I really like "that's unfortunate" as a response, too. Currently I say, "I'm sorry to hear that", but I've been looking for a replacement for sorry-as-an-expression-of-sympathy-not-fault. (But I can't help but hear it as the tagline to Dude Perfect's Wheel Unfortunate: "That's UN-fortunate!" It doesn't work so well as low-key, non-committal sympathy that way :lol:.)

There is actually an option for reading about it instead of watching, but it's somewhat less user-friendly. "Blended Structure and Style in Composition" is, as I understand it, the original inspiration for the IEW program. And what IEW did was take it, digest it, teach it, and then used their experience to make TWSS, et. al., to teach their version of that approach to others and provide supports for using it. I have the book, it's really quite awesome - lots of good info, presented well - but it's also *a lot of info*. (Full disclosure, I only made it somewhere to Unit 2; it was definitely my fault, not the book's.) This is against all IEW advice, but I did in fact use SWI-B without having done TWSS (or finishing BSSC). I watched the videos with the kids, paused repeatedly to answer questions and offer my two cents and have the kids answer Pudewa's questions, and learned on the fly with the kids. I had read several overviews of the approach (including the one in BSSC) and, idk, it seemed to work out well enough.

Fwiw, my girls have worn both flats and low heeled sandals/boots/dress-shoes for piano recitals. I never worried about black flats not being dressy enough, and none of the various heeled shoes (1-1.5in heels) they wore ever gave them any pedalling problems. All that their teachers have ever said is to make sure to practice with whatever shoe you mean to wear, and in the half-dozen ones they've tried pedalling in, there's been no duds.

welth, wich/witch (which), fredom, seperation, anglacain, arived, richises, tobaco, coton, wich/witch (which), colenists (got right earlier), where (were), persacution Mayflour, arived, clearde, indinn, vilage, previouse, arived, where (were), moor, of (off), wilingly, folow, governer Ok, it looks like homophones and doubled letters are not his friend, and he missed some schwa'd vowels (where the unaccented vowel gets smooshed to an /uh/ sound). And he has problems figuring out which vowel spelling to use. And in "richises", when he spells something phonetically (but incorrectly), it looks like he realizes that something is wrong with his phonetic-but-incorrect spelling ('richis') - he knows it ends in 'es' - but he doesn't know how to fix it and so just kind of adds it on. "Clearde" seems similar - sounds like "cleard", but he knows there's an 'e', so he throws it on the end. (And "previouse" - correct except for the added silent 'e'. Is that a common problem for him, throwing on an extra silent 'e'?) And how he crossed out the 't' in "witch" - he knows it wasn't right, but he wasn't getting the 'wh'. His phonetic spelling is quite good, though. In a lot of ways, this reminds me of my 5th grader's spelling - they are the same sorts of mistakes she makes. Some of them can be addressed phonetically. It helped dd11 to figure out whether to use 'w' or 'wh' when I explained how they are actually different sounds, only our dialect pronounces them the same (as 'w'). We practiced saying some 'wh' words, where I emphasized the /hw/ sound, and it helped her to learn that the w/wh spelling isn't actually random. And many of the cases where he's not doubling a consonant, that doubled consonant is protecting a short vowel. So 'vilage' is actually vi-lage, with a long i; it needs that second 'l' to be vil-lage, with a short i. Same with 'tobaco' (makes it to-ba-co, with a long a, instead of to-bac-co, with a short a), 'folow', 'wilingly', and 'coton'. When dd makes mistakes like that, I usually read it aloud just like it sounds, and if she doesn't figure out how to fix it on her own, I explain how she needs that doubled consonant. Generally homophones are a matter of thinking about the meaning plus visual memory (to remember how each meaning is spelled); when dd makes one of those mistakes, I do my best to take the sentence literally as written and ask her, for example, how the Moors fit into the Atlantic crossing. I try to exaggerate the humor of the mistake as much as possible, both to highlight the error and also to fix the spelling/meaning connections into memory. Schwa'd vowels are mostly memory, but SWR has a think-to-spell technique to help bring auditory memory into it. Basically, when you learn to spell a word, and whenever you spell it thereafter, instead of saying it normally, you say it while pronouncing the usually-schwa'd vowel as written. So, for governor, you'd say to yourself "gov-en-OR" as you spelled it, to help remember the spelling. Likewise, with 'separation', you'd think "sep-AR-a-tion", to remember the 'ar' instead of 'er'. With 'indian', you'd think "in-di-An", to remember the 'a'. With 'arrived', to remember the double r, you could think "AR-ri-ved". Whenever dd makes one of these kinds of mistakes, I explain how unfortunately our ear isn't a good enough guide, thanks to the schwa'ing, and do the exaggerated "think to spell" pronunciation. ETA: I agree with Lori D.: I don't think this is that bad in the scheme of things. Not where you want to leave it, no, but there's a lot more good than bad here. It's about where both my girls were spelling when I started StM with them. But it is also the level of spelling that prompted me to get more serious about doing dictation with my 5th grader this year - where we had overcome so many difficulties, yet somehow there were still enough misspellings to be eyebrow-raising. (When older dd was at this point, I was still just happy about her getting more and more words right, and wasn't worrying yet about what words she still got wrong; somehow my expectations for dd11 are higher, probably because she was never as bad as dd13.) Dictation has helped with cementing common irregular words and getting homophones right - it provides targeted practice that comes pretty close to mimicking the "in the wild" writing task. (And I've started having dd13 write things from memory. IDK what it is, but apparently doing dictation from short-term memory isn't the same task as writing down things from long-term memory, and for dd13, the latter is the harder one.) ETA2: Another program, which I haven't used but which gets rave reviews for kids who need a lot of practice at the sorts of things your ds needs practice with, is Apples & Pears.

I agree with Lori D. that what works will be whatever addresses your ds's particular root issue(s). My kids' issues have mostly been auditory processing weaknesses, not visual memory weaknesses; on Lori's list above we had low auditory-sequential memory and difficulties breaking words into syllables and blending syllables together (also difficulties breaking words into individual sounds and blending sounds together). But, other than needing to teach oldest dd to pay attention to the visual details of words in the first place (which we did using Spelling You See's marking system, very similar to Lori's colored whiteboard spelling technique), once they could finally *hear* the sounds, they've had few problems with remembering the spelling. That said, I've found Spelling Through Morphographs to be pretty darn awesome and thorough, hitting things through several different methods to address several common issues. If your ds is reliable at spelling phonetically regular one syllable words, but is bad at remembering which phonetically-correct spelling to use and/or is bad at multi-syllable words, it could be a good choice. My oldest started StM as a garden-variety bad speller (which was a huge accomplishment in itself, because she was truly awful before we started working at it), and exited it as a pretty decent speller. Not perfect, but her spelling doesn't hold her back anymore; she correctly spells at least 95% of the words she writes, and the ones she misses are usually unfamiliar words she's not written before. At any rate, here's what we did and why: *went back through phonics book and spelled (in cursive) all the phonetically-regular one-syllable words (all 2,000 of them, from CVC through vowel and consonant digraphs). My goal here was to teach them a) to be able to hear the sounds in a one-syllable word, and b) to spell by syllable, not by individual letter or sound. Thus working in cursive (I combined cursive practice and spelling practice), because I've read that you can't effectively write in cursive if you can't write by syllables. Certainly the kids found spelling in cursive much harder than doing so in print - a lot more had to be automatic. At the end of this step the goal was for them to be solid at spelling one syllable words by sound, in cursive. *at the same time, we did Spelling You See and/or marked up copywork with the SYS visual marking system. The idea was that, just as in the previous step they were learning to aurally break spoken words into sounds, here they were learning to break written words into individual phonograms. (At the time, my oldest couldn't distinguish individual sounds in spoken words or distinguish individual letters in written words - she remembered words as hazy aural or visual outlines. No surprise she couldn't spell.) Once they completed all the one syllable words in cursive (step one), I started having them do their SYS and other copywork in cursive. *After finishing step one, we did REWARDS reading. This teaches reading by syllables and reading by morphographs. I used it to help them learn to break words into syllables and blend syllables together into words. They needed the advanced reading work, and it also served as an intro to working with words by syllables. *Once they were done with REWARDS - aka once they could spell one-syllable words by sound and could break words into syllables - we started Spelling Through Morphographs. The goal was to combine all the previous skill-bits into spelling by syllable/morphograph, and to do it in cursive. StM also works on common non-phonetically regular short words, so there's a lot of practice with those, as well. It worked as advertised. Oldest dd had a breakthrough about 1/3 of the way through (something clicked and spelling started coming easier), and another 2/3 of the way through (something else clicked and spelling became old hat). *At the same time as StM, we did Touch, Type, Read & Spell, to hit typing and spelling together.

I've seen the movie (a lot) and that line always bothers me. I agree that it's certainly not saying "the reason he kills people is that he's adopted", and it's understandable that Thor would feel the need to distance himself from his brother's actions at that point for lots of reasons (to confirm his support in the fight against Loki, to confirm he's against mass murder). But to use *adoption* as the means to place distance between Thor and Loki? It was a funny one-liner, as intended - but wow! the (probably unintentional) things the movie said about adoption with that line! I feel the need to comment on that line just about every time the kids watch it - in the "what *were* the movie people thinking!?!" sense - and my take is that the movie people just didn't *think*. All it was to them was a zingy one-liner, and they neither intended nor even considered the wider implications of what they were saying (that an adopted brother is less close than a biological brother). I don't think the line says anything terribly deep about what people think about adoption - other than most people simply *don't think* about adoption one way or another. I still don't like the line, though.

Oh, that would be perfect for a photo ornament. For the past few years, I've made photo origami ornaments, where I photoshop the photos so that when the photo paper is folded, the pictures end up just where they need to be. But it's not easy to find appropriately-sized Christmas-themed origami patterns that are simple enough to fold with photo paper (photo paper is not ideal origami paper - can't do anything that requires too many folds or too narrow of folds), and last year I gave up and did a photo book instead. But this looks perfect - thanks!

Extra-curricular, I think.

The way I placed my oldest in WWE, when we started at age 9, was to use the example lessons in the Instructor's Guide as placement tests. I started right at Year 1, Week 1, and then did Yr1/Wk4, then Yr1/Wk11, and so on, till we got to a level that was a good fit (which, in our case, was the beginning of Level 2). If your library has a copy of the Instructor's Guide (mine did), then I'd rec using it to fine-tune his starting level. If your library doesn't have it, it's probably not worth buying just to use as a placement test. In that case, I'd rec using the end-of-year mastery tests as placement tests. If he has no problems with the WWE1 mastery test, then he's ready for WWE2; if he has no problems with the WWE2 mastery test, he's ready for WWE3, and so on. Somewhat related, WWE is quite gentle and fairly quick, and so it would be quite doable to supplement it (although I didn't, even doing it "behind", WWE2 in 4th and WWE3 in 5th). ~*~ WWE: awesome for kids who love literature. I started it with a very reluctant writer, and it was the lit selections that made it not just tolerable but enjoyable for her; the lit-centric-ness keeps it interesting. (And it exposed both dds to a wide variety of literature, and sparked their interest in new books - we used the WWE selections as a book list.) And it's awesome for parents who aren't sure how to teach writing, because it's totally scripted (but, once you get the feel of it, it's easy to ignore or paraphrase the script if you want). Other pros: because it's lit-centric, it manages to both break writing skills into parts and teach the parts separately, while also keeping those parts embedded in a meaning-centric big picture. And I feel like teaching from it helped teach *me* how to teach beginning writing. Cons: Not a traditional program (that can be a pro, too); not a lot of output (sentences and paragraphs, not pages - was also a pro for us); doesn't have a wide variety of writing assignments (focuses on narration, copywork and dictation). I originally went into WWS with oldest (in 6th), but ended up stopping after six weeks or so because parts of it were too hard for her. Originally I figured I'd try again in 7th, but I ended up dropping it entirely because I decided I liked the philosophy of LToW better. In general, though, I've been very impressed with how SWB makes each step explicit in the WWE/WWS series. IEW: I've just done SWI B (as a bridge between WWE and LToW), but I liked it and it did what I wanted it to do. I watched the videos with my student (one every two weeks, if you are doing it over a full year), pausing as needed to come up with our own answers or to make comments or to answer questions. Then we did the writing project for that lesson. It was broken down into logical steps, that were consistent from lesson to lesson, and I assigned and evaluated and helped as needed with each step. It provided a chance for us to move into multi-paragraph writing and was an introduction to outlining and writing from an outline. Plenty of hand-holding. People who like their writing programs really free-form probably wouldn't like it, but we all appreciated the step-by-step directions. Again, like WWE, I learned with the kids - the videos taught us both what to do, and taught me enough that I could reteach and otherwise help the kids through any difficulties.

This, pretty much - I post the week's checklist on the fridge. Although, unlike some, my master checklist lists subject/curricula, but doesn't give specific assignments. (I'm a do-the-next-thing homeschooler, where "do-the-next-thing" means "you can figure out 'the next thing' on the fly".) So it's a "master checklist" in two senses: it has the master plan for this year's hs, and it's the copymaster I use to run off that week's blank checklist on the copier ;). I do just as much planning as it takes to find a rhythm to our days and weeks, as well as a rhythm to our subjects. Once I've got that, I can figure out the specifics on the fly and am ready to go forth and do the next thing. I also tend to do as much in my head as possible, only turning to paper when things get too complex and I need an external brain to help ;). I had to start writing down our daily/weekly rhythms once my middle hit 3rd grade (my beloved general checklist), and this year looks like the year I have to start actually writing down some of our subject rhythms. So until 7th grade, "independent assignments" pretty much entirely consisted of "go down the general daily/weekly checklist and do-the-next-thing or do-the-thing-assigned-today", where I came up with the assignments on the fly after teaching the lesson and nobody wrote anything down. (And, really, the only specifics were "which pages in the math workbook"; everything else just followed the general pattern or flow.) 7th grade was our first year with a non-consumable math book, so math assignments now had *two* moving parts: "which problems", as well as "which pages". But I quickly got in the habit of assigning odds, so that was easy to remember, and dd still had no problems remembering which section without any of us writing it down. And our new writing program went from the weekly pattern we were used to, to a two-week pattern. But it was pretty easy to grasp and turn into do-the-next-thing assignments. But this year, 8th grade, we're starting to move from daily classes and daily assignments to twice-weekly classes and weekly assignments that have several parts. (AKA more than dd - or I - can reliably keep in our heads.) It's mainly just in one subject (writing, LToW), so right now I'm just writing out (on the fly) a more detailed checklist in that subject's notebook, complete with due dates, but I hope to transition to her writing that into her planner. Or else I'll actually type up a more-detailed-yet-generic checklist for that subject, now that I'm getting a feel for the rhythm of it, and have her work off that, writing in specifics and due dates as needed. (I really like checklists - they're my external brain. The making of the checklist is how I plan out our daily and weekly - and now subject - rhythms, and checking things off is both a means of recording and accountability.)

Ok, it sounds like she understands active and passive voice in English, then? Active voice is where the subject does the verb, and passive voice is where the verb is done to the subject. It's the same way in Latin. So look at the changes she made in the English sentence. Say you have "The boy rode the horse". To change from active to passive, you switch the subject and direct object, and you change the verb from active to passive: "The horse was ridden by the boy." You're going to make those same changes in Latin. Just like in English, you're going to switch the subject and direct object, but where in English you switch the word order, in Latin you change the endings (there can also be a word order switch, but it's the endings that are key). Switch the subject ending to a direct object ending and vice versa (watching out for differences in declension and number). And just like in English, you're going to change the verb from active to passive, but unlike English it's strictly a matter of changing endings (again, watching out for changes in number, if the subject is singular and the direct object is plural, or vice versa). If she hasn't already, I strongly suggest that she parses every word in each Latin sentence. It's a lot easier to see what needs to be changed and what stays the same that way. Parsing is where you state all the attributes of each word. Nouns and adjectives have declension, gender, case, and number; verbs have conjugation, person, number, tense, mood, and voice. With changing from active to passive, all that's going to change wrt nouns and adjectives is case; all that's going to change wrt verbs is voice and maybe number (if the subject is singular and the direct object is plural, or vice versa). Once she's parsed the active sentence, and then written the parsings for the transformed sentence, then it's just a matter of adding the endings that correspond with the new parsings.

I think you might have better luck if you post your daughter's answers and ask for feedback on them. Or point to the specific issue she's having. Or if she's so stuck that she has no idea even where to begin or what questions to ask, that might be something for her to email the teacher about.

I agree with avoiding busywork in favor of putting time into things that are worth learning from, but I think that some spelling curricula *can* be worthwhile even for natural spellers. Namely, spelling curricula that focus on teaching the patterns and logic behind spelling. Yeah, it's "not necessary" in the sense they will likely spell fine without it, but it's nevertheless something worth learning. It's the same reason behind teaching grammar even to those who have an innate intuitive grasp of grammar: sure, they probably will write well enough without it, but learning how things are put together is innately rewarding and inherently worth doing. Signed: a natural speller who ended up with exceptionally non-natural-spelling kids. Even when I oh-so-naively assumed my kids would naturally absorb spelling from their no-doubt-copious reading, I always planned to hit spelling from both the phonetic side and the morphographic side, because I thought it was a thing worth learning. And now having indeed done spelling from both angles (so. much. spelling, to kids who desperately needed every bit of it and then some), I'm quite pleased with the knowledge I've gained, as well. It *is* worth learning. (And the benefit of being a natural speller is that you could probably learn it in a quarter of the time.)

We're semi-rigorous, or at least aspiring to a multum non multa sort of rigor; which is to say, we (try to) work hard and well at a few important things, but we definitely aren't doing all the things or taking all the time. At any rate, my 8th grader spends about 6 hours per day, 4 days a week, an hour of which is independent reading. The fifth day is music lesson day, and she spends about an hour on schoolwork that day. Piano practice (30 min) is part of the school day. Our school day runs from 9am-4pm, with an hour-long lunch from 12-1pm. My 8th grader's schedule looks broadly like this: 9:00-10:15ish: Independent work 10:15ish-12:00: Mom teaching time (math, Latin, and either writing or grammar) 12:00-1:00: Lunch 1:00-1:30: Piano practice 1:30-3:00: Independent work 3:00-4:00: Independent reading So she has 1.5-2hr of teaching time with me, 2.5-3hr of independent working time, 0.5hr of piano practice, and 1hr of independent reading, 4 days a week. She could definitely use more time to work, as she never gets everything done - there's always at least one subject undone that gets rolled over to the next day. (It's a combo of too much to do plus lolly-gagging.) When I first saw the problem, I'd figured that we'd reached the point where we needed to have regular "homework" - not because of wasting school time, but because at this level there's just too much to do to get it all done during the school day. But after talking with my sis, I've decided that just because ps students her age regularly have hours of hw doesn't mean I need to do the same. I mean, I'm hs'ing because I don't want to do things the ps way - and upon reflection, I *don't* think it's good for school to spill over into non-school hours like that. Last year, I'd already made the choice to not let school work spill over into independent reading time - at 3:00, school work is put away, finished or unfinished, and quiet reading time begins. It prevents written school work from taking over reading time, which imo is important in general, but is extra important for us, since we hit so many content subjects through independent reading. And I found that it makes for a much better end to the school day; it gives everyone a chance to relax and decompress before afternoon activities or chores, and my kids really needed that. I'm thinking that something similar applies here: that the things that happen outside of school are important, too, and so non-school time needs to be protected as much as school time needs to be protected. And overall, I do think we are making good progress on school - I think we are doing fine.

I haven't been paying attention to what's going on when I log in (although I have had to login on all my devices in the past few days), but I checked and one of my security extensions lists "madebytribe.com" as a site that wants to run a script on this page. (It, like the twelve other sites wanting to run scripts here that I haven't approved, is blocked on my desktop; I'll have to pay attention on my tablet to see what's happening there.)

Try bookfinder - it searches several booksellers at once. Scanning the results, I saw some copies for under $20. (I remember when I bought my copy, it took some looking before I could find an affordable used copy - they seem to be getting scarcer every year - they aren't everywhere anymore, not like they used to be in the early 2010s.)

Don't have any experience with those specific curricula, but I do have two lefties. As far as it goes, the number one thing that helped me teach them handwriting was making the effort to write with my left hand (I'm a rightie). Nothing makes the nuts and bolts of writing left-handed clearer than to pick up a pencil in your left hand and try it out yourself. (Idk about you, but the how-to-position-your-page instructions always made no sense to me - I had to actually pick up the pencil left-handed and move the paper around till my slant looked right before it made sense.) Plus it made demonstrating and troubleshooting problems for the kids much easier when I used my left hand just like they were, even though I'm no better than semi-adequate writing left-handed. (Was an interesting experience, having to consciously pay attention to letter formation - helped me explain techniques for trickier letters better, when I had to figure out how to prevent *myself* from writing them mirror-image.) I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I used no program to teach printing. Just lots of copywork. I demonstrated a cursive-friendly letter formation (aka the one that cursive-writing me found most natural), but didn't force it. There was plenty of bottom-up and right-to-left letter and number formation from all three, but especially the lefties. (I actually didn't teach letter formation to my youngest lefty - he learnt at preschool - and he's the most idiosyncratic of the lot.) I used Smithhand to teach cursive (because I liked the stroke focus and the appearance), and the process of learning cursive did wonders for my oldest lefty's handwriting, printing as well as cursive. I didn't need to modify anything but paper slant (and tbh I didn't worry overmuch about that). My oldest lefty ended up naturally writing the meant-to-be-slanted cursive straight up-and-down, and it hasn't been a problem - it looks good and writes fine. I did make the kids always use "school pencils" that encouraged a tripod hold during school, and I corrected their grip as much as possible. And I did watch out for if my lefties started "hooking" their hand, and corrected it right away. Honestly, teaching my lefties has gone about the same as teaching my righty. I stressed about handwriting too - a main reason why I never actually *taught* print (hello, procrastination, my old friend) - and, idk, between casual corrections and putting a fair bit of work into cursive (I used cursive as part of phonics reinforcement), it so far seems to have worked out well enough despite my haphazard approach. Unless your dd turns out to have some kind of writing issue, I expect any decent-ish handwriting program, done with decent-ish attention, will work just fine.

I second Dolciani. After a brief try at AOPS Pre-Alg that was too intense for us, we went to Dolciani and that's been great. It does a review of arithmetic from first principles, showing how everything builds up and fits together, which was exactly what oldest dd needed. It introduces the idea of proof without putting it front and center.

I'm going with very individual. My kids all have/had difficulties with decoding. With my oldest, decoding actually lagged behind reading comprehension - she was a whole language poster child, naturally using picture clues and context clues and grammar clues to bolster and work around her weak decoding. With my middle, I think decoding and comprehension went more or less hand-in-hand, although I think her reading comprehension lagged behind her decoding, while her decoding lagged behind her oral comprehension. For a while, after decoding was solid (except for decoding unfamiliar multi-syllable words, which we were working on explicitly), she wouldn't read anything unfamiliar, while she *would* read fairly high-level books that she was very familiar with, from read-alouds and audiobooks. Youngest is still learning to decode, but his oral comprehension (with read-alouds and audiobooks) is quite good. In general I'd say his (fledgling) reading comprehension is more-or-less in line with his (fledgling) decoding skills, in that he understands what his readers are saying. One thing I did notice with my younger two, wrt decoding and comprehension, is that they both try to decode first, understand second (while my oldest tried to comprehend without decoding if at all possible). And so they found individual words easier to read than connected text (unlike oldest, who was the opposite - the more context, the easier to guess and thus avoid decoding). Which meant there was/is a decent period of time where their connected-text reading stamina lagged/is-lagging behind their individual word decoding. And therefore their reading comprehension lagged behind their decoding. (Although I thought of it in terms of their connected-text decoding stamina lagging behind, since in general decoding was harder than comprehension for my kids.) That said, not one of my kids was reading in Oct of 1st grade. End of first for oldest, end of second for middle, and I'm hoping for end of second with my red-shirted youngest.

If you took out painters - "I think that (we, us) need help" - then I would intuitively pick we - "I think that *we* need help", not "I think that *us* needs help." Thinking it through, I think that the "that" is key - it's introducing a clause. So "(we,us) painters" is the subject of the that-clause, so it's in the nominative case.

I will say, our garage is still full-ish of random crap, and it does bug me. We have it useable-ish, in that we can now get to everything we need to get to, plus have a decent walking path from the door to the house to the car in the driveway, and (with five minutes of moving) can get one car in the garage in case of hail-storm. But it needs a really good sweeping, and it can't get that while there's all the crap in the corners - crap that I'm scared to touch for fear of black widows. So I've just left it for dh, who occasionally puts on gloves and tackles a spot - so there's incremental improvement. And it's at a level now that I can live with - it was a really milestone for me when that happened. So I guess vote for pitching everything it takes to get it liveable enough. Maybe toss all the cardboard and rearrange - see if you can live with the clothes bags for a while or not.

We did just throw out most of our cardboard boxes. There is no recycling here at all (which is so weird to me, even after a year here we still maintain our dedicated "paper trash" can, even though it just goes into the big trash can with the rest in the end). I hate throwing out good boxes, but when we found a black widow (!) in the packing material in the garage - well, that was a great impetus to just chucking it. (God help me, I moved to a place where it is *normal* to find black widows in one's garage every so often :svengo:. Everyone I told that story to just nodded their heads and said, "Yup, that happens sometimes.") I saved the 15 or so best boxes, breaking them down and storing them in the attic, and let dh throw out the rest (wearing gloves to handle them!). ETA: WRT old clothes, idk if this is a great thing to do, but what I would likely actually do: if there was ever a chance I'd end up in one of the towns with a donation place, I'd save the clothes and take them with me whenever I ended up going. I don't have as many old clothes as you do right now, but what we do is just save them till our church's rummage sale (once or twice a year) or till we go see out-of-state relatives (once a year). Not sure that's the greatest option (and we can't even keep them in the garage (bugs!)), but that's what I do. The "collecting for rummage sale" old clothes bag is on the dog crate in my bedroom , and that's where they live in near-perpetuity.

We've used them (Black & Decker model 310), to good effect. We had mice in our basement up north, and my parents (who'd used them) got us four packs (of three), and we put them all over the house. They seemed to work, in that we had no more signs of mice for the rest of the time we lived there (at least 3-4 years). We put them up in our new house, and haven't had any mice problems, even though we are by the woods. They haven't bothered the dogs at all. Things my parents noticed: some brands have an audible (to humans) hum. The Black & Decker ones were the second or third ones they tried. Even then, one or two of the B&D ones were audible - we either returned them or didn't use them or used them in the garage or some other out-of-the-way place.

This.

Honestly, I think this is your answer - you've used it, you like it, you're currently using it, and it's presumably working - you're probably better off resisting the "grass is greener" syndrome. My oldest did *not* get fractions, so I have tried several things: LoF, MM, MUS, and Keys. Of those, MUS was probably the most helpful - all the manipulative work provided a concrete conceptual base - but that might be overkill if he already basically gets fractions. The best part of MUS was the fraction overlays, and they only wanted to use them when they needed them to understand the problem; once they understood what was going on, they quit using them. What ended up working best for us, in cementing fraction understanding, was going through the fraction chapters in our pre-alg program (Dolciani). So maybe keep that in mind in choosing a pre-alg program, to get one that hits fractions thoroughly and well, for extra fraction reinforcement. But as for right now, in your shoes I'd still continue on with Keys to Fractions as long as it is working.