Jump to content

Menu

Caryl

Members
  • Posts

    157
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Caryl

  1. Giving this one bump to see if there's anyone. I know it's not likely many have used this yet.
  2. I know it just came out last fall, but I wondered if anyone used Omni VI this year? What did you think?
  3. Got an email this morning with this sale. I might have to go spend some money (shoot- it's been awhile since the fall curriculum buying spree...) :lol: To take $10 off any order, simply enter coupon code EMRM into your shopping cart after selecting your courses. Or, to buy 2 Great Courses and get a third course FREE, simply enter coupon code VU4E into your shopping cart Has anyone used Analysis and Critque: How to Engage and Write about Aything??
  4. And I totally agree. I have 4 teenage girls and they can get moody and depressed all by themselves- no sense making them read depressing books. Earlier this spring I was reading Buck's The Good Earth. I had completely forgotten how terribly sad this book was (not to mention way more sex than I remembered!). Yet it is on many Christian reading lists as recommended with no warnings for us old moms who can't remember well books we read 25 years ago. Anyone know of a great annotated list of great (either big G or little g great) books so I don't have to pre-read ALL of them??? I can't keep up!:tongue_smilie:
  5. but we have only used them once, and in that instance we could have figured it out if we had tried a bit harder. I don't think they are necessary, but I have found that I am remembering Algebra better than I expected. That might change as we get deeper into Algebra II. What I have found to be a nice supplement are the Khan videos. Different slant, calm voice, reassuring manner. If one of my kids is struggling, we switch to Khan for a few days. I REALLY like them. And free is good, yes?
  6. Ok- a non-geek question for itunes. Do I just download or do I have to convert for my po' man "ipod" (just saying- i'd rather have the cheap version b/c sooner or later I'll wash it, or the dog will chew it, or a kid will "borrow" it...)
  7. Wow, what a quick response! I thought I had to have an Ipod to use Itunes?
  8. I got a Sansa Fuze for Christmas. I'm looking for lectures and encouragement. I can find lots of music and audiobooks, but I like listening to non-fiction stuff when I'm driving alone. I've purchased several of SWB's lectures (on sale). Any sources for free worthwhile-listening MP3s? Thanks!
  9. It is really hard to homeschool with toddlers! We're just out of that stage, as my youngest (of 7) is 5 and does "school." Here's a few things that worked for my. YMMV! 1. Toddlers first. If I spend the first hour of school with the youngers, they tend to have their fill of Mom for a bit, and will play more independently. 2. Have special toys the toddlers get to play with only during intensive school time. 3. Pair older siblings with littles to free up your time to work with other older siblings. If it's a nice day, they go outside. 4. Have a schedule. Things run more smoothly when everyone has a rhythm to the day and knows what is coming up next. The good thing about this stage...is that it ends.
  10. Thank-you!!!! If anyone has more, keep 'em coming! Any really great day hikes (3 miles round trip or less)?
  11. Bruce Cockburn Christmas Emily Mitchel The Holly and the Ivy Odetta Christmas Spirituals Narada Christmas Collection (the old one) We like the christmas albums from Jars of Clay and Mercy Me as well
  12. We'll be spending the first two weeks of January in South-Central California. We'll be coming from the north on Highway 15, meandering around at whim the first week, and ending up for the 2nd week near San Luis Obispo. Any great suggestions where to go? We're on a budget, and don't really enjoy big "attractions." We do like camping, hiking, beach combing, museums (especially small quirky free ones). Our kids are all girls, 5-16. Even the smallest is good for a 2-3 mile hike. We're used to cold. If it's 40 degrees out, we'll probably be wearing shorts and t-shirts. TIA!
  13. Almost any horse will kick if startled. Most of our horses are fine, and will never kick IF they know you are there. We talk as we tack them and groom them, and we never approach them from behind. We have a set of skittish young draft horses, and we trail a hand on them as well as talk as we work our way around them while harnessing. That said, we have one horse that sometimes kicks. You just never walk behind her. So ask the trainer. I'm sure that if this particular horse had a problem, the trainer would have issued a warning. Most horses at lesson facilities are pretty bomb-proof. Have fun!
  14. I just re-read this book, and I had forgotten how much of this book was about sex. Not really explicit, but the description of his feelings for his wife and the mistress he takes into his home is pretty adult. I also forgot how hopeless this book was at the end when he is old. I'll wait with it until late high school.
  15. First, kids change so much over the 4 years of high school. Second, sometimes a curriculum line is a poor fit. I thought we would do all 4 years with Apologia. My oldest daughter hated it. I'm so glad I didn't have all 4 years to resell. Finally, I have changed. My philosophy of homeschooling is evolving, as is my confidence to do things without a curriculum to help me. The longer I do this, the less stuff I need other than some good books and good tools (like a microscope, a plant press, a good computer and laser printer). There is so much information on the 'net for free, I feel almost guilty when I buy much. I truly believe I could teach very well with only a few older edition textbooks for math and science, and the internet. The trade-off, of course, is time. One also has to weigh printing costs. It is cheaper to buy a $2 copy of Tom Sawyer at a used book sale than to print it out from Gutenberg. I often find great books at our local used store where they are $0.25 for paperbacks and $0.50 for hardcover. Most of my copies of classics I’ve found for under $1. Our finances are tight this year (we're building a house, paying as we go). This year I spent less than $400 for all 7 of my children (K to sophomore). I used what I had on the shelf (much of it collected over the past few years from used book sales, Goodwill, and some used bookstores in two nearby college towns). I bought some used older edition textbooks from Half.com for generally less than $10, even with shipping. As a time saver for me, I splurged on Omnibus II used for $65, and found the associated books used on Half.com, mostly from the same seller to save on shipping. I'll use Omni II for the top 3 kids (8th, 9th, and 10th). While TOG has always tempted me, we’re more a science/math/natural history family and Omni plus some history spines (purchased used) and a notebook timeline/ mapbook serves us just fine. I tweak Omni a bit with some more lit and lit analysis. I could drop Omni altogether, but it would involve more prep time for me. I also bought a few consumables for the younger set, all used off the homeschool curriculum boards. I'll have some printing costs through the year to add to this total. A summary of strategies that have helped 1. Have a list of desired curriculum and watch for it used- vegsource, these boards, and homeschoolclassifieds 2. Watch library book sales, Goodwill, used stores. 3. Paperback Swap- but remember that each book you get cost you at least $2.38 to ship out a book for a credit. I was on Swaptree for a bit, but now they charge for each transaction and it made me so mad I quit. I found more of my books are requested on Paperback Swap. 4. I generally find Half.com cheaper than Amazon marketplace, and I try to combine from one source to save on shipping. Amazon does not discount for multiple items from the same vendor. 5. Publishers often come out with new textbooks every few years, often with only minimal changes to the previous edition. 6. I use many strategies from TWM, but not curriculum. For example, my kids write something about everything they read in lit, history, and science and so they are writing nearly every day in those 3 subjects- summaries, reports, responses. I find I don’t use the extra stuff packaged with curriculum so it’s not worth buying it. 7. We use the library a lot, and do interlibrary loans for things we need to only use for a few weeks. 8. Best places for new stuff is Rainbow Resources and Christian Book Distributors. Some specific suggestions: Tapestry of Grace (rhetoric level, years 1-4) Buy the first year- try to find it used and then resell it used. Find the books used as much as possible and then resell them bundled. You might find you don’t even like TOG! Apologia Science. This is easy to find used for 40-60% off retail on used curriculum boards. Saxon Math, from Algebra through Calculus. These are sometimes on Paperback Swap. You can also easily pick them up for 40-75% off retail. I will say that I like Lials better than Saxon for Algebra. Hope that all helps someone! I just got rolling and couldn't stop!
  16. I'd sure eat them:) We raise organic grassfed beef as our main business. Under organic rules, you can only use certified organic feeds, your pasture and woods must be certified (that there has not been unapproved substances used like pesticides or fertilizers), no antibiotics ever, vaccinations are OK. If you are a small producer, there are special rules for record-keeping, inspections and payment into the certifying program (all of which take a significant amount of time and $$ for us), but the your production system must follow all organic stipulations. There are penalties for using the word "organic" when not certified, although rarely enforced. If you hope to sell them, perhaps you could use some other words to describe them that still conveys how much better your chickens are than the stuff in the grocery store. I'll bet they taste awesome!
  17. Gosh, I re-read your original post and I don't know where I got the animals part.... Please chalk it up to the middle age "muddle" (which I have been assured will get better in a few years!). Anyway, plants are easier to study, IMO, because they don't move.
  18. I think the ecology and field biology would be a great class, and I'm hoping to set this up for my own kids when I have at least three of them that can do it together. My expertise is plant ecology. Many "experiments" in ecology are observational rather than manipulative. There are so many things one could study: come up with a question, design a sampling scheme, collect data, analyze, report. Examples: -Is there a difference in density of Tree Species A on north aspects compared to south aspects? -Are there more bird nests in Tree Species A or Tree B? -Is the frequency of trees occupied by bird nests lower adjacent to roads compared to within the forest? The stats for analyzing data generated by such studies are pretty straightforward. These are clearly observational studies, but are the foundation that leads to asking “why†questions and further manipulative experiments. You could also, perhaps, come up with a study where your son actually does some manipulation of vegetation (since he doesn't want to harm animals). For example, if you were interested in the factors that may increase the density of a particular prairie wildflower, you might be able to form an experiment that involved mowing and/or burning compared to a control. The design and analysis of this experiment are a little more complicated, but not much. Here's a site that has examples of projects done in a one semester college class on Field Methods in Ecology. http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~efc/classes/biol315/biol315.htm Here's a syllabus from another field ecology class: http://www.sbs.utexas.edu/bio373l/BIO373L/syllabus.htm Robert Leo Smith's Ecology and Field Biology is a pretty readable text for a class like this. And I humbly submit my own book "Monitoring Plant and Animal Populations" which is ridiculously priced by Blackwell, BUT, the first iteration of this book was put out as a technical reference and is free: www.blm.gov/nstc/library/pdf/MeasAndMon.pdf (opens a very large PDF). I wrote this to help natural resource managers think through monitoring programs for rare plants and plant communities (the Blackwell book includes animals). It includes setting objectives (essentially setting up a research question in a management context), methodology, and some simple explanation of statistical analysis of typical monitoring data. I've wanted to revamp this for a high school audience... but who has time?! Good luck! Whatever you do, it sounds like a fun class to me!
  19. I used to get a lot of materials from Scribd, but now they charge for access to files that are not recent.
  20. There is a series of books called Roadside Geology of ** (state). These are great- although we live in a state where the "bones" of geology are easily seen because we have so little vegetation. My kids can recognize landforms, rock types, etc from a moving car. We also collected rocks and looked at soil samples. We also used the Prentice Hall books, and we all got bored with the question and answer stuff at the end of chapters. We did short, one-page reports for each chapter and they retained much more of the information. I also supplemented with lots of Netflix movies.
  21. My oldest daughter dealt with some serious health issues starting the end of her freshman year through much of her sophomore year. Because of this, she is about a year behind in school. She is extremely bright, and still tests very well. Before she became ill, she was consistently testing in the 99 percentile across the board on the standardized tests we take every year, and scored in the high 90’s this spring in spite of being sick and having done so little school. She has the ability to be a National Merit Scholar, although I’m not sure she has the drive. She has already decided what she wants to do, and does not need to be a Merit Scholar to go to the college she has selected (in state tuition and very affordable), although a few smaller academic scholarships would be helpful financially for us. She is OK with essentially getting put back a year and redoing her sophomore year. She has a summer birthday, so while technically she would be a junior, she would be a young junior. She has other and varied interests, and does not want to sacrifice those in trying to catch-up. This particular child would also benefit from going to college a bit “older.†What complicates things, however, is her younger sister, who is 13 months younger than her, and while not super-bright, is pretty smart and disciplined and does well at school. She is on-grade (will be a sophomore). If we lived in a vacuum, there would be no problem. But we don’t. Both daughters will be taking PSATs this year at the local high school. They may both be playing basketball at the local high school. What grade they are in matters for these things. One option is to call her a junior for PSAT and basketball, but then use a gap year to finish up, perhaps doing a few CLEP courses as part of her “senior†year. She probably won’t score that well on the PSAT, but the school she wants to go to will accept most CLEPs for credit. My question for the hive is: How does waiting a year affect eligibility and scholarships for college? My other option is to call her a sophomore, and deal with the awkwardness of having two kids, a year apart, that are in the same grade. My oldest is a bit uncomfortable with this, but I told her she could honestly tell anyone that asks that she was sick for a year and missed a lot of school. Given how self-centered most teenagers are, I’m guessing it might never come up. The benefit of this option is that she would probably do really well on the PSATs next year, as well as the SATs the following. She would be well-staged for other scholarships as well. My question for the hive is: would anyone at either college or the testing administrators care how old she is? I need to figure this out pretty quick, because I have to get them signed up for testing and sports.:glare: HELP!!!
×
×
  • Create New...