higginszoo
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Posts posted by higginszoo
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I think the girly but more grown up is the better way to go. My 7 year old voted babyish, too.
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There are parental controls that you can use on the Fire to keep internet access turned off if you choose (you'd need to go in and turn it on to download additional books, I think ... but then you could turn it back off again).
The Fire does have more game/surfing abilities than the regular Kindles, but you don't have to load games onto it or use the web browser. My dyslexic son likes the color version better (though he now uses his iTouch Kindle app) because the brown on sepia mode is a lot easier for him to read than the black on white, but he only ever uses my Kindle Fire as a book reader (occasionally, the littlest will use a free times tables game I loaded onto it while we're waiting somewhere).
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My older dd got hers done as a demonstration at a cosmetology school. The instructor I talked to originally said that she used a needle, but the instructor who actually did it had a senior student use a gun.
My cousin is opening a tattoo shop in the next year or so, and is a certified piercer (has a LOT of piercings himself), he's 7-8 hours away, but I'll probably have him do younger dd's. She has decided in her own head that she has to be 8 to get it done, so we'll be waiting that long anyway, and then next time we're down visiting my family, I'll probably surprise her.
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Like most people here, I don't agree with their ideology. When I lived in UT, I started out being able to just fill out a simple form, pay for a regular stamp and mail it in, 5 minutes. Then HSLDA stepped in and suddenly I had to pay a notary, pay for delivery confirmation, and running those errands meant dragging the dc around for up to an hour. HSLDA wouldn't have even represented my family that year because of our ideology and some of the educational choices that we made that were in the best interests of our children, but against their policies.
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Neither of my boys have ever really asked. With the oldest, we found an opportunity that looked promising and tried it for a while, but after less than 2 years, he came back home readily, and has expressed that he'd only want to go back as a plan C or D, it's not a priority or particular desire of his.
My little guy only asked once because his friend down the friend pressured him into asking. Circumstances didn't work out just then to send him, and when I offered him opportunities for next year and/or the year after, he has come right out and declared that he'd rather not go to school, certainly not now, maybe not at all. He'd be my only exclusively homeschooled dc.
My older dd went for two years at her own request, and will go back for high school at her own request. I found a charter that might take her next year, but she declared that she'd rather stay home.
Younger dd is the only extrovert in a house of introverts. She'd thrive in a brick and mortar school environment, and as soon as conditions are favorable in our local ps (right now it's overcrowded and understaffed, but there are plans to correct that), she'll go.
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I'd check out the obvious first. If not that (very well may not be), it could be the start of perimenopause where things start to get a little wonky. That's how mine started at about your age. Now, just a few years later, I don't ever know WHAT to expect as far as female issues. My doc (GYN turned family practitioner) assures me that it's all normal and typical, but it drives me crazier than the hormones are already driving me.
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We're pretty relaxed, but the dc are in a 'give us structure' phase right now. So I hand them syllabi.
The older two are working through Geometry and Biology together. The oldest is journaling on the Harvard Classics suggested daily readings. The second is making some kind of wildlife/bird illustrated guide-ish kind of thing. Oldest needs high school Americna History, and I realized that the second hasn't really studied it all the way through, with less than a year and a half until she goes out to high school, so they're going to start going through an AP syllabus for that.
Little guy has a history bug right now, so he's wanting to follow along with the big kids, and has gotten a head start, choosing a middle school-level textbook over the Joy Hakim series of books. He is also working through Life of Fred Algebra and Real Science For Kids Level 1 stuff (Chemistry right now, I think ... his interest has waned, so I don't know where he is with it).
The litlte one is finishing a BrainQuest workbook from Barnes and Noble. She is also reading the Little House books and will probably tag along after a fashion with the older kids' American History stuff, but I don't have curriculum, per se, for her.
I'm thinking of re-introducing them all to Khan academy and maybe setting up some sort of contest for mastering modules. Competition is always well-received here.
We've been pretty structured for several months now (for us), I'm waiting for it to fall off as it usually does in cycles. I love the term tidal homeschooler, as it describes us very well.
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I was hospitalized a few times in the third trimester with both of my middle dc. Both times involved u/s, and both times, when the transducer was placed just right, it was obvious. They were a girl and a boy... we weren't finding out with ds, but my gut was telling me boy anyway. The hardest part was knowing, but not telling, especially when I was in labor and dh still wouldn't settle on a boy name, and when the doctor (who hadn't seen the u/s) called him by the girl name we HAD settled on when he delivered the head.
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Would I expect it? Yes.
Having a 13 year old boy myself, do I believe that the same thing would happen here? Yes. :glare:
(Except that he has braces right now, which IS actually causing him to pay more attention, as having stuff stuck in them does bother him enough to make him brush.)
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But you know, I'm willing to give the Girl Scouts the benefit of the doubt. They have always been forward thinking. It's hard not to love an organization that Martin Luther King Junior called "a force of desegregation." (That’s not to say that I’m not hearing your frustration.)
I guess it depends on where you were. About 20 years after Dr. King died, there was much ado made when I went to participate in the SC legislative page program in Columbia. Whether it was because of the demographics of people who signed up to host or possibly assumptions made, but I was apparently the first white girl to be hosted by a black family for such an event. It wasn't a big deal to me or to the host family. I had been to an international event with my host girl's older sister, and had a great time with my host family and the other girl being hosted for the event (who was heavily influenced by the program and now serves as a top legislative aide). But higher ups for the event and the council were all in a tizzy over it all, as Girl Scouting was still somewhat segregated in SC, even in the late '80s (so was the high school I went to, a concept which I found completely bizarre.)
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My favorite typo from the high school board is "duel" for dual as "duel enrollment". Teenagers these days!
But fencing as a PE elective sounds intriguing. :) Especially if they can get college credit for it!
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The crib you are selling is espresso in color, not expresso! :lol:
But if you drink expresso, you go really really fast, don't you? :auto: :lol:
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I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who pitches curriculum over things like this. I have a friend or two who seem to think that I'm overreacting, but I will NOT use curriculum with glaring grammatical errors, even for science or math.I saw this in the introductory pages of a language arts curriculum and promptly sent it back for a refund. I just could not get past it. Science, maybe. Math, maybe. I realize not everyone is a wizard with words. But language arts? Really? -
One from a homeschool transcript service today: they serve a nitch market ... I don't think that I'm going to fit into that particular niche.
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My last 2 are 4 years 1 mo apart, but this has always seemed like a huge gap in comparison because my other gaps are 13 mo and 17 mo. I had infertility and multiple miscarriages before my oldest and between #3 and #4. My first miscarried baby in the second group would have been less than a year younger than my third.
It has worked out pretty well, though it was a lot more like starting over than before, when I still had a baby when the next one appeared (the older group were all in diapers together).
The younger two (7 and 11 now) do play together a good bit, and even combine in their schooling off and on (they both did SOTW -- though the 11 year old picked up the pace and the littler one didn't follow along as well that way ... now that we're doing just American History this year, they'll be combining some elementary materials again while the older two do an AP level course.)
One of my lifelong best friends has a 5 1/2 year gap between her 1st and 2nd and 2nd and 3rd. She uses brick and mortar schools, so she had a lot more time to focus on the early years with each child individually, and the older children were big enough to be of help with the new one. Her dc are 17, 12, 6 and 3 now, and they're all close, even the oldest and youngest, in spite of the 14 year age difference.
Any spacing is going to have its advantages and disadvantages, if you even have the luxury of picking spacing.
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I'm 3 mo shy of 40 and 50-75% gray ... not ready to deal with it yet, so I color it. My mom had her youngest child graduate from high school, became a grandmother and turned 50 all within a 2-3 month period and stopped coloring around then. Her hair is really pretty natural, but I'm just not ready for that look just yet myself.
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Once they hit about 8, kids in our neighborhood are pretty free-range up and down the block, and into the large city park behind our house.
My 7 year old and her age-mate made some poor choices and had their range tightened down significantly for now after the other mom and I spent a frantic half hour tracking them down a couple of months back.
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From the point of view of a military kid, there was always more of a sense of stability when we went along with my dad, even when it meant changing schools and living in a hotel room, if we went along with my dad to wherever he was going, even on those short school assignments. We did different things different times, so I can compare it to staying put, going to the next station ahead, and going back to stay with family, and by far, going with dad felt the most secure and was the happiest, not only when I was little (he went back on active duty when I was 5), but into my college years.
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He does kind of look like an Oliver. It's one of those classic names that is making a comeback, I've met several little Olivers over the last few years.
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We have two of them. There is no significant difference between the Appleletters and Bananagrams. They seem to be different brands for the same game/concept. The dc like them, and it's nice to have several sets for big games with friends, or for the dc to play solitaire versions.
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I have a *ahem* friend who faced this very situation this week, except that this *friend* is in the throes of perimenopause and can no longer predict when her friend might show up to visit. The GYN (well, she used to be a GYN, now doing family practice, but conveniently still offers GYN services to non-pregnant patients) informed my friend that it looked like she'd just started as she finished her exam.
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They look great, and Trinity is so close to us. My ds qualified for the Center programs, but the price tag is more than we can swing, and we didn't qualify for any aid either last year or this year.
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Stop and breathe. Don't worry about curriculum too much -- he's going to learn this whether you teach him or not. I think that the biggest adjustment I needed to make was in my mindset -- I rarely have to teach any of my gifted children anything -- reading, math ... they pick it up with minimal curricular intervention, even now. My biggest mistake was with my oldest -- jumping in too much and trying to teach. My younger ones who I just let discover on their own are much more enthusiastic about learning.
My youngest has had no formal history whatsoever. Sometimes, she listens in to SOTW with her brother, but usually seems bored. Yet yesterday, I quoted "Beware the Ides of March" when I looked at the calendar. She looked at my quizzically. I told her it was from a Shakespeare play about Julius Caesar. "Oh, he's the one whose friends killed him because they didn't want him to marry that Egyptian lady named Cleopatra." Yep, that would be the one. She doesn't remember where she heard it, but I didn't teach it, and she hasn't had any curriculum that has covered it.
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I have a low end Canon laser printer that I've been very happy with for 5 years now. I only have to replace the cartridge about once a year, and I can get off-brand refills for $20-30. With an inkjet on inksaver (I went through several -- mostly Brother and Epson), I was running through 4-5 black and white cartridges a year at $15-20 a shot.
My next printer will likely be another laser, either Brother or Canon, but I'll definitely go for duplexing and a sheet feeder next time!
Unclaimed money - is any of it yours?
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
We have something from a bank that still had an address from 13 years ago, even though we had the account up until 11 years ago. It's in dh's name, so I forwarded to him to look into. We only had joint accounts there, but it only came up in his name. Less than $50 according to the state, but hey...