Oh, it's a very safe city compared to most American cities. Lightly policed though, except in the Downtown East Side. The DTES is its own little world, functioning independently (albeit very expensively) to the rest of the city.

I live in Vancouver, BC. I live in Vancouver proper. Vancouver is expensive, particularly in property value. The closer you are to downtown, the more expensive it's generally going to be. The west side of the city is more expensive than the east, and suburbs drop in price the further out from the city you go. The more expensive suburbs are Richmond, Burnaby, and North Van. The less expensive suburbs are Surrey, Langley, White Rock, Maple Ridge, New Westminster, that kind of thing. West Van is very expensive because of the nature of the real estate there. The metro area extends right to the US/Canadian border. The downtown core is maybe one hour to 90 minutes to the border, depending on traffic. Some of the suburbs are religious. The city is not religious. It's a beautiful city and the quality of life is very high. The weather is moderate (snow maybe two days a year, never gets very hot), the scenery lovely, and the outdoor activities plentiful. There are no limits on home schooling. Religious home schoolers are concentrated in certain suburbs, while unschoolers are concentrated in the city proper. Traffic is bad. There's fairly good public transportation. Immigration to Canada for skilled immigrants is very simple. You are either sponsored by your job, or you can apply the ordinary way. Each person has a point value. Calculate yours and you'll get an idea. If you have enough points, you should be fine. You get points for speaking English or French, having higher education, having a savings account, that kind of thing. Feel free to PM me if you want more information.

NtK -- What your X Grader Needs to Know, from Core Knowledge My kids do tons of music and they seem to be able to amuse themselves fun-wise, so I'm good with that.

I've had that experience as well in France. Thank goodness I can get by in French. Quebec goes to massive lengths to preserve the French in the face of English hegemony. You aren't allowed to put up a sign in a language other than French unless it's got the French on top and the French is some percentage larger than the other language. The language laws are myriad and it does put Quebec at a disadvantage internationally. Companies aren't locating in Montreal anymore, partly for that reason. The ridiculously high taxes don't help either.

I don't own things in advance for my kids. I definitely would not have minded the clutter of one extra set of mesh panties.

If you are working until three or six, you are doing way too much. He's got two hours work in him, max.

I'm not sure, given the small benefits of breastfeeding when you try to control for confounding variables, that the extent of breast-feeding pressure is necessary or even justifiable. And I have going on eight years of nursing, mostly tandem, youngest age of weaning 3.25.

They were so over-the-top on breastfeeding that they wouldn't sell you a pacifier in the gift shop. You had to walk to the children's hospital gift shop to get one. When one of mine left the intermediate care ward, they took the pacifier back.

I believe that a bright enough kid can overcome doing virtually nothing in school up before university, and we probably know people like that. But they're here and I'm here and I feel keenly that I should not waste their time, and so when I'm giving them formal education it ought to be the best education possible. This is a fairly competitive area.

Oh, for two of my kids there was a program going called Books for BC Babies, but I got the board book from the visiting health nurse. And for two of them they gave me a copy of a DVD called The Time of Purple Crying or something like that. IIRC the jist was that even if the baby screams, don't shake it. But by the time I had the third, health visitors had switched from coming to my house and looking over the baby to calling me on the telephone and asking me whether the baby was feeding well.

Nothing. Seriously, nothing. They gave me one pair of mesh panties, and when I needed a second, they refused. One pair per mother. One time they gave me a sitz bath. You can use diapers while you're there. When I had a c-section they gave me advil and stool softeners in a baggie. Nothing for the baby -- there were no clothes there, and you had to leave behind the blankets. They'd let you use diapers while you were there. When I had a kid in the intermediate care nursery, they dressed her, but I changed her out of that outfit when I was allowed to hold her and it went back into the communal pile. This is Vancouver, Canada.

I think Americans don't learn other languages because they aren't particularly close to any other country (and the largest border is with Canada), and because they already speak English. English is the lingua franca of the world right now. Canada has spent approximately nine bazillion dollars trying to get people bilingual. The results have been uninspiring. French Canadians speak French and range from "getting by" to fluent in English, with a heavy lean towards fluent in Montreal. Everyone else speaks less and less French as one moves away from Quebec. By the time one gets out to Alberta or BC, no one speaks French, even though they took it from fourth grade at the latest. You don't have to so you don't. If all of the best movies came out in French, and all of the good TV was in French, and the bulk of the science and academic writing was in French, people would know a lot more French. As it is, you mainly use it for not having to turn your cereal box around to know what the ingredients are.

I mentioned them in the other thread, but I still think you should look at the international A-levels. That's what Raffles in Singapore uses. With the exception of Japan (notoriously weak in second languages), most people in those countries do take a second language from early on (or attend school in their second language). http://www.cie.org.uk/

My kids don't particularly like doing academic work. They like not having to go to school, and doing academic work with me is the price to pay to avoid that. Look, phonics doesn't exactly rock my socks either. I can see where he's coming from. You can expect that he does it with a limited amount of complaining, but expecting him to think it's great fun may be beyond him. If you are doing more than a couple hours a day with a first grader, I think you are doing too much. Also, in the future, Saxon might not be the way to go with this particular child. It's a rule-following, do-the-next-step curriculum. And you might be doing too much writing. Writing is physically quite difficult for a lot of young kids, and takes quite a lot of energy and effort. If he remembers it well orally, then other than the handwriting practice, I'd probably go with that.

If you were following a "truly Classical model," I think that would mean you'd approach history through the epic poems in the original languages. Which you're probably not going to do with a six-year-old. Everything else is an innovation, so innovate at will. You're not required to go with a four-year model, or use SOTW, or anything like that. Those are just tools or structure that some people find make life easier or help them organise.

Core Knowledge published one of the best Blackhistory texts on the market, Grace Abounding. Black American content is well integrated. Calling it white-only is a slur.

IB you need an IB school for. I just suggested it as an example of a world-class education. International A levels can be sat by anyone. But they aren't the same as English A-levels. England split off.

I agree that I'd probably pick rigorous math and science over Latin and Greek if I had to. Probably not French and Hebrew, which are important here.

Classical education is an education grounded in the classical languages. In our house it doesn't look like anything, because my eldest is not ready for Latin, let alone Greek. She does Hebrew.

We are doing CW Aesop and it's secular. I also have CAP Fable and it seems secular too. Latin: Cambridge, Oxford, Wheelock.

As I said, I don't know anyone with a permanent vaccine injury. I do know someone permanently injured by whooping cough. He contracted it as an adult (the pertussis immunity is the most likely to fade) because he traveled to an area near ours where the opt-out rate of vaccination has become very high. He was unconscious for some time and still has seizures, over a year later. Unless we get those vaccination rates back up, I think we're all going to know someone seriously injured by a vaccine-preventable disease.

In my ideal world they'd write the international A-levels. You could take a look at the A-level diploma (the international one, not the UK one) or the International Baccalaureate diploma. The two main differences are that the United States separates out math (other people continue to just have math class rather than algebra/geometry/trig) and most countries start with the second language(s) much earlier.

AFAIK the left brain/right brain business has been all but debunked. http://www.livescience.com/39373-left-brain-right-brain-myth.html My lefty is eccentric. My second is ambidextrous and a typical thinker.

We're in a similar situation. At this rate she will finish Aesop sometime next winter. About to turn eight. I was thinking of doing the poetry section as a buffer.

I don't think that Hirsch's work is as applicable to a home schooling context. Children living a very enriched life will absorb a great deal of the cultural context in which they live. They read widely, go to museums, talk about it . . . also, you're using McGuffey. That's got quite a lot of content, right there. If you get the Core Knowledge Curriculum, your kids are probably familiar with nearly all of it for their grade level.