And if his issues happen only when he's eaten wrong, and if you can conquer the difficulties in holding to his diet, well then, you've solved the problem, no counseling required. The reason I bring it up is that in my understanding, though, an explosive child is more likely to come from a family with anger management issues—not so much the abusive sort of issues, but the "I never get angry, I'm sweeter than that" kind of issue. The sort of family where you look at the crazy kid and say, "How could she be so out of control? The parents are so nice!" That would be me.... Everyone has anger. I didn't recognize it in myself, and couldn't tolerate it in my child. She had some experiences in early childhood that created substantial anger in her; I saw her anger, couldn't help her with it, and vilified her in my mind. (There must be something wrong with her! Otherwise, how could such a good mother as me have such an out-of-control child?) We got counseling quite early, but it was of poor quality and left me too certain that she was the problem and not me. Now I know how to help people with anger much better, and life is much better for all of us.... Also, I should say that we didn't enter marriage counseling because we had marriage issues. We have a very strong marriage (though I have to say that it wasn't nearly as strong as I thought it was!). The marriage wasn't the trouble, but each of our individual issues was, and we worked on those—with huge benefits for both our marriage and for the kids.

Rosetta Stone is a good product (though more expensive than its value, in my opinion), but it is not a full program. And in the forms I've seen (it's been a few years), it does not teach the grammar at all, indirectly or directly—it uses the grammar, but not in a way that enables you to draw proper conclusions. I've never heard of anyone being able to learn grammar from a Rosetta Stone product, so don't feel bad if you can't! Duolingo is a much better program, and it's free. It's much more complete, although I've never seen a single program that was truly complete. Assimil is a good program, but I suspect that it works better for adults and experienced language learners than it does for children. Michel Thomas and Pimsleur are good programs in quite different ways. I have a German-language resource list that sums up some of my opinions on those. They are both audio programs, but quite different. I think that Thomas will take you farther (if you can stand his terrible accent in both Spanish and English!); Pimsleur will help you develop an excellent accent and some real fluency, but with only a very limited number of things that you can say. Either one is fairly expensive (well, not one of the older MT audios); try to get them from your library. Michel Thomas has an app you can download which allows you to hear a lesson free, then download additional lessons ($5 for an hour, I believe). Or you can buy the whole program at a better price, if you like what you hear in the demo lesson. (Don't hesitate to buy the older lessons—I can't imagine that the newer versions add enough value to justify the huge increase in price.) On my sort-of-site (not ready for the big time, I assure you!) I also have a number of Spanish language resources listed. (Spanish, not German, is my real area of expertise.) Some day, when I have the time, I will edit and improve this list. If you look at my Stage 1 link - which is really a mess - you will see some helps for beginning Spanish students, using a reading method I can't find anywhere online, to my bewilderment. At the bottom of that Stage 1 page is a set of links to a number of different exercises. The "Ciudades and pueblos" exercise is the one I've worked on the longest; the "caballo" and the "planta" exercises should be usable, too. The EYC link was intended for an IRL class I was teaching, and probably not for raw beginners. If anyone looks at the Spanish stuff and likes it, please let me know. Encouragement makes me much more willing to write lessons!

I am currently teaching a group of students German and have spent more hours than I care to think combing the web trying to find helpful resources. Rosetta Stone is a good product. However, its cost, in my opinion, is very much out of line with its value—which isn't a problem if money is no object for you. Please don't feel that you're missing out on the "right" way of teaching a language if you don't use it! I like RS myself, but it is not at all a complete program. Most of the students that I've talked to who've used the program did in fact learn something from it, but many of them hated it, and all believed that its value was limited. My annotated list of resources and recommendations for studying German. I prepared this list mostly for my own students (ages 11-18). I have not marked all of these for appropriateness for various ages, especially since I haven't studied all of them. KatherineTheGreat, thanks for the link to the children's books. That's one I hadn't come across yet.

I had an explosive child. I don't know whether any of her issues were due to dietary problems (I would be more open to experimenting with that now that I'm gluten-free myself), but regular meals and sleep schedules were vital for us. Let me encourage you to find an excellent counselor to go to, to explore the idea that there may be family issues going on. My ADHD, explosive child settled down markedly when my husband and I entered counseling. She was supposed to participate, too, but after the second session, she refused—and it never mattered. I do caution you, though, that there's counseling, and there's counseling. A year and a half of counseling with one person can be equivalent to four hours with another. In our case, I got some substantial benefit from the 18 months of marriage counseling that my husband and I did, but we got much more benefit from the eight-hour workshop I took at a counseling center. We continue to work with that center when we need help, even though it's 100 miles from home, because it's still much more time-effective. In our particular case, the main benefit that I got is that for the first time I realized that I do, in fact, get angry. (I didn't realize it before—didn't experience the emotion of anger.) I also learned that I could experience anger as a good thing: it helped me identify when a problem was occurring, and filled me with the energy to solve that problem. What a revelation! Recognizing this and dealing with my own anger early in an appropriate way, rather than unconsciously letting it affect my behaviors in indirect ways, allowed me to deal much better with my children. That changed the emotional tone of our home and improved my relationship with my daughter, who started settling down. (This is hard for me to write even today, because civility and gentleness and encouragement and self-control and such have always been what I've strived for. It's hard for me to accept that it was much, much harder to be my child than I imagined.) Today this daughter is no longer explosive and is doing well at a university. And my husband and I are still working to heal our own wounds that have kept us, at times, from parenting in the ways that we would choose. Our other children, I hope, will benefit from this too!

I don't know if that's completely true - that summarizing is a means to an end. In this case that's what we're using it for, but it's far from the only situation. I say this because of my experience with my friend who has the same strength - it's a wonderful strength but it's also very useful to be able to boil ideas down for others. Our friend also has extreme difficulties making himself clear in writing, because he feels the need to put every relevant fact into a sentence with extreme precision. I'm grateful for his strengths but it would be better if he could develop just a bit of balance.

I haven't used any of these programs but I've been looking very carefully over WWS (ordered it last night) and I have to say that I myself had to think hard to be able to summarize the story in Day 2 - so it seems to me that a young one with memory problems might really be overwhelmed, yes, especially if she also doesn't like to read. There's also a lot of reading in the program - it's great stuff, in my opinion, but you might want something more focused for her.

In general, you will have troubles using MUS as a spine and supplementing with Singapore, I would think, unless you use a Singapore text of a much lower level. The sequence of Singapore is extremely tight, meaning that if something is taught in chapter 3, it's likely to turn up in every chapter after that, without warning. So, for example, you can't skip ahead to a "measurement" chapter and think that you won't be practicing addition and multiplication there, if these are introduced in previous chapters. Singapore texts really shouldn't be done out of order, in others words. For first grade in particular, maybe it would work out okay, depending on your child. But it strikes me as trying to do two very different curricula simultaneously.

Oh, this sounds so very familiar! A friend is like this, and it's highly frustrating because we deal with him in a number of business situations and it takes him ten minutes to explain what others can get across in one. You don't want to fight this, but maybe you can still strengthen his ability to summarize? It might help if you can use different words to tell him what he's doing. For example, on the metals outline, he could think of each point as a LABEL rather than a summary. He needs to label the whole section, not write everything down. Would it help if he were doing a multiple-level outline already? Because the way he's doing it, there's not really anything left to put at the lower levels. Perhaps his mind would allow that already? You could also use an analogy so that he can understand what a summary is. For example, a store sells many different things - and each one really matters. But if you need to know what a particular store sells, you don't need to know the particular items - you need to know categories. It would be annoying to a shopper if the signs on an aisle listed every single item - and it would be just as annoying if "screws" meant only one kind of screw. The detail (a screw just the size and material I need) is important, but it isn't appropriate to give that level of detail on the sign to the aisle. His job, when he's outlining or summarizing, is to write a guide to the aisle - not to do a full inventory.

The company has not contacted me since then, so either they won't be incorporating this or they don't need to talk to me about it before they do. The good thing about iMOnTime is that I can set it to use certain schedules on certain days. I start a "class starts" reminder, for example, and set that to go off at several times (say, 8:30, 9:30, 10:40, and so forth) on specific days (say, MThF between August 27th and June 1). Then I set a separate "class ends" reminder. I can set other "class starts" reminders for Tuesdays, and for Wednesdays, with the abbreviated schedules that we need on those days. And I can distinguish between these reminders by making a category called "normal days" for one, and "1:45 Finish" or "11:30 Finish" for another. So far, so good. (Or, if I don't minding having the same thing happen (same sound etc) for the beginning and end of class, I can combine these all into one reminder.) But I've just realized that if I decide one Monday to use a Tuesday schedule, it's not that easy. I can duplicate the normal Tuesday schedule and then modify the dates to say that I want to use this new reminder today only. But then I would have to go in to the normal Monday reminder and turn off the reminder sound for today (or I'll end up with both sets of reminders all day). The trouble with that is that I will then have to remember to turn it back on after the day ends, or next Monday I won't have any reminders sounding at all. I have to decide whether there is an advantage, here, to using this system over just keeping a timer in the room and setting it every time, or just remembering to use the clock. I'm wavering on this point. The fact that we won't always be working in the same room makes me think that the timer has the advantage - but that's one more thing for me to think about, every day, which is something I wanted to avoid. This just doesn't seem as if it would be that difficult to program, as long as you just want the bells and don't care about the user interface. Maybe my son would take on the challenge. I'll need to talk to my husband about that... I'll also take another look at the other program I mentioned above.

My dh and I have had discussions about this, too - I figure that a little bit of water on the floor (no bath mat, although sometimes a towel) dries up on its own, whereas he dries completely in the shower. He's convinced me of the value of at least getting some of the water off while still in the stall so I'll drip less, but I continue to get out while not yet dry and letting myself air-dry. Why do I air-dry (and sometimes put on clothes while I'm still damp, despite the inconveniences)? Because I get impatient. Washing hair is necessary - getting clean is necessary - standing in a hot shower is lovely - but drying with a towel is neither necessary nor lovely. Once I'm out I can be doing my hair, or getting my clothes, or brushing my teeth, or reading a book. I have enough trouble convincing myself to do the necessary tasks. I'm constantly looking for ways to make routine tasks efficient in order to get to the interesting parts of life quicker. I haven't found that it's very effective to combine reading with showering, though I've tried it numerous times over the years....

I agree with this. It isn't that I think that all parenting choices are okay, or that people's choices should or shouldn't be judged (we're all judged constantly by all sorts of people), but that when I hear of a tragedy like this, what I feel called to ponder is not, "What idiots!" or "What fools!", but "What a tragedy! How sad, that so many people will be saying goodbye to a loved one, or fearing going out in public." And maybe, "Is there any reasonable thing that could have prevented this, or is this just one of the consequences of living in our imperfect world?" (This doesn't mean that those thoughts don't enter my head - just that I try to steer away from them into what I see as a more productive direction.) I wouldn't mind a discussion of whether kids should, say, attend late-night movies - but not in connection with a tragedy, and probably not in the same week. I would also have more sympathy for someone who seemed interested in understanding the reasons behind someone else's thinking, rather than just blasting those who disagree with them. ("It would never occur to me to take kids to a late-night movie, but obviously some people disagree. Why does it seem okay to some people? What am I overlooking?")

I emailed the iMOnTime people last night, letting them know what I needed to be able to do. In particular, I'd like a separate volume control from the rest of the computer (so that the alarm will sound even when the sound is off), a sound that continues for a specified time period or until stopped (rather than a single beep), and (ideally) increasing volume while sounding, so that it won't be too loud when we're right by the computer but will get loud enough to be heard from anywhere in the house. (I also would like it to sound even when the computer is asleep, but I didn't mention that in my email.) I asked whether there was a way to write a script to accomplish these goals. I also figured that I wasn't the only one who could use this, so I hoped that my question might encourage them to eventually work it into their product. I didn't expect their answer: They're going to try to incorporate some of these features into a new release, due out in about two weeks! They asked if I wanted to help test the new release, too, and said they'd contact me for more information about what I was looking for. So, Leav97, you're absolutely right about contacting a company - but I had no idea it might be possible to work something like that out so quickly!

I didn't go with my daughter to orientation last week, so it wouldn't have been me (though you could have met my daughter, I guess).

I've also been searching for school bell software, but so far have found nothing Mac-compatible so I haven't really evaluated any of those. I've downloaded something called iMOnTime, which looks very good. I can set ALL the time-to-start-class alarms at one time: at all these times (8:30, 9:30, 10:45...) play this sound, but only on these days of the week and during these months, starting on August 27th and ending on June 30th. Then I can de-activate that during holidays, for instance. That looks easy - and I can copy that alarm for a Wednesday (say) and make slight modifications when needed, so that looks really good. I am a bit confused about some of the things - I can't figure out how to make certain modifications - but maybe that's an issue of having only a demo version. I will play with it a little more, but if it works the way it looks like it works, I think it would be worth the $18. (I doubt I'll find anything for free, and that's okay, but I'd hate to have to pay if it doesn't do what I need.)

One thing I've figured out is that it isn't a timer system I need - it's an alarm system. That makes a big difference in searching. I've found something called Alarm Clock Pro which is better than the timer I have been using and has some powerful ways to set alarms, but I can't find a way to group alarms together (and I'd need something like 20 per day!) so that I can say "use this set today" or "use this set tomorrow," although I could set up a non-modifiable system. And this one isn't free after the 15-day trial period, either. So I'm still hoping. By the way, greenvneck, I'll have a UNT student this fall, and we have an aerospace engineer in the family. :)

I'm about to enter my 15th year of homeschooling. I started out intending to unschool, and have been steadily increasing the amount of structure in my school ever since, so I've seen both sides of this. I am now hoping to find some software (Mac compatible) that can keep our school on track. (No smartphone, but iPad is a possibility.) My situation is that I will have 3-4 high schoolers and one middle schooler (my own son and daughter and some friends) in the fall, all at different levels, and it's critical that we stay on task and on schedule if we are going to accomplish what we want to accomplish. Plus, I get passionate about whatever I'm doing (whether teaching or not) and tend to "forget" to call a halt to what we're doing, so my poor students never know what's coming and when they'll get a break or how much they'll have to do in a day. The strict timer system is at least half to protect them from my enthusiasm. It will also encourage me to keep giving consistent effort to every subject, not just the ones that I'm enthusiastic about at the moment. I'd like some simple software with an easy interface for me to tell when I want timers to sound on different days. I've found some timers but most of them are clunky - for example, I don't want to have to set several separate timers for a specific schedule. The current timer I'm using, every timer has to be set separately: ring at 10:50 on MTThF, ring at 11:00 on MTThF, ring at 11:35 on W, ring at 11:45 on W - very time-consuming and hard to get right. Plus, if I decide to use the Wednesday schedule on Tuesday one day, there's no way to use the timers short of going in and changing every single timer for that day - and then changing it back afterward, which is impractical. I'd much rather be able to enter a single command that meant, "Use the schedule called "Wednesday" today rather than the one called "Daily." Can anyone recommend anything to me? Thanks so much - and my students will thank you even more.

I have an MA in language teaching and experience in the classroom and tutorial settings. I was always taught that translating like that is inefficient, and avoided it. I struggled for a long time to figure out how to get my oldest daughter to get started in Spanish. Then one day at the library she discovered a tape with songs that said things like, "Red is rojo, red is rojo, verde green, verde green." I held my nose (knowing it would do no good) and checked it out for her. The next thing I knew, she had a growing basic vocabulary in Spanish and was interested in the more communicative activities that I had been trying to do with her all along. Since then I have discovered that translation can be useful in many ways, and can often be the most efficient way to practice something - but it should be far from the only method used in a program. I have never used Risas and Sonrisas but I just got it in the mail today and have been looking over it. It introduces many topics with a song that has translation, but from then on it deals with pictures, questions, and other strategies. It doesn't have step-by-step lesson plans for the homeschooler, but it does tell you what to cover in each lesson and the guide contains lots of ideas for doing things, plus the demo CDs show things in action. I don't know how this would work out in practice, but I'm definitely going to be trying some aspects of this program out this fall in my own home. I'm also going to look at the links that everyone else has posted. Thanks!