The Teaching Co's Understanding the World's Greatest Structures looks good. I watched a free lecture that was very interesting on thin shells and the Hyperbolic Parboloid. Here's a MOOC that's already started but I'd guess they'll have another one: ThinkTank Cities.

*bump* I'm interested in this too. My two older homeschoolers just got tablets and I'd like to be able to bluetooth them their daily schedule, or online on a family account through some app.

I would not expect it to work on my tablet. It'd be bonus, but I don't expect a curriculum writer to be up to date on every new technology. Maybe you can download a better PDF reader. I'd blame the tablet, not the PDF. I know a lot of things didn't work on my 3.0 Honeycomb but within 6mo everything did work, and now with my 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it all works or has an app to make anything work.

My high school did 1/2 credit of Trig and 1/2 credit of Pre-Calc. If they can get away with it, I'm sure we could. But with Geometry, I think colleges specifically want 1 full credit of that.

:lurk5: Interesting. My boys would love this too.

I think the office wants you all to be thankful you still have jobs. :confused1: I like the hot cocoa idea. Very creative.

Great ideas! You all are fast. Thank you so much. I've pinned or bookmarked everything you recommended already. :D I'm excited!

I'm planning units about making our own fictional country set in the late 1800's. I figure we can make a country and come back to it multiples times throughout the school year focusing on different aspects of a society. I want to cover as many subjects as I can: math, LA, history, government, science, art, geography. My kids that will be doing this are 7-11yo. The kids have built their own little community outside with pine cones and acorns for money. They barter and sell for items to build teepees and set up farms, so I think they would really be into this. I've also been reading about Problem-Based Learning, which makes their education more relateable and goal-oriented. DH and I were thinking it'd be fun if we gave them a newspaper issue at the beginning of each lesson of what's happening in their country because of the previous lesson's decisions/changes, the citizen's opinions of their country, and new issues our DC need to address. Since we recently covered Western Expansion touching on resources and are currently doing a unit on Ecosystems and building a zoo, we could start by planning the types of climate regions and resources our country should have, size, any neighboring countries, etc. Then I'm thinking we can choose a political system. Name a president or ruling family (depending on their system choice) and decide on characteristics or qualifications for their leader(s). After that...? I need ideas on what we could cover during the year and how to present topics on their level.

We're on the opposite side of Fort Bragg in Western Harnett.

We do fruit, yogurt, or applesauce for morning snack, then they get one item out of our snack bin in the pantry for afternoon snack. All the prepackaged things get dumped out of their boxes into that. I also headcount, ours plus other children. Many moments of panic have taught me to figure out how many I should have before I count. Like - stepdaughter ( at friend's), - baby (with husband), + friends' son, + neighbor boy = 9. Then I count by twos or threes. You know you've got a lot of kids when you start counting by 3s!! We should play games more, but it's so overwhelming with so many competitive boys that we don't very often. They do active games and video games together.

The last place I'd take my somewhat sick child is a germ-covered ER. We took a feverish child in once. He also had a red chest, headache, and neck stiffness. We treated him like he was highly infectious with the plague for others' protection just in case he did have something major. Thankfully it only systemic poison oak with coincidental headache/neck pain.

I'm dealing with a similar decision. I sent 4 of mine to school and ds7, who was my best homeschooler and loved learning, is having a terrible time. They all will be coming home, but I don't know when to bring them home...just ds7 (leaving his twin in the ps class alone) or all 4 together, which means waiting?

As a Jessi only since I've been married (Jessica before), I still always think Jesse/boy when I hear the name.

When mine have had practice on unlighted fields after dark, we parents would park our cars facing the field and turn on our headlights when it got dark. It worked.

I want my kids to understand that there can be regrets for not doing things. I was only taught about regrets from the things that were done and so I lived in fear of making bad decisions...thus my usual decision was to do nothing. I have lots of regrets of the things I didn't do. That said, if my children tried something and found they didn't like it or weren't good at it, they have the option to quit after giving it a real effort and understanding of why. We convinced our older boys to do one last year in wrestling this past Winter and they truly hated it. Lesson learned. I think kids grow up to regret the things they quit because their memories warp and their likes change. It doesn't change who they were and what their experiences were at the time in their childhood.

Catherine Lindie? An updated version of Linda. BTW, I voted the second option since you mention TWO names you don't like in your third, so going by the only other name seemed like a good idea.

He's probably not contagious anymore and don't be surprised if the results come back negative. They only come back positive for the first 3wks or so and it takes up to a week to start showing cold-like symptoms in the beginning. We rotated through it for 5 months so we just did whatever people felt up to doing. Once the cough takes over, it's from damage to the lung tissue and usually the illness is over. We did the croup treatments for helping it: steam, cold air, humidifier, etc. Mostly we just suffered through. Friends of ours had good luck with a nebulizer when their family had it.

Wow, it's appalling that so many of you are just fine with him saying, "Shut up! I don't talk to White people!" If he was white and had said "Shut up! I don't talk to black people!" towards an elderly black teacher it'd be an entirely different discussion, I'm sure.:glare: Also, I think it's my job as a parent to say something when another child hurts my own...or any other child in my presence, for that matter. Next time OP, please say something in defense of your dc. It's adults tolerating his behavior that's allowing him to think it's acceptable.

Try standing and nursing. Sway, sing, and rub her back like you would to sooth her and she will settle down and nurse longer. I've had to do that many times with gassy and colicky babies. It really works. I agree on checking for tongue tie too. I've had 3 of those and they are less patient at first. They do figure it out though, it just takes longer. Standing while nursing will work for that too.

My search came up empty too, and I could obviously see this thread. Odd. IXL looks great! Does anyone know if you have to buy extra memberships for extra children if you don't care about the separate reports?

We liked Mr. Q but printing it was a huge pain. We switched to Building Foundations for Scientific Understanding this year and have all liked it. It relies on us looking up videos a lot and that gets us exploring more than what we started with. "Also, I'm not very knowlegable in Science and it outlines possible questions my children may ask and how to answer them along with questions to ask them to get them thinking deeper about what is happening.

I completely understand rude children while on the phone and often have to run to my closet to escape them!...but two things I noticed from your post: you could have put down the iPad to focus on the call and you could have asked her to clarify who she was.

He prefers TT and hates the discovery method. I think that's just out of laziness so I want to introduce it through a fun subject like c&p instead of Alg. The repetition is why I didn't want to do TT's and AoPS's Algs at the same time. We did the entire 650pg text that went with Chalkdust's Prealgebra over the course of two years. We've beat that horse dead so I wouldn't make him do AoPS's Prealgebra. Any other options with him getting TT in there somewhere? I suppose I could get the AoPS Alg and try it this summer and see how he takes it. I just don't want to drag him kicking and screaming through a whole year. Maybe Kineticbooks Alg would be a good compromise before switching to AoPS only.:confused: