We do the same thing but with buttons and it really works to improve table manners. The offending party hands over the button and the one at the end with the most picks the after-dinner family activity. I guess it works because it makes us very aware of how we are perceived, but without any true "punishment", just a simple reward that still benefits us all. There are many things done in families that are not acceptable to do to guests/in front of guests, which is why those manners are separate. I'd never insist a guest scrape his own plate or the like, but I would for my child. When the buttons are put away, so is the game, but not the requirement of table manners.

http://shop.creekedgepress.com/ We haven't started them yet. I ordered the set for Medieval history to browse through and see if it will work for us.

I third the Gamma. I also made my own graph paper on Excel and made each unit a different color: hundreds tens ones to help keep everything in order (thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand followed the same pattern). When we did math we did the problems orally at the same time, so that there was no "4 x 3 =" but "40 x 3 =.."

:grouphug: Tell him great, you delegate the party planning to him. I feel your pain. We have a very wide-spread community here and it's undergoing some changes at the moment. It took a year of coming together and 2-3 people doing it ALL before a board was made to help spread it out. One thing was that it was stressed we needed to take turns finding field trips. Is there a park or something in town where you can have a weekly hang-out? Just something stable in the routine, if you don't have it already. It's definitely one of my favorite days to look forward to.

I treat myself like my kid. I usually set my timer for 15-20 minutes and then go off and do something else. Notes are made in an always open Word document so when I have baby-free time I can go back and do research, pay bills, etc. Routines are super helpful for me. I am a bit scatterbrained but if I can do the same thing at the same time every day, I feel better. Mornings are : start laundry, empty dishwasher, get cup of coffee, internet until The Kid is up. It really helps.

Our afternoons are usually a finishing of morning projects and Spelling. DS usually will spend the time reading or finishing a history/language arts project before quitting for the day. Science is scheduled just like any other subject, everything ready to go so he can pull it out and do it. We do try to get experiments to coincide with the baby's naptime but if not, I toggle between the two. History the same. Typing - we scheduled those lessons every other day until he was through with them. We alternated with art. Music is once a week at our co-op. We live in a foreign country so language learning is done every day, at least 15 minutes study. Learning games...those are scheduled as we have time for. The other day The Kid decided to turbo through 3 weeks worth of math lessons and that left us a big blank spot in the morning. Great - time for Scattagories! DVDs are done on the weekend or while working on a project of the same subject. We schedule errands after dh gets home or on weekends or on the way to/from activities. There's a rest period here in the afternoon that's taken by most businesses so it doesn't do us any good to go out then. And in the morning the baby is sleeping, so we don't go out then, either. It's a little frustrating some days. Field trips are easy, errands are not. And we don't schedule playdates at all. There's a once a week meet-up for P.E./social time through our hs group and there's enough kids in the neighborhood to play with in the evenings. I'm not scheduling anything else!

Can you do a combination of both? I love the books offered in the BF selection and we own several of them already. I also bought the Milestones In Science kit this year as a supplement to our history and well, I've been happier with other things. Most of the kit is wonderful for late Ren-early Modern times, but not so much for ancients. We also own the first book of Hakim's Story of Science - a great read. If I had to choose I'd pick the kit along with either of the two: Hakim OR BF. Preferably the BF selection.

Oh! I found mine free at Currclick. There's a few different ones for each section in history. It's worth the download, at least, and if you don't like them you didn't waste anything.

$7 non-organic, $8 organic. And only available in half gallons.

It's surprisingly been a busy summer here. The Kid and I started back to school at the beginning of this month, so June was spent preparing for that. July has been spent on organizing my thoughts and lessons for co-op. August I'll work on preparing for cub scouts. Aside from that, I've started doing the Couch to 5k in the early mornings. It's the only time nobody else is on the road. My Kindle has been put to good use. Our next hot day we'll get a chance to try out our solar oven we built in anticipation of, well, summer. We're still waiting for the heat to actually come. Last year we took Currclick's calendars and celebrated all the weird, wacky days listed on them. We had just moved in and I didn't know the area too well so we did theme nights and "holidays" at home.

:) We won't really be using a curriculum for the little one for the next few years, but I will be getting ideas from my Montessori albums and Tot School, along with book suggestions from Before FIAR and Peak With Books as he gets older.

Chem II is an introduction also, but written for students who are able to grasp more information at a time. If your library has any of the books browse through them and see what you think. :lol: Yes, only a few kits are included. However, the books Fizz, Bubble, and Flash, Geology Rocks and Adventures with Atoms and Molecules all provide many, many more experiments! This year we're doing Physics II. So far this week we've done 3 experiment days and two computer link/summary/definition days. We've done at least 2 experiments a week since we've started a month ago. There will be some down weeks as we get further in, but it won't be a month before we do another experiment ever. Maybe 6-7 days at the longest stretch.

I don't count anything a small child memorizes as 'learning'. All it is is repeating like a parrot, nothing more than learning a jingle. I did know a 20mo who learned his sounds and by age 2 was reading simple books. He understood numbers, too, and counting. That was amazing to see.

I hate the Young Scientists Club. We use Noeo, but the first two years of the program (ages 9 and 10 here) we used I took out the instructions for the YSC kits, rewrote them, and slipped them back in. They are very poor as a science aid, giving no space for the kids to wonder or form hypotheses after introducing the experiment before explaining to them exactly what the outcome should be and why. There is no learning involved, only force feeding of information. Wild Goose was so much better for science kits and not novelties. We still use Noeo, but I dropped the science kit add-on and chose other supplements for the year. I'd rather pay for kits from Steve Spangler Science or Wild Goose or Thames and Cosmos or the big Lakeshore Learning tubs that cover a part of the subject. They're much better at getting excitement and interest out of my kid than YSC ever was. ETA: the books in Noeo are wonderful. They offer lots of hands on learning opportunities, especially the chem II and physics II choices. If I had to do it without ordering any extra kits I would still stick with Noeo. The hands on books are awesome.

I think there are different approaches for different children. We tried Saxon and couldn't make it through one year. The tears and frustration level was high enough to make my kid think he sucked at math. Which wasn't true, of course. He just needed a different program, something that was gentler, not spiral, and showed him how to form all the concepts concretely before moving into the abstract world. Math is now one of his favorite subjects and he is marvelous with word problems and mental math. He just needed time to go slow in the beginning and at his own pace. What was a perfect curriculum for friends of ours was not something that worked for him.

We've been schooling outside a lot. It gives the big kid a breath of fresh air and the baby can run around to his heart's content. Inside, we have a quiet room for schoolwork and large projects to hide in when we're not using it or The Kid needs a spot to go think/work independently. For the most part, though, our day is a mixture of entertaining the baby while reading off a spelling list or setting him up with simple practical life activities at a small table while I work more with The Kid.

When I started looking for curriculum I asked myself a series of questions: Secular or religious? How does he learn best - visual, tactile, or audio? Which philosophy for a spine - traditional school-ish, Montessori, Classical, Charlotte Mason...? Do I want it ready to go or am I willing to make copies/get supplies as we go along? It narrowed down our options pretty quick to just a handful that had the potential of working for us.

Yard sales. Chinese food. Good donuts. Dollar stores. Knowing there would always be toilets in the public restrooms. Mail every day. I don't miss a whole lot, but these are at the top of my list.

We just have different categories in our budget. Our slush funds go into our savings, but I keep track of how much is in each with our Excel spreadsheet. I used to use an old checkbook register as a ledger, one page for each fund. Right now the only family one we keep separate is our vacation fund. We've found that we tend to overspend if we don't keep it apart from everything else. It has its own savings account that we drop a little into every month.

There was a year The Kid didn't read hardly at all. I put them in the bathroom and car, expected him to read minimal things, read to him, got audio books, made him check out seven books a week from the library...but it wasn't until he was past the phase that he started picking up things to read on his own. He reads voraciously now, so I think easing off my requirements that year helped him a lot.

That's actually on our list to read this year with the 12yo. It's an important story about what happens when things go too far. I'm comfortable with the descriptions in it and the discussions it will foster. That said, I wouldn't mind if another felt uncomfortable with it and changed the selection for a group setting as long as we knew ahead of time. You might want to look at Margaret Peterson Haddix' Among The Hidden (or any of her other books) as a substitute.

I wish there was something like that here - maybe a Secret Sender program? I've seen it work well on other boards.

I wish I did! I have a very hard time recalling faces/names. Last year I had 4 boys in my co-op class and it took me a month to learn all their names. Now anything printed, especially books, I can recall at the drop of a hat. It made it easy to memorize plays and poems as a kid. I see pictures of the pages in my head and can "read" the information back to myself. That's how I eventually learned the kids' names - I made them all name plates in Greek to sit on the table. :lol: Recall picture of name, scroll up, see kid..

Ah, thanks. The assumption that it's all true doesn't bother me a bit, but the "how do you apply God's word to your life" type questions that are in most bible studies are not for us. I wish I could find something that explored the bible from a historical/archeological standpoint and asked questions/gave information about the time period it was written in. So frustrating!

In our fridge there is a Brita pitcher full of water, orange juice, and a half gallon of milk. The milk is used mainly for cereal. We pay twice as much for half as much here so we put limits on how much is drank. Orange juice is brought out to the table at breakfast time. For lunch and dinner the water pitcher sits on the table. We really only drink water. We stress the importance of eating calories, not drinking them and so keep water as the 'normal' in our house. We have insulated Kleen Kanteens that sit on our counter so we can grab and fill, we designate one person to fill glasses at dinner during set up, we order large bottles of water for the table when we go out to eat. Anything else is a treat.