Busy bags and sensory bins that are supposed to be the magic answer to keeping your toddler occupied while the olders do school. All those turned out to be was a great big mess maker as my son proceeded to dump them out in two seconds flat. Yay for dry oatmeal, rice, and beans all over the floor because cleaning that mess up didn't take up any time out of our school. :glare:

All Through the Ages possibly.

Lions of Little Rock might work. It takes place the year after the Little Rock Nine enrolled in Central High School. and deals with the closing of the Little Rock school districts so that no more African American students could be enrolled in white schools. An AA girl who can pass as white attends a Jr. high anyway where she befriends the main character of the book, a white girl. Of course, the girl gets caught and there is fall out in the community over it. I read it for the first time this fall and thought it was excellent.

I drink a tablespoon a day and since I've started I've had people comment on how good my hair and skin look. It's the only thing I've added into my normal routine, so I'm assuming that's a byproduct. The biggest impact I've noticed is not having any seasonal allergies. Even when they harvested the cotton around here which always brought on an allergy attack before, I didn't even have a sniffle this year. That side effect alone has been worth it.

You could buy one of those car adapter things that plugs into your cigarette lighter, but has a normal household plug receptacle on the other end. Plug the crockpot into that and keep it on warm in your car until time to eat.

I'm all kinds of messed up. I prefer the no 's to make nouns ending in s plural, but I still say the extra s even though it's not written. So Arkansas' natural beauty would be pronounced Arkansas-z natural beauty. The apostrophe at the end making you add the z sound to indicate possession. Did I totally make this up or does anyone else do this as well?

I'd use them without a second thought.

Thanks everyone! My dh had his best "told you so" face when I informed him that the Hive agreed with him. :lol:

My dh just brought home a flat of about 15 cans of diced tomatoes. The only problem is the expiration date was in May of 2016. Dh says they are fine because canned foods only go bad long past what the date on the can says. I'm hesitant to use them. Who's right?

I always find the generation bashing odd. Especially when all the protests after the election were happening and that meme was flying around Facebook about how the millennials are so used to getting participation trophies that they can't handle loss, such as the political election. 1) My generation (and the generation of 90% of the people sharing that meme) are the parents who decided to give out participation trophies to our kids and not keep score in games. You can't blame the millennials for that. They were just kids, so if you truly believe that trophies and no score games are the problem, then it's your fault. 2) Protesting via demonstrations, rallies, marches, etc. are in the very fabric of our country's beginnings from the Boston Tea Party to the Vietnam War protests. It's not something that millennials suddenly invented in 2016. My oldest is barely in the edge of the millennial generation. I get tons of compliments on her behavior and work ethic from the adults who run the extracurricular activities that she participates in. I think the amount of millennials who fit what that song is talking about is small and existed in every generation.

A skiff is a small, light boat. A skift is a light dusting of snow. At least these are the way I heard these terms used growing up in Arkansas.

Any tried and true ideas for keeping the cat out of the tree? We have an artificial tree that we started putting up last night. Immediately the cat proceeded to climb up through the branches to the top. I've halted the process since i don't want to add ornaments until we've figured out a way to keep the cat out of it. The space is not one that I can put anything around the tree. TIA

Do you put earbuds in your ear every day for any length of time? I get what you describe and had never had it before so I googled. Apparently with the rise of earbud use this has become more common. It's because the earbud traps moisture in your ear canal which causes the wetness, flakiness, itchiness. It's kind of like swimmer's ear but without the pain. I know that it was my earbuds causing it because I didn't have issues until I started lying in bed each night watching Kdramas on my tablet with my earbuds in so I didn't disturb dh. I would watch with earbuds for about an hour every night and started having ear problems about 2-3 weeks after doing this every night. Now I make sure and only use one earbud at a time and rotate between ears every 10 minutes or so. It has gotten much better.

Our kitty litter goes in those small size plastic trash bags. We buy the super cheap brand since it's just for the kitty litter. We throw it into our big trash can under the carport. Are plastic trash bags banned as well or just the store plastic bags?

My dd12 is studying Early American history this year and I need some recommendations for a good, living book style, biography of Christopher Columbus. My problem is all the ones I've found for her age are "Rah! Rah! Isn't Columbus amazing!" All the books I've found that present a more balanced view of who he was are usually for adults/college. Is there a book out there that's a combination of both, middle grade reading level and also a balanced view? TIA

Family Read Aloud: Ramona's World (we've been working through the entire Ramona series for a while now and we're on the last one! Up next the Poppy series.) Dd12 Read Aloud: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh (I don't know about my daughter, but i'm really enjoying this one. I'd never read it before, just watched the cartoon.) Dd9 Read Aloud: Baby Island (proving to be a favorite with this girl as much as it was for her big sister years ago)

:lol: You sound like my dh. He was astounded that 1) people would be so close-minded and 2) I would put up with this cr@p for an unpaid, volunteer position. Nothing I can do about the book choice. The entire year long literature course was planned in the summer. They have been reading TKAMB for three weeks and will finish discussing it this coming Tuesday (our last co-op class of 2016). I tried desperately to get them to split the literature class into a jr. high and sr. high class, but they couldn't find someone willing to teach the class. I'm slowly coming to realize the the "literature" class is actually a let's promote the super conservative (alt-right) narrative about social events and debate (everyone agree with what the teacher's view is) it in class. My poor dd12 is so frustrated by everyone's close-mindedness in these debates that she wants to scream. It has led to great discussions at home though, and I'm proud of the free-thinking, compassionate person she's showing herself to be. She has also garnered a reputation as a fierce debater, and everyone is afraid to go against her. :hurray: :lol:

I found this when searching. It's an excerpt from his book, Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire.

Honestly my thought process for the assignment went something like this; Man is accused of a crime he didn't commit in TKAM solely because of his race. I wasn't going to open that can of worms with a ten foot pole (see previous posts), so I started thinking of a way to have the kids write about a historical time period when people were treated unfairly based upon race, specifically white versus AA like in TKAM (tons of options to choose from here). I wanted to make it something they might have an easier time understanding so I chose school desegregation because the people involved were the ages of most of my students so I thought it would be easier for them to relate to the feelings of the characters they decided to write in their short story. I did do historical research for them about the time period, Brown v. Board of Education, etc. and gave them a book and documentary list for further study as well. Plus we've had class discussions about it as well. There are absolutely much better topics related to TKAM, but the assignment in the Writing and Rhetoric book is a historical fictional narrative, so I was trying to align it with themes and setting in TKAM as much as I could however imperfectly.

So we joined an awesome homeschool co-op only 15 minutes away compared to our 45 minute drive last year. I am even teaching two writing classes using Writing and Rhetoric material and the kids are learning a lot. I'm coordinating the writing assignments for the 7th-12th grade class with the literature class so the kids are using the books they are reading for me to create the assignments. Well, things got derailed two weeks ago when I was talking about using writing to deal with social problems. My example was Dickens and how he wanted to expose Victorian England's mistreatment of the poor, and how people of that time believed poor = lazy, sinner, crook, etc. I brought that into modern times about how people in the US tend to judge those who are on government assistance (food stamps, welfare, etc.) negatively. I explained how Florida passed a law requiring mandatory drug testing before you could receive benefits because they were so sure they would catch a lot of welfare recipients using drugs (aka being poor = drug addict) and how that didn't happen. One of my students then made a comment about a specific race and having children to keep more money rolling in. I couldn't let that slide so I kind of went off. Not in an angry way, but in a factual way. Said student kept being more upset (and the entire class was getting involved) so I finally stopped the conversation and suggested we just move on. I had to meet with the co-op director last week because a parent or two complained about my rant. I was asked by the director, in a very nice way, to tone down the social commentary because all the kids come from different backgrounds and their parents don't necessarily want their children exposed to some things. This week we had class on Election Day and the kids were talking about the election. I was commenting how this has been such a difficult election for so many people to decide who to vote for myself included. One of the girls looked at me with a smirk and said, "You're not a Republican are you?" I told her that I really identified more as an independent because I didn't agree fully with either of the major parties. She grinned then and said, "Thought so." :huh: :001_rolleyes: I'm assuming this was all because of the welfare conversation the week before. So today while out walking around the neighborhood with the kids, I get a call from the literature teacher at co-op. She's concerned because as the big writing project for the semester I assigned the kids to choose to write a fictional historical narrative set in either The Dust Bowl or school desegregation because the kids are currently reading To Kill a Mockingbird (which is set in the 30's and deals with racial injustice). Almost all of the children are choosing the desegregation option. The literature teacher is concerned because she's worried the white children (they are all white except for one minority child) will start to believe the "liberal narrative that white people are still guilty for these racial sins." At first I genuinely had no idea what she was getting at so I questioned a bit and apparently since the kids have already read Huckleberry Finn this year and are now reading To Kill a Mockingbird, she feels that my paper is just heaping more racial issues in their face. She said she worried about choosing two such racial books for the kids to read, but she is really just focusing on the goodness of some of the characters in TKAM instead of the racial tones. I was flabbergasted. Teaching TKAM without addressing the race issues in the book?!? :eek: :confused: :mad: Honestly by the end of the conversation I think she was feeling me out to see if I was some 'crazy liberal' indoctrinating the kids with 'BLM propaganda'(not bashing BLM at all. I agree with what they are doing bringing attention to a serious issue) through a writing assignment, because we shouldn't bring up too many racial things with the kids since that's not really a problem anymore and we don't want them to feel bad about it. I am so done with this co-op group. My dh wants me to quit at semester, but I made a commitment to teach the year so I will. I've never encountered people who are so afraid their snowflake will hear something that goes against their family values/beliefs that they shut down any and all discussion of anything controversial. Is this what most of you have found when dealing with conservative evangelical (which i would actually be classified as a member of a conservative evangelical religion) homeschool groups because this is a first for me and I'm just :banghead: . I'm starting to think only secular homeschool groups for me from here on out. Anyway, thanks for reading all of this. I really needed to get all of that off my chest!

We lived in Littleton for two years while dh was in seminary. It was wonderful! It is one of the western suburbs of Denver so the location was great. We could be in the foothills of the Rockies in 15 minutes and be in downtown Denver in about 30 minutes (if you timed traffic well). I would move back in a heartbeat.

Does anyone else think the bad guy is the historian's real dad? I'm totally getting that vibe. BTW, I love how they show what 90% of American (and world history for that matter) has truly been like for those that are non-white. Usually time travel shows deal with that in one episode and then gloss it over in the rest. This one is at least realistic about the situation in every episode.

Thanks for mentioning the show, OP. I had missed this one and I'm binge watching it now on Hulu. I really love it! It's the kind of thing us history majors liked to toss out and discuss in college. What if XYZ person from history hadn't died at this time or if XYZ event didn't happen? Good geeky fun.

I hate apples in all forms: juice, pie, sauce, cake, oatmeal, baked, etc. I don't like the flavor and never have. 2 out of my 3 kids though, LOVE apples, so I buy them a bag of honey crisps every week and they plow through them. My third kid doesn't like any fruit.

I make my eggs exactly the same way you do, except I don't add milk and I add salt and pepper while the eggs are in the pan. I scramble the eggs completely when I first put them in the pan and then stir them two or three times after that until they are finished cooking the way we like them, soft and creamy. I think making scrambled eggs this way is delicious, and I've never had any complaints. I say keep doing what you're doing.