I *hate* not being able to find things - *loathe* it - and one of the hardest parts about having kids was how stuff of mine that I carefully kept track of would end up walking away because of someone else. It was *maddening*, and I've dealt with it by putting a fair bit of energy into finding places for everything that it hacks me off to not be able to find, and then put an inordinate amount of energy into restricting access to those things as well as making sure that those things always, always, always get put right back immediately. Plus I have an extremely strict standing rule that *no one* is allowed to get *anything* off my desk without asking, *ever* (and it's a standing desk, so kids too young to reliably follow that rule couldn't reach it anyway). (Also, no one is allowed to *put* anything on my desk without asking, because no one but me is allowed to junk it up ;).) Because, yeah, we're lucky if we can find one of the three kid scissors, etc. And the kids never know where all their Barbie shoes are, or doll clothes, or anything, really (on the really important/valuable things *I've* established places for them and make sure the kids put them back in there each time, every time, but something things still fall through the cracks). (And dh isn't that much better - important things of his get lost semi-regularly.) I'm kind of sad that I suck so much at teaching the skills of keeping track of things :(. It doesn't help that I'm not all that organized - I just have a good memory and am observant, so I see where things are and remember them (even when the locations are something like "midway down the second pile on the right on the shelf of horribleness" ;)). But that does little good with a family of people whose executive function skills are as mediocre as mine, but are *far* less observant, and with less good a memory. (And the older I get, and the more crap there is to keep track of, my memory is no longer up to the task - so I'm painfully learning how to be somewhat organized.)

I've had the "lost nouns" mommy brain thing since dd9 :-/, and last year the brain fog started hitting hard - couldn't concentrate, couldn't read, couldn't think seriously (and I was also very fatigued - physically, mentally, emotionally) - it was extremely frustrating and disheartening, especially since I'm only in my early 30s. I turned a corner after sleeping 10 hours a night for a month, and I still aim for 9 hours a night now (the nouns go missing whenever I'm short of sleep - it's kind of the first sign of trouble). I also added in exercise (daily walks and stretching/strengthening 2-4x/week), omega-3s and a B-complex (plus a multi-vitamin). And now that it's winter, I've started using a light therapy lamp - SAD's an issue for me, and for whatever reason the brain fog hits hardest when SAD's hitting hardest. (I don't know if the lack of light itself contributes to brain fog or if the depression leads me to do/not-do things that contribute to brain fog (I definitely spend waaaaaaaaaaaaay more time fracturing my attention surfing the web when I feel depressed than otherwise, and that doesn't do good things for my mind or emotions).) And I've prioritized devotions over other thinking reading - I believe that being spiritually renewed and refreshed through God's means of grace is foundational for all of life, physical as well as spiritual, and I finally started living it out ;). I have definitely felt a big improvement doing this, but I think it just is getting me to everyday-typical, maybe a touch more - which is *awesome* compared to the impairment I was experiencing this past Feb-Mar, but isn't always enough to be able to do my studies the way I want to. I can usually read and contemplate my books when I get time during the day (which is a wonderful improvement), but most of my interruption-free time is at night after the kids are in bed, and despite improvements my brain is still not up to heavy reading/thinking then - it's *done*, and I just end up messing around online. I live in hope that continued sleep/exercise/vitamins/light, and continuing striving to live out my faith, will lead to continued improvement - that I haven't plateaued yet, that there's not something more going on. (I do wonder/worry about hypothyroidism - I've some symptoms and it run in the family.)

This is what we do, too. The first year we moved up north, we ended up leaving our lights on 24/7, because plugging and unplugging them in the cold proved beyond us wimpy southerners ;). They were regular lights, and yes, our power bill went up 50% or more - it was ridiculous. Thus why we got the timer - saved the cost of the timer in our power bill in the first year alone.

I read (and reread) them in chronological order - you can figure things out well enough if you start with a later series, but they do include characters already introduced, and, idk, I prefer to know all the backstory and relationships and such, instead of just guessing or inferring or not even realizing the depth of information I'm missing. Agree with a pp that the Trickster series is my favorite :) - I'm still in favor of reading them in order, but if you get bogged down and it's go out of order or nothing, then I vote for go out of order ;).

I grew up along the Gulf Coast and lived in FL before moving up north (to northern IL). I used to think I could live anywhere, but I now don't ever want to go anywhere farther north - it's (mostly) not the cold itself, but it's the *dark* (and the cold+dark together). I had no clue that SAD would be an issue before I got here, but it has become a major issue. The past two years were bad enough that I started planning to get a light therapy lamp this year in August. It's helping, but it is just a barely-adequate substitute for actual sunlight, and it's not the only thing I'm doing to (try to) stave off the black hole of depression. I'm doing fairly well at the moment, but it sometimes feels like half my life is spent preparing for winter/darkness, surviving winter/darkness, and recovering from winter/darkness.

I used to work in an in-house call center (fundraising for the seminary my dh was attending - the school covered a significant portion of the tuition costs for the students in addition to all the other school expenses), and we were happy to send out a letter to anyone who asked. (We were evaluated based on number of completed calls - spoke to a real person and got a yes/no/send-me-a-letter response - instead of on how much we got in pledges, which made for a less stressful working environment.)

The Disney Store has some Star Wars costumes - Princess Leia and Darth Vader, plus some from the new movie. Dd7 got the Princess Leia one, and it was very nice.

So, I've spent the past hour playing around with Genesis 1, trying to fit it to common hymn tunes :lol:. It's easier to work with bigger chunks than just single verses - in fact, if your chapter is all on one theme, you could just do the whole thing to one tune. I started by cutting and pasting the text into a word processor, and put each meaningful chunk on its own line. I then counted the syllables in each line, and took a look at the longest chunk, and whether any patterns were showing themselves. Then I looked up the tunes whose meter matched my longest line, and picked one I knew very, very well (this is key, it was easiest for me to work by ear instead of strictly counting out syllables, and to do that you have to know your tune by heart), and started singing the text, noting where breaks naturally fell, and adjusting my line breaks accordingly (combining small chunks, breaking up bigger chunks, re-chunking sections), as well as breaking the lines into verses. I found it easy to stretch too few syllables (make even a five syllable text fit a tune meant for eight), but with extra syllables, one extra was all that I could easily manage. I worked a verse at a time, and just kept going till I ran out of text. (It's troublesome when you end with less than a full verse - when you get within a few verses of the end, it's worth trying to jiggle the lines to end on a "verse break"). Anyway, I started out using the tune for the Doxology - Old Hundredth - which is in long meter (88 88) and that went reasonably well. There were some lines that required me to take out vowels (over becomes ov'r, the becomes th') to reduce my syllable count, and some lines where I stretched a syllable over three notes, but with creative juggling and *lots* of singing lines over and over and over until I got them to sound right, I got a decent rough draft of Gen 1:1-5 done in an hour :). (I don't know if that's easier or harder than pointing the verses for chanting.)

In addition to the above suggestion of fitting the words to common tunes - nursery rhymes or familiar hymn tunes - another approach would be to chant the verses. The advantage of chanting is that it easily accommodates verses of any length, and if your church chants the psalms or parts of the liturgy in its service, you'd already know some chant tones. The downside is that if you have no exposure to chanting whatsoever, it takes a bit of getting used to and that might negate the advantages of not having to fit the (non-metrical) verses to an established metrical tune. There are a lot of indexes of metrical hymn tunes online, arranged not only by name and composer, but also by meter. So you could split a verse (or verses) into meaningful logical chunks, count the syllables in each line, and look up tunes that matched and pick one that was familiar or easily learned. (As I was playing around with Gen 1, most verses can be broken up in multiple ways, and the little words could be moved between lines without messing with the meaning. Plus, you can usually easily fudge one more or one fewer syllable in each line with most tunes.). Here's one index of hymn tunes: https://www.ccel.org/cceh/cceh_ind.htm

I wonder if homeschoolers are more likely to be "crunchy" or otherwise more willing to question authority (or whatever), so that they are more likely to resist the common-in-some-areas-and-with-some-doctors pressure to induce around 40 weeks and so are more likely as a group to go longer past their due date than others, which would contribute to higher birth weights. I had two early inductions for medical reasons (35wk and 37wk), with one spontaneous labor at 39wk, and my babies' birth weights tracked along with gestation length (6lb 5oz, 7lb 3oz, and 7lb 8oz).

Yep, this is my experience, too. It's annoying, because everyone talks about the awesome Prime savings with groceries/toiletries and I'd love to be able to take advantage of it, but it's never any better than what I'm already paying at Wal-Mart. IDK, maybe I'm not looking at the right things?

Not that this changes whether the program would have worked for you, but they do tell you what to do: stop the dictation every time they misspell a word, right as they misspell it, and help them spell it correctly right then. Stop the dictation at the 10 min mark (which includes the time you spent helping them fix misspellings), however far you've gotten. And then keep going in the program, and eventually, through the continued practice, they will get more and more of the dictation done in 10 minutes. The focus is on getting whatever words you get to in the dictation correct, with help as needed, not on getting through the entire dictation. (I have Wild Tales, and I found this info under "Dictation" in the weekly activity guide for lessons 8-36 section of the instructor guide; it was right before the FAQ. It was repeated in abbreviated form, with a pointer to the above "more important information about dictation," in the guide to lesson 1. The instructor guide definitely packs a lot of info into a small amount of words and space - I missed a lot of specifics when I skimmed through it the first time.)

Idk how it is in the op's family, but in our family someone eating in front of others and refusing to share with everyone present (where someone being left out because of known food restrictions is as comparably rude as refusing to share with them) would be breaking family rules, and imo it would be legitimate for a family member to be upset and call out the offender. Yeah, those rules don't apply to everyone, and out in the world you just have to suck it up and deal, but within the family, it *is* the rule, and it applies to every family member. But it sounds like the OP's family has conflicting ideas of what is the right way to handle these situations, so there's no clear family rule or culture to appeal to, which makes it extra difficult.

My dd7 has food restrictions, and though we eat things she can't have, we always have an equivalent item for her. If there's nothing comparable, then we save it until I can get her something. I don't feel right eating in front of someone without offering to share (so dh and I save the treats we don't want the kids to eat till after bed), and with dd7's food restrictions that means not eating something in front of her if there's nothing comparable for her to have. When we go out, I tend to bring along snacks in case there's not enough she can eat, and sometimes I promise to get her something at home if there's an unexpected or special treat she can't have. All the kids have opportunities to see people having treats that aren't shared, and dd7 has the additional (and common) problem of being offered treats she can't have and having to wait till we get home to have anything of her own. She deals with it pretty well, but I do what I can to make things easier for her, and part of that is making home a place where she can eat "normally", as close to everyone else as possible. I'm really having problems understanding your dh openly eating things your dd can't have in front of her, because that's goes against our family culture and I'm having a hard time seeing it as anything but hurtful.

I'm a visual "does it look right" speller, and while I loved phonograms and spelling by sound as soon as I learned them, I've only *just* started understanding spelling rules for choosing between phonograms. It took copying down each and every spelling in The ABCs and All Their Tricks, in prep for making a spelling-to-sound chart (to match my sound-to-spelling chart), for me to start noticing and appreciating the patterns that underlie "the rules", which made them more than rote things to memorize and blindly apply (that (incomprehending) view of "the rules" is why I'd been teaching reading and spelling phonetically but without rules - maybe now that I get them I'll start incorporating them).

My dd picked out Wild Tales because she liked animals :). WRT cursive - honestly, I plan on ignoring that once dd9 is comfortable with cursive, or at least I'm definitely going to do everything else in cursive, including WWE copywork/dictation (which for us includes SYS analysis). I'm not sure I find SYS's reasoning wrt printing-only to be compelling, at least given our situation. As stated, "Copywork should be printed in order to develop visual memory. When students read, everything they see is in print, so they should use printing while learning to spell." IOW, as I understand it, reading the word in print and writing the word in print each contributes to developing a visual memory of the word. As I understand it, SYS starts by teaching spelling-by-sound and then (once that idea is internalized), layers on spelling-by-sight (and later adds the spelling-by-meaning layer), and the print-only thing is part of teaching spelling-by-sight. Thing is, for us, dd9's visual memory for the overall appearance of printed words is excellent; it's her ability to break the whole word into parts that's terrible. It's why her spelling is so horrible (but it's improving :phew:) but her reading is excellent - she can recognize words as wholes but she doesn't know the parts well enough to reproduce them (and she can't apply her phonics knowledge to spell by sound because she she can't break spoken words into phonemes or syllables, either). But once she works through a word a few times, analyzing the phonograms and word parts - which forces her to *see* them and how they are related to the sounds she hears - then she has no trouble remembering which spelling was used to spell a given sound in a given word (and it improves her ability to break the word down orally). Which is to say I'm far more concerned about developing her ability to spell by sound (and by meaning) than I am her spelling by sight, because that's by far her strength - once she finally *sees* the word parts, she easily adds those details to her mental picture of the word. (And it's why I like SYS's color-coded chunking system - she likes it and it forces her to see the parts.) Your ds sounds different, given the spelling mistakes you posted. Just about everything he wrote was very phonetic - he just didn't remember which of several phonetically correct phonograms was the actual one used. And that seems to be a matter of rules and/or visual memory (where SYS focuses solely on the visual memory aspect), in which case it might be helpful to have every visual memory boost he can get.

But reading and spelling aren't two unrelated things :confused1: , but rather are complementary processes, like addition and subtraction. They are completely interrelated: spelling is encoding sounds into written words, and reading is decoding those written words to turn them back into sounds. They use the *same set* of sounds and phonograms - there is no such thing as a combination that only exists for spelling while it doesn't exist for reading. I really like SYS, don't get me wrong - I think their color-coded chunking method of analyzing words is awesome, and it was more than worth the $50 I paid to learn that. And the open-and-go factor can't be beat :thumbup: - it was a huge help to not have to do anything to prep but open the book and get started - I really needed that earlier this year, and if I need it again, I'd happily turn to further levels of SYS. But some of their listed vowel chunks aren't actually vowel chunks by SYS's own definition - "two vowels that usually make one sound in a word" - because they pretty much *never* make one sound (at least there are no examples in the 17,000 word Hanna list - I wouldn't even know what single sound(s) to assign to them :confused1: ), but always have two separate sounds (such as "io" in "radio"). And some of the consonant chunks simply do not exist in reality - no words are spelled with them - those letters just don't appear doubled in English (such as "hh" or "vv" or "ww" - maybe there's some obscure word out there somewhere, but again, there's nothing in the 17,000 word Hanna list). It's not the end of the world to have them in there, because they just aren't going to be used ever (because for all intents and purposes there are no English words spelled like that, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are *no* English words spelled like that), but honestly, there are enough real vowel and consonant chunks in the English language to sort through without adding in ones that are logically consistent but don't actually *exist* in the real world. (I do understand why they probably did it - it does make for a very neat, logical pattern. They paired every vowel with every other vowel (plus with "w" and "y" as needed), so you have "aa ae ai ao au aw ay" and "ia ie ii io iu"; and they doubled just about all of the single consonants (so you have "bb cc dd ff gg hh kk ll" and so on to "zz"). It's extremely logical and ensures that you don't miss any real chunk, and it does make for a nice, clean chart layout. But it also obscures the real structure of the English language, giving a nice shiny logical-but-shallow view instead. I don't find the trade-off worth it, and so I made my own charts to use instead, but ymmv.)

I have Book C, Wild Tales. I got it because a) I couldn't quite picture how to do it on my own, and b) because I wanted open-and-go, with no need for me to pull together my own sources. It was pricey, but I'm glad I got it, because I needed to see it done before it clicked in my head, and it does definitely deliver on the no-prep open-and-go-ness :thumbup:. That said, now that it has clicked, I use the technique on our other copywork and dictation and honestly, I doubt we will finish Book C, let alone buy another level. (Unless and until life intervenes and I need it already done for me.) It's a really awesome technique and I'm glad I learned it, but now that I have, I've modified it to suit us better. I have my own sheets of vowel chunks and consonant chunks (a sound-spelling chart with the sounds arranged by LIPS categories and the spellings sorted by frequency), plus a more comprehensive suffix sheet (from REWARDS), and I've added in marking blends (because dd9 can't hear them) and prefixes (because dd9 is learning them in REWARDS). I use my own sheets even when we are doing SYS, because I like them better (the association with the sounds, plus SYS has this annoying tendency to list a bunch of chunks that aren't actually English phonograms (like "io" and "uu" and "hh" and "vv", just to name a few). The marking order I've come up with is: vowels (chunks, then bossy-R and tricky Y-guy), then consonants (chunks, then blends), and finally word parts (prefixes and suffixes). The repetition was good at first (dd9 was a very bad speller), but as she improves, it's starting to be unnecessary, although she still doesn't mind it.

I'm thinking mostly of the 9yo, but I also have a 7yo and 4yo. We have the Usborne Book of World History, and that's been something dd9 can read on her own - she pulls it off the shelf on occasion. And, yeah, the Kingfisher Science does look like it's written on a whole 'nother level - guess I can give it a try and see how it works. I usually like to buy books used when I can, and the Usborne science encyclopedia is almost as much used as new on Amazon - I don't want to buy it unless it I need it. The various Usborne First Encyclopedias, otoh, are all under $5 used, but I wasn't sure if they'd be more for dd7 instead of dd9 (and they are all awfully short). I was also looking at the DK First Reference books - they seemed to be at a higher level than the Usborne First Encyclopedias (and twice as long), but at a lower level than Kingfisher Science.

Is there any reason to get the Usborne Science Encyclopedia (which is the one rec'd in WTM)? I'm wondering why WTM rec's the Usborne science encyclopedias over the Kingfisher ones, while SWB rec's Kingfisher for history. Thanks for helping - or hindering - my book buying tendencies, whichever one is called for in this instance ;).

As I read that, I was thinking that the men's statements and women's statements aren't really equivalent - a big part of the difference in tone is the difference in *audience*. I can relate to that way of voicing disagreement - softening and backing up in order to not cause offence - but at least in my circles, that tone is used among friends and family, people you have a relationship with and that way of approaching disagreements is intended to indicate that the relationship is more important than the disagreement (although there are ways to be clear with both the disagreement and the importance of the relationship - "hiding" the disagreement under a lot of wiggle words is not the only, or best, way to do it). The men's statements are public, polarizing statements (and I bet they pissed people off and got themselves called bastards) - and if they'd used the same tone and words to speak to their family and friends, I'd bet they'd not be received well :lol:. "Sally, make me my dinner!" "Give me my expense report or give me death!" I do think women experience pressure to not disagree openly in public - so that, unlike those quoted men, who spoke that way in their public life but hopefully not in private, women feel that pressure to "not be bitchy" even when the situation calls for it. I don't know how much is internal versus external pressure to avoid disagreement (there are men who'd not want to be confrontational either).

I know I've read old advice (maybe in one of Charlotte Mason's books) that said you ought to let your sheets air for a few hours before making the bed.

The churches I've been at tend to use kosher wine, and that's usually pretty sweet. Mogen David concord wine is one I've had a lot and like, and I'm not much of a wine drinker (probably why I like really sweet wines ;)).

From what I'm seeing, AAR's scope and sequence doesn't correspond to a "typical" grade-level sequence. Looking at the AAR Level 3 pre-test, successfully completing level 2 means that students know the first 44 phonograms and how to read: *words with blends at the beginning and end *V-C-E words *Bossy-R words *basic contractions *words with -ed ending *two syllable words Looking at the levelled readers we have, I'd think he could read most Level 2 and maybe some Level 3 readers. Level 2 uses mostly common words and expects more decoding than use of picture clues (most level 1 readers have phonetically harder words and less common words than level 2 readers :confused1: , because they expect beginning readers to use picture clues :glare: and have parental help). You might need to be around to help sound out common words that are phonetically difficult (because all the common levelled readers series I've seen completely ignore decodability :cursing: and instead seem very sight word and picture clue based). Honestly, most of the levelled reading series I've seen seem very ill-thought-out and more of a money-making thing than actually of help in reading, because none of the levels are of any phonetic-reading use until you can read anything in your oral vocabulary, whereupon you can read *any* of the levels (minus print size and number of words on a page - they do increase in complexity there - but you still need to be able to read everything in your oral vocabulary to truly read even level 1 readers).

Ack, sorry about the bad link. This hopefully is a good link: http://www.toastmasters.org/199-YourSpeakingVoice