I honestly can't imagine learning music theory independent of an instrument. How would it make any sense outside the context of actual music? I suppose it could be done but it would be extra difficult. Within the context of learning an instrument, basic theory comes very naturally and easily (at least it did for me, even as a young child). Advanced theory is another story, but most people don't study that. Are you interested in learning piano? I would think that taking lessons for even a year would open up the world of basic music theory.

This is exactly what I do, almost right down to the day! If something happens that prevents me from doing my day's "chores", I just let it go. I might also make up for it later in the week if I feel so inclined (usually just a portion of it, though, like if Monday kitchen day gets skipped, I'll at least mop the floor and clean the sink on one of my lighter days). If you think about it, this makes sure everything gets cleaned at least once every two weeks as well, though generally it will all get done every week. If you have a two-week schedule, think of what happens if you miss a day--that day's chore wouldn't get done for a month! Definitely get over the perfectionism thing, though. It's paralyzing. With cleaning, I just have to remember that housework done poorly is still far, far better than no housework at all. Some days, if I'm in a hurry or I just don't have the motivation to be super thorough, I very consciously notice that I'm not being as thorough as normal and that's just how it is that day. C'est la vie.

I definitely consider myself a natural a speller (never studied and never missed a word on a test), but I'm very grateful for the spelling rules I know. Occasionally I find myself repeating one to myself when I'm spelling one of those words that is somewhat tricky and for whatever reason my mind is going blank and I can't tell which spelling "looks" right. Rules certainly don't hurt a natural speller, and you never know which rules might end up being helpful.

Even still, an all-day parking garage would be a better deal and a lot easier (and you could come in later). You'll be paying for four people to ride the train, plus parking at the Metro station--that's over $20, which is the standard daily parking rate. Just sayin... Of course, if your family would enjoy riding the train then that's part of your DC experience, so go for it. I just hate the train. And yeah, the Metro system here is much, much simpler to navigate than NYC, so if you've got that down, you'll be more than fine.

Maybe I'm crazy but I think you should drive. I hate taking kids on the Metro--they hate it and everyone around you is rude and impatient with them. Plus, it's just plain exhausting. During the week there is a TON of metered street parking available around the Capitol building, a short walk to the NMNH. It costs about $2 an hour. There is a 2-hour time limit but how long can kids really last in a museum anyway? P.S. I would never consider the VRE. That is SUCH a long ride. You'll all be worn out before you even get downtown. P.P.S. If you do decide to take the Metro, I wouldn't go before 9:30 because the commuters are very impatient with tourists--you don't want to get caught up in their anxious rush anyway. And I don't know about the other stations but at West Falls Church, there is a bunch of parking--right at the front of the garage!--that is reserved from like 6:30 am to 10:00 am. It fills up fast after 10:00, but if you get there at about 9:50, it's yours. Enjoy your trip! ETA: DH and I were just talking about the cost of parking in DC and even if you did want to stay the whole day and pay for a parking garage, you're looking at about $20 for the day. When you consider that you pay $5 to park at a Metro station and at least $5 round trip per person for the train, it's a better deal to just drive. Plus, you save yourself a LOT of time and energy. (And honestly, I've never had a problem with DC-area traffic after 10 am. Things move pretty smoothly, and I'm coming into DC from Northern Virginia via 66, which is pretty much the worst road in the entire country.)

This is great advice. My dd is 4.5 and has been writing letters for quite awhile (just because fine motor skills have always been her "thing" and she's really interested in writing). All I care about is that the strokes are in the right direction and that she gets them on the correct part of the line. DH and I both have terrible handwriting, so really our kids have very little hope of ever having truly beautiful handwriting. As long as it's legible, I'll be happy. For now, as long as she's following the "rules", I don't get too hung up on neatness. (Though I can tell when she's being silly and sloppy and I just ask her to slow down. No biggie.)

Yeah, this occurred to me the other day, that perhaps I don't attach quite the same meaning to the word "lazy" as some people do. All I meant by it was the tendency to avoid anything that requires real effort. I certainly don't think my daughter is a lazy, good-for-nothing slob who will never succeed at anything (or whatever horrible ways people interpret that word.) But thanks for pointing out that it has some baggage for a lot of people.

This is really helpful (as are all the posts pointing out the challenges perfectionist people face). I definitely have perfectionist tendencies myself and it took me all the way until a few years ago to acknowledge that I never tried anything in my life that I didn't know I would succeed at. At the time, everyone looked at me like this incredibly capable person who just succeeded at everything, but now I know that it was because I didn't go for the other stuff. We have been aware of dd's perfectionist tendencies since she was a baby. She took her time with all of the developmental milestones, but once she started doing them, she was very, very good. After awhile, we could tell she was waiting until she was sure she could do it well. I guess I didn't think about the connection between that tendency and her quickness to walk away from something that was challenging. We did learn awhile ago to really praise her efforts more than her accomplishments (mainly because of my own experience as a praise junky and perfectionist). When she does persist in something, we make a big deal out of it: "Yay! You tried and you tried and you did it!" Thank you, thank you, thank you for this post.

DH comes from a family that I think is really weird and secretive about this stuff. I come from a family that is really casual about it. With our first, we were going to wait until the second trimester because that's what dh wanted. But then I blabbed to my friend at work and she told me I should just let people be excited with me. And then if something bad happened, all those people would be sad with me, too. I sort of agree with that. It's nice to share joys AND sorrows with the people in our lives. I'm currently pregnant with my fourth and our operating "rule" is that we immediately announce pregnancy to anyone who we would tell anyway about a miscarriage. You know, even if we kept it to ourselves but then lost the baby at, say, 10 weeks, I KNOW I would tell my mom and my siblings about the miscarriage. So why not let them in on the joy from the beginning? Everyone else, I wait until the second trimester. For Facebook, I wait until 20 weeks and then I announce the gender and the pregnancy simultaneously.

I don't have any experience with narration yet (since my oldest is only four), but I just had to laugh at this comment because I so TOTALLY agree! The bad writing and biased content in the majority of homeschooling books is hardly good advertising for the ability of the average homeschool parent to educate their children well. I know there are a lot of very intelligent homeschool parents out there who can write well--THEY need to be the ones writing these books!

Actually, I wasn't referring to your post at all. Yours was one of the helpful ones I referred to. I was only referring to the blatantly critical ones, which were the minority. And I actually think it's good for people to know that their words hurt people. If I hurt people's feelings, I want to know. Yes, people are responsible for their own emotional reactions. But that doesn't mean we should all run around spouting insensitive, critical language and then saying, "Hey, it's your fault if you take offense. You're in charge of your feelings." We SHOULD be aware of the fact that we don't know people's circumstances and we should tread lightly, especially when it comes to sensitive issues like parenting. We all feel certain insecurities as parents (if we're being honest with ourselves)--we don't need other mothers reinforcing those things or pointing out new ones, you know? And FWIW, I do give people the benefit of the doubt. This is the first time in my life that any post on a forum made me cry (and I'm quite active on another board). Most posts are either clearly supportive or murky and I assume that the murky ones are trying to be supportive just aren't worded well. It's the blatantly critical comments (of which there are a couple on this thread) that I find to be completely out of line.

THANK YOU! :hurray:

Faithr, thank you for your constructive message. Look, ladies, I admit that my language in my opening post was a bit harsh. Im having a bad day. Ever had one of those? When I say that we've known this for awhile, I'm only referring to the fact that we are bothered by dd's tendency to give up very easily with most things that she tries, including things that she really wants to do, like riding a bike. She just tends to give up right when she meets resistance. It bothers us. I also admit that this is my first time doing this. She's my first kid. Maybe my expectations aren't entirely realistic (and I'm not talking about my expectations for reading, as I really don't have any, but rather my expectations regarding her behavior). And I'm not clueless about child development--it was my minor (not that I'm claiming expertise, by any means.) But please understand that I love my child. I like my child. My child is a very happy 4-year-old--she plays all day long (doesnt even watch TV), she dresses up, plays with play dough, paints, makes messes, does puzzles, runs around in the woods, etc. We laugh and snuggle and I read books to her. I don't sit her down at a table and force her to do school. I said that I started teaching her to read because she was interested. Then I backed off because she wasn't interested. And now I started again (at dh's behest) and she clearly isn't ready. That's all. I not pushing academics on her. Thank you, everyone who has offered advice and gentle reminders. To the rest of you, enjoy the rest of your afternoon knowing that you made someone cry today--kind of a lot--and feel like a failure as a mother. Over sensitive? Perhaps. But that's the kind of day I'm having. The thing about internet communication is that you don't know the state of mind of the person on the other end of the computer. You don't know what kind of day other people having. And you certainly don't know what kind of parent someone is or the nature of their relationship with their child from a one-paragraph post on a random message board. So let us all remember that our words can hurt people, even people who don't care about our opinions, and post our comments accordingly.

Seriously? Who talks to a complete stranger like this, based on a tiny little piece of information? :confused:

Lack of readiness was honestly my first thought. DD did originally show an interest in reading, so we moved forward. (This was several months ago.) Then she started putting up resistance so I dropped it for a few months. Lately, dh has been pushing me to get back on it, so I decided to give it a try and this is the result. So maybe my new question is, how do you deal with a pushy dh? :glare: (I'll start a new thread about that over on the general board.) Thanks, ladies.

My dd is super lazy. We've known this for awhile. It shows up in several non-school contexts and of course it shows up in a school context. We're very informal right now, just learning to read. She totally knows how to sound out words and she will do it proudly...until she sees a sentence. Then, feeling slightly challenged, she says she can't do it. Any gentle prodding just results in whining. She's SUCH a whiner. How do you deal with day-to-day laziness? Even incentives don't totally fix the problem (she still whines the whole time). Honestly, stuff like this makes me wonder if I'm going to last as a homeschooler.

I don't have a list but I imagine most of these things will be learned naturally, just by being a part of our family. We're very do-it-yourself, fix-it-yourself, make-it-yourself kind of people. So our kids will learn cooking, baking, sewing, knitting/crocheting, meal planning, frugal living, basic home repair, stuff like that. I am, however, planning to find a good money management course for kids when dd gets a little older. That's one of those things that I don't think very many of us were taught very well. I have strong feelings about this topic for public schools. I wish schools would teach a "life skills" course that includes basics about human development (for when they become parents), relationships (what a healthy one looks like, basics of communication and conflict resolution, etc), resume/interview skills, personal finance, home buying, etc. These are the core skills and knowledge people need to function effectively in society, and the majority of kids enter adulthood knowing absolutely nothing about them. We plan on modeling healthy relationships and teaching our kids these things along the way or as they come up (as with home buying), but not all parents are conscientious about this stuff and some just plain don't possess the skills themselves. ETA I forgot to link to this book that I bought a few months ago. I haven't read much of it so I don't have any opinions But I thought I would just point it out. Only 99 cents on th Kindle. http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Self-Sufficient-Children-ebook/dp/B003XVYHES/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324577798&sr=1-2-fkmr0

Good advice! Thanks! :thumbup1:

Has anyone bought this? I'm really interested in this series, but I'm wondering if the teaching edition adds very much to the basic cd's (which can be purchased separately and gradually, as opposed to dropping $220 at once). I can't tell from the descriptions exactly what the teacher's resources are.

If you want to do grammar, spelling, writing through literature, I think you should read more about Charlotte Mason's approach. That's pretty much how she advocated learning language arts and she has a lot of good ideas. As for the other subjects, I agree with po who suggested finding a book you like as a spine. There are a lot of those things like "First Encyclopedia of ________", things like the human body, astronomy, etc. I would use one of those just to guide you through a subject and introduce you to each topic. Then you can go to the library and get more books to go along with them. You can also find books with tons of science experiments (Mudpies to Magnets comes to mind), or little projects to go along with various history topics. Or you could just google ideas for supplemental activities. That's what I would do. You could use those encyclopedias in the way you mentioned, by maybe letting your kids choose which topic they want to study next. That way, you're choosing the overall subject, but you're also following their interests for specifics.

A few months ago, I was somehow completely excited about FIAR. I thought it was so awesome, how it can use one book to hit on five subjects. Then we ended up moving and all of that sort of overtook my plans to start using it. Well, last night I pulled out one of my volumes and started looking at it again. I was totally disappointed. Suddenly all the activities seem lame and many of them seem like a bit of a stretch, just to make up something for the subject. What the heck? Am I the only one who thinks FIAR is not what it's cracked up to be?

I love this article! I think too often we focus on the difficulty of reading material rather than its content. Reading isn't just about decoding, it's also about comprehending and experiencing. The content of picture books can be superior in a number of ways. First of all, its age appropriate, meaning tht it is about things kids can relate to and understand or learn from. Secondly, i recently read a similar article that pointed out that many picture books present a broader range of vocabulary in their short 32 pages than some of those Junie B. Jones type books present in an entire chapter book! Third, the content of picture books can really be quite sophisticated on an emotional and even literary level. Seriously, some of these picture books are deep! They give a child a lot to think about and a lot to talk about. Many chapter books are only good for sustained reading practice, which is fine, but it doesnt represent intelligence or excellence or sophistication.

I love Facebook! I live on the other side of the country from all my friends and family, so I obviously can't interact in person with any of them. And I highly doubt that I would be giving them all a ring once a week or so to hear what is going on in their lives, which I love hearing about. I also feel like I have gotten to know some of my friends so much better through Facebook than I ever knew them before because I frequently link to articles that spur thoughtful--and yes, sometimes heated--discussion. But all of my friends always remain civil toward me and each other, even when we disagree strongly. I love it. As for privacy stuff, what you don't put up can't be made public. There is so very little personal info on my facebook account that I don't care if the whole world knew it. It's basically just my name. You are in charge of what info you provide, right?

I think $79 is a great deal for a solid ereader like the Kindle! When I got mine last year it was $139 (and the newer ones are much nicer), and of course they started out much higher than that, even. I don't know that many ereaders will be much cheaper. You could check the Sony one. But other than that and the Nook, be careful what you buy because you want to have access to all the free stuff.

My mom taught me to crochet as a little girl but I totally learned to knit from YouTube! Just search "how to crochet" and try a few videos until you find one that works for you. Different videos use different camera angles or explanations from the demonstrator, so it's helpful to look through a few before getting too frustrated. As for sites, check out ravelry.com. Tons of free patterns and a little addicting. Good luck!