My takeaway is that I gave my kids the wrong names to be homeschoolers...

I really like the Starfall kindergarten reading curriculum. It's designed for a classroom, not homeschoolers. It involves a lot of science and social studies/history. It's very gentle, but I used it a little with one of my kids, and I think it really gets the job done. And it's very open-and-go for teachers. I was also really excited that the Superkids reading program has been redeveloped and issued. I know nothing about it, except it's the program that my district used when I was a kid, and I loved it! It was my dream to grow up and live on a rainbow school bus :)

They're pretty separate. First Language Lessons is mostly a grammar program, concentrating on speaking proper English, parts of speech, practical uses of language (letter writing, knowing your address). There is no writing, except occasional copying things over to help drive a point home (can't remember how much of that there is in Level 2, actually, but in Level 1 my son is doing things like copying his address). Writing With Ease is the composition program, which, over the long haul, teaches kids how to read critically and write coherently. The first two years are VERY repetitive, and deceptively simple. But we're in the 3rd year now, where things are picking up, and there is definitely a method to the madness :) I think that in schools, "English" (or "Language Arts") is just treated as this giant catch-all, and so we don't really think about how many separate subjects are actually contained in that course of study... reading, handwriting, spelling, vocabulary, grammar, etc. FLL and WWE breaks up grammar and composition into two separate subjects, so that the student can concentrate on each one independently, and the idea is that they come out stronger at both.

Bring a bag of Goldfish for each child. Give bag when you take off, and turn on TV screen. Child will eat happily for a looong time. It totally works :) Remember to bring goldfish for the flight back home, too. :) ETA: Also, bring a water bottle for each kid. Has to be empty to get through security. As soon as you're on the flight, ask the attendants to fill them up. This makes the kids happier. Remember, though, that airplanes are so dry, and the kids will drink a ton, so be prepared for bathroom breaks... and if you have kids in diapers, and are used to a pretty standard rhythm in terms of knowing about how often you need to change them... they'll need to be changed more often. I learned that lesson the hard way. Agree that the "lots of little toys" strategy is more trouble than it's worth. If you can't find an iPad/phone/DVD player for each kid, try to find out if the flight has individual video screens. It's nearly as good.

Ha, yes, I admit that I was kind of blindsided when it turned out that "I find it morally wrong to give money to adult children" turned into "of course, I'm saving up for their down payments," which is something that most parents can't do, and sure sounds like major help to me! (But still reading the thread...)

FWIW, I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. And I have a soft spot for origin myths, from any culture, and particularly from my own. But unless you're researching what Wampanoag Indians were wearing in the early 17th century, and doing the best you can to celebrate that, just skip the whole dressing up as a generic "Indian" to celebrate Thanksgiving.

THIS THIS THIS. Everyone would think it pretty silly if the "Europeans" at a first Thanksgiving showed up in a mixture of dirndls, Roman togas, medieval jester costumes, and Viking-style fur vests with horned hats. I wouldn't consider it offensive, because of course everyone knows better, and would take it as a dumb joke... everyone would laugh because we all know perfectly well that's not what European colonists living in Plimoth in 1623 were wearing. It's equally silly to show up in the Pocahontas costume you bought on sale the week after Halloween, with red stripes on your face, and paper feathers in your headband. Except it actually is offensive, because it shows absolutely no comprehension of traditional Native American dress, or the fact that there were many, many distinct tribes with different traditions and dress, and and it shows a complete lack of interest in learning anything on the subject. That lack of interest in learning about Native tribes, and the ignorance of grouping all "Indians" together as some generic trope, is what makes it offensive.

They do it in my town, and it always confirms my decision to homeschool. Paper feathers in headbands, generic "Indian Princess" costumes. Some kids have "warpaint" on. I've never heard ANYONE speak anything negative about it. If my kids went to school, they'd be staying home that day.

If you look at historical trends, the idea that people are supposed to be self-sufficient adults at 18 or 21, with no help or particular ties to their parents, is a pretty new invention, and only really came about in the post WWII era in America. There were a few reasons for this, both cultural and financial... for example, that was the first time that very young Americans could afford a house of their own, thanks to the VA bill and swaths of newly built cheap housing. Really, it's a historical blip that's somehow become cemented in our minds as "the way things used to be." Prior to that, it was standard (though obviously not universal) for children of ALL classes to live with their parents until they got married... and then they often continued to live with one set of parents for years after. Housing was expensive, and there was no particular reason not to share resources. I think most people know that lower class families often lived in crowded tenement-style apartments with extended family, but it was perfectly normal for middle and upper class families to live intergenerationally, too. If you read old books, it's pretty common for all manner of extended family to be living together, and when you read history or biographies it's common for them to mention that the young married couple lived with one set of parents for a couple of years, and then bought a house, and Cousin Martha moved in, too, to help with the children... the idea of the "spinster" was the unmarried relative who spent her days spinning and weaving and watching the children. The idea of the nuclear family living as a stand-alone and completely independent unit is very much a product of the nuclear age. Housing, energy, and food costs are rising for most Americans... but really they're returning to more historical levels of unaffordability. I think that it's definitely going to become more common for families to live together, and/or to provide financial support both up and down generations. I know of at least two young 20-somethings (both women... separate families) who moved back in with their parents, rent-free, after graduation from good schools. Within a few years, both owned property (one a house, one a nice condo). There's no way they would have been able to save for that down payment if they hadn't been "mooching." I don't know the exact details of either arrangement, and I think that there were informal agreements about who was paying for groceries and doing things around the house, but both families are very clear that the top priority of everyone was that the girls would save as much money as possible while living at home. This may have been "mooching," but I also think it was very smart and I would be happy to do it for my own kids someday.

In levels 1 and 2, it's really easy to double up, but I'm finding that's a lot harder to do in Level 3. I usually doubled up 1 and 2, but for Level 3, I'm finding that we're skipping a bunch of the dictations, because so many of the reading/narration ones are also dictations, and I figure that's more important. And then after we do that, I don't really see the point in making her do a second dictation that day.

If you're using WWE, do you prioritize "a lesson a week," even if it means skipping individual days within the lesson (so you don't really start the week until Wednesday, and you do "Week 11, Day 1", and then Thursday you do "Day 2", and then you're busy Friday, and the following week, you start "Week 12, Day 1" without having done days 3 and 4 of the previous week)? Or do you prioritize doing each lesson in order, even if it means doing "Week 11, day 2" on Thursday and "Week 11, day 3" on the following Monday? If the latter, what about at the end of the year... do you end on Week 23 (or whatever) and start the next level the next school year, or do you start Week 24 the next school year? I've done both, and I don't think that it really matters. I was just wondering what others do, out of idle curiosity. And I was just using lesson to mean the 4-day groupings of exercises, because I couldn't think of another word :)

Very well said. I would do it for my children, if I had the money. And if I had lots of money... well, you can't take it with you. I'd rather spend it on my kids than to just let it sit in a bank.

Interesting. I remember when they left the church. The last paragraph is particularly interesting to me... that Phelps may have softened at the end of his life, but the leadership of his church was out of his hands. I assume that someday there will be an expose about the film director who seems to have been converted awfully quickly, and now apparently runs the whole show. That will be interesting indeed.

It's always been this way in some families. It's getting more common in others. Salaries have not kept pace with living costs in many places. I understand that the whole unpaid internship trend is significantly less of a factor than it used to be, but that was just ramping up when I graduated college, and there were entire career tracks that you couldn't enter unless you could get a full time unpaid internship for a year.

Only 1 of my kids can actually read, but all 3 of my kids spend a lot of time looking at books. I think part of it is that we just have a ton of them. I only recently reduced our board books by about 1/2, and the ones remaining fill a large sterelite plastic bin, overflowing a bit. I don't know how many that is... 40? My kids have been handed books to look at from the moment they could sit up. Then we have maybe a thousand picture books? Too many to just fit in one place, so they're all over the house, which makes them convenient. You can be in nearly any room in our house, and there are some nice picture books at kid-level for them to look at. I think that part of it is that my oldest DD1 is a natural reader, and she models reading for the younger two. I think it's partly because we restrict screen time. Any of my kids would rather watch a TV show or play on the computer than read. When we don't have that option, though, they're happy to read. I think part of it is that I love bookstores, and so my kids spend a lot of time sitting on the floor of the kids department, looking at books. That's how I was raised... my sister once famously said "a vacation is when you go to bookstores in other towns." :) I dunno, I know that it's too early to tell, but I do love how much my kids love books. I bought them a big artist retrospective type book about Ed Emberly the other day, and they've been obsessively reading it and copying the pictures. They have entire Calvin and Hobbes strips memorized, and act them out. It's really nice to see how important books are to them.

As safe as I ever have, which is not really, but I'll be doing it anyway. We're flying to England in a few weeks, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that terrorism doesn't concern me. But it's one of those things where you can't just stay inside your house forever (and even if you did, there's always carbon monoxide to worry about indoors), so what else can I do but soldier on and live my life? I will say that over the years, these big terrorist attacks are one offs, and happen every couple years. Of course, everything is heating up, so it wouldn't surprise me if there were more on a shorter timeline, but overall, if you look at the past decade historically, now's actually a pretty safe time to travel to Paris.

It only adds about 2 hours to the trip according to Google Maps, but would you want to go through New Orleans? I've never been, but I've always wanted to go. Then that route has you going up through Shreveport, over to Fort Worth, and up through Oklahoma City. Though I don't know where in Kansas you're going, so I just plugged in Wichita...

My husband actually made us pay $500 for a structural engineer to come and assess our floors, because of my book problem. :lol: The guy said he'd never seen so many books, but so long as we kept most of the bookshelves around the edge of the house, it would be fine.

Wow, my Costco never has anything good!

:lurk5:

I can't "like" this a million times, so I'm just going to quote it and say that this basically sums everything up. Also, we seem to have scared off the original poster, LOL.

Nonfiction is open to libel laws, and you'd better be able to prove that you have good reason to believe what you've written is true (and libel in the US is based on it being slanderous AND untrue... if you can prove that what you say is true, it's not libel). Fiction is a bit trickier... you'll see a disclaimer in the front of fiction books saying "nobody in this book is based on anyone, living or dead." This is clearly a total lie, as it's impossible to imagine authors never, every putting any sort of personality traits, quirks, conversations, or actions of anyone they've ever heard of or met in their book. But it seems to do the trick. Occasionally there will be a libel case of someone saying that a book character was based on them, but my understanding is that these cases are very hard to win in the US. Different countries have different libel laws.

Yes, nightly until I was about in middle school. Then they continued to read to my younger sister for a few more years... I was welcome to join in, but I usually had too much homework. When I was younger, they'd read to us in our rooms before bed, and when I got a bit older they'd read in the living room while my sister and I colored or did a craft. (My dad usually worked late, so my mom usually read to us. When he was home, he was usually the one who read to us.) My parents are a bit book-obsessed, though, and were always reading. At the dinner table, they'd each have a magazine in front of them, reading it and discussing the stories in their respective magazines with each other. I can't help it, and despite DH's disapproval (though he's gotten used to it now), I still bring The New Yorker to family dinners, and tell everyone what I'm reading about through the meal.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is a list of fiction books... it's not surprising that it doesn't have biographies or history. As for Holmes' poetry, I'll preface this by saying that I'm really into poetry, and make my kids read tons of poems, and I read poems to them all the time, and I'll just say that I'd never prevent my kids from reading any book of poetry they want in their free time, but there are about 100 poets whose books I'd have them read before we got to Holmes. Which is kind of my point. If I wanted to teach my kids great poetry on the cheap, I'd go to Amazon and buy the last (not current, the one before that) edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (available used for $1.89 plus $3.99 shipping and handling... In my copy, which is the "shorter 4th edition," Holmes has one poem in it, "The Chambered Nautilus," which is worth teaching) and work through that. The thing's about 1500 pages, arranged chronologically. I'd also buy the Random House Book of Children's Poetry (83¢ used, plus $3.99 shipping and handling) and work on that with kids. Which is also kind of my point... what Robinson tried to do has been done, by others, much better, and much cheaper (free, if you have a decent library). You'd have to get a couple books to compile a complete k-12 curriculum. Even if you know nothing about children's literature, a few google searches about "list of children's book prizes" and then finding those titles would more than cover you for literature from about k-6. Then look up the Core Knowledge Curriculum subject list to search for non-fiction subjects, and find books on them. Middle school would be kind of a mix of the above (I'd probably wait until about 7th grade for The Giver, for example, but a 7th grader is also certainly ready for some adult topics), and then find a book about "Great Books" and work through that for literature and some history. And, as Farrar says, even The Well-Trained Mind has book lists, and they're much better than the Robinson one.

First of all, Charlotte's Web isn't on the list. It's not in the public domain. Secondly, the vast majority of books on the list are the super schlocky and awful children's books. The Bobbsey Twins are lots of fun to read in your spare time, but including them as not insubstantial part of your literature-based curriculum makes them fair game to bring up when criticizing the curriculum. Thirdly, yes, a lot of history happened prior to 75 years ago. On the other hand, a lot also happened in the past 75 years, and I think it's pretty important for kids to graduate with a modern education. And finally, it's really just an awful list. There are some books on it that should be read by everyone. There are many, many, many, many more books on it that have fallen out of popularity not because of some evil PC publishers conspiracy, but just because they're not good books. And to charge people $200 for a list of not-good books, when any library has a shelf of books with titles like "100 books to read before you die" or "Classics of literature that everyone should read" or "Classics that children love" or something like that, is absurd.