Oh, I must not have had enough coffee yet...I just realized the title said "kindle"...duh.

Not showing up as free for me...I wonder if it was "yesterday's" app but it just hadn't changed over when you posted. I'm hoping that somehow later today it will still show up as free for me!

I am more reading this thread for entertainment/information as I don't have an informed opinion about High School really, yet...But I did feel the need to say that my high school biology class involved no dissection what so ever. I don't recall many labs at all, other than one involving making sauerkraut. I did dissect the requisite frog and worm in 7th grade in a different school district. I also had an excellent chemistry class with a real lab and a physics class with an okay lab...in which the instructor pretty much wanted to guarantee an "easy A" for all the students by giving away answers for the tests while we were taking them. :thumbdown: The result (not just of this...but of my so-so math education and my general ability level in math and science) was that I "failed out" of engineering by getting a D- in the first physics class for Engineers...but then changed my major to English and easily aced every class in that major and loved it. I don't think I was really cut out to be an Engineer in the first place though, even if I would have had better math and science in high school.

That other thread was mine. :-). I was browsing through the novel selection at the Royal Fireworks Press website and saw one that might interest you: http://www.rfwp.com/book/hitlers-willing-warrior I love book threads on these forums...the Hive is great at finding books! :-)

I am not familiar enough with AAS to directly compare, but I have found that especially on our second year in Essentials (doing the advanced lists), DD is able to be fairly independent. I need to dictate the list on Mondays, but then after that she can practice words on her own and do further practice/a test on the spelling city website. She still is not an awesome speller but it is slow and steady improvement. It took us about a year and a half (with some breaks) to get through Essentials the first time. We have primarily used it for spelling -- my DD was already a good reader when we started, and the grammar just isn't our cup of tea. It's good, but we are just liking other things more. The first year we did lesson on Monday, dictate the list on Tuesday, practice phonograms or other games on Wednesday, practice words or sometimes do the writing exercises in the workbook on Thursdays, test on Fridays. We weren't in a hurry to go through it (I wanted time and maturity to help things sink in), so I was not trying to do any more than one lesson per week, and a few times we lingered on a lesson or a review week for more than one school week. It should really only take a school year, or a bit more than that to go through it even if you just do a lesson a week.

Their customer service is pretty friendly, so I would not be surprised if they would reset your downloads for you. Another option if you are still having trouble for future files is to use dropbox. I download items on my laptop (for anything I want to print I need it there anyway), but then transfer just what i plan to use on my iPad via the dropbox app, and from there it's a snap to open it in iBooks. Dropbox is a free app, but you do have to register to use the service so it can "sync" the files between your devices.

So, if I, as an adult, can barely do that (aka visualize a word and spell it backwards), does that explain why it was so hard for me to learn to spell?...LOL! Learning to type well and seeing my mistakes fixed over and over again by spell check was what really helped me to become an okay speller. And now doing logic of english with my kids has helped fix a few more words I have always struggled to spell. But to this day if someone asks me to spell that is even remotely complicated, I can't do it unless I write it or type it. Yet I can always tell by the look of a word if it is spelled wrong even if I am not sure of the correct spelling. So far, it seems my daughter takes after me in spelling. I just asked her to try and visualize a word to spell it backwards and she had a hard time too. Very interesting!

Thanks...maybe I will just have DH teach her long division first...LOL! He could teach our kids math without using a textbook at all if he were the primary teacher in the family, so I am sure he would do a great job explaining it to her. We have been working through the elementary series slowly as a read aloud with all the kids listening, but we are only just finishing Edgewood. I kind of want to continue that progression without jumping randomly ahead (more for the sake of the DS7 and DS5), but DD will do fractions mostly on her own, I think. She'll have a little bit of CLE 400s to finish out this summer too, but I want to keep her motivated to do math all summer and she loves Fred. We did almost no math last summer and I really regretted that.

Bump...anyone know?

I thought I read somewhere that that student needs to be able to do long division before beginning Life of Fred Fractions. Is that correct? Is knowing "short division" enough (aka division problems with a single digit divisor and any size dividend)...or is true long division needed for some of the problems? I had been planning to have DD do LoF Fractions this summer (between 4th and 5th)...but I just realized that she is not going to get to full long division before the end of the school year (I'm not sure it is in CLE 400s at all?).

Awesome...maybe I will go ahead and order it or ILL it. We picked up three others that arrived on the request shelf but this one sounds great!

My DD in first grade could have independent reading time on her own by the second half of 1st grade, but that was it. My DS can/will do short copywork or handwriting practice, math fact practice and sometimes other math workbook pages (he is accelerated in math, so that may not be typical -- he sometimes likes to spend 15 minutes on his own puzzling through a Beast Academy problem). He can read Magic Tree House type books but is not confident and won't do it by himself. He wants me there to help if he gets stuck on a word. Sometimes he chooses on his own to write a story, but only when the mood strikes him, and I have a hard time capturing that writing interest in a way that is productive for school work! If I need my 1st grade to be productively occupied, I will sometimes get him going on an educational game on the computer or iPad for 20 minutes....or just encourage him to take a break to play until I am ready for him again. My older DD is very independent this year (maybe more so than is good for her!), so other than brief moments spent doing a bit of K4 work with my next younger DS (he is only interested in a few minutes per day of seat work, which i am fine with for preK), I find am pretty available to work with DS7.

One thing to consider is that it doesn't leave a lot of time for any other outings or fields trips. Maybe that's not an issue for you, but we end up going either to an organized field trip with a group or an outing just as a family at least a couple times a month if not more -- zoos, museums, historical sites, etc. We are in a co-op that meets only twice per month for a half day, and on the non-co-op weeks we usually fill a half or full day with a field trip, with an occasional random field trip thrown in for a special event happening on the same week as our co-op meets. With the time at home you would have to be more focused to get done the school work you are hoping to get done at home, so there would be a lot less margin for errands (shopping, library, etc) or things that come up that need to be done at home (cleaning, laundry, etc). Obviously those things could happen on evenings and weekends (and I often do that), but if your evenings/weekends are ever full with other things it is more likely to cut into core school time to get errands/chores/house stuff done. Ultimately if you are aware of those schedule considerations it seems possible with your oldest being in 1st grade...but it hardly seems sustainable for very long beyond that as the quantity of schoolwork increases and as you need to give more time to your younger dc. You might also have to consider if it will be harder to quit once you have started -- you will have formed relationships, your kids will make friends, etc. If it isn't sustainable, will it be hard to quit and say good-bye after a year? If you are just looking to get out of the house, you could also look for other extra-curricululars that meet after the public school day is over, and may have a mix of kids. That would allow you to get school done before going to these events (we do tae-kwon-do and gymnastics this way). You could also look for individual classes offered to homeschoolers -- instead of committing to a year of co-op for your music, art and PE, you could try and find a six week music class, a semester long PE class, etc. If the schedule gets too full it is easier to not sign up again or just bear through the short commitment rather than being stuck with a whole year of something that might be too much. We've done that in the past and it has worked out well. Good luck!

This is fun... :-). I might question the age a little bit on Cheaper by the Dozen. I read it aloud to my DD last year in 3rd, and even at that age there were several references I felt I had to either edit or explain. Sections about "necking" (I can't remember now if that was the exact word used, but that was the subject matter), a peeping Tom, etc. I think even this year as a 4th grader she would be just slightly more savvy to "get" what was going on. I think a bunch of things toward the middle-end of it would go right over a 1st grader's head. That might not be a bad thing if they are a tag-along listening in with an older sibling, but if you are looking to place it on a reading list, I would definitely go 4th or older.

I agree...I need "4-h Projects for dummies" or something. ;-). It helps just slightly that my DH did 4-h for a couple years as a kid...but he was about DD's age or a bit older when he did it so his memories are somewhat vague. We'll still finish out our year with 4-h and do fair projects, but I think we will turn our focus to a Maker Club for next school year (though we will definitely try and get a small start with that this summer while the weather is nice and we can do outside activities). I think if our current 4-h club was right in our part of the city I might try and work within that...but starting project groups within the big 20-minutes-away group would be a giant stress with none of the kids living in our immediate area. Starting one of these Maker Clubs is probably a bit easier than starting a new 4-h club since it is more free form and we can set up the expectation right from the start that we will try new activities or skills together at the meetings...as well kids as working stuff on their own outside of meetings too of course.

The Maker Clubs look awesome!!! Pretty much exactly what I had in mind. There aren't any in my entire state yet, but if I am going to put the work into starting something I think this would be it! I showed my kids the website, and they are super pumped...even though DH arrived home with DS's birthday donuts, they kept looking at it for a long time instead of eating the donuts...LOL. :-)

Do most 4-H clubs "do stuff" at their meetings? After I complained to DH about how relatively non-interactive the meetings are...he told me that his 4-H meetings as a kid were exactly that way!!! So I thought that perhaps maybe that is the standard proceedure. The only reason I knew about the idea of project groups at all is seeing them mentioned on here, so I don't actually really know how those work either. I feel really clueless about the whole thing. We joined a club about 20 minutes away from our house in another county, because there was only 1 general club in our own county any closer, and the meeting conflicted with something else in our schedule. The 20 minutes away meeting is not such a big deal, but it didn't occur to me at the time that all the "extra" stuff outside of meetings would be at least that far away or further because it was a different county's 4-H. The county has a ton of county-wide activities, but it happens we live 50 minutes away from this county's office where some of these activities are held. I am intrigued by the idea of starting my own club and doing it the way I "think it should be done", but I feel like I would be the world's most clueless 4-H leader since I can hardly figure out what is going on just as a parent in the club we are in with fair projects, etc. :lol:

I think this is going to be a bit of a rant/complaint session...but maybe someone will have a good constructive idea for me... :laugh: We're doing 4-H this year for the first time and it hasn't been quite like what I thought it might be like. The kids basically sit in a meeting and listen for an hour once a month. There is a business portion of the meeting mostly about activities that we can't attend for various reasons (too far away, happen on nights we have other commitments, not for our age kids), and then one or two kids give a presentation on a topic or hobby. That part is kind of interesting, but not interactive. Then they eat a snack and go home. Our 4-H doesn't have "project" groups -- we're basically on our own as it gets closer to fair time to help the kids get a project ready for the fair. I am excited about that aspect, though I have no idea how to know what to have the kids do, as they haven't given anyone any "directions" on what to do with fair projects. When we signed up, I thought the kids would actually be "doing something" at the meeting, not just sitting for an hour and listening. I enjoyed being in girl scouts as a kid, and we actually "did something" in our meetings -- made crafts, worked on badges, did service projects, did activities together. I wouldn't have a problem per se with doing the scouting thing, I don't like that it would involve joining TWO organizations in order for all my kids to be involved and having TWO sets of meetings, social events, camps, etc, etc to deal with. There don't seem to be any coed scouting organizations active in my area. Our life seems very full already, and two separate scouting organizations to accommodate my girl and my boys would be too much. I think what i am looking for is some kind of co-ed club/group/organization where the kids can get together and actually learn how to do something new or do an activity together or work on a project during the group meeting. And the aspect of having a goal to work toward (the equivalent of badges in scouting or fair projects in 4-H) seems like a pretty crucial element. There needs to be some end goal of sorts or no one would really want to continue just for a club's sake. I don't want something as purely educational as homeschool co-ops seem to be (at least around here...), but not just a fluffy "fun" club either. I know, I know...It's probably a pipe dream. :lol: I guess it feels better just to write it out and dream. :laugh:

http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/508931-x-post-wwii-fiction-set-in-germany/ :001_smile:

I am really excited about this -- I've always wanted science that tied into history and included activities that "repeat" great experiments of the past (or at least do something similar). From looking at the sample it seems there is quite a bit of that sort of activity. :hurray: I'll be using it for 5th/2nd/K'er next year. I'll probably throw in extra topical library books for 5th grade DD...maybe I'll even finally get my act together and do a few lessons on related topics from BFSU vol 2 for added depth for her. Maybe...I have an ongoing pipe dream of being able to pull of BFSU2 lessons, but haven't been successful for two years. :lol:

That makes a lot of sense... The phrase "The victors write the history" could apply to historical fiction as well! I think the idea of historical fiction from the "losing nation's viewpoint" is a very interesting concept though. I might have to do more research to see if we can find anything similar from a different war. I spent a bit longer sifting through our library catalog and found a couple intriguing possibilities that take place in post-war Germany: Transport 7-41-R by Terry Degens and Darkness Over the Land by Martha Bennett Stiles. I was able to request the first title, but Darkness Over the Land had only a non-circulating copy so I might have to try ILL. They are older books (60s-70s)...I'll probably pre-read to see if they are age appropriate or not. I requested Behind the Bedroom Wall as well. I may just have to look at these and decide which if any make the most sense for DD.

Thanks for looking! That one does look really interesting! I spend quite a while looking on amazon last night, but it was hard to come up with good search terms. There are a lot more holocaust focused books or books written from the Jewish perspective rather than the German perspective.

Do you think that's appropriate for her age, though? I read the description and it sounded pretty dark...not sure. The amazon suggested age on that one was grade 7 and up, and one of the reviews said grade 9 and up.

I bumped an old thread in the Logic Stage board about this too...but here's the question I am looking for suggestions on: Mostly drawing from a couple threads on here, I made a pretty long list of WWII fiction for DD (she's almost 10/4th grade). Between independent reads and read-alouds we have done Chestry Oak, Twenty and Ten, Number the Stars, Waiting for Anya, and Snow Treasure. DD plans to read Winged Watchman on her own and we are going to do House of Sixty Fathers together. I thought that would be more than enough...but as we finished Number the Stars together last night she made an interesting request -- she asked if I had any fiction books set in Germany during and/or just after WWII that talks about what life was like for "ordinary people" -- she wants to know what it feels like to be a kid on the side of the country that is doing the invading, and then what it is like to be on the losing side of a war. i thought that was a really fascinating request, and I have done a bunch of searching and haven't really found anything i thought would fit the bill. She doesn't want to read any more in depth on the holocaust (understandably at her age) so I am really looking for something set in Germany and not so focused on that subject (though some touching on it might be okay), but more looking at ordinary German kids. Any ideas?

Bumping this old thread with a related question. I picked a lot of our historical fiction for WWII for my DD (almost 10/4th grade) based on this thread -- between independent reads and read-alouds we have done Chestry Oak (read it right after I saw this thread, as I just could not wait until we got to this topic in our studies...we loved it!), Twenty and Ten, Number the Stars, Waiting for Anya, and Snow Treasure. DD plans to read Winged Watchman on her own and we are going to do House of Sixty Fathers together. I thought that would be more than enough...but as we finished Number the Stars together last night she made an interesting request -- she asked if I had any fiction books set in Germany during and/or just after WWII that talks about what life was like for "ordinary people" -- she wants to know what it feels like to be a kid on the side of the country that is doing the invading, and then what it is like to be on the losing side of a war. i thought that was a really fascinating request, and I have done a bunch of searching and haven't really found anything i thought would fit the bill. She doesn't want to read any more in depth on the holocaust (understandably at her age) so I am really looking for something set in Germany and not so focused on that subject (though some touching on it might be okay), but more looking at ordinary German kids. Any ideas?