The sappy TMI part, feel free to skip: I am so thankful to have found this online community for support. I definitely was overreacting to the math situation, based on a lot of other stressful things happening that day. (Good news: I paid off my $5000+ credit card that had become the most stressful thing in my life and cut it up for once and for all. Bad news: We had to wipe out half of the kids' college fund. Good news: The college fund was earning 1% interest, my Discover APR was 14.74% interest. Bad news: It was still my kids' college fund and it made me feel like the Worst Parent on Earth.) I have to remember to take it one day at a time, which is difficult when I'm a hardcore "planner." I am so fortunate to have a kid that really does enjoy any opportunity to learn new things, I just need to calm down and gain a bit of confidence. The math part: Yes! You are all right. I need to stick it out a bit longer. For now, (and by "for now" I mean yesterday and at least Monday, anyway) I am dropping the student text book. I am using the manipulatives, common sense, and discussion to teach the lessons, and as long as he flies through the workbook part I will not be paranoid that he will never make it into AP Calculus:tongue_smilie:. I didn't buy the 3B set for MiF so I was going to have to figure something out for the second half of the year anyway, and that is still the case right now. I really appreciate all of the input. I looked very seriously at the suggestions given here, and I feel like Horizons or CLE could be great for us. I had been considering Saxon and TT but after checking them out, I fear they might move too slowly for him (at the grade 3 level, anyway.) Again, thank you, thank you, thank you. :grouphug:

This is only our second week of homeschooling, and the math program I was very excited to begin (Harcourt's "Math in Focus: The Singapore Approach") is not working out at all. My third grade son can do the problems easily, but the manner of doing the work is totally different from the way MiF wants him to do it. The whole program builds on working with number bonds in a specific way, and it is just not the way his brain works. My DH, a mental math whiz who never even used a calculator until pre-calculus, looked at the book today and says it makes things way too complicated. DS attended ps for first and second grade, where they never had a math book, workbook, or program. All they did was worksheets, and at the end of the second grade year the most complex thing they were doing was two digit addition with regrouping. Despite this serious lack of structure, he does fine with more complex problems (we have been using Primary Grade Challenge Math and a couple of other fourth grade workbooks.) I finally called my mom (2nd grade ps teacher) today in tears, and she told me to just find a basic math program that we could easily become familiar with and she would purchase it for us, as I have spent my entire curriculum fund for the year already. Nothing Singapore, although I love it and I think it would be a wonderful way to teach someone if you started at the beginning, nothing new or fancy. Just a well-established, tried-and-true math program. She thinks this will be a better transition from "here's a worksheet, that's all the math you get today" into an engaging homeschool math program that he will enjoy. Should I just go with Saxon? There are two grade 3 Saxon texts, and the "intermediate" text does not offer a teacher's manual, is this a problem? Is there a better program? Thank you so much for any advice. It has just been an overwhelming day today, and not in a good way. I will learn and progress, I know. Homeschooling is still the best thing for our family, I will just have to do a lot of adjusting to get the proper fit.

I should have been more impressed by the "planning" my son did. I always just though, "Well, that's odd that he's able to do that" when he would create really neat buildings, contraptions, or artwork from odds and ends. As he got a little older, I was able to see that he wasn't just randomly lucky but genuinely able to see the pieces he would use take another form than the one in front of him at the time. For example, when he was 4, he was making a series of cuts in an index card and I asked him what he was doing. He finished, then folded it several times to reveal an 8 paged mini book. I still have no idea how he did that, and I still have the book! (Brag alert!) When we eventually did have him tested last year, his Perceptual Reasoning Index was 99.7%. He had been displaying signs of enhanced perceptional ability for years and I had never thought anything of it, other than "Hmm. That's odd."

Wow, it never occurred to me that I shouldn't leave the house with these appliances on!

My mom is 52 but she has always looked young. ;)

I read The Wind in the Willows to both of my dc in June, and they loved it. My ds7 was instantly hooked, but my dd6 complained for the first two chapters that she didn't like it. I think, in the end, it was the illustrations that finally helped her fall in love with the story. We read the hardcover edition illustrated by Inga Moore. The word "ass" definitely sneaked up on me and when I read it aloud, my kids just looked wide-eyed at each other and then at me. I just took the opportunity to say a few words about the meanings of some words changing over time and the different meanings of that particular word.

DH gave me a Kindle for Christmas so I have been catching up on all the classics I had never read (which, I'm sad to say, is most of them!) Right now I'm reading Moby Dick, and I have to admit I am looking something up in either the Kindle dictionary or my old Brewer's every few minutes. It is really worth the effort, though! My daytime drink is Nescafe and ice with milk, but I often read at night with peppermint tea.

We never actually "banned" Disney, but we did make a conscious effort to limit the "Disney marketing-machine" effect on our dc. There just seems to be a lot of commercialization and cross-promotion of Disney films/merchandise/theme parks and it was just too forced for us. When my ds was younger, we would skip the previews and bonus features on the DVD's and go straight to the movie. He doesn't seem to really be interested in Disney anymore, and my dd never got into it at all. (I have actually tried to get her to watch the various Disney princess movies and the only one she will ever sit through is "The Princess and the Frog.") They both seem to prefer the Studio Ghibli films to the Disney films. We did flat-out ban access to Disney websites or television shows because they were just garbage fluff, for lack of a better term. ;)

1.5 hour wait? That is absolutely terrible! I usually wait about 30 minutes to see my g.p., which I was okay with until I saw her face plastered on advertisements all over town: "Accepting new patients!" I really hope I don't have to wait longer than that next time! My dd's allergist/ pulmonary doc is another story. It is an all-day deal. 30 minute drive, 45 minute wait, 20 minutes with nurse, 45 minute wait, 30 minutes with doc, by this time she's starving so 30 minutes to stop and eat, 30 minutes to drive back home... Ugh. I dread those days! When it's a specialist you're talking about, though, you just kind of have to take what they give you. I certainly wouldn't put up with that kind of wait if I had any other option!

Thank you all so much for the advice! I feel a lot more confident now about just doing it my own way. Also, I didn't know there were different styles of Italic, so I appreciated the links.

I've been lurking about these forums for several months and I have learned so much from all of you! I'm preparing to homeschool my son in the fall and I feel pretty confident about some of my choices, less confident about others. Right now I'm having a hard time choosing a handwriting curriculum. I ordered the GD Italic teacher's manual and two of the workbooks, but now that I look at them I just don't love the style as much as I thought I would. My question is basically this: Can I just teach him my own handwriting style? I'm so new to this, I'm still in the "I don't want to ruin my kid by straying from pre-printed curriculum!" phase. ;) Honestly, though, my mom was a professional calligrapher before becoming a public school teacher, and my handwriting is kind of a combination of the Italic she taught me and the D'Nealian I learned in school. Also, I should mention that he already knows lower case D'N pretty well. I know, the easy thing to do would be to stick with D'N through the upper case, but some of those letters are just... kind of ugly IM(very)HO!

This is my first post.