I love these books, too. We got so much out of just the short science section in What Your Preschooler Needs to Know. I found a ton of other books and activities on the themes presented in there. I also loved the poems and songs and stories.

I found a ton of great preschool books in the educator section of Barnes and Noble, and we did stuff from those. Two of my favorites were Count on Math, and Science is Simple. They're both published by Gryphon House, which has tons of other great preschool books. I liked Peak With Books, too. The Letter of the Week curriculum was good. I actually preferred the toddler curriculum, which has a little theme each week (I think the first week is cows). I used that as a framework for a while, and just added other activities that are better for slightly older kids. The Scholastic Teacher Express store has some great teacher curriculum books. They go on sale fairly often, and they have a $1 sale every year: I think in August. I've bought some GREAT books there. I also like buying their coloring books, and I print out a sheet whenever I need to keep my kids busy for a bit. There's one that's called Month-by-Month preschool almanac, and it has 4 different themed weeks for each month (including summer, which is very nice) with read aloud recs, and craft project ideas, and art projects. The Teacher Express site is nice too, because they let you preview a great deal of the book before you buy it.

Can you arrange more playdates for her?

Is there a place to download it for free? I'd like to take a look at it before deciding whether to buy the hard copies. Isn't it in the public domain?

Thanks! I'm very interested in this subject. I reread them as an adult, and was so shocked at how different they were from an adult perspective! They are so close to starvation at every turn. It made me really not like Pa, to keep dragging his poor family all over the place when it sounds like they had a pretty cozy life in the Big Woods!

This is my favorite Amazon product for its reviews. It's a desk that latches on to your steering wheel. So you can write while you drive. http://www.amazon.com/Wheelmate-Laptop-Steering-Wheel-Desk/dp/B000IZGIA8 The customer images are pretty priceless, too.

I think 8 and 10 are too young. It's a book for teenagers. There's a teenage love triangle, and a lot of violence. More importantly, it's a criticism of our society's obsession with appearance, how desensitized we are becoming to violence, and the "bread and circuses" mentality of the media. I think a few more years experience in the real world would be useful to be able to understand the major themes of the book.

My library has a book sale room, and children's paperbacks are 25 cents. I check in there every week and buy every early reader they have. Well, I do admit that I left Chipwrecked on the shelf! I would like to have a handy library that DD, and my other two kids when they're older, can pull from. And since the books are $5 each new and are read quickly and probably only once, I can't see buying very many new!

It's a very well written YA novel about life in a future dystopian North America, where all of the resources are concentrated in the capital city, and the rest of the country lives in extreme poverty. In order to punish the outlying areas (called districts) for a past revolt, every year each district must send two teenagers to appear on a reality TV show where they must fight to the death. It's very well paced, very well written, and has some interesting things to say about the general trend our culture is taking. Definitely read the books before you see the movie. I read all three in a weekend: they're not terribly long or terribly tough. But they are worth reading.

Do you mean what does a "dead language" mean? Language changes over time, as people use it. New words come into the language, people stop using other words, and words change meaning. That's a living language. Classical Latin is a dead language, because it's no longer living. People no longer use it conversationally, and so it has stopped living. That doesn't mean that it's not worth knowing, or that it can't be useful to know. I think some people do use "dead language" as meaning "useless language," but that's not really what it means at all.

The inactivity of the adults is awful, I agree, but it's also realistic. They were once teenagers themselves, who watched their playmates and friends go off to the games, and be brutally murdered. This becomes clear in one of the later books, when even one of the most fortunate/prosperous citizens of District 12 is plagued by lifelong psychological and physical repercussions from the PTSD of watching her sister die in the games. Everyone is starving, and the parents are doing all that they can to provide for themselves and their children. They don't have the energy or the time or the resources to launch a revolt of their own. And they know what will happen if they try. And Katniss's parental situation is particularly intense: her father is dead, and her mother is mentally ill and can not care for her family. Having parents be unable or unwilling to take care of their children is a common thread in children's books and stories. It wouldn't be a very interesting story if the parents were always there to step in and efficiently and maturely handle any issues that pop up! In the vast majority of kids books and fairy tales, the parents are dead or very busy or incapacitated in some way. In the Hunger Games, they are so beaten down that they have no resources to rise up: they know what will happen if they do.

Oh no! How long has it been down? I just went there recently to look at her Reading Rainbow directory. That was my favorite homeschooling blog. I hope that everything is okay for her.

I agree. I read the books, and they WERE disturbing. But in a very pointed way, that makes you think. Collins says she got the idea for the books while flipping between a reality TV show and gruesome coverage about the war in Iraq, and started to think about what our society considers entertainment. It does seem a stretch to take the "last man standing" point of most reality TV competitions and make it literally about life and death, but Collins did an excellent job "world building" and I think that how our society got from here to there is as believable as not. I don't think I'd let a 10 year old read it: it's definitely a book for teens. They are violent, but they are about a lot more than that.

It says that the homeschool version is the Christian school version, slightly modified. How Christian is it?

:iagree:

Thank you for the review! I am seeing it with some friends, and I loved the books.

Maria Montessori was certainly not anti play or anti imagination. She originally had all the usual play centers in her school (dolls, play kitchen, etc), but found that the children were not interested and so she took them out. If anyone is trying to insist that children are not allowed to play or imagine things, they are absolutely not following any sort of original Montessori philosophy, but some sort of modern neo-Montessori extreme. While there aren't play centers in Montessori schools, outside of school children are certainly expected to play imaginatively. And since the Montessori school day is only 3 hours long, there's plenty of time spent not in the classroom. M. Montessori believed that children need and actively yearn for a grounding in reality before they can invent their own worlds. The way that an adult author of fiction must understand the reality of her subject (whatever the genre) before she can use her imagination to create a fantasy world. SCGS, I really hope that your relative doesn't actually try to keep her child from playing imaginative games. That is child abuse.

As alilac said, when my daughter starts to guess words it's a clear indication that she's tired. She loves reading, and so she insists on pushing forward, but there's a point where she's just making so many mistakes that I have to put an end to reading time before she gets frustrated and upset. That's a somewhat tricky maneuver, because I don't want her to feel like I'm punishing her by making her stop so I try to distract her with something else that she wants to do.

The most basic underlying philosophy of Montessori is "freedom within limits." So while a child has limits to what they are allowed to do, they have complete freedom within those limits. I think those limits include: setting up a safe and welcoming environment, selecting toys and games and activities that are appropriate for the child's level, enforcing behavioral and social expectations.

Huh, I've never heard of this, but I guess it makes sense. But I live someplace relatively urban, and storefront churches aren't uncommon in lower-rent strip malls.

That's my memory, too. I remember we started switching teachers for social studies and science in 4th grade, but before that it was language arts and math pretty much all day, except for one period a day when we either had gym (2x per week), art, music, or health. I don't know how long those periods were, but I would be really surprised if they were more than 40 minutes. My school did level tracking starting in kindergarten, so language arts took most of the day because the teacher would work with each reading group one at a time. The other two groups would sit at our desks and do independent work during that time. As someone else said, this isn't the whole picture: science and social studies were integrated into language arts. I remember in 3rd grade having to do a book report on a historical figure, for example. Our readers covered both fiction and non-fiction.

English muffin pizzas with apple slices. Normally I do a real veggie too, but I was feeling lazy tonight.

I've noticed that mine are due to when I'm sleeping through the night again finally.

I forget. :lol:

:iagree: To add to your second question, I don't respond when I don't have anything constructive to add. There are so many people of different backgrounds and different beliefs here, and people tend to be non-agressive towards other people's backgrounds beliefs, that I think there are many posters who would just rather leave the thread than post something that the OP doesn't want to hear. Whatever your issue is, I hope you come to a decision that works well for your family.