Choir Ballet Tap Jazz She wants to do gymnastics or tumbling but the classes clash with dance which is her main interest.

Levy.http://www.booktopia.com.au/the-bedside-book-of-chemistry-joel-levy/prod9781742660356.html Off to look at the other one now :)

We are a little way into McHenry's Elements and loving it. The Bedside Book of Chemistry has also been a fun addition (lots of biographies etc).

Thanks. She is not an only child. Her brother is three years younger and his development has taken an entirely different trajectory. They are very close but he is in no way a peer for her. She does have a lot of acquaintances and even good friends through her activities, but there is something missing that was there with the more on par friends who are no longer geographically close. Right now she is not complaining, but I noticed how much more relaxed and happy she was after playing with one of the younger girls I mentioned (who still lives an hour away), and I wondered if perhaps I should be putting more effort into this. I'm pondering asking the local ps if they will let her sit in on their chess club. There isn't an outside of school junior club within 1.5 to 2 hours, there isn't even an adult club in this area. I'm fairly confident she would start to meet more peers through violin as she gets older, but again the nearest decent youth orchestra program is 2 hours (& she wouldn't be ready for another year or two).

Sounds great to me. Almost like here (Mountains near the Eastern seabord of Australia). We have none of those, oh...except the poisonous spiders and snakes. We have terrifyingly venomous versions (numerous) of each of those. It snows a few times each winter at our altitude, doesn't often stick though.

Yes, whenever I have time to actually sit & read them they are down. VERY frustrating.

I know there have been plenty of threads on this topic here and on similar boards, but it's my turn. I'm feeling a little alone in parenting DD and at the same time wondering how much effort I should be putting in to finding like minded peers for her. Until now we have been very lucky in stumbling upon similar ability peers, albeit 1-3 years older. The chief issue is that as life goes on, all those families have moved away or we away from them. In the broader community we interact with now there are a couple of girls 1-1.5 years younger than her & an Aspie boy 1.5 years older than her that she connects with on that level (she has other friends, these are the ones she opens up more about some of her interests with, since theirs are somewhat similar). The boy isn't interested in her friendship at all, which isn't surprising given the gender thing plus the fact that he doesn't have a high need for social interaction. Which leaves the girls. One we know well and one we don't. They are lovely and one has just started to learn chess so DD is thrilled she may have another child to play with (she plays with her best friend when she visits, but that's once or twice a year as she lives six hours away), but DD has always been the younger in a friendship. She isn't really sure how to be the older partner & I can see there are maturity differences that interfere a little too. Anyway, yadda, yadda. A lot of background... I'm just wondering how much effort other parents put in to seek out peers for their children. DD has plenty of other friends but she isn't fulfilled by them. Also since most of them are older, we are starting to encounter tween/teen things cropping up which aren't of interest or particularly comfortable for her (she is 6.5).

My daughter was similar until recently. If she really can decode anything (and mine could), then the only answer is practice and patience. How much of her own reading is she doing? I spent a lot of energy just finding more and more materials looking for something my would actually want to read. She wouldn't stand for Frog & Toad etc although those were a comfortable level that would have been good for practice. In the end it was Harry Potter that hooked her. She was willing to struggle through slow painful sentence by sentence which quickly got faster. Soon she was starting the third book reading silently to herself (at which point I finally convinced her to stop and try something else for a while as it was getting scary).

Ok this is obviously cultural and not decade related but the books thing is just really, really weird! I remember reading something as a preteen, perhaps Judy Blume that mentioned the protagonist walking home from the bus carrying her books. I thought "I wonder why she didn't take her bag?" but it never occured to me that no-one had a bag/backpack. I was born in 1976 so yep, backpacks were everywhere by the time I started high school but even my mother had her old satchel style schoolbag in the garage.

Skip the textbook and buy the HIG instead. There is a lot of extra, meatier stuff in there. We hardly touch the textbook either, my dd prefers the b&w format of the workbooks.

Posting to follow. I've been pondering it too.