The recent thread on OSU German opened my eyes to the possibility of online courses offered for Spanish language. My DS is only 6 now, but he has done a lot of kiddie Spanish from preschool level. He has studied informally using a lot of "Teach Spanish to Kids" type of DVDs that I picked up along the way. He also has done some simple workbooks. He has always had some staff at his preK and preschool who were native Spanish speakers and have taught him some songs and words. He loves Spanish and wants to learn it. I would like him to be fluent in Spanish before he reaches middle school which is when Languages are offered as an option in our school system. I would prefer an online program that allows him to go at his own pace because hiring a Spanish tutor or adding in a Spanish group class to our weekly routine is not an option for us right now. Are there any online courses that are available for the age group 7 years and up? BTW/ he is learning Latin, but is still at the elementary level. Any and all suggestions are appreciated.

School communication was a 4.5 for K. They sent a weekly "performance report" home - both academic and behavior (and notes about specific incidents when the behavior was not good). They also sent email monthly reports on what the class was going to learn for the upcoming month. They sent reminders when there were projects due. My kid's teacher replied to emails within 2 hours. She also got my son tested for vision because I had a concern before he was eligible to be tested (only done at 1st grade) and then sent me the testing report which confirmed that he had some issues. There was only one parent-teacher meeting in the year. But, she set up a special meeting for us when we had concerns. And she took the time to talk to each parent during the back to school meetings and the open house event. But, the problem was that the report cards were too "generic" in the comments sections as if she cut-pasted the wordings from some existing template - for e.g. "He shows great growth"., "He is improving on his social skills" (this kid is the most social and most popular in his class and is the biggest "helper" for the students and teacher), "He had a great trimester" (????). I would have liked individualized comments like - his handwriting improved or his reading level went up or some such thing. So, I am not giving it a 5 star rating.

There is a young man who is the dad of a child at my son's school who wears a kilt all through summer and fall. Since we drop off our kids at the same time, I slow down my walk back to the car to catch a glimpse of him almost every monrning. The expressions of all the men and the women in that parking lot when he strolls along makes me smile. Most of them have either a surprised look or are smiling when they see him and some even turn their heads around to get a better look when they pass him by.

If your child shows great interest in music and is doing well in his piano lessons and never has a problem practicing, would you require rigorous practice even though you know that your child would never choose a career in music? The reason I ask is because this child (6 year old) also expresses interest in a lot of other activities (like soccer, basketball, field trips etc) which can not happen due to piano taking much of his free time (which is limited due to several other ongoing sports and activities). I have told him that he needs to drop piano to get 30 minutes free time to do other things. But he wants to do other things and piano too and pick up a second instrument too. I am well aware of the benefits of piano (and music in general) and am pretty strict about practice (teacher's requirement is 30 minutes a day/ 5 days a week). Sometimes I wonder if I should just practice 3 days a week (yes, I sit with him for practice help every day) and let him do other sports on the remaining days. Would you require rigorous practice if your child is learning for enrichment and enjoyment? ETA1: This is a child with truly boundless energy and who is interested in every activity he comes across - sport, art, science, summer camp, music etc. And his mom is someone who is just now learning how to say "no" and not signing him up for every single activity he wants to pursue. ETA2: The 30 minute practice takes up to 45-60 minutes daily because of the compelling need to chat in between, fool around and play all sort of interesting music, compose his own music and generally have fun at the piano. A song played 4 times is almost never played back to back - there are always breaks of some kind to adjust the metronome, try out a cool tune in between before continuing. We are working on the focus ...

My child (6 year old) goes to school in the public school system of California where computer literacy is mandatory. I volunteer to teach kids in my DS's classroom every week for 40 minutes of "Technology Lab" which starts at K level. They do some neat stuff on the computer for 5 and 6 year olds. At home we use the computer for DS to access DreamBox math, EPGY courses, Reading Express, Discovery streaming and Scratch programming. I limit the screen time to 25 minutes each day, though many days go by when we don't touch the computer. We have ipads at home for DS but he uses it only once a week or so. He uses my phone to click pictures or make videos occasionally. That is the complete extent to which he uses technology. No Minecraft or Angry Birds or any such thing. We are an "overscheduled" family, so even though we have plenty of technology at home, we do not find the time to access it. Computer access has been a life saver for me when I was out sick with the flu for 2 weeks last year. I used to lie down on the sofa and let DS loose on DreamBox math, Khan academy or EPGY Language Arts and get a few minutes of rest while knowing that he was learning something while not pestering me for attention or watching mind numbing cartoons. Those are times when I really was glad to have access to those content.

I did not read all the other posts, but I am here to tell you to stop taking Splenda or any other artificial sweetener that contains aspartame and stevia (though natural, you can google the bad things that can happen when you take stevia). I read about all the bad stuff that aspartame does to you and switched tp using Splenda in 2004. That whole year I lost almost all my hair and had severe stomach cramps and my stomach used to make loud and embarrassing noises all day long - my doctor diagnosed it as Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I read about the after effects of Splenda and stopped it and the IBS went away overnight and my hair grew back in a few months. Aspartame is an artificially created chemical and Sucralose is made from sugar that is modified at a molecular level so that the body does not recognize it as sugar and hence will not digest it. Both are not good things to put inside your body and these are the main chemicals in Spenda and Equal. My boss drinks Diet pepsi all day long instead of water or any other beverage. He is 35 and one day he was diagnosed with severe Rheumatoid Arthritis and he now walks around with a walker - my own theory is that the long term consumption of "diet" drinks with aspartame led up to this condition in an otherwise healthy, young man who looked to be in the prime of his life just last year. I recently was asked by my doctor to chew gum because I had an inner ear blockage and chewing might help with the blockage. I could not find a single pack of bubblegum at CVS or Walgreens that did not say "Light" or "Lite" - which is code name for aspartame or splenda - the ingredients listed were sucralose or aspartame. I finally found some "gum balls" for kids made from real sugar. Please eat real sugar in moderation or completely cut it out of your diet. Do not drink "diet" drinks containing sucralose or aspartame. In the long run, there will be health problems associated with them.

I would make my child go - I am a mean mom when it comes to these things. Because it is only for 2 weeks totally. And she can learn a lesson that what you want is not always what you get in life and that sometimes you need to make the best of the situation that you are in. I would also remind her that it was her choice to go there in the first place and offer her a small alternative activity that she loves (beach trip, outing to an art supply store or some such thing) if she shows good attitude and stops complaining during the camp duration! But, definitely let her camp director know that she is bored as she thinks that so many pointless activities are going on. Some feedback would help them to streamline their activities and make it more interesting to everyone.

California - LA and San Diego are neighbors - so it is easy to do both in a week to 10 days. Another choice would be the east coast - NY, Boston, New Hampshire etc in one go.

Thank you! I was going to ask and then got distracted by all the posts in this thread!

My son says he gets a "stomach ache" when he is nervous, anxious or under stress. For him these situations are typically related to watching scary TV content (very sensitive kid - even Nick Toons gives him anxiety), performance anxiety (when he is being timed on any activity) and when he makes mistakes (perfectionism). I am even sure that he does not know what a "stomach ache" is, but just that the uncomfortable feeling in his stomach related to nervousness is like a stomach ache to him. We generally try to keep him unstressed and let him read books that are age appropriate, ban all TV time and let him know that it is OK to make mistakes and the important thing is to improve from them. So, I suggest that you let your daughter be more relaxed and remove all stressors from her life. Also, try changing out her food intake - remove all acidic content from her food - like tomato sauce based food, orange juice etc to see if that helps with any possible acid reflux issues. And another thing that I always do for my DS is to put him on a chewable probiotic supplement for kids (I get them from Whole Foods) and let him eat a probiotic yoghurt every day - they generally help in keeping the digestive system healthy - especially for kids who have been on antibiotics and have lost the good bacteria from their system. Good luck.

I have no ideas on the OP's question, but I just wanted to share that during our treks to National Parks in CA and neighboring states, I got leaflets for the "Junior Ranger" programs that the national parks offered. Some of them had projects for kids involving conservation and about local wildlife. It is free and it could be a fun and interesting project for your daughter. You could even make a trip to a national park with lots of snakes?? It is open to kids above 5 years old. http://www.nps.gov/learn/juniorranger.cfm

My son's piano teacher used the "story" of a piano street with 2 kinds of houses - with 2 black keys and 3 black keys. The lady of the house with 2 black keys had a cat who liked to sit on the bench outside the house - called "C", she had a dog who liked to sit near the doorstep always (that note is a "D") and then an elephant tried to visit one day and got stuck in the door - that note is called an "E". And she has a whole storyline of all these notes as animals and she pulls out small toy animals and puts them on the appropriate places on the staff to tell the story. She also does one new note every few weeks and uses some really basic piano textbooks to play musical patterns with just a couple of notes until they can be understood well. She is a highly qualified piano teacher from a top music college and has taught the 3-6 year old set for over 35 years. She says that the only way to make the notes stick in the child's memory is by making fun stories for kids and playing games with these characters and simple songs with these keys. This could be an approach you can take along with a basic elementary piano course - like Little Mozart's, Alfred's or Faber. Since you are a musician yourself, I believe that it would be very easy for you to teach your kids basic piano. Good luck.

My DS started reading silently when he was close to 5. But, I was not comfortable with the way he pronounced some words and the way he would not pause at punctuation marks - so I enforced reading aloud at home. Then he started Kindergarten and they enforced "silent reading" there - so I let him read silently ever since. I think that when they start reading a lot and the volume of words go up, they can get tired reading so much aloud. That is when the transition happens to reading silently. PS: I confess that when I read aloud to DS, I get tired after a while.

Wow! Thanks a lot for all the thoughtful responses! You guys are great!

I can't stand Curious George. That being said, the modern version of the series states that George was a stowaway or some such thing and he voluntarily followed the man with the yellow clothes - I saw it in a TV episode. I would never buy or borrow that series (new and old) for my child, but you can try the new version if the old version bothers you .

The recent threads on early readers and those gifted in math evening out set me thinking on the opposite path - do kids who are struggling in certain skillsets like small motor skills, language, speech, math etc ever catch up with their peers and perform as well as them (as in mainstream classroom level) ? Or is that just wishful thinking? I am asking because I have a child (6 yo) who is probably a few years away from decent writing, drawing and coloring while there are several little kids in his class who produce masterpieces every time they touch a crayon. The contrast is really stark and stands out that my son feels self conscious about it. We are working on those skills and have been for a couple of years now. The pediatrician does not see any problems nor does his school teacher. It is just that he is not good at fine motor skills. At this point, it does not seem like we will see vast improvements any time soon and he is going to be in "catch up" mode for a long time. When it comes to catching up - be it in any field - academic or non-academic, is it possible in the normal course of things, or does it require great effort from the parents and teachers to accomplish this?

I think that you should check how a legitimate day care center works in your state and try to follow all those rules (you need not bring it up with the other parents if you do not want to, but be aware of the rules in case something crops up in the future). For e.g. emergency contacts, allergy medications, sickness policies (yours and theirs), discipline issues and how to handle them, meals and snacks, period of notice for quitting (yours and theirs), payment for books and supplies, late pickup penalty, sunscreen and medication policies, how injuries are dealt with etc. These are just a bunch of things that my child's day care and preschools handled. So, you might want to think about them because the children would be in your care in your home for extended periods of time. Also, I am assuming that your home is already child safe because your kids are already living there. Also consider how to communicate the status of the learning and how to present the achievements to the parents (testing results, reports etc).

I go to google and search the wtm forums from there.

Bill, due to the nature of the economy in my area, most of the families in my son's school district are educated elsewhere and expect different things from their kids. They also are sadly able to compare the curriculum in their native countries for math and science with the curriculum in my local PS and the comparison does not look good at all - for e.g. in India, a child who is 6 years old can do multiplication, fractions and 3 digit subtraction mentally and have formal "Social Studies", Geography, Science courses. Same in China. And some of these parents are frankly disgusted when their child tells them that they spelt 2 rhyming words, traced a letter and drew a picture and colored it - and that is what transpired all day long in K. They panic and take their child to academic afterschool programs to "compensate" for the slacking in school :)

Well, I have volunteered extensively in my son's PS K year and this is what I know - The children all went to preschools - some to academic preschools and some to developmental play based preschools. All of them knew upper and lower case letters and letter sounds at the beginning of the school year. They started out writing words and then simple sentences. By mid year, they were working on capitalization, punctuation etc. By the end of the year, they were writing paragraphs using the "Step up to writing" method. For the K open house event, they created so many crafts on underwater animals and wrote a paragraph each on sharks, dolphins, otters etc and displayed them on all the walls - a very impressive sight to me. They also had comprehension exercises where they were asked to write simple sentences to answer questions from a story. And they were doing phonics, spelling and dictation (3 and 4 letter words). Every week's homework also included a section where they had to draw a picture and write a paragraph of 5 simple sentences about the picture - for e.g. draw and write about your favorite form of exercise etc. And yes, they encouraged creative spelling (and I discourage it at home). We are in a high performing school district in a well educated neighborhood and the expectations from the schools are sky high with very pushy PTAs who demand more homework, Tiger parents who challenge the teachers and send kids to academic afterschool programs and the need of the school administrators to keep up the school's high scores - so our experience may not be the same as other schools.

Though I put mine in the recycle bin last year, I decided to look through mine this year. And I got a big surprise because their search engine does not bring up all their stuff - I found some interesting books that I never knew they had & never knew how to find on their website. I am going to email them to suggest that they put up the catalog as a downloadable PDF on their website since their search is not their best feature. A PDF catalog is something I might enjoy reading!

My son can read one book by holding it in one hand, fiddle with his legos with another hand while listening to another audiobook. He seems to understand all that he is doing, so I don't interfere! I say, let it go, if you think his comprehension is good.

Thanks, Crimson Wife. I have been looking into MCT curriculum for the next few years. I will definitely get Caesar's English when the time is right.

My son who is 6 is advanced in LA. He loves words and meanings and spellings and so do I. So, we have been doing vocabulary informally for a while now. I pick a word of the day and he looks it up on his dictionary and each of us comes up with sentences that illustrate the usage. We make it a fun game. And we read a lot all the time - above grade level books - fiction and non-fiction. We also listen to good literature on audio books on car trips. My child is very motivated and loves to learn words. How do I help him? Is there a curriculum or just reading more and more is enough?

Nothing so far in the past one week of summer vacation. It has been an art and science camp, field trips and the regular extracurricular activities as usual in our home. Maybe a little Dreambox and EPGY got thrown in, but that is all we have been doing. There are simply not enough hours in the day when a full day camp and extra sports and music are thrown into the mix. We will have some time in Aug when there is no camp and I will see how it goes then.