No, I wouldn't be bothered if she didn't tell me. She's entitled to her feelings, and to keep them private if she wishes. I dunno, I'm not really into the "parents as friends" model, though. Crushes seem like the kind of thing you discuss with friends. Maybe that's just because how I felt as a kid... I don't think I ever told my mom about my crushes. I saved that for my diary and my friends.

When she was two, there was a boy in her preschool class that she would say with a big sigh while gazing off into the distance. "Today I play with Sally and Jane and Mikey and Timmy and [pause to take a deep breath and look up at the sky and exhale while she says, lovingly,] Paul." Kinda freaked me out ;) I think my first crush was in 3rd grade. He had the deepest blue eyes, and I loved to look at them. I think most kids have had some sort of crush by the age of 12.

There is no way to guarantee that a baby will be quiet, so it makes sense that theaters ask that infants not be present at all.

I think I see what you are saying, and I agree. I'll preface it by saying that I don't have an accelerated learner... I just have a terrible toothache, and it's 4am, and so I'm just bouncing around the forums reading random threads. :) So take this with a grain of salt, because I don't really belong on this forum. We started MM1 when she was just turning 5 and going into kindergarten (she went to a Montessori kindergarten, and I was after schooling. She loved math, so it seemed like a good idea at the time). She whipped through that whole first book... until the last chapter. It's about place value, and she just totally hit a brick wall. She was just not developmentally ready for it. We did power through it, in exactly the way I think you're describing not wanting to do. I didn't really want to do it, but the last chapter was so short, and I wanted her to be proud of herself for finishing the whole book. But yes, it was totally possible to push her through something that she wasn't developmentally capable of understanding. For first grade, exactly a year later, I started her back at the beginning of MM1. Again she whipped through the first book with no issues, including the place value part. Easiest thing in the world for her now. It's so easy for her that I don't think it's a full enough math program for her. I dunno, I see people here say that it's difficult and time-intensive and so they only make their kid do a page or two a day, but DD can do a 2 page lesson in under 15 minutes, and has never balked at doing a 4 page lesson... it takes her about half an hour. Given that dividing the two 1st grade books into 36 weeks means that she needs to do about 3 pages every 3 days, I don't think that 15-20 minutes of math every 3 days is enough for a 1st grader (And I'm no slave driver... I think about 20-30 minutes a day is more appropriate). I decided against doing that every day, because we'd finish the book around now, and start MM2. And I'm really wary of running into the same problem we did last year. I really don't want to hand-hold her through the stuff she's not ready for, and the last thing I want is for her to be convinced that "I'm not good at math" or "math is hard" because I'm having her do something that was designed for older kids. So... that's the long story of why we do MEP, too. She actually finds MEP much, much harder. I think she's, unfortunately, already used to the idea that "schoolwork is easy," because she's bright enough and I'm relaxed enough that it usually is for her, and some of the logic problems in the program in MEP are HARD (especially the ones that are supposed to be solved as whole-class exercises). And while I love MEP in its own way, I really like the straight-forward, no-bones approach to MM, and I think that DD responds to it very well. (Better than she does to MEP). In practice, I have no idea what other families do. Kids are certainly developmentally all over the place, so I'm sure that there are many 5yo kindergartners who could do the place value chapter in MM1 without any problem. But, at the same time, it would not be a hard sell to convince me that some families would have done exactly what I did, which was to power though the tiny difficult-for-her section because the rest of it seemed so easy, even though nothing is really being learned or retained. After all, I did it, and it was easy enough to do.

I haven't used them, but I've heard that WP materials are strongly Christian, and very hard to secularize. I asked about it a while back, because some of them look really cool.

My 4 year old has been loving the Usborne Playtime "I Can Draw" books. He doesn't have great fine motor skills (age-appropriate for a 4yo boy, I think... but still), and the directions are perfect for him, and his drawings from it are really good. http://www.amazon.com/Draw-Animals-Usborne-Playtime-Series/dp/0746029438 My 6 year old loves it too, but it's perfectly at my 4yo's level.

I thought these were terribly until i had a super active 4 year old boy and live in a miserable winter climate. Now DH and I joke "what we really need is a treadmill for him." If I had money to burn, I would totally buy one, LOL.

I ordered an Amish workbook. Maybe that's totally nuts. It seems to be a mix of gentle explanation and lots of drill on several topics every day. I'll wait to see what it actually looks like when it arrives, but I'm kind of thinking of having her do part of a page every day. If that doesn't work, I probably will just do part of a lesson every few days. She's going to summer camp for most of the day, so whatever I do, I don't want it to take more than 15 minutes a day. Thank you everyone for all of the advice!

It's fine if your goal is to grasp "the idea of a story" or "the author's style." But neither of those are why people study great literature. You can get the idea of most stories by reading the back of the book, or the summary on Wikipedia. The author's "style" is often more than just sentence structure... and can not be gleaned from just one book anyway, as even authors with well-known styles often experiment or try something new with some of their books. I agree with those who say that, IMHO, reading fewer books deeper will lead to a greater understanding of literature, and will come in far more handy in building lifetime readers than what your friend is describing. FWIW, in the school that I worked at for a short while, the honors students read whole books, while the lowest-tracked kids just read excerpts. Reading full books was definitely the expectation in the college track.

I mainly want to keep the math she knows fresh. I don't want to do much, but I've heard so much about how kids forget over the summer, and I thought it would be a smoother transition if she keeps it up over the summer. I don't want to do very much (which was why I was thinking 1 problem from a vintage book a day or every few days was about perfect), I also don't want it all to completely fall by the wayside.

Oh my goodness, I never knew that these existed! Thank you. And thank you everyone else for your advice! I'll probably end up going with the MM Review Workbooks, since we're using MM.

I'm sold on the idea of continuing to do math over the summer. However, I'm not sure what to do. I don't really want to accelerate the programs we're doing. And I don't really want to just slow down, because we have a great rhythm now and I don't really want it to appear flexible when we start up again next fall. If you make sure to do math over the summer, without accelerating, what do you do? Workbooks from Barnes & Noble? Generate worksheets? I was thinking of maybe using one of those vintage texts that have a never-ending list of questions, and she can do 1 a day (or 3x a week... whatever schedule would get us through the grade-level ones). I think there are a few options for that... Strayer-Upton Practical Arithmetic is one, and there's another one that was posted here recently and I need to go back and find it.

And it's not like there aren't plenty of other options. When people use them, I assume that it's as much for ideology as anything else. If anything, you have to have a certain ideology to even entertain them as options.

Thank you very much for clearing this up. I just read the samples online, and it seemed like the religion was going to be a lot more heavy-handed.

It's the Disney "limited time DVD release - Will never appear again!" strategy, I guess. But I'm a sucker.

I think that "fringe" can have different definitions based on where you are standing. We are secular homeschoolers living in a pretty secular/cafeteria Catholic/liberal WASPy area. To me, A Beka and BJU are definitely fringe. That in and of itself is not a judgement (though I definitely have negative opinions on them). They are way outside the norms of anyone I've ever really known (and I've moved around a lot), any education I've ever had, and any education I ever want my kids to receive. Other people with different perspective, maybe who live in areas with more religious homeschoolers find them normal. Some probably think that they lean too liberal. I leave it to the mathematicians to debate whether to teach set theory, but my instinct is to wonder if they are like the scientists who don't believe in evolution.

I think it's one of the most popular math programs on this board. If you go to education -> k-8 Curriculum, and search "mammoth" you'll get tons of hits. We use it, and are so far happy with it.

I think it's interesting to note that the Life pf Fred author is a very strong Christian, and makes no bones about that in his books. And he introduces set theory in his very first book. It just goes to show just how fringe the A Beka material is.

I would probably also lose book report/story writing. But I'm not clear what it is. That would take DD FOREVER to do, even very simple ones. I usually have her dictate a GoodReads review every few books that she reads.

We don't do everything on every day. I think it breaks up the schedule to have different things on different days. We do math (MEP) and composition every day. (We just started doing MEP every day, instead of 2 pages 2x per week, because it's getting harder). Both of these are programs meant to be used every day. Our grammar book has 3 lessons a week, and so we do that MWF. We alternate that with handwriting, so she does 2 pages in her handwriting workbook on T and Th. We also do Latin 3 days a week, but that's usually T, Th, and Saturday. She practices piano every day, and reads (or looks at books) for 20 minutes... but she does those whenever they fit in, and not as part of school. We also usually do memory work in the car, because what else is there to do but recite poetry when you're driving around? We do history on T and Th afternoon, after everything else is done. She usually does science on Saturday mornings, with her dad. All this is to say that I agree with you that following the same routine every day is monotonous and a whole lot of work. But I don't think you need to totally switch to a T/Th schedule to get a little variety into your programming.

I'd think it would mainly be useful for teaching kids how outlining works... "Is this a topic, a sub-topic, or a detail? Put it where it belongs." But it seems like it would be confusing as a final outline.

See, I only have 3, but I'd have to get them all re-dressed, because they'd be covered with breakfast. :lol:

If I had a dollar for every time I've forgotten someone's shoes, I'd probably have hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Luckily my car is a total pit, and I can usually find a pair of someone's shoes to put on the poor, shoeless child. This is totally counter-intuitive, but I usually wait until the last minute to get them dressed and out the door. They seem to respond better to urgency. It drives my parents crazy when we visit them, and my mother starts getting them ready an hour before we have to leave. Well, by the time we leave they've already taken off their clothes, gotten them messy, lost interest, and so on. My strategy is that 10 minutes before we leave, I toss a full outfit at my oldest (in your case it would be your older two, and possibly your middle child) and tell her to get dressed, and then get the youngest two dressed (in your case, just your toddler... I'd let the baby live in jammies). And then I load everyone immediately in the car.

It really depends on the setup of your house/garage/driveway, but in my setup, I had no problem getting a toddler dressed and then putting her in the carseat in the car while I got the other kids dressed. I also finish getting kids dressed in the car at our destination, if need be. I rarely bother with shoes and socks for the little ones until we get there, because they'll just pull everything off. One thing that makes a big difference in getting the kids dressed is that I put away kids clothes by outfit. I hang everything. That way all i need to do is grab a single hanger (with top&bottom), underwear, and socks.

I agree with this, and I found this to be true with the 5 time method we have... it became all about powering through the song 5 times without really caring about it. Doing it 20 times is, I'd imagine, even worse for that sort of attitude. That's when "doing it 5 times PERFECTLY," started, though I quickly realized that isn't fair at the start of the week, especially for the harder songs. (She's still a beginner, so her "songs" range from 1-line long ones that are supposed to teach a certain point, to 2-page long ones... most are 1 page, with two rows of music.) So at the beginning of the week I encourage her to go very slowly, and really concentrate on how each note is supposed to be played. And then by the end of the week she should be playing it the way that it's supposed to go.