School got done today but very little curriculum. That was totally fine. DS9 covered writing/typing and spelling by writing a story at the computer. DD6 dictated a story and did a mountain of flash cards by choice, rather than math games. She's weird :-p. DS5 worked on skip counting by 2's and 5's to 100, read some words off the white board, and wrote his brother a super nice letter practicing handwriting for his name and then dictating the rest. Then the kids made businesses and hired each other as employees. I made them pay each other in percentages so that was decent math work for Ds9 and he did do a couple pages of actual math. It was sunny, so they went to the park at lunch for a good long run around. Overall we had lots of fun. DH and I got to talk on the phone yesterday and because we are such geeks, I complained about the AOPS problem that I couldn't find a way to solve without the quadratic equation. We did it together on the phone and agreed that it must be solved by iteration. I don't have the solutions manual but I am going to go with it because I have heard such brute force problems exist in AOPS .. now I don't feel so badly. Tomorrow, more studying for me. DH might stay home sick which would actually be nice as awful as that sounds. I miss him. For the kids, spelling, handwriting, math... MCT for DD, Astronomy for DS. After school my local homeschool group has a "recess" group that is meeting at a playground so I might take the kids over there if it is decently not rainy again.

Only my 4th child memorizes songs and rhymes. The others don't even know all the words to the prayers we say over the food at dinner every single day. I don't know if it is a flag for anything, but I don't think there's anything wrong with my kids except that they have absolutely no rhythm or singing ability. My 6 year old in particular can't memorize a song for anything, but she will try and sing a retelling if you ask her to -- she synthesizes a meaning and story but can't remember the actual words. She's otherwise very advanced verbally, taught herself to read at 2, writes amazing poetry and long child-like stories that play on different literary elements.

Thank you! That's fantastic. I think he'd really love some sort of camera/cell phone option. I'll have to see if I can figure that out. His fine motor is definitely average for a 5 year old boy so I hadn't thought about the Dover coloring books, but that is probably something to keep on my list.

That's great news soror! I'm anxiously awaiting ours, maybe it won't take the three weeks they claimed it might. My very mathy 5 year old started filling in random pages near the end of his math book hoping he could just do the last page and go to BA. I'm hoping he'll be able to do it sooner than later and then we'll keep going in SM until the next comes out.

I think I probably should have gotten the solutions manual for AOPS Intro Alg. This is so embarrassing but I spent all day mulling over the last three problems in chapter 3. I assume there is a way to solve them without the quadratic equation but I'll be darned if I can think of it. It poured rain so I didn't actually build the fire pit. If I get my kids to bed before 9 I'm running to the big box store for the bricks so I can build it tomorrow. As for Russian and French writing, I did a nominal amount. Kinda wasted the time I could have done more listening to Hillbilly Elegy on audiobook. The kids were actually less impressed with a day of electronics than they thought they'd be. I think they'll be glad to go back to school tomorrow. DS9 has lessons 9 & 10/quiz for CLE math tomorrow. TTRS, handwriting, Treasured Conversations, and Astronomy. Dd6 has math games, handwriting, MCT Island grammar (a.k.a. Her bedtime story). DS5 has two pages of 100EZ, and a couple pages of SM 1A, maybe he'll also do handwriting. If it's nice out, I'll send them to the park at lunch time. If it's rainy again, we'll try to make progress through the read alouds.

Tanaqui, I think we could be friends in real life. :) I'm sorry you are going through this phase but you sound like an eminently reasonable mother. Although mine are younger, I have two that like to punish me with similar attitudes. I'm laughing over here at "Calling people on the phone" and "swallowing glass". Good luck. I think I'm gong to pull mind out of school for middle school and have them go build a cabin on the woods or something..

We did a lot of the "when/then" stuff at that age too. It gets easier when your oldest comes around because the littles tend to follow the lead of their bigger siblings. We used a lot of Charlotte Mason ideas for moving through the routine of the day. We got up, made our beds, got dressed then ate breakfast. "Oh you're hungry? Better get dressed so we can get on to breakfast. Oh you don't want to get dressed? But I thought you were hungry, let's go!" Having a flow of things just takes the emotion out of it all. "You want to move on to the fun thing? Great me too. We'd better keep going!" Or "you can sit at the table (or lay in bed if it got really tense) or you can get dressed, but playing legos isn't one of the choices yet"

Ah of course I understand. None of my kids will do anything but review without me so BA isn't any different than SM or anything else for us, but if you have a system that's working I can understand your reluctance to go for something more teacher intensive!

I ended up reading BA 3 to my 8 year old last year. By the end of the year he wanted to read alternating characters with me but still didn't want to read it alone. It wasn't any sort of problem. I don't think that reading independently is essential as long as you are willing to work at their hip.

Woohoo! He did it. Four kiddos with clean teeth (and one with no teeth hehe). I bribed him with another day off school tomorrow and 20 diamonds in Habitica, the RPG to do/task list that we use for him. He even smiled a few times and let the dentist take out his two very very wiggly teeth. The dentist was awesome; I think the best I've ever met for building rapport. So, no school tomorrow for the reward but I am not too worried because we did at least a half day on labor day and we often go 6 days a week. I'll sneakily make up the work on Saturday :) I'll use the day to get a few things done - I'm aiming for one chapter in AOPS Alg for me, building a fire pit, studying Russian and writing a few paragraphs to a few pages in French depending on how tired I am.

My 5 year old is really into animals and nature. Not sure where the bounds are exactly. I think he's had every field guide in the house read to him cover to cover as a bed time story, with Latin name and classification as well as length/height/weight details left in. He's moving on to adult non-fiction. One Wild Bird At A Time was his book which he listened to several times before he was ready to share it with the family and let the other kid hear it. Fortunately the author has several more books that can keep him busy for a while, but I was just wondering if anyone had great ideas or suggestions that we should put on the list. I honestly don't have time to pre-read or pre-listen to everything that looks like it might be somewhat interesting for him so I am taking the easy route and asking for help :) Scientific discussion of reproduction is fine, but adult humor slipped into discussions is not. As always, I appreciate any help and am so grateful for this board.

We may or may not get to school today. Dentist appointments are at 2. Huge anxiety for DS9.(The dentist knows, we'll be taking about options more than anything) He's already hiding and sulking. I'm hoping he'll get it out and take a nap even before we have to go. I am not pushing anything. I might even reward him for going with no school, no minecraft restrictions all day tomorrow. My other two, we are having a slow start but will probably play math games for a while which will feel sufficient for K and 1st. It's so funny to me that because of time zone we are just getting started when many of you have finished your day.

I don't really think of it is "road trip gone awry", because you just can't drive thousands on thousands of miles with kids without SOMETHING unexpected coming up, and we really cover some miles each year. We just consider it part of the adventure and remember to be grateful that we aren't on a historic voyage eating maggoty hardtack. On my recent trip to see the eclipse (6k miles), we did run out of gas in the middle of the wilderness driving across Canada. We only had 2 gallons with us but were over 55 miles from anything either direction (mom accidentally blew past the required gas stop in the dark). We made some signs with sharpie on paper towels and the second car that drove past us was able to help -- only took about 45 minutes for that to happen. On the trip before, we got a flat tire just about 4 hours from home after a 12k miles. We found out at that time that run-flat tires are a huge lie and only last about 25 miles, not enough to get into towing range of an an area that sold tires for my car. That one took about 6h on the side of the road to resolve. .. Then of course there is the list of stomach viruses, the times we pulled into camp in the dark only to wake up and realize the entire site was poison ivy, that time I parked in front of a glacier (accidentally in the dark) and the glacial winds froze everyone (and some things more literally). it is all good stuff

For fiction we recently did Treasure Island, Redwall, Starman Jones (LOVE this book. It's a Heinlein that's safe for kids), and the three Bunnicula books. Earlier in the year we did a LOT of Elizabeth Nesbit books which are beautifully read on Librivox by Ruth Golding. On our recent trip we did the first two SOTW books on CD plus the first of Hakim's Story of Us. We also did One Wild Bird At A Time which everyone was wild about but I might have really strange kids. It's by a bird watcher/ornithologist and describes how he developed questions and found his own answers -- great for scientific inquiry and he does wild stuff like taking a chain saw to his bedroom to help some woodpeckers nest in his cabin. We're all excited to listen to the rest of his books.

I agree with Arctic Mama. Make the appointment, talk to the allergist. Allergist can be a hit or miss doctor -- the good ones are great, the bad ones are horrid. If you don't have a great family allergist, find some allergic friends to ask for a recommendation. It is even worth driving a good ways to get to a great one when you have some competing issues going on.

We're not doing school today. DH had a nice four day weekend and I am heartbroken to see him go back to work. We've hardly seen each other this summer and it doesn't look like his workload and travel will let up until Thanksgiving. :( We did read some Horrible Histories with DS9. I think maybe they are too horrible for us. We shelved the WW2 one for now. Going to read a little Murderous Maths in a few minutes, which hopefully is slightly less serious. And I'll probably have ds do TTRS. Kids of a lot for a so called non-school day but whatever :)

My 9 year old fell apart for most of last year. I think it is a stage. One thing I realized at that point was that his independent ability and work-with-me ability were two separate things. To encourage a tiny bit of independence, I needed to make that independent work MUCH easier than the work he was doing with me or his anxiety was out of control. I actually moved him 1 and a half grades back for math. Now I consider his independent work like a separate subject that we do, and we keep progressing both threads of math. On his own, he's a hair below grade level and with me he works about 2 grade levels above that on the white board. I don't know how that would work for other kids, but I feel like I finally found a magic formula to meet his needs.

The oil tank is a little scary if this isn't your forever home. Growing up, my neighbor's tank leaked and they couldn't sell their house, so they had to rent it out for many (~15)years. Not sure if they ever managed to sell it. I'm not sure it is a deal breaker, but if this is a comparison between houses, the oil would be a pretty big negative. Plus it's so so expensive as heat!

I have the free trial right now, but I don't think I'll keep it. I guess I have gotten spoiled by modern Crash Course type format. It just seems to take forever to get information out of great courses lectures. It's a one month trial though, you should definitely give it a shot and see if it suits.

Good morning good morning, and happy Friday! The toddler got me up before the rest of the house which means I can do a few pages of AOPS Geometry before we start school. Could grumble over lack of sleep, or rejoice at some quiet me-time. Choosing optimism this morning :)

We mostly did ok today. No studying for me, but my mom is in town and while I always think that will result in more time for myself, it often just means I am chatting with her all day when I should be doing other things and taking advantage of the help. Oh well. Nice to have her around anyway. Most of school got done for the kids, still no spelling. DH is off tomorrow so we are going to aim for efficiency and then have family time. Core subjects for the kids, and I am going to aim for 1h study for me.

Yay woohoo! We have been waiting but DS is still finishing Singapore 1A so we have a little while. He desperately wants these books and talks about when he can have them all the time.

If you are going to buy Percy for kindle, consider the deal with the audible book and kindle book together. My kids have gotten a ton of mileage from the audio books and I think if you buy them together it's only a total of ~15$. I can't remember exactly, but much less expensive than buying the audio book first.

I adulted today. Did the kids ILP meeting and then ran a few errands while my mom supervised here. Tomorrow we need to do a nice full school day, with spelling which is actually the only subject neglected so far this week (I'm super proud of that) and I need to start my own studying again. I decided to do the AOPS intro to Alg and intro to geometry books just for fun. I also have an undergrad physics text book for refresher that I'd like to make progress on. Then I need to practice/keep up/improve my writing in French, and study Russian so those are my courses for the fall.

I have nothing great to add. My son did a few of these suggestions before Percy, some after. Percy Jackson was his gateway to reading though. He struggled and struggled through sea of monsters after I read the first one out loud. After Sea of Monsters he really took off and read most the other Riorden books.