I always assumed English is the Latin of our day. The whole world is learning English, it is the lingua franca :D. I can't tell how envious I am of you native speakers. The amount of time it would free if my children would have learned English from birth and I didn't need to pound every vocab word individually into their heads :smash: . I do think that programming is an excellent way to study logical and clear thinking. I do hope my computer engineer hubby will take this on, because with teaching English and Latin and self-educating Greek...I'm pretty maxed out.

:grouphug: Jean :grouphug:

:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug:

Star Trek, definitely! What? WHAT? Star Trek ornaments? Since 1991? :svengo: I obviously lived under a rock since 1991.

:grouphug: I would look at this careful the next few months and I'm sure as a caring mom you will see if you need to change some things or not. Praising effort is indeed very important, but if you have a little one who is quick to learn things it can be difficult to hide suprise, as you say, or just simple delight, because it is delightful to learn things quickly, to have conversations with your child where she makes all kinds of beautiful connections etc etc. I'm not saying you have necessarily caused her perfectionism/unwillingness to work through a challenge, because part of it is certainly age appropriate, but I would do my best to find things to gently stretch her and get her used to a challenge/frustration/failure and then celebrate that challenge and her effort. It's the one thing I regret looking back to what I did with my dd10.

I would follow your child, but I would watch out for one thing: if a child notices that the best/easiest way to get mommy's attention is to ask for academic lessons, such a kid *could* burn out on the academics, while still craving mommy time. That *could* become a difficult situation. So I would try to see if it's mommy time in general that will satisfy or if the child wants real academic stuff, or a mix of both, of course :). My second and third dd both threw some big tantrums just before turning 4 yo because they wanted to read. They did NOT want me to read to them, or play with letter magnets, or with stickers, or play a game with me. They wanted to learn to read, so we did. We got through our phonics curriculum in 3-4 months with never a problem. After learning to read we started math, which is the highlight of the day for them. I'm very pleased with how it went, because it made it much easier to challenge them appropriately while still keeping school very short. With my oldest dd, it took me years...years....to accelerate enough to get her appriopiately challenged, which did her perfectionism no good :(.

Thank you. It is a tragedy. Plane crashes because of defects are bad, but getting shot down.... :wacko:. My husband took that plane a couple of weeks ago. Makes it very close, suddenly.

Those pdf's are amazing! Thanks so much for linking to them! Yeah, I don't like lectures much, I keep thinking 'I can read this so much faster, this is sooooo slowwwww'. I hope you too will be able to find something for your headaches. Weird, isn't it?, how they can start suddenly or (in my case) get so much worse than before. My doctor only does this :huh: when I ask *why* this happens. I mean, there should be a reason, right? And if I know the reason maybe that will get me to a solution, right? Doctor: :huh: . Sigh.

Thanks! (I have hormonal migraines and they have been very bad lately, but this week should have been bad..but I have new medication and I'm still standing, so maybe.....it's working.) I don't think a different edition will be a problem, at least I hope so! I also had several already and I'm not going to spend money on buying the same book, translated by the same translator but in a different edition :toetap05: .

That's good to hear! I was starting to get a bit worried :). -signed by someone living several meters below sealevel :lol:

Now you have done it, Melissa. You ruined my relaxed planning. :lol: It's good to know that the Hymns are online, Amazon.de is sending me increasingly nervous emails because they can't deliver. I can imagine that a Coursera course like this makes for really weird sales patterns. Maybe Coursera needs to tell Amazon what they are planning, can you imagine 30.000 people suddenly deciding to buy a certain obscure book :D. I gave up on the quizzes after missing the deadline for the second quiz due to a migraine. I wasn't too sad, because when I did the first quiz, I realised that I really need to make notes while listening to the lectures...and that is not going to work. I find it difficult already to find the time to listen. Regarding ambiguous questions, there was this weird question on the first quiz that made me really doubt my English reading comprehension. Something about 'among the answers giving in the previous question, what are we not going to use....blabla'. And then they wanted an answerd that wasn't mentioned in the previous question :huh: . It took me a couple of days to realise they probably meant 'the subject mentioned in the previous question'.

Don't look at me, I'm allergic to chocolate. Really :glare: . And that was my 2000th post :hat: .

Okay, you win :D! Vulcano eruption....man, am I glad we don't have those here :lol:. The postal service here is excellent, but from what I hear, it's the customs inspection that is delaying everything.

Thank you! I'm glad I asked. Using a chime gave me such a nice mental image, but with my personality I could see it quickly turn into a school-bell/buzzer system of changing subjects :lol:. So totally not what I need :D. But your way sounds really lovely!

It's amazing that bookdepository can ship books to NZ in a week, while it consistently takes at least 2 weeks to the Netherlands :huh: . Rose, you are going to talk about Reader's Odyssey, right? Because I'm really curious! I did order several AoPS books, I'm really looking forward to them. (Although I really have to use my summer break to study Latin and Greek.... Summer break starts next week! :hurray: )

Stoner was originally published in 1965, but has been 'rediscovered' in 2012 and apparently reached the Netherlands this winter :D. I didn't find it sad exactly, although I found parts of it midlife-crisis-depressing. His description of how WWI and WWII changed a whole generation of people (mostly men) was interesting. The book is being hyped here as 'life changing', 'breathtaking', a masterpiece.....but I don't really get that, obviously. Could be me, though :D.

Love your magic :D. Please, tell me about how you use the chimes.

Reporting in: I read the chapters of SWB's HoAW. I finished The Odyssey, I haven't listened to all the lectures yet and I want to finish those before I start reading Theogony. Luckily Theogony is short :) and I haven't been able to buy Homeric Hymns, so if I time everything well, I will be completely caught up (minus Hymns) at the end of this week. The last few weeks: I read only one book from the Dutch High School list: Sonny Boy, by Annejet van der Zijl. Nice book. Our summer break will start next week, I plan on reading several Dutch books then. I read a lot of Lois McMaster Bujold: -Vor Game -Cetaganda & Ethan of Athos & Labyrinth -Borders of Infinity & Brothers in Arms & Mirror Dance I liked the books, but I wasn't as blown away as I had expected after reading reviews. I realised that I read so many of them, simply because they are on my e-reader thus easy to read in bed. My father and mother recommended Stoner by John Williams to me. Well, that is not really true. Apparently Stoner has been a HUGE hit here in the Netherlands, this winter, and both my father and mother tried to read it but didn't even finish it. So they wanted me to read it, to see if I could see why it was so popular. Well, I liked the book, but 'earth shattering'...nah. Two books on metacognition: Focus and Why Don't Students Like School. Focus: a lot of talking with only some minor interesting things. Really glad I could get this one from the library! Why Don't Students Like School: I had read the first third of this book last summer and had misplaced the book afterwards. This time I read it and made notes. Weirdly, it wasn't as interesting as I thought last summer. ----- 65. Why Don’t Students Like School? – Daniel T. Willingham (metacognition) 64. The Odyssey – Homer (transl. Fagles) 63. Aandacht, het fundament van emotionele intelligentie (Focus, the hidden driver of excellence) – Daniel Goleman (BaW recommendation, metacognition) (N) 62. "Borders of Infinity", "Brothers in Arms", and "Mirror Dance" – Lois McMaster Bujold (Chunky) 61. Worden wie je bent. Een reis door de ontwikkelingsfilosofie van Reuven Feuerstein – Marijn de Wit (N) 60. Stoner – John Williams (N) 59. Cetaganda & Ethan of Athos & Labyrinth – Lois McMaster Bujold (Chunky) 58. Vor Game – Lois McMaster Bujold 57. Sonny Boy – Annejet van der Zijl (Dutch N3) (N)

:lol: I have four girls, those loom bands have taken over my whole house! I do think it's fun though.

20-30 minutes is a reasonable amount for a 1st grader and a pre-K. It could even be too long :D, depending on your little one. I would not be concerned about not doing Morning Time for 1.5-2 hours, with young kids that would be their whole schoolday...and you really need to spend time on Math and LA too, right? I think your list looks lovely!

Yup. :banghead: I should just have married an English speaking man and raised my kids bilingual. Think about the money that would have saved :D.

I understand, it's an expensive test to find out if it clicks. Never thought about that! The Netherlands isn't much of a manufactoring country, we are more dependent on trade. We do have a rather singular way of pricing books, with a fixed book price, which generally means that Dutch books are way, way more expensive than English/foreign books.

That is so cool!! I have to pay custom taxes over the price of the materials *and* over the shipping costs, the latter I find totally rediculous. I have spent last evening calculating different ways of getting some new AoPS books here, so when I saw your thread, I knew you were still looking at Beast :D. I'm trying to suppress the thought of Beast :lol: because I dread the translating I will have to do (but it looks soooo cool).

Wow, that's fast! Don't you have to pay customs taxes? Nowadays I'm even more scared of the customs taxes than of the international shipping.....shudder.