Meg O'Keefe in A Wrinkle in Time.

Hi Racheline, welcome to the boards!! You might try re-posting this question on the K-8 Curriculum board, since you are looking for curriculum suggestions. Plus, this board, the General board, moves REALLY fast and questions often get buried super fast - you are much more likely to get more responses on the K-8 board! :) I don't have a suggestions for phonics - we use Saxon Phonics, which I like a lot, but it has a lot of seatwork. We break it up into a couple sessions over the day to give him some 'wiggle breaks' :) But, for writing for a wiggly young boy, I'd definitely suggest you look at Writing With Ease. The first level is pretty gentle - one sentence of copywork, or else read them a short reading selection and ask them questions about it, which they have to answer in complete sentences. Very short time commitment, and gives a lot of great practice in copywork and forming good sentences. Hope that helps!

It's not REALLY poorly worded, what they didn't tell you is that there are only TWO seats on the Ferris Wheel :lol: :lol: :lol:

I would be polite, stick to the issue of the test results, and let anything dumb she says go in one ear and out the other, with a liberal dose of "Oh, really?" and bean dip :D Some people go into psychology areas because they are trying to figure out how to fix their own problems, YWIM?

For a meaty book, for 5th grade, I'd expect at least 30 minutes. My DD had to read for an hour a day, sometimes things she picked, sometimes things I picked. Some of the meatier stuff I picked, she had a hard time getting through a full hour, but I made her stick with it to build up that ability. If he's not reading for as long as you'd like, I'd say start where he is, insist on daily reading, and increase the time by 5 minutes every month (or two if he struggles) until you get where you want to be.

OhElizabeth, this might help - http://www.fossilnews.com/1996/cladistics.html I found that article at the Miller-Levine website for the dragonfly book, which is here - http://www.millerandlevine.com/intro.html The classification chapter is Chapter 18, if you want to look up their other resources, just that article did the best job *FOR ME* of explaining what the heck cladistics was :) I'm still trying to decide whether to use this book or not for next year myself. We HAD a local chemist who taught middle school physics at our homeschool co-op this year, and she was going to use the Miller-Levine book to teach biology for next year, but unfortunately she's not going to be available after all :-( I'm probably going to stick with the middle-school HST Life Science book, just because it's easier for me to implement, and I can read it to my very interested 6YO and he'll still understand it, but my 12YO will probably not be as challenged by it as I'd like. But we are still going to use the Miller-Levine book for a few chapters, including the classification one, which is all a very roundabout way to explain why the heck I'm such an expert on Ch 18 of the dragonfly book, 'cuz I just read it and wrote the lesson plan for it a couple weeks ago :-)

Actually, the Miller-Levine dragonfly text (at least my 2005 edition of it, older versions may vary) teaches cladistic. It teaches Linnean classification for only two pages, and pretty much just as part of the history of classification. The rest of the chapter on classification is all about cladograms and DNA.

Yup - my son a couple years ago was terrified to the point of screaming and running from the room by a Hello Kitty video. To be fair, it was an adaptation of a fairy tale, and they had just introduced the villain, complete with scary music, clap of thunder, evil laugh, the whole nine yards. Not what I had expected when I popped in the pink DVD with the hearts & candy on it!! :D That said, I rarely pre-read unless I think there is going to be an issue. My son still does mostly read-alouds, and I admit I will change poor word choices on the fly when reading old stories - just today I changed a few words in a picture book where a boy was saying that ALL boys hate pink - that's my son's favorite color! My DD age 11 reads too widely for me to police her reading, too, although I do pre-read some titles and sometimes make recommendations. Last year she wanted to read I Shall Wear Midnight, in which a teen girl's friend gets beaten nearly to death by her father after he finds out she's gotten herself pregnant. It's not horribly graphic, but obviously it's upsetting, and I told her that it had some stuff in it that would probably upset her, and it was her choice to read it or not, but if she did and was bothered by it, I wanted her to talk to me. She started to read the book, got an inkling of where it was going from the foreshadowing, and decided to put the book back on the shelf until she's older. This upcoming year I've got Red Scarf Girl on the literature list, and I know that will require pre-reading on my part, so we can discuss it while she's reading it. She's too old to have books censored for her, but I still want to be able to discuss, and sometimes caution.

I have read it, as an English major in college. I felt I got a lot out of it. There is a lot to think about in it. Your 11 YO may not get much out of it yet, unless he is particularly scholarly and a very good reader. I'm planning on putting my DD through it in 9th grade. Would you mind posting the reading plan for it? Thanks if you can!!

Have you looked at the Miller-Levine Biology? The older dragonfly book is easy to find cheap, has a website of supplemental material, http://www.millerandlevine.com/intro.html , and has 2 labs per chapter directly in the book, OR if you are wanting higher-level labs, The Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments is meant to go with Miller-Levine.

That's EXACTLY what we do - I LOVE LOVE LOVE the Hake Grammar, but their writing program was pretty dry and did not have nearly enough explicit instruction for my DD ("Write a topic sentence for this paragraph." "Oh no, how do I figure out how to write a topic sentence ALL BY MYSELF, whine, cry!!"). Now we use WWS and while there is still a fair amount of whining, there is not any more actual crying, and the work gets DONE :)

They are both under $10 pretty often - you can use thetractor.com to track price history on Amazon items.

I would not suggest jumping into Saxon at the Algebra II level. Saxon has some unusual ways of presenting some material and if you start later than the Algebra I book, it's not going to be clear. Plus, the method is SO different, and it sounds like she wants to accelerate a little over the summer? It would be so hard to get used to a very different system and accelerate at the same time. Have you looked at Lial's? I think the Lial's Intermediate Algebra might be what you want. You can look at the Table of Contents here - http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/Intermediate-Algebra/9780321574978.page Older used copies are cheap to pick up.

You might check for CPO Life Science. Do you have Half Price Books in your area? Our local Half Price Books seems to get these in fairly often, often with big cardboard boxes that seem to be equipment kits. Another thought - do you HAVE to do a lot of labs this year? With a 12 YO, a 2 YO, and a newborn, I'd be strictly looking for a fairly low-lab year :) I work from home and don't have a lot of time to chase down labs either. I'm using Holt Science and Technology Life Science this year in part because a lot of the labs can be done by my 12 YO on her own using household stuff. Some of the labs are more elaborate, but I figure it's 7th grade, this is NOT our last stab at Biology, so we can skip the elaborate labs for now. A 12 YO can certainly be in charge of gathering his own bean seeds, potting soil, earthworms, and such. If the lab is too elaborate for him to gather his own supplies, then skip it. With HST Life Science, that philosophy still has us doing 1 or 2 labs a week, which seems like plenty to me. I wrote up a syllabus for how to use it (willing to share if you want, PM me your email), and I'm just going to print that off for her to follow. Then all I have to do is supervise :-)

Picturesque Book of Progress has no fictional content, or science, just history (as seen through the lens of the culture of 1930s America, of course). It's good for logic stage - I wouldn't use it for a younger child without some editing as facts and attitudes are different now. But if you want to start giving an older child an interesting window into how people viewed the world several decades ago, it's pretty neat.

Been through something similar, although my kids were a little younger at the time. Just tell her that your ideas about these issues are changing, and give her some reasons why - without getting TMI, of course. Hard to tell you exactly what to say because I don't know your situation, of course, but just simple explanations like "I no longer believe X because of Y". If your "Y" is very personal or painful, then you may just want to explain that a lot of people believe a lot of different things, and people's beliefs change over time, and your beliefs have changed recently. I WOULD emphasize to your kids that THEY are free to make up their own minds and believe what they feel comfortable with. Might see if your local library has Parenting Beyond Belief by Dale McGowan, I seem to recall some sections in there for dealing with kids' questions about beliefs. Good luck!

I think a lot of it depends on the curricula you are using. AoPS is definitely meant to avoid calculator use, we used it last year and every time my DD asked if she could use the calculator, it turned out she was taking an approach to the problem that was not the approach the lesson was trying to teach :-) But when we did Saxon, I let her use the calculator for a couple kinds of problems once she had worked enough of them by hand that I felt confident that she understood the procedure - averaging problems that had a lot of numbers to find the mean of, or for finding square roots for numbers that are not perfect squares. AoPS didn't really have any of those kinds of 'computational slogging' problems :-) So if you intend to stick with Saxon, I would consider allowing calculator use for limited kinds of problems towards the end of Algebra I, when you start running into these sorts of 'slogging' problems, especially when the 'slogging' part is just one step in a multi-step problem. Some of the square root problems towards the end of Algebra I can take up a full page of paper just with computations if you are solving with the 'cut-and-try' method. I made her do those when practicing cut-and-try was the point of the problem, but for later problems when finding a weirdo square root was just one step in a multi-step problem, I let her use the calculator.

Here's the story - DD is a great reader - NOW! :-) A few years ago she hated it and only did it under duress. But she reads for pleasure daily, and most importantly, she considers herself a good reader. She reads a lot of fantasy and some historical fiction, but not much beyond that. She's currently reading The Lord of the Rings, and has read several other adult reading level books, mostly fantasy novels. The past several months she has started showing a lot more maturity in her academic work, and we've talked about how in 7th grade she needs to start expanding the types of reading she is doing, and she seems ok with that. So with that in mind, how does this look as a reading list that will gradually increase in difficulty, and at the same time introduce her to some other genres. My thought is to start with fairly easy books that are similar to what she already likes and gradually expand, so these are listed in the order I intend to use them. I could use a few more suggestions!! :-) The Wolves of Willoughby Chase Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry A Wrinkle in Time The Railway Children Charlotte's Web Coraline The Sword in the Stone The Martian Chronicles Flowers for Algernon Tom Sawyer The Hound of the Baskervilles Murder on the Orient Express Treasure Island Thank You, Jeeves All Creatures Great and Small A Christmas Carol Watership Down A Tree Grows in Brooklyn To Kill a Mockingbird Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Red Scarf Girl Great Expectations (then a drama unit) Arsenic and Old Lace The Crucible The Tempest (her choice, she LOVES the Helen Mirrin version of this movie) Any additional titles that seem to fit in this mess of a list would be appreciated! :-) We're not following WTM history, so I'm not concerned about a particular era. Thanks!!

My DD HATED reading when she was younger, in third grade or so, but now she is a voracious reader & reads constantly. I started requiring her to read EVERY day - at first 20 minutes, and at first the big struggle was to get her to stay on it and not interrupt herself until the 20 minutes was up. We REALLY struggled with this for several months, you have to be very firm. I let her read whatever she wanted as long as it was a chapter book that she had not read before. Once she started (FINALLY) getting interested in what she was reading, and not interrupting herself, I started increasing the time in 5 minute increments until we were at an hour. She just finished sixth grade and really considers herself a reader to the point that I no longer have to assign her reading time, she reads plenty on her own. NOW the challenge is to get her to read outside her favorite genres :-) My advice - whatever you decide to do, give it several months to work. It's a slow process. But it CAN be done.

I actually have this workbook. First, it is for the FOURTH edition of the Saxon Algebra I, which is radically different in a lot of ways from the third edition. Second, it REALLY doesn't give you any extra space to work the problems. It pretty much is exactly the same as the problems in the book, including the spacing. I think it's meant to be a source for homework for public school students who can't actually take their texts home. I bought it because I hoped to be able to use it as a worktext too, but it honestly wouldn't work for that.

Swift's A Modest Proposal Orwell's Shooting an Elephant Emerson's Self-Reliance Milton's Areopagitica Thoreau's Slavery in Massachusetts James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time Joan Didion's Goodbye to all That There's plenty of others, but if you have a few good collections you should get plenty of ideas. I like the Little, Brown Readers too.

I think doubling up on chapters in a week should be fine, as long as you don't try to work on both chapters on the same day. Some of the chapters are fairly short and obscure and can be handled quickly. I just made up a syllabus for my rising 1st grader to figure out how *I* was going to use it, because I want to use the activity guide, too. We'll be doing two chapters most weeks, just reading the sections and doing the narrations 3-4 days a week, and that will still leave us with 7 weeks at the end of the school year to read Horrible Histories :-) So, it can be done fairly easily, but yeah, I wish she had designed it for a 36 week school year too. It took a lot of time to write out the plan on my own, especially coordinating the crafts and all.

It's not a big difference. The main difference is, with the 1998 edition, they don't have the lesson numbers in parentheses before the problems in the mixed practice, so if you aren't sure how to solve a problem, you have to go searching back on your own. Personally, I found this annoying enough that it was worth spending the money to ditch the second edition for the third edition :-) But, other than that, there are no major differences that I know of.

Probably a big part of the why is simply that lesbians who are more 'normal-looking' or 'feminine-looking' don't tend to stand out to us as lesbians. AND because our culture tends to look down on lesbians in a lot of ways, a lot of lesbians don't go out of their way to 'stand out' or don't let it be known that they are lesbians except to people they are very close to. So probably most of us know a lot of lesbians, we just don't KNOW that they are lesbians. Especially those of us who live in more conservative states where the social stigma would be even higher.

My kids don't struggle with math, but *I* was a late-blooming math lover :-D Yes, if interest is driving it, math can become a lot more of a love later in life - you don't have to be born with it.