Here's what I say to dh to help him with his worry about the landfill: "This item has already been made. It will end up in the landfill at some point. We can either cart it around with us unused for 60 more years until we die and our kids throw it out, or we can throw it out now and have a more comfortable home. The way to keep items out of the landfill is not to buy them in the first place. And if they must be bought, buy only the sturdiest most long lasting brands."

I agree that the skills learned while diagramming are extremely helpful for reading complex texts. Parsing and MCT 4-level analysis (which are both great) do not emphasize the relationship between the phrases, clauses, and modifiers and the words they modify. So they are not as helpful as diagramming (where you attach the modifiers visually to the part of the sentence they modify) when trying to figure out the meaning of a complicated passage. Contemporary writing does not rely heavily on dependent clauses and phrases, but if you wish to read and understand historical. Though once you fully understand diagramming, you don't always have to draw the diagram to understand the sentence, you should be able to do it in your head. It is a tool that develops the visualization of the relationship between sentence parts.

Not "requirements" exactly but you could see if Rainbow Resources has a "look inside" peek at the tables of contents for grades 5-8 Hake Grammar and Writing. It is very complete.

I think that the shunning of teachers that have different methods or work harder is also a serious problem. I have heard two teachers speak of it. The first in terms of being cornered in the teacher's room after volunteering to run two high school afterschool programs. The other teachers told her that if she ran two, then the administration might want all the teachers to run two programs, so she better not do that again next year. The next was a brilliant girl who spent all her out-of-school time taking classes and reading and preparing lessons. The other teachers ostracized her and kept telling her that she was making them look bad and that she'd better just do what was expected by the administration and no more. That young woman couldn't stand the middle-school mentality of the teachers she was working with in this suburban district and left teaching to get her PhD and teach at the college level. My friend, a college professor, was meeting with his daughter's veteran fourth grade teacher about his frustrations with the curriculum, when she conspiratorially told him that since she had only two years until retirement, she was chucking the standards and teaching these kids the way she used to teach when she was young, including among other things, poetry memorization and diagramming!

I reread chapter 18 and listened to the lecture. He does go on a short rant about secular humanism, which he radically misunderstands, and asserts that a secular humanist society rejects the concept of meaning, which is essential for good storytelling. Well, I do think meaning is essential to writing, and he goes on to explain how to put meaning into stories--mainly through personal transformation toward the good in your characters. Nowhere in chapter 18 does he literally state that only Christians can be moral. He does state that secular humanists do not assign meaning to the world with some really over-the top examples to support his assertion. My 11 year old laughed at his portrayal of secular humanists, "Mom, No one really thinks people are just bags of meat." While I completely disagree with his understanding of secular humanism, I did not find his techniques of developing characters through meaning to be objectionable. I did introduce the curricula, as I do most curricula, to my son as biased, and explained that we don't swallow books/curricula wholesale. Instead we evaluate them individually and take what we can from them. We are a completely secular family, I find the majority of this curricula unobjectionable and the writing instruction detailed and excellent.

As I understand it, one big difference is that Waldorf schools tend to delay all reading instruction until 7 or 8 years of age.

Two of them, I think, were earlier versions that did not specify the grammatical constructions and discuss "tools" of writing instead. These are Sentence Composing for Elementary School and Grammar for Middle School are the two that label the phrases and clauses the child will be imitating. I suggest you start with those two (sequentially, not at the same time), and then if you want to continue use the other two. By then your child should be able to identify the phrases and clauses.

OshKosh? http://www.amazon.com/OshKosh-BGosh-Denim-Overalls-Girls/dp/B005AHP70G

Fedco in Waterville, Maine. They get many of their seeds from small local growers. http://www.fedcoseeds.com/

There is a vintage living book called Stories of Rocks and Minerals for the Grammar Grades by Harold W. Fairbanks. It is over a hundred years old, so a few discoveries have been made since then and so there are a couple inaccuracies (but I don't let that bother me, this isn't the only time they'll learn geology), but it is a delightful narrative. It also seems to have far more information than any elementary book on geology that I have ever seen. http://books.google.com/books?id=3i6VkgAACAAJ&dq=Stories+of+Rocks+and+Minerals+Fairbanks&hl=en&sa=X&ei=TbsiT-77FYrV0QGxmd2KCQ&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAA http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Rocks-Minerals-Grammar-Grades/dp/0217995578/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327676393&sr=8-1

I loved diagramming in middle and high school (1980s). My friend's husband, who is a high school English teacher and natural grammarian, is one of the last holdouts. He thoroughly teaches grammar and diagramming. The kids complain mightily, because none of the other teachers in his school do this. Then many of them come back to visit after they have been to college for a year or two, and they thank him for being so tough. The only other public school doing this that I know of is a wealthy district in MA where one of my friend's sons go. They start in 7th with simple sentences. I don't know how far they go with it.

http://www.homeschoolbuyersco-op.org/ Home School Buyers Co-Op They make bulk purchases. A couple different curricula at a time. The more people who buy, the less the final cost. You do have to wait for the buying period to end before they submit the orders.

Bethanyniez, This is all I could find to answer your question right now. It is from Charles j. Sykes book Dumbing Down Our Kids. Sykes finds the origin of this whole-word philosophy began with James Cattell at Columbia University in the late 19th c. "Through a series of experiments Cattell found that adults who knew how to read can recognize words without sounding out letters. From that, he drew the conclusion that words aren't sounded out, but are seen as 'total word pictures.' If competent readers do not need to sound out words, he declared, then there was little point in teaching such skills to children. "The result," wrote Lance J. Klass in The Leipzig Connection, "was the dropping of the phonic or alphabetic method of teaching reading, and its replacement by the sight-reading method in use throughout America." "As many of his successors would do, Cattell confused the 'attributes' of readers (or in later eduspeak, 'the expected behaviors' or 'outcomes') with the appropriate way of acquiring those attributes. Of course, skilled readers did not stop to sound out words; long practice had made that unnecessary. It was thus an 'outcome' of learning to read; the mechanics of reading, including the ability to sound out words, enabled the reader to achieve that outcome. But since the actual process of sounding out words is not the desired 'outcome.' educationsts decided that they could dispense with it." Sykes p. 107-108

I know it is hard for people who have excellent public schools to believe, but many, many of us are stuck in school districts where phonics is not only not taught, but parents are instructed not to use phonics. I quote from a note the teacher sent the parents of my son's kindergarten class: "If your child still cannot figure out a word after looking at the picture NEVER ask them to sound out the word. Instead have them guess from context." Luckily my son was reading before he went to school. My cousin was taught with the whole-language sight word method, and she was still guessing words in 5th grade. Halt the guessing game now. Don't count on a meeting with the teacher to change anything. Afterschool 15 minutes a day with OPG or a similar resource. A fun game is to print a funny sentence containing the phonograms he has learned at the bottom of the page and to tell him you will draw the funny picture to go with it after he has sounded out the words. (Something like: The cat sat on the hat--anything that will make a funny visual.) My kids loved this game and it didn't seem like work. Plus they are too small to care how well you draw.

I got it on sale from HSBC, but I can't remember when it was. Late spring or summer probably. Join and they will send you notifications.

There is a nice picture book called Thundercake that deals with fear of storms. Included is a recipe for Thundercake that you are supposed to bake when you hear the approaching storm. Turns something fearful into a reason for a party. http://www.amazon.com/Thunder-Cake-Patricia-Polacco/dp/0698115813/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327592253&sr=8-1

Scholaric works on Mac. It is $1/per student/month. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but then it is easy. http://www.scholaric.com

One Year Adventure Novel is definitely bigger and better than the NaNoWriMo workbooks. The videos provide invaluable encouragement and explanation. There is a textbook and a workbook as well as an short adventure novel to analyze. It is a high school level program. I am letting my 6th grader do it to his own ability. The best thing I see about it is that you could use it over and over again to write many novels. You would just need to buy a new Map Workbook for each new novel. Sorry this is hard to read, but here are the major sections in the table of contents: The Heroic Quest; Point of View; Synopsis; The Five Elements of Story; Someone to Care About; Something to Want; Something to Dread; Something to Suffer; Something to Learn; The Supporting Cast; The Villain; Conflict; Disaster; Dillemma; Acts and Scenes; The Four Defining Chapters; Chapter One: The Inciting Incident, Chapter Three: Embracing Destiny, Chapter 9: The Black Moment, Chapter 11: The Showdown; The Novel Outline: Formulas Plots and Subplots; Chapter 2: Promises, Prophecies, Predicaments; Chapter 4: The New World; Chapter 5: The Middle Cycle; Chapter 6: Failure; Chapter 7: Lessons; Chapter 8: Achievement and Atonement; Chapter 10: The Coming Storm; Ch. 12: The Denoument; How to Write a Chapter; Creating Emotion; The Illusion of Reality; Summary (Telling); Detail (Showing); Narrative Order; Dialog; Gestures; To Be or Not to Be: Too Many Modifiers; Symbols; Flashbacks; I Saw I Heard; Raising the Stakes; What's Likely to Go Wrong; What to Do When Stuck; The Character Interview; Setting; Character Masks; Character Handles; Unexpected Humor; Unexpected Tragedy; Unexpected Grace; Cliches; Irony; Transparency; Double Disasters: Writing the Climax; Setups and Payoffs; Deux ex Machina; Loose Ends; Parting Words; Revision and Rewriting; Revising by Verb; Formatting Your Manuscript; Sharing and Publishing Your Novel.

Birds and Blooms Magazine is very cheerful in the winter months. I've known several ladies in their 70s+ that received them. Plus they get mail that is not a bill. Looks like it is $20 for two years. It may take a month or two to get started though. https://order.birdsandblooms.com/pubs/RM/BNB/BNB-1106-Microsite-Index.jsp?null=102158&cds_mag_code=BNB&id=1327514126838&lsid=20251155268041465&vid=1&cds_page_id=102158&9gag=2124016990&9gtype=search&9gad=8935079230.1&9gkw=birds+and+blooms+magazine

Only on Lesson 22 of One Year Adventure Novel (still in the planning, not writing stage), but my son loves it. The video clips are really well done and add immensely to the workbook and the text. I am also finding that the program covers literary analysis from the creative angle: characterization, motivation, setting, conflict, theme, denoument, conclusion etc. which is an unlooked-for but great angle for further understanding of these concepts. TWO THUMBS UP! If you just want something simple to get your kid writing fiction. NaNoWriMo has free downloadable curriculum workbooks (middle school or high school) for planning your novel that include the same steps, without the video guidance. You don't have to participate in the November novel writing contest to use these workbooks.

Someone on a laundry thread posted here a while back mentioned that rather than mix everyone's clothes, she did personalized loads of laundry. I tried it and I no longer have to sort clothes! This was a great time saver. I have small square laundry baskets that stay in the laundry room, one for each person in the family. All dirty clothes are deposited in the proper basket by their owner (most of the time). Then I have a second set of small square laundry baskets (they fit one load and are easy for children to carry) into which the individual's laundry is unloaded from the drier. These are taken to the dresser, unloaded, and returned to stack under the dirty laundry baskets until a load is finished. You also do separate loads for towels sheets and whites. You could separate these by bathroom or person as well, but I haven't needed to. I used to have marathon sorting sessions on weekends. Often the laundry piled up into huge piles until we could get time to sort. Doing personalized loads has saved huge chunks of time and the laundry mountain is gone. Thank you to the person who mentioned it first!

He's certainly not cutting edge, all his ideas are from the progressive education period that began back in the late 1960s!

I'm with SpyCar. I have looked askance at many a mom and dad who let their tiny tots sit with the seat belt across their neck rather than keep them in the booster seat (which they already owned) a few years longer. Our pediatrician was shocked and proud when I mentioned that my son (age 9) was short enough to still need his booster seat. He said that he couldn't get any of his patients to keep using them once their kids hit kindergarten ("they don't have them in the bus, they don't need them in the car" mentality). My daughter who turns 7 is still in her Britax 5-point harness which goes up to 65 lbs. I think NY and NJ have laws similar to those of NJ. I think the laws are necessary, because we haven't been through enough generations of people who don't remember the time before car seats. There is still a "we didn't use them and we were fine" fallacy. What also drives me nuts are the people who install them incorrectly. One of our highly educated friends mentioned that their baby's car seat tipped over when they went around a sharp corner! And I see babies in their car seat carriers with the top clip down around their bellies all the time. The clip is supposed to be level with the armpits to prevent ejection from the car seat. Argh!

Same stubborn anti-cleanliness stance with my 12 year old. Especially frustrating is pretending to wash his hair. One day my mom was caring for the kids and put shampoo in his hair as if she were washing it, not just a dab on top while he was still clothed before he got in the shower. Then he HAD TO at least rinse it all out. So that is what I do. All my friends with older boys say you have to wait until they discover girls, then the hygiene battles will be over.

In NY. Classes with about 10 students, materials included, cost $18 for each 1.25 hour session. Materials include canvasses, acrylic paint, watercolor paper, paper-mache, pastels etc.