Miquon is more hands on in a "math lab" kind of way. I let my child figure out subtraction using the c-rods. We use SM, Miquon and MEP along with LOF as a supplement - I think that it is a great combination, but some others think that it is a overkill for a Ker - YMMV. We really went slowly so that we dug in as deep as we could into each topic before moving on to the next topic. My child really likes to work on Miquon because it is fun and hands on rather than just chugging through pages of workbook. I got the Annotations and First Grade Diary, they are good to read and I use them as references. But, I teach from my own knowledge of math using the curriculum as a broad guideline and a lot of the stuff in Miquon is self-explanatory, so I did not need the teacher's notes at all (I have a strong math background, and am good at explaining things, so I am not sure how opinions vary on teacher's notes). Get the PDF for the material that you will read because it does not matter to the student how you access the teaching info. If you want to switch, now is the time to do it rather than later. So, go for it. Good luck.

Thanks! I managed to talk to the "master teacher" at my son's music school. she gave me the same information as you all - that it is a no stress environment, the judge tries to "constructively" comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the student and that the grades are either "C" for Competent or "A" for needs Attention. We are doing elementary level, so it is just for the "good habit" of practicing and getting the pieces "polished".

Thank you for reassuring me. I feel much better knowing that my Ker will not be walking into a formal "testing" environment. Happy to know that this is a "low stress" event.

My son is participating in the National Piano Guild Auditions next week. He is participating in the elementary level and it is a requirement from his piano teacher. He has prepared 4 pieces and seems ready to do it. I am not sure what to expect. The teacher is not a native english speaker and has a hard time explaining to me what more is needed - she just says to practice the pieces and that my son will do great. I don't know anything about piano music and auditions and a google search just turned up the generic information. I am not even sure what the ranges of the testing result score will be etc (if they even have test results?). Any parents who have experience with guild auditions, please educate me. Thanks in advance.

I recommend the Sonlight readaloud list too. For my advanced reader, when I am at a loss for materials, I just pick some books from the sonlight list appropriate to his level and it works out well for us.

I have done such things in the past when it was important to me - several years ago, I left home to commute to a workplace 90 miles away each way (almost 2 hours each way on the road) - I was single and poor and needed the job and that is the only job I could get. I am not a morning person and usually sleep around 2 am and would love to wake up after 10:00 am. But, I used to leave home at 6:00 am every single day for 1 year and it was brutal. So, if it was a matter of great importance to me, I would definitely make it happen - no matter what. Recently, I have been going to a yoga class on the weekends at 7:00 AM and it is hard, but I feel fine after I get to the class!

:iagree: Check out CWP, IP and all the other books published by SM. And you may also want to throw in MEP math or miquon and some online programs like EPGY and DreamBox. That should slow down LegoMan enough!

I am with you 100% on that! For me, ETC Online was the worst purchase of an educational item, ever. I could have bought many useful things with the money I spent on it.

Thank you! I am going to check out every one of these. I will also be buying some of these for my son's use too as they are all so interesting!

Exactly this. Maybe someone else has already called social services and now they feel that you are a safe option for their family until they can tide through this. But, if you are not even close to the girl or that family, they should not involve you in this. They should just buy a plane ticket for their relatives to fly in and take care of the girl. I think that you may be setting yourself up for a long term informal "foster mom" situation and you might even be setting up yourself for the role of a homeschool teacher for her. Any mental health situation takes time to resolve itself. And same case for a dad struggling to cope with marital problems and work etc, he is not going to find a solution in a week. I may be wrong, but I had a young female in-law on my doorstep looking to stay for 3 days because of strife in her home and it took her 7 months to leave. Just FYI. So, be sure to set your boundaries with this family - by either specifying a time limit for the girl's care, the scope of your work (food, shelter, education?) and possibly working with the father on alternatives if this situation continues. Good luck.

My year has been long and exhausting and I seem to have caught every flu bug in my county. And I have been running on caffeine and willpower for a while now. But, since there are only a few more weeks of school left, I can hang in there - summer is a whole another story, but it will be easier on my child. I am seriously contemplating the past year that went by and trying to see how I can streamline my system to make it more efficient so that I am not always behind in everything! Breaks surely help. Doing a different activity with your kids than is normal will leave you refreshed. In my case, we hardly visit museums or do any "crafty" stuff or play any board games (I hate those things!) - so I have started doing these with my child and it feels energizing and refreshing.

Just out of curiosity, I tried the OP's question with my Ker (5 yo) just now and he gave me the answer as follows: "Jane read longer than Sue because Jane read for 4 hours while Sue read for less than 4 hours" - btw/ he is not very good at telling time yet. I think that the OP's terminology might not be common for most kids to understand unless they have heard that kind of question before. It is not an advanced question in my opinion, just needs to be reworded so that all kids can understand.

I am also hoping that I can order from Rainbow Resource, so if anyone can recommend any good science kits, projects etc I would most appreciate it. I am going to take my DS to attend his friend's science themed birthday party and the little boy specified that he loves science related gifts. Thanks in advance.

I attach no sentiment to material things. The people in my life need to be cherished rather than the things in my life. My DH and ILs are hoarders. So, I get a lot of "stuff" from them. It was OK because my house had room - until the kid clutter in addition to it started overwhelming me. I have quietly begun donating all the stuff that is unimportant to me to Salvation army and Mission ministries - they drive in a truck around my neighborhood on specific days and collect donations at the curbside. I subscribe to Flylady and use her ideas to declutter - I donate 6-7 boxes at a time. After they are gone, I hardly miss the items. And I have more room in my home each time! And it is easier to clean too. And my DH is too busy to notice that stuff if missing :) I would say keep the items from you grandma and ty to use the China every day for dinner for the adults. If that does not work, just donate them. Someone else will get good use of it.

If there is an interest in learning piano at an early age, it is the parent's duty to foster and encourage it. My son started at around that age - because he is very musical and we were trying to find a means to make him focus and sit still and concentrate on a task for a period of time. We found a lovely teacher who has run group piano lessons for the age group 3-5 for 35 years (where I live, piano group classes for 3.5 year olds are popular and used as a way to introduce and prepare a child for private lessons). She does not do Suzuki, but uses a curriculum that she designed - She used to mix in notes reading (her own funny way of remembering notes - a cat sitting on a bench for a "C" note, a dog waiting at the doorstep for the location of a D note etc), ear training, song and dance activities as a group, ensemble playing as a group and then learn to play 2 simple pieces on the piano each week. I know that you asked for a piano book, but we used a few in our beginning days of group classes and enjoyed them all, so I will post all the ones that we have. I am posting links to the books on Amazon (they are available on Rainbow Resources too if you want to compare prices): John Thompson's Easiest Piano Course JT Teaching Little Fingers to Play (Red book - DS still goes back to this book as the songs are so cute) Progressive Piano Method for Young Beginners Progressive Piano Supplementary Songs She used just the workbooks for coloring and notes lessons from Alfred: Little Mozart I think that these books are an excellent start for the very young who are interested in piano and they teach in baby steps which is what you want. Some of the songs in these books use only 2 (middle c and d) or 3 (c,d and e) notes and are only 8 measures long in the beginning, so it was fun and easy. We progressed to Faber's Piano Adventures after a while, but my son enjoyed the above books a lot when he was 3-4 years old. Hope this list helps your child. Good luck.

I am a mother to an extremely active boy who finds it difficult to curb physical motion. He is not ADHD but just hyperactive (because both his parents were hyperactive as kids). The best things that I ever did to help him were piano lessons and Tae Kwon Do training - both of these have taught him the skills of focusing, controlling his impulses, concentration for an extended period of time on any one thing, staying still on demand! He can stand to attention for minutes on end in martial arts class and has great control of his impulses (they gradually instill it in kids by training them on discipline). He can sit still at his piano now (though he wobbles the pedals incessantly, he can control all his other actions!) for 45 minutes. This all took time, but we have made progress. I keep a tub full of toys that can be manipulated while I read to him (slinkys, Jacob's ladder, little bouncy balls, spinning tops, elastic figures that can change shapes etc). It helps a lot for focusing. Also he cannot sit still while writing and I let him stand up while writing or coloring most of the time. And as a PP said, routines and chores help a lot - he loves to clean, dust etc and spends a good amount of time being busy on these by himself just following a chore list that I put up for him. In addition he ends his day utterly worn out because we keep him hopping from chore to activity to the next that he is exhausted - he used to take 2 hours to wind down and sleep in the night (forget naps in the day) that our pediatrician suggested wearing him down to such an extent that he falls asleep in the night by himself and it worked! He does 2 organized afterschool physical activities in a day (Tae Kwon Do for 45 minutes thrice a week, swimming in an indoor pool for 30 minutes thrice a week, baseball twice a week) he walks a mile a day to school, weekly PE in school and bikes with his friend once a week for an hour - this is the kind of schedule he needs in order to calm him down. An easy first step might be to enroll your child in an organized physical activity of her choice that she can do year round (a routine) which is physically demanding as well as enjoyable. You will see a vast improvement in her behavior as a result. Good luck.

Lego Mindstorms are the best option out there for beginners. They can also be programmed to perform various actions, so that could be an early introduction to programming too.

This is my first year afterschooling my Ker who is in PS. His school does not do "subject acceleration" or differentiation until the 2nd grade (even for highly gifted students). And his teacher is unable to pay any personal attention because it is a combo classroom with multi grades and she has to teach different things to different groups of kids all day long and simply has no time to deal with individual cases. She basically told me to send work packets from home if I had any problems with my son not being accelerated or bored in school - which is fair enough considering that now I know what needs to be done and will set my expectations accordingly! Basically, afterschooling became more important because of this situation ... I have accomplished things during afterschooling that give me a great feeling when I look back on them (especially working with my son to get him to write when he had major small motor control issues). But, the bad thing is that I seem to be devoting a lot of time to researching, reading, preparing material and then teaching things to my Ker. He is advanced in a few subjects, so I need to help him with challenging and stimulating materials in those. But, he is weak in handwriting, spelling etc where again he needs attention and help from me. And then again I want to do stuff with him just for the "fun" of learning - things like music appreciation, science projects, arts and crafts, geography, robotics etc (the list could go on and on). My DH also spends time with him - on Legos, Chess, Mindstorms, sports etc. All these are in addition to homework supervision and driving back and forth to extra curriculars. All these amount to a large part of my life. It looks like I need to take a step back and scale down the time I spend on "afterschooling" when I calculate the sheer number of hours spent on these activities. I think that afterschooling is very important (obviously) but when I catch myself sitting up at 2:00 AM dissecting another new curriculum, I think that I need to find a balance between this and the rest of my life. I can easily spend 1-2 hours a day on afterschooling. How many hours do you all spend on this?

I do not even have a daughter - but want to chime in anyway. My DS has a "best friend" - a 5 year old girl who has been his friend since they were newborns. This girl is not interested in ballet or tap dance and refuses to participate in them even though her mom tries to persuade her a lot. She is active and agile and last year, my DS invited her along with 5 other boys of his age to his Tae Kwon Do school on Valentines day for their "bring your friends" event on VDay. She had such a blast that she enrolled in it and now she is close to overtaking my son who has been doing this activity for longer - she has put herself in the black belt track and has made so many friends, most of them girls like her. Tae Kwon Do is a great outlet for girls not doing dance and it is highly recommended by pediatricians as a way to develop flexibility, muscle control and large motor co-ordination in younger kids. Non-competitive Gymnastics might be another option for you to check out as other people have mentioned before. Dance develops a certain grace in movement as well as great flexibility which can also be developed when doing martial arts (especially Tae Kwon Do which teaches whole body movements) and gymnastics. So, there are other equally good "non-girly" options out there without involving makeup, costumes etc if that is what you are looking for. Good luck.

Around here, not unusual at all - the "highly reputed" preschool that my child went to was teaching phonics and spelling at 4. In my area, all kids go to preschools, and most are really good and are full day programs (because of both parents working). So, most kids in preschool know to read, write, perform science experiments and do addition and subtraction when they enter kindergarten. Also, the same working parents put their children in afterschool care programs that also teach academics - so in my experience the local kids I see are well accomplished. That being said, when a teacher pulls you out and makes such a remark, it means that she is seeing something in your kid worth mentioning and I am sure she suspects that he is gifted. I would get him assessed for giftedness if I were you (the easiest way for doing this for me was to go to the very expensive and top rated private school in my county and fill out an application for K admission - a psychologist administered IQ test is part of the admission process and is included in the admission testing fee). Now we have a better idea of DS's strengths and how to help him. Good luck.

Where I live, in all the lottery/charter/special education public schools, there are tours in dec/jan and the seats get filled by march. But for the other local public schools (regular schools), where you live decides where your kids go to school. We need to enroll the kids in the winter/spring to get into our local school (later would mean your child might get bused to a less desirable school in the system) and then in May there is one meeting in the school Assembly Hall where they show videos of the classrooms (no live tour because it is disruptive) and they park the teachers in front of parents for Q & A and to ask for donations. This is one of the top rated school districts in this area (going by academic scores) and this is how they operate. So, your situation is quite common and I am impressed that the principal agreed to talk to you about the school instead of just handing you a flier (which is how things happen around here).

Thank you very much for this information. Though I like ipad apps for their portability, I am open to computer software too if they do a good job. I am off to check it out.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a sight reading app for piano students on ipads? My DS (almost 6 years old and been taking piano lessons for a year now) is good at playing pieces he has practiced before, but needs help with sight reading new music. I thought that an ipad app would help with the practice. I am not sure which app is a good one to buy. I am looking for an app that can be independently used, keeps track of scores and makes it fun. Thanks for your help in advance.

I went to our local one last year - mostly overstock books of popular paperbacks - like Dora, Diego, Clifford the dog kind of books for a 4 year old. I bought some because I drove an hour to get there. Nothing special in my opinion.

He is lying (ask those same parent volunteers to keep an eye out for such things happening in the class). In the meantime, how about getting a Doctor's note from your son's doctor, printing out some information about this condition and asking the teacher to put it on your son's file as a record that your son needs special consideration? No teacher can challenge a doctor's note if they want to keep their jobs. And discuss this issue with a copy of the doctor's note to back you up with the school principal.