I need to do that! I had a quick panic this morning when I went looking for Paula's Archives and found that they'd gone. Three cheers for the Wayback machine

I've done multiple colour runs and mud runs/obstacle courses. My kids had a brilliant time at the colour runs. The colour powder is basically coloured cornflour/cornstarch and the people throwing the colour on you always aim low especially if you're running with young kids. It's a great family day of fun. The last one did, we had a team of "Sparkly Unicorns" consisting of my three children (13, 10 and 8), me, and my parents :) Even my Dad wore his Unicorn headband.

Yes, yes, yes! That's one of the fantastic things about cups - they don't wick any "moisture" so there's absolutely no problem. I've even popped the cup in because I knew it was coming in the next few hours and I was going to be heading out for the day! I started off with the Diva about 8 years ago, I liked it well enough except I always had to jump around to try and get it to pop open properly :D Then I had a trip to England and picked up a Mooncup from the chemist - slightly softer and a bit more flexible, and I haven't looked back. Convenience and ease of use is fabulous

I would highly doubt that any of my kids could actually write out a long division problem as "long division". With my eldest, she struggled with the steps - divide this, times that, subtract that ..... Far too confusing. So after showing her long division I then showed her the way I learnt which is short division. It's exactly the same process but you don't write down all the steps. To be honest I've never, ever found a problem that *requires* being written out the long way. http://www.wikihow.com/Do-Short-Division

I've just come across this app tonight and had to share. How many kids don't want to go to bed because they want to get to the next level AND it's an algebra game?! http://www.dragonboxapp.com/# I don't normally pay for apps, but this one actually seems worth the money. The game section has ten planets that you progress through and each planet starts off quite pictorial and moves to standard algebraic notation ie. the first few levels your answer may be box = fish/armadillo + rock but by the end of the level your answers are more in line of x=a/b+c There's a practice section as well where you can choose addition, multiplication, x as a denominator, expanding brackets, factorisation .... My eldest DD is just finishing up the algebra section in Singapore New Syllabus 7 and this app looks perfect to keep her skills up while we move on to geometry :)

I love the layout of that assignment sheet, Heather. What do you use to produce it?

:iagree:

I'd have responded the same way. I had a similar experience with my eldest daughter in one of her gradings. All through class, progress checks etc... she'd been spot on with technique, but get to the actual grading .... she was all over the place! All her moves were over exaggerated, technique was, um, weird. When she finished grading and came out for a drink I noticed she looked a bit teary and asked her if she was maybe a little nervous - she was way past nervous. She passed and received her next belt, but we had a short chat straight afterward and then sat down and had a good discussion about it a day or so later. She confided that she had been full of panic throughout grading and she knew that affected her performance so I offered to help her find ways to deal witht he panic. Since then she's graded a few more times with no problems and is working on getting through exams without freezing up completely. I think you need to be honest as it opens up a pathway to discuss strategies to overcome problems. If I'd said to my daughter "Yay, you did great", not only would I have been lying but we also couldn't have had further discussion leading on from that experience.

We're having a bit of writing intensive for the rest of this year so it is perfect timing :001_smile: My eldest dd is raring to go; she seriously can't wait to start and is biding her time working throught he middle school workbook. I figured that it would be a good example for me to sit down and give it a go at the same time as my kids. Might as well make it a family affair even though I have absolutely no clue what to write about. I'm seriously not a creative story kind of person :lol:

I've just thought of one invaluable feature of the Kindle - the ability to look up a word in the dictionary right there while you're reading. Whereas you often think "oh, I'll look that word up later" and never do with a paper book, with the Kindle it's right there!

I'm another one who absolutely loves her Kindle:001_wub: I held off on getting one for far too long because I loved the feel of a book, the smell of a book, and I absolutely hated reading text off screens. I eventually relented because I was taking the kids on a two month holiday to England and the new release book I had ordered (which would have been rather heavy) didn't look like it was going to arrive before we went away. I found that the Kindle would make it witha few days to spare, so I bought it on a whim just so I could read that particular new release. In the 2 years that I have had it I've read an enormous amount of books. I even read War and Peace - the Kindle is far lighter than the real thing :D I love the portability. I love that I can read it outside in full sun with no glare. I love that I can get the next book in a series within seconds. We now have a second Kindle which is for the children to share. I find all sorts of freebies that I think they would like so I pop them on their Kindle and let them read at their leisure. I use it occasionally for homeschooling: sequential spelling is on there so I can just read the lists without printing them out, Story of the World is on there although I usually just use the paperback, Writing with Ease is on there, again so I don't need to print out the instructor pages. Although it is moderately useful for homeschooling, it's real benefit for me is the pleasure reading. And, dh doesn't need to build me quite so many extra bookshelves :lol:

:glare: I got all excited only to discover that "this title is not available for customers from Australia" :crying:

I think mine is going to throw out the averages somewhat :lol: Started dating June 1996 Engaged Nov 98 1st child March 2000, 2nd child Jan 2003, third child Aug 2005 Married Nov 2006 Our engagement was two weeks short of eight years :D

I voted down but, for us, that means the lid too! When I first met DH he had been a bachelor or living only with males for a very long time. He never used to put the seat down. I, on the other hand, had grown up in a household where the seat was always put down so it used to drive me nuts. We had a bit of a chat about it and DH's reasoning was that he had to lift the seat everytime and I had to lower the seat everytime, so it made equal work. It was a fair observation but I hated seeing the toilet seat up :glare: We compromised: if everybody puts both the lid and the seat down when finished, everybody has to lift something when they want to go. Still equal work, but looks so much cleaner and tidier;)

My dd12 started having migraines in April - she's had another 2 occurances since then. She loses 50% field of vision in the left eye and a headache devlops afterwards. The first episode probably gave me more of a scare than it did her, she is a little too laid back at times. Now when it happens she comes to me and says she thinks she has a migraine starting, takes paracetemol, lies down for half an hour or so and everything is back to normal. Although she says she feels a little odd for a few days after each episode. I'm guessing that it's likely hormonal.

I have problems with pdfs occassionally. Some files just don't want to print properly. Last week I had a file where the font was obviously having trouble going in one piece from the computer to the printer - all the headings had words printed with one letter off ie "love" would be "mpwf". I usually get around it by checking "print as image" on the print page. Not really ideal but it is a good workaround for those problem files. From memory, the Mr Q life science was one where I had to use that workaround because the font was justifying oddly; some words were squished together and others were spread far apart :tongue_smilie:

:iagree: Mentally I would do this. Pen and paper, I'd start at the ones and regroup as necessary.

Ah ha! Thank you, it was the twisting part I was missing. We've got the box open; still can't find the key though :lol:

Quite a few years ago I bought one of those Ancient Egypt Treasure Chest boxes. It's got games, hieroglyph stamps, necklace beads and other things. It's also got a key .... somewhere :tongue_smilie: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Treasure-Chest-Ancient-Working-Myself/dp/1561384623 We used it about 4 years ago on the last Ancients cycle and I pulled it out today to discover that I just.can't.open.it. Anyone got one of these and can give me an idea of how to make the lock open? The little tab on the side doesn't appear to move anywhere.

:iagree: It drives me batty when the cost of postage to Oz is often as much as the item I'm buying :banghead: Others for the list are LivelyLatin and Sequential Spelling. We're using a lot of downloaded pdf curriculum this year. I'm printing off student pages as needed and everything else I either read from Kindle or we all look at it on the tablet.

I've just got an Acer Iconia tab so I'm very interested in this thread. :bigear:

I love reading everyone's week in reviews, I get so many cool ideas from them :) Ours is up for our first week of a new school year

I get caught out with this quite often. I'm in Australia and buy a lot of my curriculum from the US so I'm often stuck there at the checkout page comparing how much postage is for the one item vs buying the next in the series for the same postage cost. Sometimes it has worked out in my favour but there have been a few times where I've ended up with 2 (or more) items that just don't fit us. I now buy as much digital download stuff as I can, I save on postage but have no resale value. I seem to be in a lose:lose situation :tongue_smilie:

Ahhhh, so it's not all in my imagination. I was 5' 5.5" when pregnant with first dd. I was quite upset when I found out last year that I'm now actually 5'4" especially when that first born dd (now 11) is 5'1" :glare:

even though I mainly lurk :seeya: