I'm having fun now. I had a neighbor who called everyone "an iggernit pig!" I still miss my younger DS calling pajamas "Jomamas." That was my all time favorite. Second was "Hammerman Minkin" for 'Abraham Lincoln.'

My father never understood the song in Sunday School: "Jesus lives me, the Sino." My friend's mother is French. She proudly proclaimed her rural status one time, declaiming, "We're now just a couple of country pumpkins!"

Okay I have two, one cute, one very politically incorrect :Angel_anim: My nephew apparently sees a lot of Amazon boxes arrive at his house. At Christmas he unwrapped a box, and exclaimed, "ALL RIGHT!! I GOT AN AMAZE-ON!" I had a very (very) elderly great-great aunt when I was quite young. Whenever she was crocheting, if you asked her what she was making, she'd give you a big smile and announce, "I'm making an African!" <afghan>

There is no promising 170 days part, but otherwise, that's it-- no testing, no portfolios, etc. All can now be handled online, as well. In Sept/Oct you register the names/grade levels (or ungraded status) of your students, and in July you record how many days they attended. Sometimes you can make a quiet deal to do some extracurriculars at the PS with a sympathetic activity advisor (I don't want to name specifics and get any particular one in trouble, but I've gotten my kids into a program here and there with the permission direct from the coach/activity director. Obviously this would not apply to high school sports). I've never seen a need for a third-party diploma-- we have DE homeschool friends who have granted their own recent diplomas, and their kids have all received scholarship offers from very well-known schools with no problem. Delaware students can register for classes via PA Homeschoolers for AP courses, and take courses at Del Tech or the University of Delaware. The compact size of the state means that many homeschool gatherings or co-ops stand a good chance of being within driving distance :). Northern Delaware is also an easy drive or train ride from Philly, DC, Baltimore, or NYC, and a very short drive from an amazing amount of culture and history available in the Brandywine valley and in Delaware itself, from Chadds Ford to Gettysburg to Fort Delaware and of course the beaches (which are about to be torn asunder by a hurricane).

The State of DE posted an interesting tip I had not considered. If you have solar powered walkway lights, they can become temporary indoor lighting for you at night if you need it during a power outage. Just bring them indoors at night, then poke them back in the ground again the next morning to recharge.

Indeed; as with any form of study, you can lose the forest for the trees; one role you will fill as the teacher is to help discover that tipping point to nudge the student away from the checklist crutch and into more natural writing-- perhaps using a pressure-timed essay or some other device, just as fluent martial artists find they must train under some level of stress in unchoreographed fighting in order to gain that next-level proficiency. . . . and there is always that return guarantee :)

I am starting to wish I had gotten our broken upstairs window fixed...

Halloween is one of the few nights per year that you can have all the candy you want. It's kind of self-regulating-- eating too much is such an unpleasant feeling it isn't a mistake they will make very many times :). Most kids are actually reasonably self-regulating. I let them have at it for about 24 hours, then we ration it, and they're pretty okay with that. I have one kiddo with a massive sweet tooth, and another who is pretty indifferent to candy and sugar in general. He usually gives his candy to his brother after a day or two.

On one side of my family, everyone goes white by age 30. On the other side-- well, people assumed Mom was dying her hair, as she didn't even sprout her first grays until around 73 (she is now all gray). I seem to have received a mix-- I am in my 40's and I have a few dozen grays blended into my brown hair opposite my part. I don't worry about it. I look younger than most of my friends, grays and all. Frankly, I think the gray looks awesome-- I've earned it, along with the life lessons I've learned along the way.

PS: On SWI-A specifically-- I wanted DS9 to learn he could learn from someone other than Mom all the time-- sometimes he gets a bit stuck on the Mom channel :). It's fine that he works with me a lot-- he will only be 9 for one short year after all-- but big brother needs my time too, so he needs to learn to deal without me some too. Success here; he loves listening to Andrew on the DVD! He also loves the writing samples provided, and is very proud to work on this work alone even though he used to hate writing. DS11, using the Medieval book, is grudgingly admitting that it is helping his writing to get better, and that he is even starting to see some value in editing his work to improve it, which for him is huge. I see a day and night difference in his writing from before we started to work on it-- though some of that also goes back to the time we spent with WWE; we covered books 1--3 in a year, plus a small chunk of WWS, and that helped him tremendously.

:iagree: My younger is using SWI-A and my older is using the Medieval Writing book. My older son particularly resents the checklists, and we finally had to sit down and discuss why the assignments are the way they are, and I explained it this way, when he got to one where he was instructed to remove all state of being verbs from his essay: I explained that in this assignment, he was getting intensive practice on rewriting passive sentences, and because he had to rewrite ALL passive sentences, he was being forced to think up several different means of coping with this task instead of just thinking up one or two ways of doing so. Now in the future, when he needs to rewrite a passage of his own writing in a more active voice, whether because a professor demands it or his own writer-spidey-sense demands it, he will have a variety of tools in his writer's toolkit to draw upon, rather than always tackling it the same way and ending up with boring writing. Similarly, with respect to the repetitive charge of having an -ly word and a strong adjective and a vocab word in each paragraph, having to do accomplish this week after week after week in a manufactured setting will, in an effort to avoid boredom, force him to come up with creative ways to think about how to incorporate these features into his writer's tookit, and to see for himself which ones work and which ones don't, and what each method accomplishes for him-- forcefulness, concision, precision, scene or tone, whatever he needs-- so that in the future when he is free of this artificial checklist, he will have enormous experience using these tools and will be able to call upon the appropriate one at will to accomplish what he needs to accomplish in his writing. I likened it to his karate. In karate, we practice many types of drills-- we do isolated basic techniques over and over again. We practice prearranged sparring drills, pre-arranged self-defense techniques, and pre-determined sequences of moves called kata. We do these moves over and over and over until they can be performed automatically. There is no intention that if caught in a self-defense situation, the student will suddenly stop and perform Seisan Kata from start to finish to ward off his attacker, or stop his attacker, request that he reposition himself into a particular wrist hold, then proceed with the attack so that the student can get out of it properly. However, it would be the height of foolishness to believe that these drills-- the individual techniques, the prearranged sparring and self defense, and the kata-- would play no role in the student's ability to defend himself. Of course they would. The idea is to drill the techniques into a student so that he can use them fluidly without needing to plan out each move any more than we need to stop and plan out each word of a novel sentence before we can speak it in casual conversation. IEW is providing the student with a repertoire of techniques from which to draw as needed when writing. I hope that makes sense.

Sent you a PM.

We love our PS3, but I am not making recommendations because our tolerance for violence and some language would make many WTM'ers hair curl. We don't engage in those things personally, but don't shun them in games. To answer your question, though, yes, the Move controllers are indeed very fun and a step up from the Wii. You can still get Lego games and stuff for it, but the games do bend farther toward teen land than the Nintendo stuff, and there is a heavier bent towards more violence and language in general (though not exclusively). Are there any Jedi or hunting games? Those could be good. There is an excellent boxing game that gives my son a serious workout, but the language in that one makes even my ears curl a bit. I wish they had a 'clean it up' option :). You can box just as well without turning the air blue, IMHO. Fortunately my kds are good about not parroting what they hear; they get that we simply don't believe in speaking that way.

In our former school, it would have been a less benign meaning. They said outright, and told the kids that now that they were in school, the teachers and principal had more say over rules and their lives than families and parents, both in and out of school, and that in case of a conflict (in or out of school) to follow school rules, not parents. They were very particular about guns (we are in an upper class suburban area, not a gang area or violent area); they were not to even say, 'gun' or use their fingers to play guns at home, and Mom and Dad didn't have the authority, apparently, to say differently. Needless to say, since my kids are Nerf armed to the teeth and DS the elder owns a BB gun, but hates violating rules this presented a conflict, resolved when I met with principal and teachers and explained that primary rule-making, at home or school, resided with ME. If they wanted easy compliance with homework, dress codes, and behavioral policies, they had better respect ME because my children behaved at school with MY support from home, which they would not have if they undermined the family.

You do not necessarily need every possible book in the Singapore series. Not every kid needs that much overkill, particularly in first grade. Frankly, I find there is too much drill between just the text and workbook; the only reason I use the IP book is because for my DS the workbook is often not challenging enough, so we might skip workbook and just use IP book sometimes. I have never even purchased the CWP.

I started my 9YO on Town this year and he has had no trouble. General background info: he is gifted (high nonverbal IQs) but has always had language and processing and memory difficulties; I worried about MCT being a good fit, but it has been brilliant (so far Grammar Town, 25 sentences in Practice Town, and three chapters of Building Poems plus 8 lessons of Caesar's English Completed; we have not yet started Paragraph Town or literature; I was going to do Para. Town after poetics ends, and start lit after the holidays). Also as background, he did do R&S 3 last year, so he was not a grammar novice, but it could be done anyway; GT does not skip anything basic such as nouns or verbs ;)

Yes, I'm well aware of that. That doesn't mean it makes any sense! I do not routinely set fire to my kids' beds.

Lands' End has footies in sizes 4--16 in the first item I clicked on, btw. I haven't checked LL Bean or Eddie Bauer.

. . . and of course, we want all cotton, no polyester. What is with the "flame retardant" fake fiber fetish? I swear, I promise not to wave my kid over an open flame after putting him in bed. Really. I want the cotton stuff, and preferably cut so that he doesn't have to dislocate a shoulder to put it on. I've had an awful time finding cotton PJ's for a 9YO boy who is over 5' tall and still likes little boy PJ's and wears all cotton. I end up just buying waffle weave long johns in winter, and hoping for the best in summer-- he hates "Leg Underwear" or life would be easy then; I could put him in boxers and a t-shirt.

If you have an ipod or ipad, we are only paying $6/month to subscribe through the app, and yes, it is the full library of videos with the quizzes, not just a small subset of the videos (and they are all available at once, not piecemeal). I understand there may be additional resources available on the website (books? worksheets? I have never seen the website version) and you do not get those with the app.

Another excellent point above.

Thanks for "getting it," ladies! One of the benefits I get out of homeschooling is getting to see the world through their eyes on a regular basis :). Every time they observe something new like a Euglena, or make a connection such as noticing that Cabot used the similar recruiting tactics for colonists to Canada that Ericksson used, or somebody masters factoring polynomials, you just can't help but see the world as new again.

Not all kids need to be killed with review and drill. In fact, doing that to them can make them hate math if they don't need it. However, a first grader needs you to see how he's doing, because yes, you need to listen to them, but they don't always gauge their abilities accurately either :) It's a fine balance :) *****That said, consider this when deciding how much "continuous review" is needed in math. Math naturally has continuous review built into the subject matter by the nature of mathematics itself. *When you learn subtraction, you discuss addition naturally; the two are quite related. *When you learn multiplication and division, again, they are very related to addition and subtraction. In fact, when doing multi-digit multiplication and division, you HAVE to use addition and subtraction. Separate "review" is unnecessary, as you are already using it. *When you study "other topics" like time, measuring, and geometry, if you do word problems, you are probably incorporating problems that involve addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division along with the measuring, time, geometry, etc. So again, "review" as a separate subject is unnecessary; you are just using what you already know. Similarly, a well-designed program will incorporate those "other topics" into word problems and examples any time after they have been introduced even when ramping up to the next level of add/sub/mult/div again, so you don't need to "review" those concepts because they are being continually used again. Singapore Math does this-- you might be working on a unit on adding hundreds, but there will be word problems involving liters, miles, rectangles, time, and money. Why make a big deal out of reviewing those things if the child can do those problems? *When you move on to fractions, you are definitely adding, subtracting, talking about place value, multiplying, and dividing. *When you move to decimals, you are absolutely working with fractions, adding, subtracting, etc. *When you move on to algebra, fractions don't go away. Neither does addition, subtraction . . . get the idea? You don't really need to review it, because you are constantly using it.

My brother has two, two weeks apart in age (both adopted). --one day they played "gas station attendant." They filled the tank of his Toyota Tundra to the top with the garden hose. --He was searching for them (these two are never out of eyeline for long even after TSS workers go home) and heard (garage door up) (thud) (giggle) he ran for the garage... Yep, garage door rides. One kid manned the switch, the other would grab the handle and ride the door up to the top, and drop down just before getting caught in the ceiling (age six). --age two, the 'older one' leg in a cast from CP surgery, grabbed brother's keys, out to the garage, hauled himself into my brother's Tundra, and at this point I saw him, but before I could stop him, he put in the keys, keyed in the combination to open the garage door --memorized from watching Daddy do it--threw the Tundra into reverse, and stretched down to the accelerator and backed it out of the garage (these kids are QUICK). I caught him before he made it down the driveway, hampered as he was by the truck's driving height. Yeah, my brother deals with an active set of three like this. His oldest could retire the office computer by age three. The fact that all three qualify for TSS workers individually tells you something about their judgement skills, so he has three that are super bright, super physical, and non-stop interesting to live with. Adorable kids ;) They have a designated parking space at the ER.

Science Wiz makes excellent all in one kits. The color kit had quite a lot in it, as did the DNA and chem kits.