Saille
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Posts posted by Saille
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That's a great blog post! Thank you!
The only thing I'd really add is that ETC Online requires some management. It's very exacting about speed, and I've found that I had to bump the kids up a level from time to time, because after a while their speed will drop just due to boredom from doing the same lesson again and again trying to hit the speed requirement.
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Yeah,. They were good too.
I have a real fixation on the plum ones.
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I'm sure that's not what the pp meant. I have a friend w/6 boys. It is impossible for her to keep any food in her house w/o it looking like the Huns came rambling through. I've had her dc over to my house and they wiped out an entire fruit bowl of about 20 pieces of fruit and a gallon of milk. It gets expensive, and I completely understand how she is more restrictive in the kitchen/pantry than I am w/my dc.
Yes this. I have to ration milk.
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Oh, that's right. I've only got one kid, I'm not a real parent.
Ow! I did not mean that. I only meant that they can't triple team you for food. That's the beginning and end of what I meant. I'm sorry!
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Wait...there are *chili mango* jelly bellies? For real?
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No, there are times that I just like to be alone (I'm rarely alone)
I love my children so, so much, but I am much more of an introvert by nature than most of my current acquaintances would believe. It is going to take me forever to decompress when the last kid moves out, even if I'm "empty nest" grieving.
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Someone who does this, and there are quite a few of you, explain why. Is it the thrill of not getting "caught" by your children? Is it a selfish streak? Do your spouses know? How often does this happen? Is it like getting a fix or something?
I'm truly trying to understand.
Maybe it has something to do with "forbidden food." The only thing we forbid is food with artificial sweeteners because there are members of our family that can not tolerate them. Is that the case? Is it like sneaking in peanut butter when you are not allergic to it, but one of your kids is?
Well, at my house it has nothing at all to do with forbidden food, and everything to do with the "locust phenomenon". You have one eleven year old. I have three kids under the age of nine. Anytime I eat *anything* that they are not eating, they converge. Any time I turn on the television, they converge. Even if they've had a snack and I haven't. Even if they've had their screen time, and I haven't watched anything in days. And I do set standards, explain, rinse, repeat. But it's tiring. So yeah, sometimes I just wait until they are not around to put food in my mouth, because then I get to actually chew and swallow without answering questions about what I'm eating, where I got it, and how much there is even though the kids just freaking ate. They get treats. I bake. We buy little things. Stewart's usually gets us good during the ice cream sale, since we know everybody down there and they're competing to sell the most half-gallons. But they are just plain not entitled to sample or comment on every goldarn thing I eat, anymore than I would raid their stockings or Halloween stash without asking.
It is possible to indulge oneself in the act of being in the moment while eating something tasty without having a disorder, an unhealthy attitude toward food, or some sort of weird dualism with one's kids.
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LOL, Garga! My mom gave me a book with a nun on the cover. It was...ahem...not informational.
Ds9 is enrolled in OWL right this minute. In class, they're mostly talking about puberty changes and interpersonal communication. The text, which he reads at home, is It's Perfectly Normal. It's fairly explicit while explaining things simply and honestly.
Now, in theory ds would read this to himself. But I gave him an earlier book in the same series about a year ago, and it was pretty clear to me that he told me he read it, but skimmed it at best. At the time, I let it go, but now he's getting to the age where if we don't assert our family's worldview WRT "tea", someone else is going to get there first. So, I offered to read it with him, and he seemed more comfortable with that. So, we've done the last thing I ever expected, and read almost the entire thing together, with discussion. He hasn't asked for his dad. His dad knows I'm reading it with him, and hasn't asked to take a turn. I'd say it pushes his limits a bit, but not so much that he asks to read it alone or to stop reading...and this is a kid who'll pitch a fit if he doesn't want to do seatwork. A couple of times, we've talked about the fact that some of this won't really *matter* until he's much older, but that it's important to have correct information, b/c so many people don't. Based on our experience, I'd guess that I'm now the official "talk" person for all kids...but we'll see.
Oh, but he did say, when we talked about the fact that some cultures have puberty celebrations, that he'd be OK with "like a party because I'm older, or something, but not because of PUBERTY stuff! That would be weird!" With Dd, on the other hand, I'll likely do a ritual involving a bracelet and special beads to mark her first year of menses, and she'll love the secret womens' club initiation aspect of that.
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I am using #7 at the next possible opportunity!!!
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Still interested (though I have a small backlog here :blush:).
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Aren't you the same mama who had the fox attack? We've had misplaced aggression before as a reaction to a nearby predator who'd maybe been pressing the fence or pacing outside it. The last time a roo started attacking us, I separated him from the others and put him in the other half of the barn, but forgot to shut the window. The next morning, there were feathers all across the yard, and no roo. I felt pretty bad about it. Whatever it was had probably been sniffing around the barn for days, maybe even coming into that half at night and not being able to get to our flock in the other half. Small wonder he was edgy and aggressive.
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Wow! I thought this thread was looking a bit sleepy, and then I skipped a day, and *bam*! Thanks!
Bill, I'm kidding, really. My kids love the Magic Tree House books, but they do come up in twaddle threads a lot.
Some of the books posted are ones we've read or done as audiobooks already (Spiderwick, etc.), but I'm betting that some of them aren't fresh in her memory anymore. Igraine the Brave in particular got my attention. There are also quite a few books listed (Araminta Spooky and others) that I haven't heard of before, and we've never read The Magic Finger, so I'm pulling together a batch on Amazon. Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles was a big "launch" serious for my ds when he was dd's age, so maybe I'll try those, too. For those who are interested, I just saw a steampunkish hardcover by Tony DiTerlizzi, and it looked like it had a female lead, but it also looks a lot longer than your average Spiderwick book.
We've seen the flower fairy books and not been impressed. I think some of the Disney fairy books are written by Gail Carson Levine, who wrote Ella Enchanted, which might account for better writing quality, but I kind of gagged a little when I read that she was doing them. Tinkerbell as an icon has gotten a bit bootylicious for me, and I always kind of hated the girls-fighting-over-Peter-Pan thing anyway, so I've never encouraged Tinkerbell.
We love love LOVE Miyazaki. Have y'all heard that his studio just did a version of the Borrowers? Hurrah for Arriety, strong female character! We have one of the Totoro graphic novels, but I hadn't thought about tracking down some of the others. Castle in the Sky might be a good start, since we haven't seen that one in a while.
Lori D., that is an amazing post! I will be paging through that one for a while...
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Oooh, Droon might work. Hadn't thought of that.
Bill, are you advocating...twaddle?!? (We do read them, though. She likes them.)
Punchy, most of those are books I like, but they're all too high at the moment. I agree that Deerskin is disturbing...The Hero and the Crown has implied adult situations, as I recall, but nothing like Deerskin. And I'll hook her up with Beauty, Rose Daughter, and Spindle's End when she's ready, along with a host of others. But for now, they need to be somewhere between The Paper Bag Princess and *about* Magic Tree House's level of difficulty.
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You're welcome!
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I clicked on this thread b/c I have a fourth grader this year, and wanted to see what fifth-grade WTM'ers were doing. We work 8-12 M-Th, and cover Latin or Greek, MCT, Geography, Logic, Math, Phonics, Art, Copywork and Mnemosyne during that time, with additional time allotted for independent fiction and non-fiction reading. We do History in the afternoons, and Science on Fridays.
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Were I in that situation, I'd surf some, but I'd also find it a lot easier to work on my self-ed. My only options at this point are to get up before 5:45, or do it after 8 p.m. at night, and by then I'm usually too wiped to focus well.
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I wrote a blog post about that very topic here.
If you have one of the brand new ones, I am jealous! :D The camera is a fantasic addition, and I'd be using it constantly b/c I wouldn't have to mess with cables, uploading, etc.. Also, it looks to me like people are now using the camera in conjunction with skype to have wireless f2f conversations with people. Fring might be another app that would work for that.
I use a timer app a lot (have used it doing the Iowa at Barnes and Noble, use it at home daily to keep us on track, etc.)
We use mint.com to keep track of our finances. I have the Amazon Kindle app, various foreign language flashcard apps, an app called CalenGoo that lets my dh and I sync our calendars and see each others', etc.. A lot of people here who have Audible.com memberships seem to like that app, as well. I don't know about you, but I do a fair bit of carschooling with audiobooks. We also have all our mp3 files on the iPod, everything from Latin vocab. practice to SOTW.
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Poor Posy! She's tagging along after her brother in her reading. They both love high fantasy, and she's getting really sick of the few adventurous girls afforded to her being adjunct characters. She burst into tears this morning because she realized that a primary Warriors character she'd been assuming was a girl was actually a boy (hard to tell with cats, and she's reading through the graphic novel, so there are not a lot of gendered pronouns).
I'm doing my best, but a lot of the books I can think of are chapter books more advanced than my 7 y.o. can handle. And I'm finding a lot of realistic fiction when what she wants is fantasy. The only fantasy books I've so far pulled from my own shelves are:
The Light Princess, by George MacDonald
The Ordinary Princess, by M.M. Kaye
Tatterhood and Other Tales, by Ethel Johnston Phelps
And two of those would have to be read-alouds.
I have loads of picture books with strong female protagonists, but as far as picture/early chapter books that are fantasy AND have strong female leads...um, help?
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I use the Pampered Chef corer/peeler/slicer. It works best with firm apples, but you can adjust the peeler to handle different types of apples. I had to do that for some Liberties today...they seems a bit softer than what I usually buy, but they were windfall/utility apples, so that could be it, too.
We are up to our ears in apples this year. I found a place that is charging me something like $4 a bushel for windfalls I pick up myself, plus we've done actual pick your own. So we've brought home about six and a half bushels of Ida Reds, Liberties, Spygolds and Cortlands. I've made apple sauce by just quartering the apples, cooking them down, and running them through the food mill. I'll mostly use that for homeschool lunches and as an oil substitute in my baking. Then I made some "pretty" applesauce using the corer/peeler/slicer. I only use cider to sweeten. I made apple-ginger marmalade, which has crystallized ginger in it and is spicy but *yummy*! And today I made seventeen quarts of pie filling, but my recipe used cornstarch rather than flour. I still have a couple of bushels left. I'm thinking about fruit leather or apple butter. They may get me back to the orchard one more time for some Pippins or Northern Spys, too.
LOL, I wandered and forgot to actually answer the question! I would freeze any of these once I'd cooked them, and have done so in years past. But this year, I'm canning.
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LOL...I read this last year. The author seems to like to play with the middle-class neuroses of a certain generation, and groups homeschooling under that heading. The extremes to which some minor characters take it are, IMO, predictable. Sort of like watching Stephanopoulis's capped teeth hit the news desk when someone says "radical unschoolers".
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We picked Liberties and SpyGolds this weekend...I'm still waiting for the Northern Spys and Pippins, though.
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My fourth grader started Island Level late last spring. We're planning to work through Island and Town Levels this year, and start Voyage next fall. So far, we love it. It's at once inventive and structured in a very, very commonsense way. Ds is definitely retaining it. The conversational aspect of it is nice, and is reinforced by the fact that ds met MCT last spring. Another big plus for us is the way MCT weaves in Latin and Greek. We're finding that our foreign language studies and MCT reinforce each other.
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For future reference, tell him to ask his resident asst. or resident director if there is a student cab service. We had one, and it was the only way we could get back to campus from the hospital.
Still worth checking. It was a student safety thing, not a campus thing.
MCT users, check in -
in K-8 Curriculum Board
Posted
The grammar section on the SAT requires students to identify sentence errors (by marking the incorrect portion of the sentence), improve sentences (by choosing the better/best answer from among five options), and improve paragraphs (by doing the above, and by moving, combining or omitting sentences). There are categories of common sentence errors being tested, including subject/verb agreement, verb tense, misplaced modifiers, use of pronouns, idiomatic errors, and diction errors. But no, nobody is going to be twitting your kid for failing to appreciate the difference between an adjective that modifies a noun and a noun that modifies a noun. I'd laugh, if it didn't make me sort of depressed.