That was my thought, too - that her family wouldn't eat her food if they had other (better, to them) options. You're a kind friend to roll with it even though it bothers you so much :grouphug:. I hope you and your family enjoy both your dinner with friends and your other, more traditional Christmas dinner :).

Yes, I have a yearly hs budget and I keep a running total of what I spend. It's not all curricula - I include books (for them and for my teacher education), "school supplies" sorts of stuff, the keyboard, etc. I put the yearly amount in during the summer and then buy throughout the year. (Last year I had some left over that carried over to this year; this year I just drained it two days ago. If I need more I'll pull it from my fun money, since there's a large crossover between my "teacher education" books and stuff I buy for me, and I went a bit wild on teacher Ed this year.) I bought lots of stuff out of my fun money before we started officially hs'ing (yes, I was that excited ;)), and I recorded most of that somewhere or another, just to keep track of how much fun money I had left. I've spent $1800 in official hs budget money and probably $1000-$1500 in the five years before that.

Love the piano guys, too. Lindsay Stirling is the violinist in the Mission Impossible video - we really enjoy her videos, especially her collaborations with Peter Hollens (vocalist). Also the violinist from Celtic Woman is fun to watch and listen to. Vanessa Mae has some enjoyable arrangements as well.

My mom lost hers while doing hurricane clean-up a few years ago. She and dad ended up buying a new one. Good luck getting it sorted :grouphug:.

See, and I was expecting That Mom to be the one who raised her hand and said, "So, basically, you have a minimum SAT score of 700."

Both the zoo and the aquarium would count under "live animals", so my guess is that you are supposed to compare zoo + aquarium votes to museum + planet show votes.

My dad's job is kinda like that. They are salaried and have flexible hours, but they had a rule/guideline that they wanted all first shift workers to generally be there from 9-3 (excepting lunch), and they could choose whether they wanted to get in the rest of their hours before or after that 9-3 slot (or whenever). But it was more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule - people took off early all the time, and some people even had regular hours outside of the "official hours". One person didnt come in till after 12pm, and worked through the evening, which was technically against the rules but either he got it approved or no one complained. And Dad would come in around 5am and leave after lunch (minus all the days he worked overtime, of course ;)), so he basically worked an entirely different shift from the other guy, even though they were both technically first shift workers. Which was the exact situation the official hours was supposed to prevent, but since it didnt interfere with getting work done, nobody worried about it. But the case of people occasionally leaving during official hours (instead of regularly taking off during official hours) - that was totally ok and never an issue.

That scenario sounds like it would have more in common with Benezet's experiment than the Sudbury class - intentional but mostly informal math prep, instead of self-directed activities providing the "math prep". Though Benezet spread the formal arithmetic teaching over 2-3 years instead of one.

The link isn't working for me, but, assuming it is the Sudbury school article, I read it a while ago, so here are some random thoughts of mine: I'm sympathetic to the basic idea that motivated learners can learn waaaaaaaay faster than unmotivated ones. I'm also sympathetic to the idea, promoted by John Holt and pretty core to unschooling, that students learn waaaaaaaaay better when they haven't been socialized into seeing school subjects as unconnected to "real life", and so give up on the idea that school learning ought to make any sort of "normal" sense, end up effectively trained out of using their normal real-life intuition in their school work, because they were explicitly or implicitly taught to follow the teacher's method whether it made sense to them or not. (And I've learned how *easy* it is, even as a person who really values understanding, to be tempted to say, "it just *is*", after the twelfth clarifying question. And that is one on one, with a flexible schedule.) The biggest issue that occurred to me as I read the article was the question of how many prerequisite skills had to be in place for the formal learning to proceed so efficiently. In addition to plenty of number sense and math intuition (developed how? through what sorts of self-directed activities?), this was a bunch of highly motivated and curious students, very self-starting, with plenty of grit and perserverence - all of the character strengths promoted in How Children Succeed, in fact. Unschoolers seem to expect math intuition and those character strengths to flower automatically if not stifled, but what if they don't? The idea is intriguing to me, but I see it as much like "one day potty training" - sure, with all the prereqs in place I have no doubt the actual formal learning goes very well. But it's a formidable number of non-trivial prereq's, and unlike the potty-training book, which at least spelled them all out explicitly, the article takes them all for granted as naturally flowing from the unschooling process. Which is great when it works, but gives you zero help for proactively working on getting all the prereq's in place when the unschooling process falters.

That is an interesting discussion, but not quite my point here. In that thread, I think that everyone agrees that *some* people need math beyond Alg 2 (who those people are and why they need it is a matter for debate, but the bare fact that some non-trivial amount of people need it seems to be generally accepted). And whether CC's position - that you need Alg 2 to be career and college ready - is a good one would fit in with that discussion. But my point is that even though *some* non-trivial amount of students need more than Alg 2, including pretty much all STEM students, CC does not choose to address that path at all. Their minimum standards may be high, but their top standards aren't high enough. People who are as college ready as it is possible to be under CC are still not ready to go into STEM majors. But CC doesn't seem to acknowledge or care about that reality - they seem to treat their "college ready" as college ready for any major, but students with STEM aspirations who can't start with Calc 1 in college are far less likely to graduate in a STEM field. Basically my point is that CC's "college ready" is a far more minimal standard than CC touts it to be.

CA might mention it, but it's not part of CC proper - you can tell by how they are suggesting schools look to CB syllabi for ideas, instead of referencing particular CC standards. Things are *really* left up to the schools to do whatever they think is best, and they acknowledge that different schools are inevitably going to focus on different things, and there is no real attempt to come up with specifics that all schools ought to cover - pg 116-117 have 20-odd topics, but there are no CC-aligned standards nor CC-aligned tests to ensure some level of basic standardization. Which is the opposite of what CC was trying to do - standardize the core components of the core courses. CC doesn't seem to think that anything beyond Alg 2 qualifies as a core component of being college ready for math - else they'd have created standards for it. And even the quoted bit for CA's standards just *allows* for Calc to be taught, instead of *requiring* it (math through Alg 2 is required to be offered in CC).

A blog I follow has the opposite opinion wrt the math standards - that CC's "college ready" is *not* STEM-ready. From looking at PARCC's site, they only have standards going through Algebra 2, and their definition of "college ready" is "academically well prepared to engage successfully in entry-level, credit-bearing courses in College Algebra, Introductory College Statistics, and technical courses requiring an equivalent level of mathematics". That is from their description of the highest level of achievement in the highest set of standards CC offers - you can't do any better in CC than that (pg 6 in http://www.parcconline.org/sites/parcc/files/PARCCCCRDPolicyandPLDs_FINAL_0.pdf). College Algebra seems to be Pre-Calc, basically, and my understanding is that if your goal is to major in a STEM field, it is *highly* recommended to have taken through Calc 1 in high school. The blogger was rather disappointed that CC set the bar for their top category so much lower than what good colleges expect for STEM majors.

It's an interesting question for me. My sister and I have very similar IQs, we went to the same schools (decent suburban district) and took the same classes, with similar grades and AP/SAT scores, and neither of us were particularly challenged, though both of us thought we learned a fair bit (I, at least, remember most of what I learned - I could have done more, but what I did was worthwhile - it was a good foundation). And I went on to college and crashed and burned due to my inability to put my work ethic into practice after years of slacking, and my sister made the transition with no problems and graduated with a 4.0 in math. Best as I can tell, it comes down to personality differences. My sis is the sort of person who works hard whether she needs to or not (like my mom), and I'm the sort of person who pushes the limits as far as I can, only working when I needed to. My entire 1-12 schooling was one long experiment in just how little I could work and still maintain top grades, pushing the limits of procrastination and minimum effort more and more each year (even as the work got harder and harder). Breaking that habit when I hit college proved to be more than I could manage. For me it wasn't the shock of having to study or feeling stupid for having to study, it was the fact I had conditioned myself to only work under pressure, with an ever increasing threshold for how long I could procrastinate before feeling the pressure, and that pretty much guaranteed I was going to find my limits the hard way. I held on as long as I could, walking the knife edge, before crumbling under the pressure instead of managing to develop an effective work ethic. But neither of us worked to our full abilities in K-12, though my sis was successful in spite of it. I do a lot more independent learning now though, fwiw. But she's happy with her schooling, in a way I never was, even as I went through it - no real differences other than our own selves. I wanted to homeschool my future kids from the moment I heard of hs'ing (age 19) - I was still succeeding in college at that point, but I knew I'd wasted a lot of time in school (read 2-3 books a day from sixth grade on in classes) and wanted more than that for my dc. Having all that time for fun reading skewed my perspective of what I should expect out of life, plus ingrained the idea of work = no fun that still plagues me today. Work is that thing you do as fast and as minimally as possible so as to get on to the fun stuff, not something that is worthwhile in itself. It is the opposite of the attitude that gets you ahead in life, and I wasn't even raised that way - my parents aren't that way at all. Years of "school is your job" with school being an immensely *easy* job got me used to not having to work - and that is a trick and a half to overcome. ETA: So my focus is on making sure I give my dc an education that both requires and is worthy of their full abilities - one they need to work for, and rewards that work - whatever that means for them. My parents instilled a growth mindset in me, but I still managed to pick up a lot of stealth fixed mindset beliefs about intelligence meaning not having to work because of my experience in school, plus got no practice at putting the work ethic my parents instilled in me to work. (I feel a bit like Mr. Darcy - my parents instilled good principles in me, including a good work ethic, but then left me to follow them as I would (which, given an easy "job" for my formative years, wasn't that great), and my application was kinda hit or miss.)

I don't have five kids, but I take my three with me to my doctor appointments - it's never been a problem (my doctors have all been very understanding and accepting of it, and I'm used to doing things with kids sitting on/by me ;)).

Here's a comparison I did between the U.S. and Italian editions of Athenaze: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/83103-comparison-of-the-us-and-italian-editions-of-athenaze/ Short answer is that the Italian Athenaze has a lot more reading passages and is overall organized much more like Lingua Latina (although it still has some glosses, and separate grammar instruction) - the appeal is for people who are looking for a Ancient Greek version of Lingua Latina.

We officially use the Nicene Creed for communion services, and the Apostles' Creed for non-communion services, but in practice some churches just use the Apostles' Creed for both. I know the Nicene Creed, but not as well - I think we say it mostly at a few special services.

I'm Lutheran, and the Apostles' Creed is pretty central - we say it every week in the Divine Service, and it is a big part of our catechism (one of the six chief parts). It is formally memorized in sunday school and confirmation, but mostly everyone knows it by heart just from saying it every week (my 7yo knows a good chunk of it just from that). I've been taking baby steps into praying the daily prayer offices, and the Creed is included in those (along with the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer). Basically the Commandments are a capsule summary of the Law - they tell us what we must do (and show us how we fall short), and the Creed is a capsule summary of the Gospel - what God has done for us. (And then we respond to what God has done for us as we pray the Lord's Prayer.) Reciting, meditating, praying those three texts is basically Christian spirituality in a nutshell.

I set up some filters a month or so back to avoid that very issue. When you are on the "view new content" page, one of the options is "filter by forum" - can't remember details, but I imagine I clicked it and it was straightforward from there ;).

:lol: I do have the 3rd edition of WRTR on my shelf (if only I'd known, as I was picking up a cheap copy for reference, it was the *4th* edition I should have been getting ;)), as well as SWR. I've read through the 1st edition of WRTR (library copy) a couple times a while ago and I understand the basic idea, but the devil's in the details and all that. I've been procrastinating starting up formal spelling, partly because of having to figure out a WRTR routine and partly because I haven't figured out how to get handwriting in yet (dd7's handwriting is self taught, and as a lefty, she writes a lot of her letters from right to left; I've been trying to find a time in the day where I can work with her one-on-one *without* sibling interference, to remediate her letter formation). Maybe I need to get off my duff ;).

My dd *loves* LoF, and if I went at her speed, we could easily finish one of the elementary books in a week. One lesson takes about 15-20 min here, including reading and discussion time. There are about 5-6 problems per lesson, some easy arithmetic, some easy conceptual questions, and every couple of lessons or so there is a really think-y conceptual question.

Dd7 is the whole language dream child. We have done a 100% strict phonics-only approach to reading, and thank God for it, because she guesses enough as it is. She naturally reads for meaning and intuitively uses all the whole language strategies (pictures clues, context/grammar clues, phonics clues) plus guessing from word shape/length to tackle unknown words. And she is *good* at it, very good (for a while when she was 4 we thought she could read, because she could guess so well from so few clues). But she has all the typical downsides of reading via whole words, and I can tell which words she learned phonetically (from explicit teaching or from being forced to slow down and sound it out because her natural whole language strategies all failed) versus those she learned/absorbed as wholes from her fun reading. (She tends to miss suffix changes on words she learned as wholes unless context indicates her default choice just doesn't fit grammatically and so she is forced to take a second look. Plus she is unable to use her whole word knowledge as a help in decoding phonetically similar words, but she *can* do that with words she learned phonetically). We used Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach to teach reading (but I used a phonics method, not the author's hybrid method), but she had a few explosions in reading last spring and it's now too easy for her. She can read almost anything she picks up, but her ability to phonetically decode unfamiliar multi-syllable words is almost nil; however, her large vocabulary plus her amazing ability to guess right from context mostly makes up for it, especially given the 3th-4th grade level books she mostly reads. Plus, her visual memory is fantastic, and once she figures out what a given word is, she'll remember it as a whole after one or two repetitions. Decoding phonetically is definitely a lot harder for her than just remembering the word, and even though I never just give her the word but help her sound it out, she figures plenty out on her own. Anyway, right now I am using ElizabethB's syllable dividing lessons and working through Webster's Speller (as a reader). It does seem to be working well enough - her ability to sound out unfamiliar multi-syllable words and to pay attention to little niggling letter differences is improving - but idk, it all feels sort of haphazard and flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants somehow - like I am throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. I guess I'm just wondering if there is a more systematic or efficient approach, or some particular techniques that are quite useful in this situation.

I thought that was *awesome*. I've had a few of those moments here, for sure.

I'm thinking of the Good Books in terms of their being *real* stories - written primarily to be a good, enjoyable piece of writing, not primarily as a tool to *teach* something about writing or language - yet they *are* useful at deepening our children's understanding of language. Thus the idea of the Good Books as preparation for the Great Books. My best guess is that the math equivalent of this would be math problem books, written primarily for the joy of solving them (not as hidden vehicles to teach math) - instead of offering up an interesting story for others to enjoy, the creator is offering up interesting math to enjoy. And once you get a certain amount of math under your belt, there's quite a few of those out there that I've been able to find. But mostly those require you to be at least through elementary math (often basic algebra and geometry, too). I haven't really seen any for early math outside of curricula like Miquon, MEP, and CSMP. And as awesome as those curricula are, I *also* want to have a bunch of math-for-fun books around to do with my dc the way I've been reading to them since they were little. Idk, maybe, just as baby books are mind-numbingly boring to parents (as are most early readers, and most beginning piano pieces for children, etc.) - the kids' ability is too limited for anything accessible to them to have intrinsic interest - there's a certain amount of math ability/development that is needed in order to do anything interesting, and kids hit that point in math later than they hit that point in language. Or maybe the problem is *me* - that I am used to reading to my dc, am comfortable with it, even in the face of toddler distractions ;) - in a way that I am *not* used to doing with math. I read living math sites a lot a few years back, and my recollection was that they were more about taking advantage of the math opportunites already present in your everyday life than how to use outside sources of for-real-math with your dc the way we read books to them (and so introduce words and ideas to them that they wouldn't have otherwise seen in their everyday life), but they still might been helpful for getting into a mathy lifestyle ala Bravewriter's writing lifestyle. Or maybe, just as I read them out-of-level books to stretch them (so long as they enjoy it), I should just pick up some easier-but-still-real math puzzle books and do them with them even if they don't have all the prerequisite knowledge and I'm doing most of the heavy lifting. Or maybe I should just concentrate on carving out time to play cards and dominos and chess with them, sit down and build with them, and call it a day.

I do get why parents choose to uphold their (higher) standards at all times. But sometimes that seems to turn into a pride thing where those parents (not you :grouphug:) look down on other parents who need or want a break from some of the minor aspects of eternal parenting vigilance. That even when a break is offered, it makes you a "lesser" parent to take it. IDK, like so many parenting things, the issue of standards and what are deemed "acceptable" reasons and places for relaxing some of them so easily turns in round 5,297 of the mommy wars :sigh. Which is what I think I'm reacting to, here (whether I should or not).

WRT the question of, "what if it were *my* kid dumping out bins of toys at someone else's house? Should I just ignore it because I'm having "me time"?" Well, what if you get up and go to clean it up, and the hostess says, "Oh don't worry about it :)". Is there anything wrong with taking the hostess up on her offer and enjoying not having to worry about it? I see so many parents who would insist on upholding their family standards even when they are invited to relax from them while in some one else's home, and while it is those parents' choice to make, I don't think choosing to take the hostess up on her offer is wrong either. And I don't think it is wrong to *enjoy* it. There are things I wouldn't let my dc do even with the other parent's permission - such as hurt people or pets - but if they didn't mind if my dc caused a bit of damage to a given toy, I would follow their lead and not worry either. And the OP, by staying silent, gave tacit permission that what was going on was ok by her lights. Whether or not it *should*, practically speaking silence gives consent.