@lewelma, thanks for getting this going! I haven't time to post more thoroughly right now, but am so encouraged by what y'all have written & am looking forward to working together on our curricula. 🙂

Me either! but all the other grownup folks in my group had & one ran, briefly, a Cthulhu-based game in 2019. So I dabbled in some but was not in a good mental space for his work.

Morning! Today: migraine prevention protocol x3; work on campaign, on RPG rules, and on next session; work on school plans for June and for July-Dec term; think about younger's birthday later this month; clean house; fitness; work outside; read.

It is! There are these castle-y sketches on the insides so if you take the boxes down you can turn them inside-out for something fun. At least, they did years ago. 😉 I wonder if Bookshark has them too. Odds are. ETA -- @OKBudmay I ask how you do your plans? I am a chronic overplanner. @8FillTheHeart -- you plan over the summer, yes? I'd love any thoughts for how you balance planning ahead with overplanning (maybe you are past that now!) and all the weird things that thrown one's plans off a bit. I'm working through the Plan Your Year stuff now which at least has my plans detached from dates, so it is more do-the-next thing.

Totally late to the party. So now I'm more-or-less off-topic. But: I am interested in designing the shape of our curriculum, though I use mostly organized stuff that I re-shuffle or re-purpose. I won't use Facebook, though. Not arguing or trying to convert! As in, I don't even have time to present my position; but this would be a no-go for me. Might it work to start a group like that with a monster thread? or a unifying thread or "pinned" post -- we could functionally pin it ourselves just by posting regularly enough 😉 -- on these boards? bet you thought of that already & it's a horrid match for what you envision, but since I was down on Facebook I felt responsible for suggesting an alternative.

We're due to start our next "year" of school in July, and we could all use a sense of something fresh & engaging. I'd like to do a "box day" and get our school space organized for a Proper Start -- something I've never done (maybe better to say "never managed"!) but which I think would be especially fun this year. Lots of the stuff will be coming off my shelves and a bit will be new. I'd love to be able to package it in those cool Sonlight boxes-with-castles drawn inside 🙂 and maybe there's a simple way to do that with plain, biggish cardboard boxes (if you know of one, please tell me). And I'm hoping to have a sort-of planner/instructor's guide for myself, with really just a sketch of the points to hit each week for some stuff (history) and reminders to spend time-on-task for other stuff (math, language arts). I'd like to include a game/puzzle, maybe MindWare style, Anybody else doing this? anybody else done it? Ideas for packaging, contents, little projects/kits/treats for the first days of school?

Afternoon! Today is mellow-ish. Main challenge is to ensure boys do some school (math for elder, history + math OR LA for younger); piano; fitness all around. Me: work on RPG, house, exercise, be mellow. Dinner: chicken wings done somehow; veggies galore; something sweet? not sure what, or if dessert will happen. ETA: today's been even mellower than expected, which has been wonderful. I feel like, for the first time since the pandemic broke, I can actually think a little. Have winnowed our June school goals down to: wrap up elder's Artistic Pursuits, if feasible; keep elder's toes in his math; wrap up younger's spelling, if feasible; keep younger moving forward in math; move both boys through the rest of SoTW 3 + reading. And do some of the art + music stuff I'd planned. Be ready to pick up modern history / a year of 1/2 chem + 1/2 physics in July. Spend June prepping, organizing books into a "box day" -- a good chunk of which will come from stuff I already have 😉 . We'll keep history WTM-style but I need to have specific weekly goals or lesson plans, which I can triage so that they only work for a set time each week + I can adjust that time. Same for science, I suppose. The rest of school is pretty much dictated as do-the-next step with the addition of reading lists and a bit of rounding out.

This wonderful -- 🙂 for focusing energy & attention the Black writers' work! I am cheering like mad, now. I loved this Guardian article on N.K. Jemison's work and her experiences getting published &c. Esp. got a kick out of her take on Lovecraft, since folks -- including PoC -- in our gaming group really enjoy the Cthulhu stories but all agree that the racial stuff in those books is, well, what it is.

A good morning to you! @Critterfixer: you are going for the pitch, yes? Hoping all goes well with that & with everything else, too. I'll do some cheering: I'm so, so glad and a bit in awe that you are keeping writing, setting & working toward those goals, despite the rather unusual times. Today: So far, hit the points I wrote about yesterday. Need to do school with younger today, focus on language arts + history? Memory work? argh. here's a draft for today: plenty of yoga, "ballet", aerobics for me esp. to help prevent more migraines which are a huge waste of time Spend 15" drafting minimal June school + fun goals for boys: include maths, history reading, literature reading?, art, and memory work for school. For fun, get our balance thingy up in the yard, plan time to do Kiwi crates with younger, find books for both, other ideas. 15" quick-list of school for July - December (prep for Saturday planning seminar -- free!!!) 15" quick-list of school for January - September (prepping as above) 30 - 60" RPG work. Start with short list and do the boring stuff first: As list, review quickstart write note to A work on D&D fun characters with younger do housework: Flylady + few rounds of cleaning. dinner: chicken fingers, salad, baked apples. extra credit: have time to do walks with boys after dinner. Make time to catch up with boys.

Today was migraine survival 😉 . I had a zoom meeting & didn't throw up once during it, which was great for making an okay impression! and am beginning to recover. Boys played a lot of Minecraft, with a lot of Legos, younger read a ton, we dabbled in math and did an oral review of our (very basic) French. Tomorrow kicks off with very early orthodontist appt. for younger, online "fun" summer class for elder + elder is planning to go on a bike ride with DH and, socially-distanced, one of DH's friends and his two daughters. So we're hangin' in there.

Morning! Off right this moment to get outside a bit; elder had an early-morning language class (a "fun" summer course, read & discuss and no req'd homework), both boys did some piano practice (Zoom recital to follow later), we've all had breakfast &c. So we are here. 😉

Good morning! Today begins, Lord willing & creek stay down, the first day of my 2-day roleplaying gamemaster workshop. To my surprise, as I started prepping last night, I'm really excited about this! So a couple of days of fun. We're also heading into some weeks off -- between 2 & 4 -- which is good, because this mama is pretty burned out! ETA: vicariously enjoyed your breakfast-for-dinner, Critterfixer. Plus I <heart> blueberry syrup: so glad the bushes have their early-season ripening going on. (I guess it is early-season; the only blueberry bushes I personally know get going around July/August. My blueberry fantasy world has both kinds!)

Morning! Today: Light school: math, language stuff, composition, do art, piano, draft our next month's plans. Do a round of cleaning, chicken and salad for dinner + something apple-oriented for dessert, bit of outside work. Shakespeare or Bible today.

Good morning! I never got back to yesterday's post ... our role-playing-group is going through a bit of a shakeup, so that took a lot of energy. All should be well. Starting with some time outside in the garden before the heat picks up. Today is a normalization day, basic school + piano, prep for game some, joy.

Morning! More later. For now: math. !!!

Well! It may be 4PM, but it's never too late to be accountable! Doing okay on Restoring Morale. A couple of things derailed my day, but all in all the most important stuff is happening. What's left: exercise; send DH out for dinner; prep for tonight's RPG. For tomorrow: focus on 30" on school, 30" off and see how that works. Use as much of my downtime as possible to get memory work going.

I saw that Arcadia mentioned us. Hi @Arcadia!!! We are homeschooling our 2 boys, fairly WTM-style, in California. Elder will be in ninth grade sometime next year. I'll just toss out how we're thinking of some of these issues: DH and I do know that if kids from worse homes & with worse educational opportunities than ours are to going have equal access to higher education -- access based on their abilities & willingness to work hard -- it lowers our kids' chances to get institutions of higher education. Homeschool entrance to UC system: I'm unfussed about this right now, for us, for a couple of reasons. I don't see the UC system moving away from testing options for the A-G requirements. That slippery-slope reasoning is, I think, false. Esp. as this would be regressive, ie shrink opportunity for non-traditional students. Unlikely our DSs will want to be in the UC system -- elder especially -- and we are fortunate enough to have college funding (barring financial disaster). Elder DS will almost certainly want a smaller school. Berkeley might end up being a good fit but we would never count on getting in. If our $$$ fall through, it will be hard for DSs. But nothing they face will be harder than what I went through to get a degree so there is a way in which I'm both doing my best to help things work out for them, and also convinced that if they can't bring it together after the awesome start they are getting then that is out of my hands. I kind of go back and forth on this. 😉 Dropping the SAT/ACT tests for UC applications. UC has already done this for graduate programs. DH is prof. at a competitive UC grad school + has served on/chaired the admissions committee, and they are not seeing a drop in student quality. Grades are not going to be the only criterion for admission. There will also be: letters of recommendation; personal essay; activities; awards; etcetera. This is how the schools make the calls amongst top candidates: by sorting through all that other material to help build the undergraduate classes they want. If a kid's grades show a drop that needs explaining, then it should be explained. The admissions committees are not made up of people who are out to get students. They actually want to help folks who deserve help and they want to have strong classes. Let's be blunt: kids who are coming out of underserved communities, or disadvantaged backgrounds, probably are going to take fewer of the most-demanding math/sci/etc. courses. Because no matter the talent and drive, when they come from schools with weaker math/science courses then they have to -- at the very least -- come up to speed before they have the same skills as kids from the best schools. That last case is me. I didn't have the best test scores going into high school, I didn't take the most demanding college courses, and my college GPA wasn't great either. I went on to a science doctorate but left ABD (all but dissertation). By the metrics being tossed around, I did not deserve my place at a prestigious women's college. Here's what I mean by that last point: I didn't even have great high school grades, because halfway through ninth grade my parents pulled me out of the residential state home I was in and brought me back to live with them: they were violent, and my mother was mentally ill. I had "F"s for the rest of that year. My grades started picking up the next year but didn't get to straight A's until I was big & capable enough to stop my mother from beating me. I had tested great on standardized tests before high school, but had no money for test prep stuff (even books) and no idea of how to prepare, so my SATs were good but not stellar. I got an "A" in AP Biology but a "3" on the exam, which sounds bad if you don't know I was the only person in my school to even pass the test (the rest got 1s and 2s). I had no money for college, joined the National Guard my junior year of high school so that I could pay for state school with the GI bill, and then ended dropping out of the state honors college after 1 semester because I couldn't afford books + my mother was making life horrible for my younger sisters. Attended local community college while living at home. The GI Bill would only cover full-time attendance, and so I got my associate's degree following this plan: I worked half-time for money. I attended school full-time at night & on my days off and got 2 As and 2 Fs each semester so that I had a C average and kept my GI Bill funding. I cooked for my family, attended my sister's PTA meetings and took them to doctor appointments, and tried to monitor my mother so that when she became physically dangerous we could get her hospitalized as soon as possible. Even after things settled a bit & I found my way to the women's college, I chose Art History over Physics because I couldn't keep up with the problems sets in math & science while trying to help my 15 year-old pregnant sister find a way to manage (our father wouldn't allow her baby to live in our house because the father was not white) and my 14-year-old sister get into a residential high school so that she could get out of our home. My father wouldn't do her application & financial aid paperwork so I forged it. She had depression problems in the high school, which was walking distance from my college, and helping her would have cost me my degree -- I just couldn't hold it together -- but my now-husband stepped in and more or less insisted that I focus on getting the degree done. I worked as a lab technician at MIT in a series of projects and took classes there via the employee benefits program, and got into Neuroscience graduate school at Boston University. My GREs were also not stellar, but all my post-graduate grades are As. Pulling up my test scores was something that I couldn't manage. For both SAT and GREs I didn't have the money for the best prep, and I didn't understand the level of prep that other people put in. I thought it was good, for the GREs, to work through a couple of practice tests -- and in any case, I did well on my written practice tests but more poorly on the computer real tests. I should have practiced on the computer, but at the time it cost more & I didn't know it would have been worth it. I was willing to work, and I have the raw smarts (I'd have been golden if they accepted IQ scores), but I never had the test scores. When DH took a job as a professor while I was still in grad school, I moved with him to the West Coast and tried to finish my degree long-distance, but left when our child needed homeschooling. One reason I didn't finish is that I wasn't able to develop the level of mathematical skill I needed to do the work I wanted to do (advanced statistics for analyzing neural population data). Now I'm homeschooling two boys, helping ensure that my mother-in-law can live in her own home (attached to ours), and supporting my husband's career. There is nothing in my professional performance that will look good on my elite alma mater's metrics. But I can attest that I've benefited from my first-rate education there and that my children and my husband have, too. And there is every likelihood that my children will do "well" because of the energy DH & I have put into raising them well. It often takes a generation or two. I typed all that out because it just one story of all those high-grade, low-test stories. Not all are as sympathetic. Many are more so. But a consequence of ensuring equal access to opportunity for people who have talent and will work hard is that some people are going to need more help when they arrive at college/university. DH (the child of a MD & an immigrant PhD; he had a private school education all the way through) now is very proactive in training both under-represented minorities and people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds (ie, grad students who lived on the streets during high school). Such people have challenges that mainstream students don't. One challenge is that they don't tend to ask for help when they need it because they expect that if they fail it is their fault and no one ought to help them, whereas more traditional students expect professors to be trying to smooth their path. There are, of course, other challenges; and a strong math background is a common weakness in such students. I am an "n of 1" -- a single case that doesn't prove anything, really. But this is one example of how a WTM-homeschooling California family thinks about the current situation. It's complicated, no simple answers.

Morning! Got totally demoralized yesterday. I registered both boys for fun summer classes online, and found that the instructor of elder's science class doesn't know much science (and has written some strange anti-Muslim stuff), and the instructor of younger's Narnia class espouses a personal philosophy that non-monastic, pre-contemporary-"mindfulness" humans weren't fully conscious. I don't think the latter fellow actually connected the dots to the logical conclusion that CS Lewis wasn't fully conscious; but regardless, I think younger DS & I will just be reading Narnia for bedtime story and I'll replace his class time with some fun project or -- and this is frankly more likely -- time to play games on his iPad. He was looking forward to having a "fun" hour of school each week & I am just not up to organizing & implementing it right now. Elder was looking forward to learning science & hanging out (online) with other kids who like science too. Bombed on both fronts, not sure what I'll replace his class with. Strange but true fact: the one student other than DS who really understood math & science was also, as far as DS saw, the only one other than him who knew where the book of Deuteronomy comes in the Bible. Also our history memory cards keep having factual errors. Sigh. + AARRGGHHH!!!! Is it really so hard? and the answer is yes, yes it is. Already accomplished today: threw history cards into the waste bin. Also, boys have read literature + done a bit of other stuff. Younger learned about the existence of acid rain + some consequences of it, elder reviewed foreign language vocab + grammar, both went over foreign language saying with me. Everybody also got breakfast (before all that other stuff) & I picked up the kitchen. Not sure what today's goals are. Work to restore my morale, I suppose. Hit math, languages, history + science reading, piano. House cleaned up a bit, garden tended a bit, dinner -- salmon burgers with some greens, and dessert involving either apples or blueberries or both. I ought to spend some time on my: math, Greek, and getting our memory work together. Prep for tomorrow's RPG + spend some time prepping the game I'll run in a week or two.

Morning! Today's biggest goal is a WTM-style day. Praying for success here. Next to that, fitness; dinner (chicken somethings, salad, blueberry something); house a bit; outdoors a bit; catch up with DH.

Tuesday is here! sort of whacked me in the head, feels like. Ah well, into the fray ... school: art, piano, math & composition, languages, music history, American art history "bingo" + make sure younger has completed lesson. Poetry memorization review. house: FlyLady stuff, daily work, outside 15". RPG work: e-mail group + DM with critique. Draft brief summary? and begin work on new campaign. Narrow down the system; the style; brainstorm a few ideas for entry point + merging with my larger universe; register for weekend workshop (free!) + check with DH for help with boys those days. Focus: joy, grace and beauty.

Lori, when I first skimmed your answer I was thinking you didn't understand the problem. When I re-read it carefully, I realized you understood the problem better than I had! and felt rather chagrined. You were entirely right that this isn't a good game for them right now, even though the social element is so dear to me. Upon reflection, I wrote the game master about my concerns. Then he wrote the whole group, and it turned out we were not the only ones not enjoying it. So now we'll be doing something high fantasy, and I may run a game in a couple of weeks (since the fellow who had planned out the noir game could use a break!). You helped a lot of people! And I'm going through the linked references you gave, finding ones that the boys enjoy. Like Calvin & Hobbes -- always a hit here! Anyhow: thanks so, so much. + e-hug!

Afternoon! Sporadically sunny here. We're having a light week here, with me planning and all of us working to have lots of joy. School today: reading, math, composition, dabble our toes in memory work. House: vacuumed all of it, DH shopped & we decontaminated the food stuff; laundry, boys' rooms, general picking up, FlyLady stuff. Other: RPG tonight. We ended up motivating a change of game, so I need to work on my character. ETA: also, I have Grand Goals of the Week. 1: incorporate Bible, literature, Shakespeare & poetry mem. whilst staying strong in art, music & American art history. 2: on big art paper, sketch out a pipeline from grammar to logic WTM (for younger) and from logic to rhetoric (for elder) as the basis of summer plans.

Morning! Bad migraine today, so: migraine treatment. Otherwise all's well.

Okay, so I'm betting this is a slim hope, but y'all ARE miracle-workers ... Our role-playing group is running a noir-based mystery/system (City of Mist) and my boys have no cultural clue. They are 14 and 9. The 9 year old has basically dropped out of the game; he is pretty sophisticated in RPG when we are doing D&D or similar fantasy systems, but this modern urban noir makes no sense to him. The older one is often mystified and is probably going to either quit soon or just disengage (ie, observe). This is our only non-family social outlet. I'm working other angles, including beginning to prep a game that I could run for our group that the boys could be more active in, but would love any ideas for getting them familiar with the "noir" genre. Everything I can find is inappropriately disturbing (surprise!). TIA. ps -- it is a Zoom game now, of course -- we moved online. ETA: elder child suggested Chicago 20's style gangster stories might work. But he doesn't seem to know of any. Apparently he doesn't like noir. Or gangster stuff. But he does like the superhero element of the RPG and the modern tech. Anyhow: help appreciated.

Plecostomus sounds sort of antediluvian ... hope you can resolve its fate soon. Invasive plants are bad enough, and at least one can just uproot them wherever they are found and leave their roots to desiccate, no ethical quandaries at all. Today starts with fitness, then piano theory + math. Poetry writing, American art history, composition, languages and art projects: those are the goals. Me: do some math + Greek; work in house + garden; spend 15" at least on organizing memory work; spend some time planning school room. Exercise all around. Dinner: ??? homemade pizza, probably, with lots of veggies.