Don't panic!!! Passover lasts for 8 days, but the Seder is only observed on the first night! Outside of Israel, most Jews observe Seders for the first TWO nights. But never more than two. ;-) But Biblically, the "no leaven" thing lasts 8 days. Whereas the "eat unleavened bread" is only on the first day or two. Hope this helps!

:iagree: Sorry - I said that red meat is okay, but forgot to mention this.

I thought of this, too, because I went back to the site and it turns out they have one quite near here. I applied and now I'm getting email spam from them, but haven't heard back one way or another about the books. :-(

:hurray: Very well-written. Thank you.

I agree that it's strongly worded - but it's not exactly a threat, more like frustration. If you quote it out of context, it sounds like I'm threatening something... when really (trust me, or ask my kids! :lol:), I have absolutely no power. Hence, the frustration. Should Passover-observing Christians start their own thread? I'd like to think Christians can learn from resources on Jewish sites, just as I've incorporated some Exodus information into our Pesach lapbook from Christian sites. You will probably find good, accurate, agenda-free information about Passover from Jewish sites, so if anybody is honestly looking for that, they should feel free to use these links and share their own. I haven't dived into the Ester Maria / Karis discussion because I think they both presented their views honestly and fairly. But I will add here that as benevolent as it sounds to Christians, the "grafted olive branch" image can be upsetting to Jews. (I had this discussion with my husband about a million years ago - he's Jewish now!) If you don't feel your tree NEEDS another branch, if that branch is as foreign as, say, a cherry tree might be to an olive tree, then all grafting is going to do is open a big painful wound that takes years to heal. The olive yield suffers (I'd imagine), the cherries would suffer and might not even bear fruit. From a botanical perspective, it would be a nightmare, and from a spiritual perspective, you end up with a hodge-podge that makes nobody any more fulfilled. I love Judaism. Absolutely adore it! That's why I share my materials, on an Internet that I know is mostly not Jewish. That's why I am teaching a convert in my real life (and both my husbands converted). It may be why I'm homeschooling; I love sharing this stuff with my kids and others'. By the way, I also love Catholicism. If I wasn't so happy being Jewish, I might consider Catholicism. Not so much Protestantism, maybe because they shoot themselves in the foot too often with political correctness. Catholicism, its sacramental vision of reality, feels friendly and familiar to my 100-blessings-a-day Jewish soul. But it's NOT Judaism. If Catholics or Protestants want to learn more about Judaism, that's beautiful. But I get uncomfortable if they try to tell me they have the same thing - or that they are PART of the same thing, because the Torah tells me I am a messenger, a light unto nations, and I'm going to share that light, shout it out, as long as I've got breath in me. We are all part of God's creation, forged in His image. May this upcoming feast of Passover unite us in recognizing our fragility, our dependence on him, and our liberation from any type of service but that of the Creator. And here's a cute video to calm everybody down! :001_smile:

@Karis - I'm familiar with the mixed multitude (in Hebrew, the airev rav)! We welcome many non-Jewish friends and family into our lives (both husbands converted, so LOTS of non-Jews around!!!). However, it is my understanding that non-Jews were not included in the actual command of the Passover sacrifice, nor in several other observances in the Tabernacle and Temple. I do consider Passover to be a foundational moment specifically for the Jewish people and its significance is often distorted by "messianic" Christian layers of interpretation. But that doesn't mean I reject anybody! I have both welcomed quite a few converts as family and friend, and continued longterm friendships with people who want to learn about Judaism but not convert. Our seders have always included "all who hunger" regardless of their current faith. Ester Maria, thank you for the links! I have found good resources at the kaye7 site, but it's VERY hard to navigate with my lousy Hebrew and the help of Google Translate. :-) I'd still suggest you comb chinuch.org... you can do with the materials what you want and some is geared towards Hebrew schools, so you might find something. Also, perhaps, at mibere****.org, though you might have to poke around, and the material might be a bit young. ETA: Oops... it's starring out the main part of the url because in English it looks impolite. Mi Beresh'it. Without the punctuation. :-))) Oy, vey! Let me know what you turn up!

I'm doing a literal rerun of last year's menu! (it's been a year, nobody will remember, right?? :lol:) http://ronypony.blogspot.com/2010/03/pesach-food-2010.html (I've never heard of the no-red-meat rule and have been served beef in some VERY religious homes... however, it's never ROASTED because that is too reminiscent of the paschal offerings) For more information about Passover, check out my Passover 5771 Homeschool Resources Roundup: http://ronypony.blogspot.com/2011/03/pesach-passover-5771-homeschool.html Also, if you are Christian and thinking of celebrating Passover, you might want to read this. Best wishes to everybody for a happy and kosher holiday!!!

I thought I'd be proactive and post some stuff I've collected, because there is a lot of BAD information out there about Passover (and one bad lapbook in particular that I bought and was very disappointed by - caveat emptor). First, a link to my own homeschool "resources roundup" page: http://ronypony.blogspot.com/2011/03/pesach-passover-5771-homeschool.html (because it was put together for Jewish homeschoolers, many of my own links assume some familiarity with the Seder, Passover story & laws, etc.) Two sites with good information for families, including unaffiliated families, are: http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/default_cdo/jewish/Passover.htm http://www.aish.com/h/pes/ (general page) http://www.aish.com/h/pes/f/ (family page - including colouring pages for each part of the seder) If you go to a seder, I have written some stuff about the order of it here: http://ronypony.blogspot.com/2011/04/pesach-passover-haggadah-printable.html (there are quite a few Hebrew words in there, but I've tried to provide translations and make it as friendly as possible - while still primarily writing it for my own kids, who have a bit of background knowledge...) Here's a nice Haggadah (Seder booklet) outline with some easy-to-read commentaries: http://scheinerman.net/judaism/pesach/haggadah.pdf And a cute Passover video from aish.com! http://www.aish.com/h/pes/mm/Passover_Google_Exodus.html Finally, if you are Christian and looking for a way to incorporate "Messianic" elements into your Passover observance, please read this post first. Hope you find something useful here! :001_smile: Has anyone else found any helpful Pesach links? :lurk5:

Here's a link to my own homeschool "resources roundup" page: http://ronypony.blogspot.com/2011/03/pesach-passover-5771-homeschool.html Many of these links assume some familiarity with the Seder, Passover rules, etc. Two sites with good information for families, including unaffiliated families are: http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/default_cdo/jewish/Passover.htm http://www.aish.com/h/pes/ (general page) http://www.aish.com/h/pes/f/ (family page - including colouring pages for each part of the seder) If you go to a seder, I have written some stuff about the order of it here: http://ronypony.blogspot.com/2011/04/pesach-passover-haggadah-printable.html (there are quite a few Hebrew words in there, but I've tried to provide translations and make it as friendly as possible - while still primarily writing it for my own kids, who have a bit of background knowledge...) Cute Passover video from aish.com: http://www.aish.com/h/pes/mm/Passover_Google_Exodus.html Hope you find something useful here!

Well, I didn't exactly BUY MM, but I have a lot of the pages from the free samples. :-) What I do is our regular math 3 days a week, and one day, we have "random math." She rolls dice and I open up a packet of worksheets I've accumulated from elsewhere: Miquon, websites, MM, dice games, etc. I count the worksheets until I get to the number she's rolled and that's what we do that day (if it's short, she can roll again). It's a fun way to shake things up and I only choose worksheets that are at her level to throw in the "random math" packet. It's also a casual way to see if she's up to the level of other math programs. I pick sheets I think she can do, but they are all different from her regular program so it forces her out of her little box - a bit...

Very interested! I have written a brief compare-and-contrast between Classical and Charlotte Mason, if anybody is interested. It's up at my blog: http://ronypony.blogspot.com/2011/02/charlotte-mason-vs-classical.html Subscribing for more info!:lurk5:

I get used books at B&N all the time - great prices, and I've never not found an out of print spine that I needed.

Thanks for the link to the Singapore book! It's on its way here as we speak... :-))) (we're using JUMP Math, a local curriculum which is fantastic, but light on the word problems, so I figure it can't hurt!)

Does the math program have a helpline or email address? I hate mixture problems, but my dd had a bunch in Grade 9... don't remember this from Grade 4. :-o

Forgive me for being dumb, but why can't you do science ALL the time (but less of it) and history ALL the time (but less of it)? It seems to me that with a six-month gap, kids will lose continuity, and that it might be better, if at all possible, to scale back one or the other or both so you could keep it up year-round. As a Canadian, I have not found anything "American-centric" yet, though I'm sure Volumes 3 and 4 will have more.

We have only used HWOT and I wouldn't call it ugly. Utilitarian, perhaps, but serviceable. ETC, on the other hand - now THAT is ugly... :-))) What are you using?

:001_huh: If I’m going to throw away textbooks and go with a living-books education, it’s because I believe textbooks are stultifyingly awful, and because I have higher standards for my kids’ education. That's not something I can apologize for. I really HOPE brilliant parents and teachers will create curriculum and then brilliant proofreaders will check it over for them and then all us brilliant parents can buy it from them and hopefully make it worth their while. That is what I would like to support with my curriculum dollars.

Natasha: There are very few actual paragraphs and you are never expected to do any actual reading from the teacher's book itself. Like the SOTW activity book, Elemental Science offers a schedule and a list of suggested readings and activities. As I said, I bought the program and plan to use it. I LIKE it. Please view the samples to get a better understanding of what this curriculum is, because you'll probably like it anyway. :001_smile: For Treehouse Academy, who wrote "I would honestly like a list of grammar issues." there are about six listed in my blog post. I have spotted similar mistakes in all the samples on the Elemental Science website, and - caveat emptor - I spotted some even before I bought the books. I hope the problems won't stop me from using the books because as I've said a couple of times, I like the program and feel it's the best of its kind. That said, I think it was rushed into print when it could probably have been proofread carefully at little or no extra cost other than time.

I bought this and I'm planning to use it next "year" (starting this summer). The worldview, from what I understand, is that it's written by a Christian family, but they have not incorporated elements of Christianity into the curriculum. I haven't found anything specific that reflects a Christian point of view. Pros - it follows the 4-year WTM cycle; it is "light" but thorough at the same time. I have heard great things from parents using it - ie their kids love it and come to enjoy science. As a "skeleton" curriculum, it allows parents to use their own creativity to choose additional readings, colouring pages, experiments, field trips etc. Cons - the books it uses are not necessarily living books in the Charlotte Mason sense, ie story-of-the-world type books that you can curl up and read together; it uses Kingfisher and DK books, which not all parents love because the information is too chopped-up and presented in a flashy manner. Oh... and overall quality. More about this in a second. As I said, I bought it because I think it will give us the freedom to explore what interests us and not spend too much time with what doesn't. It fills in gaps that I wouldn't be able to cover myself and lightly directs your reading so a non-science-based parent like myself can learn right along with the kids. So what do I mean by quality? The biggest con, in my opinion, is that although the book is slick and shiny and nicely self-published, it IS self-published, which means no editing staff, no art staff... just the author herself. It is FULL of typos; absolutely reeks of them - and I am a grammar nerd, so it makes me crazy. They are on the back cover, they are inside, they are everywhere. She seems to have absolutely no idea what to do with punctuation, and I say that as kindly as I possibly can. Many, many pages are filled with inconsistencies - apostrophes are the worst. I'm not questioning her ability to educate - just to punctuate. Also, and this is more minor, some of the art provided is just plain bad, like the human body outline that kids are supposed to paste organs onto. The plant drawings are similarly awful; I may Google better images rather than use the ones provided. Lastly, I bought the book in part because it uses poems to memorize features of each type of thing studied - ie plants, human body, birds, reptiles, etc. But the poems are singularly AWFUL. I have already gone on too long here. I was actually in the middle of a preliminary review of the books when I came across this post here, so I decided to get it DONE and you can read my full thoughts about Elemental Science here on my blog. :lurk5: I do look forward to hearing others' thoughts.

I was looking at these Mind Benders last night, but today discovered a FREE resource from Braingle that is very, very similar! You can click column headings to sort the puzzles by difficulty, then pick an easy one, or a hard one, or whatever you want!

I use Magic Erase on my whiteboards, but just wanted to pop in here to warn some people that these do contain serious chemicals. I have no idea what, but my friend's dd had a fairly serious rash on her hands after touching one. So keep out of reach and let it dry well before the kiddies get at it!

If it were me, I wouldn't wait. No great reason, I'd just figure my kid was smart enough to a) pick up some information about ancients just from readings for fun, museum trips, etc. and b) pick up the course of history in the middle and not be too confused to start back at the beginning 2 years later. Plus, I would be so eager to start (which I am - we're starting this summer!), I simply couldn't wait. One last thing: there's a lot of American history in there, which is where many families begin anyway. So you could think of it as the patriotic foundation on which you'll build into the modern era and fill in the back story later on. :-)

:lol: Just lol bc this is my ds3. Good to know there are bigger kids like this, too. :-) p.s. Were you on DiaperPin 4 or 5 years ago? Your name sounds familiar...

Thanks for your thoughts! To clarify: we actually already have A Child's Book of Poems, illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa - we love it! We read poems already, here and there, from this and a few other books (A.A. Milne, Child's Garden of Verses). I'm just looking for a way to do it more systematically... perhaps with a small amount of curriculum or extra explanatory text to go with. I just find we're not doing it as systematically as I'd like. I guess I was hoping for more actual poetry in FLL, and as I said, I found that disappointing. I don't want to "tack on" too much, but I'd rather do real poems than something Jessie Wise made up herself ("Monday, Mommy Made a Cake"). Three Years with the Poets may well be just the thing. I found a nice, clear version in PDF form here. Thank you again. Any other suggestions...? (free or otherwise!)

I'm looking for something to do once a week or so with my kids to read a SERIOUS kids' poem - not like the goofy stuff in FLL (I was a bit disappointed by that), but actual poems. I don't mind doing several in a row by the same author, along the lines of a month- or term-long composer study, but I don't mind NOT doing that, either. Does anybody know of anything? Even just a list of 36-50 worthwhile kids' poems to cover at each grade level?