Just to complicate things (lol), I do teach phonograms, just not all at once. I teach the phonograms as they come up in our (traditional, arranged-by-pattern) phonics program (so just one sound at a time - really cement the first sound before adding in the other sounds). I have a phonogram chart for reference - a filled-in one on one side and a blank one on the reverse - each of the girls has a copy, too - and as we learn new sounds, we fill in the blanks. It's especially helpful when you are doing lots of informal, hodge-podge learning, because it both lets you know what you have and haven't covered, plus it helps organize all the bits of info into a cohesive whole. (It's been especially helpful with our whirlwind phonetic tour through the Dolch sight words - it helps dd7.5 see how all those new patterns fit into the overall picture - especially how many of them are really very outlier spellings.) I keep the charts handy when we are doing reading or spelling, and the girls are free to use them as references whenever they need to. (I'm actually teaching the words in our main, traditional pattern-arranged phonics program in a WRTR-style way - I wrote them up in sound pictures and coded them to indicate which spelling to use, and the girls use their charts to look up the spelling. After they've spelled 50 or so words with that particular phonogram, it's well on its way to being memorized. And having to sound out the words in sound pictures forces my sight-reading oldest to work on her blending. It's spelling-your-way-to-reading for my middle and reading-your-way-to-spelling for my oldest ;).)

IDK if any of the above blather was actually helpful :shifty. To summarize, my thoughts on when to start readers that aren't correlated to your "teaching reading" program are to start when your kid is far enough along that they have the skills to be able to sound out (with help) an unfamiliar word, instead of having to learn it by sight. Also, that your kiddo is far enough along that they've learned at least 90-95% of the words they'll see in the early lessons. And that you are far enough ahead in your main program that you won't quickly get into a bunch of unfamiliar words in the readers (or the readers are well-enough correlated with your main program that they do things in basically the same order). Or when your kiddo really, really wants the boost of being able to read "real books" (like mine did), and then you bootstrap your way into somehow satisfying the above criteria to make the readers work even when they aren't on speaking terms with your main program. (My dh has heard *so many rants* from me about so-called "phonetic readers" that *aren't*.) ETA: Also, here's the link to Dekodiphukan: http://www.center.edu/dekodiphukanPage.shtml

Both of my girls have needed a lot of practice, too. I've used Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, which has a *ton* of practice - very comprehensive word lists plus extensive sentences/paragraphs/stories for practice. The fun factor's not high, though - for my oldest I put the first 12 or so lessons on the kindle with pictures on each page, and for my middle I made magnetic tiles (Dekodiphukan sound picture tiles and AAS-style phonogram tiles) and we built the words before reading them in the text. (If you have an iPad, Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) is free and awesome, with a high fun factor (if you don't have an iPad, the print version is free for downloading). It teaches reading by teaching the 44 sounds of the English language as sound pictures (/s/ as a hissing snake and /z/ as a buzzing bee, for example), which are learned painlessly through a fun rhyming story. After learning to read and write with the sound pictures, they use a phonogram chart to teach which spelling goes with each sound. My kids have auditory processing issues and those sound pictures have been *wonderful*.) Wrt development leap vs practice for fluency, so far I have one of each. Something clicked for my oldest after about a year and she went from sounding out cvc words and consonant blends to reading everything in a couple of months. Otoh, my middle has been going the slow and steady route, and needs quite a bit more fluency practice. (From the beginning, my oldest preferred sentences and paragraphs to single words (more context to help her weak decoding), while my middle preferred single words to sentences (less for her weak decoding skills to have to deal with).) I just bought several old linguistic reader series to use with middle dd for fluency practice (Merrill Linguistic Readers, SRA Basic Reading Series, and Linguistic Readers (the latter starts out much harder than the first two). She likes reading "real books" more than reading out of our big reading book. (Eta: my oldest has needed quite a bit of fluency practice wrt decoding multi-syllable words and breaking words into sounds for spelling (her spelling was truly horrific) - at least as much as her sister - it just feels different when your fluency practice comes *after* you are fluently reading, kwim?) With my middle, I brought in readers when she was far enough along in her main book that I could teach sight words phonetically using ElizabethB's chart on the Phonics Page (when she was solid on sounding out even complicated one-syllable words (cccvccc blends), and so could sound out any combination of sounds, and was comfortable with the idea of two-letter phonograms). Our main program does barely any sight words ('a' and 'the' are the only ones in the first 1700 words), and delays learning cvce words longer than many programs, and while I really like the pure phonics-only approach, that did make finding readers she could read a trick and a half - I was having fits with trying to find phonetic readers that more-or-less lined up with our main book. Last April I started phonetically teaching her the sight words on the Dolch list so she could read the "standard" beginning readers at the library (as well as more of what she comes across in her daily life), but that's slower going than learning each pattern slowly and logically (with lots of practice) as she does in her main book. And honestly it wasn't doing her all that much good - the popular reader series are just too far off anything we are doing - the ones she could decode had too few words per page to help with her fluency (although they did help with her confidence). But I did come across other linguistic reader series this summer and ordered a whole bunch used, and so far they have been just what we needed. Starts off with plenty of words on the page, but very simple phonetically, and follows the same basic progression as our main book. One thing I like about the linguistic approach is that it provides a *lot* of cvc and CCVC/cvcc practice (more than I've seen from any other method) - really builds that foundation rock solid - and my kids have really needed that. I have noticed that the readers I bought do introduce more sight words than my main book - comparable to what the bob books do. And after realizing my dd had a 1500 word reading vocabulary yet couldn't read the most basic of non-phonetic readers (demoralizing for us both), I understand why the vast majority of phonics programs do teach some sight words. I'm still pretty anti-sight words, but avoiding them does have a price. I do like the logic of the vertical phonics approach, but neither of my girls could have learned that way. They have very much needed the teach-by-patterns approach of traditional phonics, and with plenty of practice with each pattern before introducing a new one.

I don't think we can say that. It's one thing to thank God for an injustice being remedied - He is the author of all good, after all. But it's another thing entirely to say that an unremedied injustice staying unremedied is God's will - because injustice is sin and is *never* God's will. Why does God allow injustice to persist for a time in this life? I don't know, but it's *not* because He wants injustice to persist. God is *not* the author of sin.

My third baby didn't wait for the doctor - the resident broke my water around 9-10cm and he was born two minutes later. I remember the nurse or resident saying something about "can you wait for the doctor?!" but I pretty emphatically said No!! and that was that - they got down to the business of catching the baby. I just cannot fathom forcing the baby to stay in like that :svengo:. Wrt c-section rates, that hospital had a 46% section rate, which really worried me (but it was where my high risk practice did births), but actually turned out to not be a bad thing. I talked to one of my nurses about it and she said the hospital was unhappy with that rate and was actively working to reduce it. And certainly the posters around supported lower intervention births (I spent a lot of time there getting non-stress tests and such, so plenty of time to read all the various things on the walls) and the nurses were great wrt my doula and birth plan. I had a good birth there (so much different from my first hospital birth, where I "wasn't permitted" to move at all during a pitocin-induced labor, which pushed me to have a home birth with my second). Wrt hospitals treating the moms like children, I didn't have any problems with that that I noticed with ds in the special care nursery, but when he had to go back to the hospital right after coming home, I did notice just how much *respect* I got from the pediatric nurses and doctors as his mother. They treated me as a full partner in his care - no hint of me-as-patient cluttering things up (honestly I'm pretty sure it never really connected that the mom of a 4 day old infant was herself 4 days out from giving birth) - and it was so *different* from the complete non-entity I was when my oldest was in the nicu (at a different, far worse, hospital). (My dd was in the nicu for 36 hours and the *only* information I got from anyone at the hospital about her was from two nurses gossiping over my head like I wasn't there. I didn't even get to *see* her at all in that time. I was upset about that for her whole first year.)

Some links to SMSG texts: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=School%20Mathematics%20Study%20Group (easy to find which text you are looking for and view online, but idk how easy to download/print) https://eric.ed.gov/?q=Smsg+geometry+with+coordinates+teacher%27s+commentary&ft=on (Eric.ed.gov has all the PDFs for smsg online and downloadable as PDF, but searching went better when I could get the exact title from the other link)

My results were: Score for Beast Academy: 3 Score for Math Mammoth: 6 Score for Math U See: 3 Score for Mathematical Reasoning: 6 Score for Miquon: 6 Score for RightStart: 8 Score for Saxon: 8 Score for Shiller: 6 Score for Singapore: 15 Score for Teaching Textbooks: 0 And Singapore Math is indeed the math program we use :).

Thanks to this thread, I just had a realization: part of rape culture is this sense that there's this thin line between consensual sex and rape - so that all it takes to go from consensual sex to sexual assault is for a person "go a little too far". And on top of that, often there's a sense that the line is blurry, so that people of good will can't even always tell exactly where it is in any given situation. And so it makes it feel like *anyone* could be at risk to "accidentally" take a step over the unclear-to-begin-with line - because who hasn't gone farther than they meant to (in something) in a moment of stupidity or lowered inhibitions. And I realized that I had sort of had that assumption in my head. But actually the path that leads to sexual assault is an entirely different path than the path that leads to morally good sex. (Which I realize that sexual assault prevention advocates have been saying over and over - I get it now.) Even rape culture acknowledges that good people don't sexually assault their partners. But rape culture assumes that sexual assault happens when you "go too far" along the sexual activity continuum - being a good person means that you stay on the "right side" of the line. And that makes sexual ethics focus on where the line is and how to avoid going over it. But when you see the "consensual sexual activity" continuum as *entirely separate* from the "sexual assault" continuum, then "being a good person" in the realm of sexual ethics involves both refusing to take a single step on the path to sexual assault *and* also affirmatively walking on a path that leads to moral sex. Which is the point of affirmative consent: to not just avoid forcing unwanted sex on others, but to actively seek to walk another, better path. It makes "being a good person" involve more than just "avoiding going too far" - to involve seeking the good in addition to (completely) avoiding (even a hint of) the bad.

I think it sounds awesome :). The way I've seen the footnotes done is the usual "author, title, page number" followed by ", author's translation". So, for example, "Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 65, author's translation".

Here's one (that I have) that's $10 on Amazon: http://smile.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-2-Color-Desktop-Abacus/dp/B001V9ACMK?ie=UTF8&keywords=rightstart%20abacus&qid=1463089530&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

Lingua Latina itself has three sets of exercises at the end of each capitulum (chapter). Pensum A is 10-15 lines of Latin prose in which you need to fill in some missing endings. Pensum B is 10-15 lines of Latin prose in which you need to fill in some missing words (including the correct ending). Pensum C is about 10 questions, in Latin, about the reading, and you are supposed to respond in Latin. IMO all these would be worth doing, even if done orally for a quick review. (I've found that when I've internalized the Latin, I can just read out the Latin lines and almost automatically fill in the right ending/word.) But writing out the Latin is worthwhile, as well. (And it allows you to better check your work.) Each capitulum is divided into 2-3 sections (lectio), plus a grammar section, and the Exercitia have 3-4 exercises for each lectio, plus 1-2 exercises for the grammar section. So there's 11-12 exercises for each capitulum in the Exercitia, in addition to the three exercises for each capitulum in the text itself. They are similar to the exercises in the text: fill-in-the-missing-ending grammar practice, fill-in-the-missing-word vocab/grammar practice, and reading comprehension questions that also give practice in Latin composition. It's *extra* practice, but I don't think it's substantially *different* practice than what's already in the text. Since your student has already presumably mastered the grammar, and just needs to learn to think in Latin-as-Latin, probably just reading and re-reading the text is the main practice he needs. Lingua Latina has no translation work - everything's in Latin - all the input *and* all the output. The idea is to facilitate being able to think and work *in* Latin. It helped me get over my wrong-headed notion that you translate in order to find out what the text says; rather, you understand the text *first* and then translate. Makes so much more sense that way. I really struggled in Latin once multiple meanings for each case were introduced - couldn't figure out *how* you knew which one applied in a given case??? Well, you figure it out the same way you do in English - context. But as I couldn't understand the Latin without translating it - *all* I had were dictionary definitions and formal grammar rules to try to puzzle out the meaning (and that wasn't remotely sufficient on its own) - it seemed like a catch-22 to me: I had to know what the Latin said in order to know what the Latin said??? It was a major revelation to me that I could understand Latin like an actual language ;). But so long as you can read and understand Lingua Latina as Latin, you could then use bits of it for translation practice. I do think there's a lot of benefit to translating between languages - just so long as you can think and understand both languages *without* translating.

My oldest is left-handed. We did Smithhand and she was able to learn it without trouble. It's a slanted hand, but she naturally writes it upright; it looks nice and legible written upright and she writes it smoothly.

Aside from Spencerian (which I love but idk if it's practical for us), my favorite hand is Smithhand. I appreciate both its appearance and how it is easy to write neatly. Dd9 is a lefty with several symptoms of dyslexia (and it took her years to be able to print neatly), but she has a very nice, legible cursive hand.

Same here, with my middle dd - I call her the grade she'd be in school, and so she just turned 7.5 and is at the end of first grade. (And it is weird, because my oldest had a birthday a little *before* the cutoff, and she was 7.5 for the latter half of *second* grade.) And dd7.5 also isn't reading fluently yet. In her case, it's because we spent a full year on learning to blend CVC words, and then a half year on learning to blend blends ;). (She failed the Barton pre-screening - didn't have the phonemic awareness to learn to read phonetically - and so we had to explicitly build up the pre-reading skills that most kids develop naturally or with a few weeks worth of effort. She now has the PA skills of an early 2nd grader - we're making progress :thumbup:.) I was worried about her being behind, so I looked up some "reading benchmarks for first grade", in Straight Talk About Reading, and at the end of 1st, kids are supposed to have a reading vocabulary of 300-500 words. And the thing is, dd7.5 *does* have a reading vocabulary of over 500 words - she's (over)learned ~280 CVC words and ~450 CCVC/CVCC/CCVCC words, and can sound out any other word following those patterns :thumbup: (and let me tell, you, we worked *hard* for that). But she only started multi-letter phonograms at the beginning of April and we haven't done *any* sight words (minus 'a' and 'the', which I taught phonetically). Which means that her 700 word reading vocabulary is missing a *lot* of the most common words - and she hasn't yet learned the phonics needed to decode them - so that while she can fluently read controlled text covering what she's learned, she still can't read early readers (which assume kids learn a lot of irregular common words as sight words early on). So she looks a lot worse off than she is - but it's because of the scope & sequence of our reading program instead of her difficulties. But she knows what she knows very well, she's built a good foundation, she's making good progress - and in a year's time, when we've finished our reading book (and she'll have learned how to sound out over 4300 words), she'll be right on track for the end of second grade. ETA: My older dd took off with reading at one point in our book and so we quit phonics. But later she had trouble, and it was because she hadn't ever really learned those things she hadn't been taught ;) (and so I have her working through her old phonics book as cursive/spelling practice). So in your shoes, I'd want to evaluate if she was having fluency trouble with things she'd been explicitly taught and had practiced, or if she's stumbling over things that she knows in some words but not in others, and maybe that's because she never really was explicitly taught that concept.

I used to never write in books, because it was a "thing" for me, too. But in college I got in the habit of taking notes in the (nice, big) margins of my textbooks and appreciated the convenience of it, and now I'm in theory willing to write in books. No highlighting, though - I still have a thing there - although the highlighting in my dh's books doesn't bother me. (Drives him nuts, though, when he's reading my books and can't highlight them.) Even so, I don't actually write in most of my books, though - unless I'm reading a big hardback that stays open on its own at the table, it's just seems so *inconvenient* to write in a book. I need a nice, hard surface to write on, and for the book to stay still, and most of the time I don't have that. (And I always write lightly in pencil - it's not that I'm going to go through and erase them, but that somehow it just seems less obtrusive.). There's only one book that I'm currently writing in (a big philosophy hardback that has biggish margins and can stay open on its own and has *so much* to think about that it's helpful to bracket important bits of text and jot down thoughts in the margins as they come). Most of the time, though, I usually journal. Whenever I hit a really good quote, or I have thoughts that want to get out, or I want to muse about some point further - I go over to my computer and jot it down. Usually I let the interesting thoughts or quotes percolate until I have enough in my head that it's worth putting down the book and going over to the computer to get them down. (And then I usually bang out a couple of thousand words of musings about them.)

I was terrified of dogs as a kid. As an adult it's mostly mellowed out to a slight wariness (except whenever a dog does something unexpected/maybe-possibly-aggressive, then I'm right back to fear again), but I'm still not a dog person, really. I am kinda of a corgi person, though. Dh's family are major dog people, and when I met him, they had the sweetest, friendliest, most well-trained corgi ever. He was the first dog I truly wasn't scared of. I knew when I married dh that he wanted to keep a dog around, and I was ok so long as they were corgis. But tbh, as cute as our guy is, if it were up to me I'd still choose no dog over dog. I'm soundly outvoted by the rest of the family, though ;).

I was waiting for someone to mention corgis :wub:. Granted, idk anyone else in our area with one, but everyone seems to think our guy's all kinds of cute ;). We managed to get ours for $850 last summer (did have to drive 2.5 hours to the breeder, but that's not bad), and there are many corgi rescue societies; granted, there's a lot more people wanting corgis from the corgi rescue than corgis being rescued, but my sis-in-law is connected with the corgi rescues groups and seemed to have no problem finding available corgis when we were looking. Maybe friend all the regional corgi rescue groups on FB and your dd can get to know the people involved - have corgi fun even if y'all don't end up getting one of your own :). (As for the actual question, I'm not very good with breeds - only size and color ;). I'd say half the dogs in our area are biggish short-haired dogs, and the other half are various smaller dogs with longer or curly fur. Lots of help, I know ;).) Our corgi at least runs pretty fast - my oldest can run with him pretty well. But maybe that's more a jogging pace for an adult/teen, instead of a running pace (as it is for my 9yo).

Thinking of the situation from the friend's POV - good friends for years; shared life together through thick and thin; made an effort to stay in contact even after a move; had a bit of a spat but got over it; but all of a sudden, her friend wants nothing to do with her, won't talk to her, not even to tell her what she did wrong, not even to say it's over, just unilaterally ending things without a word, with no chance to try to fix things - I've seen a lot of WTM posts along those exact same lines. I know you no longer think she's ever been a good friend to you :grouphug:, but she has no way of knowing that you've radically reassessed your friendship and now see all those years not as the mutual bonding you once assumed but as her unilaterally taking from you and not giving in return - not without you telling her. I know a common feature in those WTMers who've gotten dropped without a word is how they wished they'd been given a chance to know what was wrong and to try make things right - so that whatever went wrong could have been a wakeup moment instead of the unexpected and final death of their friendship.

IDK that I have any magical method. Once I realized it was happening, I started sitting with them and walking them through the process I wanted them to follow. "Read the whole thing. Ok, look at the first word/phrase/sentence." <I point out anything tricksy they might need to focus on.> "Are you ready - can you picture it in your head?" <If yes, then I cover the model.> "Now, tell it back to me. Ok, now write it." <They write it. I uncover the model and have them double check that what they wrote matches.> "Ok, look at the second word/phrase/sentence...." Lather, rinse, repeat ;), until they seem to have it down and can/will do it unprompted. In general, whenever I notice that the kids have subverted the point of an assignment (a depressingly common occurrence), I sit with them and explicitly walk them through the steps of the process I want them to be practicing. (I generally notice the problem whenever the assignment ramps up in difficulty and they go from doing it easily to resisting and complaining about "how hard it is" - it tends to be a sign that they didn't learn the skills I meant for them to be learning through the assignment, usually because they did it another, easier-for-them-way, that left the weaknesses I was targeting untouched. Sometimes I just can't fathom how they could do the assignment successfully *without* working on the skill I wanted them to practice, but somehow they manage it ;).) Does that help any?

With my kids, I found that they were copying almost letter-by-letter, even when they were capable of copying in larger chunks. Also, they had a tendency to copy straight from the model, instead of getting a chunk of the model in their brain, and then writing that chunk from short-term memory (which made the whole thing just a handwriting exercise instead of also composition practice). No amount of copywork done that way was going to prepare them for dictation, kwim? The point being, I had no idea (until recently) that sometimes you need to explicitly teach kids *how* to do copywork - that it's more than just knowing how to read and write. With my oldest, I make the WWE passages studied dictation. We're in WWE2, where the copywork is the same passage as the dictation, so it's already kind of studied dictation, but I also have her mark up the passage with Spelling You See's visual marking system on copywork day, and then study it for a few minutes right before dictation.

I might have to do that next time - get out the bowls and water and let her have at it :). (I remember doing that with some other tricksy capacity problem last year - the joys of pouring water overcame her "but it's *impossible*!!!!! so I won't try" screaming meltdown resistance ;).) Eta: It took a surprising amount of flexible math thinking on *my* part to figure out which measures we had that would scale up or down properly to match the problem, that was straightforward enough that *she* didn't have to already understand the problem in order to solve it with the manipulatives ;). (It took a few iterations before I hit on the right set of containers.)

The bar diagram difficulty may have been her general resistance to bar diagrams, and how, with the c-rods, she kept trying to see relationships between the "unknown starting amount" rod and the "declared to be 21" rod that would allow her to figure out the starting amount. I illustrated it twice, with different rods for the "unknown starting amount", and she *did* get it in the end, more or less, but she was really invested in trying to figure out that starting amount, and kept bringing in outside relationships between the manipulatives to inform her understanding of the illustration - thus subverting what I was trying to show with the manipulatives :doh.

No, my math major sister suggested the same thing :). And I did that with manipulatives - made the problem smaller and did a few iterations with different starting amounts. The only problem was that, as soon as we moved to using manipulatives with the actual numbers in the problem, she latched onto my made-up starting number as *the* number - because she was so convinced we *had* to know it in order to solve the problem. It seemed to be teaching her it was ok to invent numbers as needed to solve problems, instead of illustrating that the missing numbers in *this* problem were irrelevant to the solution. Maybe I need to think of a way to illustrate this with manipulatives that solves it while "hiding" the starting amount the whole time - better mimic the math involved.

By this I mean word problems that *seem* like they don't have enough information to find the answer, but when you work them out the unknowns all fall out of the problem - you didn't actually need to know them to get a definite answer. An example we had in CWP yesterday (that had dd9.5 yelling about "not enough context"!!!!!): I tried bar diagrams (but dd9.5 hates them and resists them), and idk that I showed it very elegantly anyway. I tried working out the problem with manipulatives using several different starting amounts - showing there was the same answer each time. And I finally resorted to algebra (which is the only way I truly know how to illustrate how the unknown falls out). Eventually she sorta-kinda seemed to get the point, but idk what, if anything, she actually learned. And this is not the first time she's had a screaming meltdown over a "missing information" problem (although after the last one, she's successfully done a few of them without problems, until yesterday). Any ideas how to teach this? Or how to model it with bar diagrams? (I was using c-rods to do it, instead of on paper, because dd9.5 does better being able to physically set up (and re-set-up) the diagram instead of drawing it, but I think that might have contributed to the clunkiness of it.)

I'm sort of meh about it. Part of it is that I'm trying to strengthen my kids' ability to read and spell by *sound* (a major weak point for them), and the fact that different fonts *do* interfere with their visual image of the word (and force them to think it through by *sound*) - as far as I'm concerned, that's a feature, not a bug ;). But my kids' visual memories are very good - the hard thing for them is breaking a word into phonemes - and building that skill is where we've put the bulk of our efforts; once they can do that, remembering the particular phonogram used to spell a particular phoneme in a given word hasn't been too much trouble for them thus far. I've actually been having dd9 do her word list spelling in cursive *on purpose*, because it forces her to think through the sounds in the words and how she ought to spell those sounds, because she can't rely on her visual memory for printed words. (And it helps her build her kinesthetic and visual memory for cursive words - handwriting, both print and cursive, has been difficult for her, and her word list spelling is the *only* thing she does in cursive right now (in fact, as far as she's concerned, it's primarily cursive practice, not spelling/blending practice).) But if she was visually weak the way she's auditorially weak, I might be more concerned about being consistent there - I do think SYS has a point about different fonts making forming a visual image of the word more complicated. In any case, dd9 does her copywork/dictation in manuscript, albeit more because she's too shaky on cursive than for spelling visualization reasons; Dd7 does her spelling in manuscript by default, because that's all she knows ;).