I have my dad's now, but I'm pretty sure you could buy one at a hobby shop... For a while I was using an online "virtual chess clock" (try googling that), but I like having it on the table so I can reach over and click it at a moment's notice ;)

Our very first "schoolwork rule" was that you need to ask politely if you can quit. No whining, no wandering away, no grumpiness. But to reinforce that, every single time he did ask politely I'd agree. Once he was used to that rule, we ramped up just a bit, so that he needed to ask politely and finish the one problem or line he was on. And then that he needed to finish the page. This was over the course of maybe two years of gradually increasing -- not overnight. Currently we do much like Jedi does. He has his assignments and he needs to find the time to get them done. If that means he's not doing anything else all day then that's what it means. At this point I'm up for making him stay up late to finish if he's been dawdling (not if I really did assign too much!), but I wouldn't do that to a five year old. :) It only works here because he does have the foresight to know that if he gets his work done quickly he has gobs of free time, night and weekends entirely off, and more than sufficient television time. And if he doesn't... he doesn't. We've had a couple occasions of grumpiness where he thought I was assigning too much and I thought he was dawdling, and we settled it with a chess clock. One side timed how long he was working and the other side timed how long he was complaining, daydreaming, sharpening pencils (again), getting a snack.... I won. ;) And not only did I make the point, but he learned to recognize his own stalling tactics and how he was wasting his own free time. I think I posted about it somewhere here... maybe before the format switch... But again, not something I'd necessarily do first --better to start with the politeness rule.

I mis-read your sig as saying your DS was studying Comparative Religions in Driver's Ed... which somehow struck me as funny! ;)

A very cute little 1969 Karmann Ghia, and other than the ex and the "friend" we had a similar situation... sold online, waited for the check, transfered the title (that was nervewracking to mail...) and then the great big truck came to get it. The guy driving the truck was very nice, maybe a little on the "cowboy" side... and he drove it onto the ramp. I think he would have gotten it up there somehow or other, whether it started or not -- he had that kind of look! LOL I'm sure if it doesn't start at one end or the other it won't be the first time the car-truck-guy has faced that, and I'm sure there's a way to manage. But like someone else already said, once he gets it on the truck you've done your part!

Glad it made it through! I think if you can recognize and avoid the specific situation that sends you into a tailspin then you probably don't need professional help... Unless avoiding the situation has you turning your whole life upside down. It sounds like this is a single type of avoidable situation and it might very well be enough to do just as you are doing and avoid it! :) Now if you were scared of your kitchen... or if any kind of baking made you nervous... or attending weddings... that would be so inconvenient as to make professional help necessary. But honestly I'd be a basket case if I'd made a wedding cake and had reason to believe it wasn't going to make it to the reception! That's perfectly healthy! (Not that I'm the measure of "perfectly healthy" mind you! LOL)

EEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!! :lol: (Although in all of that it's the "e" in grammar that does it -- you could have spelled everything else perfectly and I'd still be twitching! LOL That or if you'd managed to mis-apostrophize any of the versions of its/it's) Me? Quirky?? ;)

It's a thin workbook of just word problems, following the same topics as the regular text and workbook. I like to run it at least half a level behind, and preferably a whole level, because when we did it that way it served as a little review and also allowed DS to think about the process and setup without having to also keep track of something new. They are very challenging, too... there are some in book 4 and up that perfectly well-educated, mathy grownups (coughcough) stumble on. ;)

Routinely skipped either 4 or 5, I don't remember which.. And he had a friend who skipped the other. They would argue about who was right, which was completely hysterical since both of them were WRONG... but they're both fine now, and both quite good at math (although they both have a stubborn streak....) I definitely wouldn't worry yet!

Be absolutely sure that you don't have aluminum wiring (instead of copper). Depending on when your house was built there's a chance that it has aluminum. It should have come out in the inspection when you bought the house, and frequently it's replaced outright at that point because it can be a fire hazard. We've kept ours (so far) but there is only one electrician we trust to deal with it, even to the extent of replacing fixtures. Learned that the hard way. :glare: If you have regular copper wiring, and most people do, then replacing a fixture should be very easy!

I think it would be more accurate to say that some kids (maybe the vast majority?) won't be ready to do algebra at a younger age. But I also see several of us here who have had no problem. So while it would be worth it to keep in mind that moving forward might not be the right choice, each child will approach it differently. And I think there's no one "safe" choice -- either you could move too fast and burn them out or move too slow and make it boring. Both choices have their potential drawbacks, but as long as you're paying attention and you're willing to change plans, I think you can safely try either way. My main argument for going ahead (provided it works and isn't frustrating) is that once you have mastered the bare basics of algebra -- not even the tricky stuff -- you open up so many more interesting paths to try, and you can "wallow" there for ages and ages without running out of interesting things to learn. So moving ahead now doesn't necessarily mean racing straight to calculus, and taking advantage of all of those possible paths means that when you do get to calculus, you'll have actually done a great deal more than most people ever even hear about.

And it wasn't that bad! I've never heard of the different types of floors needing different tools... I'm pretty sure all the hardwood flooring I've ever seen were regular tongue-and-groove.... We rented a nailer, and because we're cheapskates, we rented the one we could get for $15 a day, which had no air compressor. It would be MUCH easier with an air compressor, but we had more time and energy than money at that point... LOL Basically you line up the plank, line up the nailer, and whack it with the mallet. That's all. Repeat about a million times. ;) You don't line up the seams, and then the only tricky part is cutting all the end pieces to fit without too much gap at the end. (They can't run quite all the way to the wall because wood expands and contracts...) And the last three or four courses have to be face-nailed and countersunk because you don't have the swinging room that close to the wall. I think we just followed the instructions in a book from the library. Anyway it's not rocket science, but it is hard work. We hired guys for the sanding and finishing because by then we were tired, but you can do that yourself too -- I think managing a sander is more of a pain than whacking a nailer. You can get pre-finished wood floor, but I've never looked into it myself, except insofar as about 15 years ago a friend put it in her house and I thought it looked a little weird (beveled edges to hide any irregularities). I'm betting that they've improved things tremendously since then. I'd ask the guys at the tool rental place. They should know exactly what you would need and have a good idea of how long you'd need them. Hope this helps!

Actually I could just shorten that to "I have no patience" ;) But DS is one comment away from taking on his own laundry just because of tone of voice, not even to the point of an actual complaint. It doesn't take much for me to skip straight to "well here's the basket and there's the washing machine -- have a blast."

It really is one of the easiest to accelerate, and it sounds like you might need that in whatever math program you have! The major benefit to Singapore for accelerated kids is that they group the lessons by topic, so you know, if you skip something, exactly what it is you're skipping. What you'll want to avoid like the plague is any curriculum that mixes problem types in every lesson -- it's so much work to pick out what really needs to be done and what can be skipped, and it's easy to miss a topic that was kind of slipped in there with everything else! I like that Singapore does mixed problem reviews, because I do think it's important to be able to take on a variety of problems together, but since it's only a periodic thing it doesn't complicate your daily assignments so much. The way we did Singapore Primary was to take the textbook and workbook at whatever speed DS needed, generally doing only the exercises from one or the other (not both). Then we added in the Challenging Word Problems about a semester or two behind, which gave him some review without being overly complicated about it. If I had heard of the Intensive Practice before we were nearly done with the series anyway I might have skipped the workbook in favor of that, as nmoira does. I've never looked into it myself, but I know that's a popular option. I generally aimed for about 80% correct on everything. More than that and he was underchallenged, and less than that he wasn't really getting it. There were a few topics where he actually had to stop and work at it for a while, but only a few. And I found that if he was doing about 80% in his daily work, that by the time the topic showed up again (in the CWP for instance) he was absolutely solid on it. I think 80% leaves it at a point where he's still thinking about it on his own, and it's that "digesting time" that really makes it stick. We were fully into algebra before he really needed to slow down... but it's a balance between knowing that he's absolutely solid on his arithmetic manipulations and knowing that he's not completely tuning out. Hope this helps!! :)

I've not really BTDT (quite), but we're in the middle of it right now. DS is ridiculously young for Algebra, but he plowed through Singapore Primary (with CWP) at top speed and had no trouble moving on. I would have been happy to stop and "smell the roses" but honestly in arithmetic there just aren't that many roses to smell. Once you've got some Algebra behind you though, there are SO many options for going deep that just required a little facility with manipulating variables. What we ended up doing after Primary 6 was to dabble in a few different algebra materials (Kinetic Books and Gelfand), and then move on to NEM. We did only the algebra chapters of NEM 1 and then skipped to the algebra chapters of NEM 2, which we should be done with in about two weeks. We've taken our time with it, and it's been a little over a year now since we started... but there are plenty of rabbit trails to explore in Algebra! :) Officially we're doing Statistics this next year, but we're also doing Zome Geometry on the side, and dabbling in the geometry chapters of NEM 1 and 2 and a little Euclid... The following year I think we'll finish up geometry and then the year after, something else. Combinatorics might be fun. Somewhere in there we might pick up Gelfand again. And then there are dozens of other clever little math niches we could explore, each of them reasonably accessible at this point.

Lack of planning on his part doesn't constitute an emergency on my part! LOL But it does make for an amusing mental image. ;)

Okay okay, I just hate the idiots ;) I know there's no point in blocking someone who's being a jerk, but it makes me feel better. So I do. What really irritates me more than anything is that I drive a very reasonable speed -- not slow, but not breakneck -- generally about 5mph over the speed limit unless I know it's a place where the speed limit is already pushing it (like a blind curve). And invariably the jerks that want me to let them back in are the ones that passed me because I wasn't going fast enough. There's one stretch of road here where the speed limit drops from 45 to 35 because you're approaching a blind curve with a stoplight on the other side, and frequently the traffic has lined up to the point that as soon as you can see ahead there's a car RIGHTINFRONTOFYOU. So being a sensible person, I slow down to 35 as soon as the sign is there. And some jerk always has to come screaming up behind me at 50-something, zip around on the left, come around the curve way too fast and stomp on his brakes because he's about to plow right into someone. There are numerous matching skidmarks to attest to the frequency of this particular scenario. :glare: And of course after showing everyone what a moron he is, he wants back in because he was planning to turn right. Well too bad. :mad: In almost any other setting I definitely try to err on the side of sympathy, but when people are risking their lives and everyone else's and then want you to allow it, I say they should be thankful the only consequences they're having to live with are the inconvenience, and not the accident they very nearly caused. Now if it's a regular merge and people are behaving themselves then of course everyone gets in and I don't care where I fall in the line -- it's only when someone is cheating, and especially cheating in an unsafe manner, that I feel compelled to communicate my disapproval. The one incident that really had me cussing though was a guy who leaned on his horn because I had opted to stop at a red light instead of trying to make it (and exactly how was he planning to get through the same light when it was already red for me and he was a whole car length later??) My first thought was that I should be sympathetic because maybe he was late for something important, or having some emergency (although the hospital is in the other direction...) Nope. He spent a whole light cycle gunning his engine and gesticulating because he was desperate to get to Burger King. :001_huh: Burger King???? He wanted me to run a red light so he could have an overcooked hamburger???? Gah!!!!

DS didn't walk until 17 months. He could stand at 12 months, but wouldn't let go of the [table, chair, sofa] to walk, and didn't actually "cruise" along things much either. He was late on all the gross motor skills, but not late enough to have an official diagnosis. The ped said he was just "cautious" which fits his personality in general. At 17 months I finally just set him down at one end of a walkway (it was a long pedestrian bridge between the parking garage and the office where I had a meeting, about 100 yards I think, and since we were early for the meeting it seemed like a good time), let him hold on to my fingers, and waited until he took a couple steps, and a couple more, and finally after probably 45 minutes managed to cross the bridge. The guy who drove the little golf-cart shuttle for the parking garage thought it was hysterical (as he passed us a good half-dozen times! LOL) From then until about 18 months he only walked holding on to at least one hand, and then he was fine with walking alone, although he has always been happy to hold a hand when one was available. Even now! He was late on gross motor skills across the board, way back to rolling over and pushing up and all that, so I don't think it was anything particular to walking. It was just that it was a more visible delay. Also he never had a walker or an older sibling, and never bothered to use things as walkers -- he just scooted around or crawled (also late). As of his first birthday we owned a ride-on toy, but he didn't use it until after he walked. Another poster mentioned balance issues with big heads, which might have been the case with DS (>95th percentile for head circumference, average or slightly below average height and weight, tiny feet), but I think the temperment was the biggest issue. There haven't been any real lingering issues, and he has become quite a good tap dancer since then. :) The number of times people have said, in regards to some aspect of homeschooling and whether one was pushing academics or sticking too closely to a PS scope and sequence, that "you didn't just set your child down at a certain age and say 'you're old enough to walk, so go ahead and do it!'"... well... I guess I did, didn't I! LOL

When I quit the department (rather in a huff I'm afraid...) I told a couple people it was because I had cable now and anthropology was a lot more fun on television. ;)

I'm sure I have pictures.... The grandparents would never have let any of those slip (although I'm not positive about the Mojo Jojo... I don't think we had any of our own pictures of that, what with our hands full of baby and whatnot... LOL) -- no idea where I've put them though!

I saw him speak at a conference in Calgary in, uh, 1990? 91? Sometime in there... He was a hoot! It was an excellent study too -- I always remember what y'all found about buying behavior during meat shortages... it was fascinating. (But I wouldn't want to do the work myself -- not for gobs and gobs of money!! LOL)

Depending on the program, archaeology can be considered a specialization within anthropology rather than its own degree program.... So in my old department the degree would be in anthropology, but an archaeology student would have taken all the archaeology classes as well as the core anthropology classes. My own degree is in anthropology with a specialization in medical anthropology, and DH was anthropology with a specialization in archaeology. A lot of our classes were together, but at the higher levels there were more separate things, and he did field school (volunteering on a dig for credit but not pay), while I volunteered on a study within my area of concentration, collaborating with the local public health department. I should warn you.... both of us dropped out of grad school when it was clear that there were practically no jobs available. Of the twenty or so other students in our grad school cohorts (we went to different grad schools), only two are employed in anthropology. This varies tremendously by school, and actually it's not a matter of the selectiveness of the school.... Where we got our undergrad degrees actally turns out many more employable graduates -- it's a much less "selective" program, but it's much more in-tune with what will actually get you a job. Of all the people I know who went to the same grad program I did, the two from my cohort are working in anthropology, one more who was a year behind me is a contract archaeologist (which is a job, but not necessarily a great one), one who was a few years ahead of me has a really super-kick-butt job directing archaeology for a historical site, and then everyone else -- like 95% of the whole place -- has gone to something else. One is in nursing school, one is in veterinary school, a bunch of us went to public health/epidemiology, there's a city planner... So I guess what I should say is if it really is his lifelong dream, then of course he should pursue it... but also do everything he can to keep his options open in case there isn't a job waiting for him at the other end. It would definitely be worth it to find a dig to volunteer on, although most of them aren't going to want kids -- at least teenagers if not college age. It can be really REALLY hard physical labor, and some of that varies by location -- I have a friend who did her fieldwork in Georgia in July with the red clay... :svengo: Anyway -- I didn't mean to sound quite so discouraging!! But if he is absolutely set on it, he should find out for himself just what he's signing on for, as soon as he can... and not close any other doors before he absolutely has to. You can do everything right and just not have any opportunities show up at the right time.

DS wants to be Spaceman Spiff this year.... which I'm hoping is very very easy... Blue sweats, yellow belt, cool sunglasses, ray gun.... ;) We've done the Headless Horseman, Tock (from the Phantom Tollbooth), a rhinoceros beetle, electric eel (with battery operated LEDs!), a policeman, a bumblebee, and when he was a tiny baby, Mojo Jojo. (DH was Professor Utonium and two friends and I were Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. I was Bubbles. :D) Fortunately DS decides early and sticks with it, or there would be no hope!

I don't know anything about Cambridge and their requirements, but we've been very happy with Singapore as a rigorous math curriculum for elementary and secondary levels for a quick student. It's a good combination of standard algorithms and thorough understanding. I'm just guessing here, but I imagine that if you went through the Primary books and the NEM books, that at the end of it you could pick up wherever that put you in the progression to the Cambridge requirements and do fine.

I had tons of opportunities growing up... and very, very little talent! LOL Okay that's not entirely true -- I was very good at math and art, and okay at music. But I tried a LOT of things I was really really bad at, and I'm glad I did, because I don't have any illusion that it was a lack of opportunity that made me bad at them! ;) I did a lot of dabbling, mostly, and was only immersed in a few things (and not always for long...) Given that there were four of us, I'm honestly terribly impressed that my parents managed to give us all the options they did. They didn't shove us into anything (although my mom had high hopes that ballet would improve my posture... oh well! LOL) and they let us all do what we were good at and try things we weren't. DS is good at a few different things, and we do give him pretty free rein in those areas. We let him fly ahead in his math and science, and find mentors and outside teachers for him where my own time or interests are lacking. I can't imagine answering "no" to that, the way it's phrased... I mean, of course we'd all pull our kids out of activities if the strain were too great -- the question is where that point is for each of us. I'd venture to say it's different for every family. In our case we've made a concerted effort to keep our evenings and weekends as free as possible. If there's no other option, we'll give up an evening or a weekend here or there, but as a rule it's family time. So I'd draw the line at something that routinely required more than two evenings a week, which rules out some pretty "normal" stuff like soccer and year-round swimming, around here. But I'm happy to give up a piece of each day as long as it's not interfering with regular schoolwork, which means we have time for quite a lot of things, actually... and if I listed them all I'm sure someone else could look at it and say it would be too much for them... kwim? I think you have to teach the child you have. If you have a child, as was described earlier in this thread, who ~has~ to be a gymnast, then it's worth it to focus (carefully). If you don't, then I like to aim for something in the middle -- allowing the child to pursue his interests and delve deep into areas of strength, but not at the expense of everything else falling by the wayside. There are basic skills that everyone needs -- a single talent is rarely enough to get you through a whole life intact. But conversely I don't think any amount of trying to "round out" a specialist is going to keep them from being who they are. If they really are hyperfocused on one area, show great talent and drive, and desperately need to follow that path, then I think you really need to let that happen... while also making sure they have those basic skills to take care of themselves (like understanding contracts!) and pick themseves up if something should end the dream career. No. It does make for a very different childhood, but honestly I don't believe in that whole "robbed of childhood" thing in general. I do think that shoving a child into committing to something they were never meant to do, or keeping them from things they enjoy, makes for a much less pleasant childhood than one would hope for. My own idyllic childhood involves a lot of dabbling and a lot of free time, but then I already had my own idyllic childhood :) and it might not be at all what DS would want for himself. Yup! DS is required to swim, for safety reasons. He has virtually no talent for swimming, and only moderate interest. He is not required to join the swim team (he doesn't have the qualifying times anyway except for recreational league... which he tries about every third year and ends up regretting), but he is required to swim. At this point, having had lessons for over six years, he is comfortable in the water and has good endurance, but terrible form and no speed to speak of. He's also required to have one other athletic pursuit of his choice (currently rock climbing) and something artistic or musical (currently flute). He's really pretty good at flute, and enjoys it, but we're not calling Juilliard or anything! LOL

We've really enjoyed Bite Size Physics -- there's a website and a printable Lulu book. DS has been doing it with a group and has enjoyed it tremendously. Lots of activities and no "weird" materials. That's my favorite part. :)