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BoZeeCo's Mom

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Everything posted by BoZeeCo's Mom

  1. Also, not only do I worry about how this is upsetting my son, I also don't want this behavior to influence my girls at all. I'm really worried about that part, too. I'm off to make coffee and practice being a "meanie" ;)before the kids wake up. I think it's the road I'm going to have to go on.
  2. Yeah, I think that parents not stepping in when kids are that little is really strange! I'm going to generalize here, but a lot of parents just don't seem to care what their child is SAYING.
  3. I've been gathering supplies, too-- it is very very inexpensive so far and a lot of the stuff we already have on hand- as pps have mentioned. I've also started writing out my bullet points for some of the units we are doing this year, as well as researching places around town we can go to kind of corispond with what we would be learning about that week. I found that last year I had to do bullet points and really study otherwise I was a dud at teaching the content.
  4. I do know the moms, quite well actually. The swing incident happened in front of the house of one of the girls. This was right after her mother had told me my son was being nasty to them the day before. (the above mentioned "leave me alone don't talk to me). I didn't know that this is what he said, I went back to question her further about what had happened after I took my kids home since he was crying.
  5. Wow. Just, wow. I'm off to read her website. Although I don't know much about this, i know I've heard a few stories on our local unschooling board that remind me of this. I don't think it's common, but there are elements that are surprisingly common in the unschooling world.
  6. I'm one of those slow processors, and this is all kind of new territory for me. Thank you for your advise. It's all taken me by surprise, I always knew this behavior was going to come out of boys vs. girls, I just thought it would be in a couple of years. They seem so young to be doing this! I'm going to make sure that I am always out there when my kids are.
  7. My kids are relatively young. My oldest is almost 7 and the only boy on a street full of girls aged 7 and below. While this is great for my two little ones, (most of the time), it's not so great for him. In particular, he has trouble with the girl next door, (6), and sometimes the girl down the street, (7). When the two girls are together they are often very rude to him. Yesterday, he went out on our porch, saw them on the porch next door, and greeted them very nicely. I heard them immediately groan, and the six year old yelled that they didnt want to play with him and he was a boy and to keep away. Now, im very pregnant and hormonal at the moment, and i didnt trust myself to say anything helpful to them in the situation, so i asked my son if hed like to come inside and play a game with me. The girls of course then said "no dont go inside!" and he seemed like he wanted to play with them. I guess this kicked off many exchanges between them, culminating in the mother of one of the girls telling me today that my son seemed very angry and confrontational with the girls. Apparently he told them to leave him alone and not talk to him at one point, which the mother found aggressive. I will admit, my son does get very angry after listening to "go away, we don't want to play with you" all the time, for no apparent reason. He is a very gentle kid, especially with girls because he's been trained to be with his little sisters. I feel that they are targeting him solely because he is a boy and apparently boys and girls don't play together in schools at younger grades, so it overflows to the neighborhood. We belong to a very inclusive homeschool group made up of kids 9 and under, where all the kids play together, and even my two year old gets invited to the bday parties of the older kids, boys and girls. I guess I'm having a really hard time seeing my son so upset all the time, and he's having a very hard time understanding why they don't want to play with him. How do I explain this? He's somewhat of a parrot, and I don't want to say anything that will hurt anyone if he repeats it. but, I also don't want to hang my son out to dry. Today, they were all taking turns on a swing, except none of the girls let my son take a turn. He was crying, and instead of saying anything to the girls or the mother, I just took him home. I'm really kicking myself over this. Sorry to ramble.
  8. I started my son with Spalding when he was in his "K" year, and it was wonderful. Just learning to form his letters correctly, no reading pressure, just learning the sounds the letters make. I read to him all the time, of course, but I did not make him read to me at all until this summer with a year and a half of Spalding under his belt. Surprise! He magically reads! I would definitely check out The Writing Road to Reading. It couldn't be more gentle or more complete. :hurray:
  9. The best thing I did for my organization was get an educators card from the library. It allows you 6 weeks of checkout time and 40 holds. we are constantly getting thrown off subjects other than MEP and Spalding, and I don't have the strength to try to really organize it. My advice: buy yourself library time, and then try to get through it! GL
  10. I think your revised schedule sounds much more do-able, and I think one thing I learned last year, (my first "official" year of homeschooling), is to let go of all of my preconceived notions of what I needed to be doing and how long I needed to be doing it for. I think it's something every first time homeschool parent learns, and you will be no exception :) I think reading SOTW books during read aloud time to everyone is great. My 4 year old was totally into them last year, and we ended up mainly just using those books as our history and nothing else. It was easy for me, and was an activity I could involve them both in while nursing. I think science can be the same at this age, and I plan to pretty much do this for my son's year this year. For our family, everyone is altogether when we're at home and I'm doing school with my son, (if I can't see them they are getting into a closet and ripping it to shreds). so I think having things like workboxes for your littler ones will be imperative. When we're doing Spalding or MEP, that's when I bust out the forrbidden Calico Critter sets, playmobile, art supplies, activity books, etc. I find setting all that up takes a lot more time than getting my almost 7 year old to do his stuff. I am planning on doing the workboxes webinar in August, for sure. Good luck! Really, for me, letting go of what I thought everything should look like was the hardest part of the first year. Spending an hour-an hour and a half- a day is realistic, and believe me, you will not believe how much they will absorb in such a little amount of time.
  11. I have used both OPGTR and Spalding. I think for us, Spalding has worked a lot better. My son used OPGTR for a long time (I think we almost got to the end), but it was a battle every day. He would lose interest halfway through, and I could tell he wasn't loving any of it. We started Spalding and it was a completely different feel. Because he was writing at the same time he was learning, everything just kind of came together. I ditched OPGTR a year and a half ago for him and never looked back. Now my daughter is starting with school, and I thought that we could try OPGTR with her. I did the first lesson. I found myself being annoyed that it was only teaching the short vowel sound of a. She wanted to practice her a's after we were done with the lesson. I let her do it - the Spalding way, though. She totally got it, and I ditched OPGTR again. It may depend on kids, but my kids so far are totally drawn to Spalding. I think for us it has a lot to do with their interest in being able to WRITE precedes their interest in reading. They think they are learning to write only, but all of a sudden they can read. My son's reading exploded after we used Spalding for a little while. Just the spelling tests. No extra reading on the side. He has only known reading for pleasure and I think that is really going a long way in creating a life-long reading fan. Plus, the phonograms teach you pretty much all the phonics secrets! I'll never give up Spalding.
  12. We love MEP here. As other commenters have said, it exposes my kids to very complicated concepts in a very easy to digest way. I use it as a stand alone curriculum, and can say that it is my absolute favorite out of all of my curriculums. I highly recommend it.
  13. I started the year with SOTW, and quickly found that, while good, it wasn't really perfect for my son. I quickly discovered that the only way he would actually be really engaged was if we were studying battles. So, I have only been talking to him about battles, (we started with what I consider the top 10 most important in history), and that is now our history. This encompasses geography, and everything else under the sun, while presenting facts that he is totally willing to retain and become absorbed in. By no means is this the center of our curriculum. I would say we are definitely all about the 3 R's with tons of literature constantly, but history has become this really fun tier two activity that doesn't even feel like work. I think it's a subject that can be at the center of everything, without being the absolute focus -- if that makes sense.
  14. I just looked up the Geography Through Art -- I love it! thanks for the tip.
  15. Hello Hive: I've been using the Come Look With Me series with all my kids for Art study, and I love it. Does anyone know of anything kind of like this for older kids? I absolutely love this series, but I'd like to amp it up for my son next year. What did your older kid use after Come Look With Me?
  16. Just wondering if this is possible. I saw an add this weekend for Turbo Tax, with a teacher filling out a materials reimbursement. Anyone ever done this? Or is it just for "real" teachers?
  17. I'll definitely keep my boy :) The reason why I want to get rid of the toys, even though the kids are so little, is because they don't play with them. They get them out, play for a minute, throw them around, and leave them on the floor. We have too much stuff, and not a lot of it is quality. My goal is to get rid of 3/4s of it, sort and store the rest and rotate. After bagging it all up yesterday, we have ONE WHOLE CONTRACTOR BAG OF STUFFED ANIMALS. This is ridiculous. Especially because no one plays with them. I swear they play more with my nicely organized bins (the actual bins) after they dump everything out. I'm feeling much better about it. It's going to be an awesome room once I'm done with it.
  18. Thanks for all the responses. I am making them put books away and dress-up stuff away, but everything else is actually going in contractor bags so I can sort it at a later date, or never if they don't ask for it ;) I'm turning the playroom into a school room. I'm calm and I think they are too with nothing in there!
  19. Has anyone ever just thrown away all the toys? I'm so tired of sorting and organizing all the little pieces. I have nice bins stuff all goes into by theme or set, and inevitably my little darlings completely trash everything. I know that they are little and this is what they do, but I'm over it. I do have a lot of storage space in my house, but I really dont want to use it to store their stuffed animals, trains, blocks, etc. We have a HUGE (about 450 s.f.) room that we have told them is their room to play in, but it is a compete horror all the time. They only fight in there and play really roughly and I'm convinced that that is because it is such a chaotic disaster. They all have their own rooms, and I do not allow any toys up there, (except Lego's in my son's case), and it has been wonderful! They keep them picked up and they enjoy spending time up there. Any suggestions? I am currently on the verge of bringing out contractor trash bags.
  20. This made me chuckle. Not at you, but with you. You say this is your first year homeschooling? I'd say you are going to LOVE it here. I think most new-to-homeschooling moms have this EXACT feeling when we start trying to get a grip on what all this means. You've got to love research to do this job right. You will get it. Keep researching. Don't give up! You will find the best. And even if it takes you awhile and you feel like the kids are falling behind, don't give up! Just read to them/make them read while you are researching and trying new things and know that they are going to be fine. When you get it all together, you'll be teaching them more in less time and they will be just fine - if not better - than they were before.
  21. I do supplement with Challenging Word Problems from Singapore, but I rarely do it, and only if I feel like we need a little more practice on something. That said, if I didn't have the book, I would be just making up extra practice problems when we needed them.
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