If you already have maps on the wall, what if you just get/make little tabs/pins/stickers with the name of the myth she's currently interested in, and she can put them in the correct place for that culture after reading?

Something I think is kind of funny about how we're all sort of trained to brag/"brag" about our kids, in our culture, is that we often talk about how early and how quickly/easily a kid hit a benchmark, which I think is often handled as a proxy for smartness. But emerging evidence seems to show that intelligence is actually much less critical for life outcomes than we think it is (so long as you're above a certain level), whereas grit and effort are very, very important. So it's interesting to me that people don't talk/"brag" more about things like "My daughter has taken two years to learn to read fluently, and she stuck it out, reading to me every night, even when she didn't feel like it." I guess that strikes me as much more "brag-worthy" in that that is a really valuable life skill, and a really valuable thing to know intimately about yourself, that you have the ability to keep going when the going is tough. But especally in American culture, I definitely see a thing where we all agree that it's more impressive if your kid hits a benchmark very early in the range, even if it came extremely easily to the child - in fact, especially if it came very easily! (No judgment: I have this demon whispering away in my head, myself.) My particular child has some mild asynchronous development happening, which is excellently humbling, and really good at making a person understand that she has much, much less control than she would like to believe! Insofar as I have any control at all, for the above-mentioned reasons of grit and persistence, I try not to ever say things in his hearing that basically come down to "he's so smart". I mean, first of all, he's four. What do I know about who he will ultimately be? And second, I don't care that much if he's smart. But I care a lot that he learns that true mastery comes with effort, not from innate talent. So if I praise him within his hearing, I try to only ever say things about how he tried and tried again until he got something the way he wanted. When I first came to this board, I felt a lot of low-grade anxiety about how I needed to provide a certain kind of academic backdrop for my kid or unspecified horribles might happen. Now, I am finding myself turning more and more into a "better late than early" person, somewhat to my surprise, but I have zero opinion about other people doing academic work with their young children. (Unless they insist that whatever is working for them is objectively best for all children, everywhere, of course.)

I don't know what your family's general philosophical style is, but I got a lot out of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen... http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen-ebook/dp/B005GG0MXI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388019234&sr=8-1&keywords=how+to+talk+so+kids+will+listen+%26+listen+so+kids+will+talk This general style of communication has also (I am a fellow conflict-avoider!) helped me feel much more comfortable with conflict. My kid is also 4, and I have to be honest, you are not going to get all the results the book talks about with a kid this young. You just aren't, at least not all the time. But I think it's so valuable both for the kid and for preserving maternal sanity that it is worth continuing even when the results are patchy at first. The only caveat is that the book presents a family worldview that is relatively egalitarian. Of course the parents have the ultimate say-so, but this isn't a style of communication that would, I am guessing, work very well for folks who are more top-down/authoritarian disciplinarians. But it does work well if you have a kid who is pretty verbal and able to cooperate in collective problem-solving.

Great stuff, everyone! Thanks so much.

What are your favorite (or least favorite, for that matter) books from the Let's Read and Find Out series? I've found the individual titles to be kind of inconsistent. Any you particularly recommend, or recommend avoiding? Here are the lists of titles: Stage 1: http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/Kids/SeriesDetail.aspx?PSId=223 Stage 2: http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/Kids/SeriesDetail.aspx?PSId=224 (My apologies if this is a repeat question! I couldn't find anything similar by searching, but...)

We watched the mitosis video, and yesterday my kid kept singing "prophase, prometaphase...":

Great suggestions! I love this board. Thanks, all.

Our 3.10 year old is very interested in body systems right now, particularly in the immune system. I'm running into problems finding the right books for him on this topic, and hoping the WTM will have some ideas. I'm noticing that books geared toward kids his age frequently lack the deeper information he really wants (ie the book will explain that viruses trick cells into making more copies of the virus, but gloss over the how), but books for slightly older kids, while they do have more information, often take the approach of turning the information into an exciting adventure story (Magic Schoolbus, Human Body Detectives), which, to his literal little brain, seems (I think) kind of confusing. Any ideas? I've just ordered a Bill Nye book and a Read and Find Out book on this topic, but I'm looking for more. Thank you!

I have a little bit of a book problem, but I try hard to keep it under control, mostly for space reasons (tiny urban living space), but also for cost reasons. I try to get most of our books from the library, but I also buy a reasonable number of kid books, generally books I consider to be high-quality, especially charming, or something I know or suspect will be referred to many times. I do try to buy intentionally, unless I'm just browsing at a book sale or something like that, so I have a huge Amazon wish list of books I'm on the lookout for. To keep costs down, I check paperbackswap.com and Amazon used books first when there's something specific I want for the kid, and only if I can't find it through those channels do I buy it new. Clearly I have spent way too much time coming up with my internal decision tree for book purchasing. :huh:

This thread is so illuminating, thanks! Randomly, does anyone know of a list (perhaps on Amazon?) that breaks down the different products you need to buy to do Singapore for different ages/abilities?

We have not yet talked about slavery, but we've talked quite a bit about what happened to Native Americans when Europeans arrived. My child is young, so the way we talk about it is not terribly sophisticated, but we do talk about it somewhat regularly. It's important to me that he have a better understanding of early US history than I did! It is particularly important to us that his sense of the agency of the peoples involved is accurate. I think the racism in a lot of texts about Westward expansion and slavery is not of the obvious type, but of the more pernicious type that casts Indians and Black folks as passive recipients of the hostile or helpful actions of white people. So I guess my approach, such as it is, is to do things like attempt to select picture books that show people of color who have agency in their own lives, are the star of the book, etc. More so than "Now let's read this book about civil rights". Sometimes this is pretty easy (there are lots of excellent, entertaining picture books that feature a Black protagonist.) And sometimes it feels impossible, like when I wanted to find some books that explained Thanksgiving, and everything I looked at that was appropriate for a little kid featured the same old set of canards about how the Indians were so nice and shared with the Pilgrims and everyone was the best of friends.

Is your kid possibly very talented? A lot of talented kids (and adults, for that matter) are very self-critical about their creative work and don't really trust the value of explicit praise. Have you tried the thing where instead of directly complimenting her work, you just describe what you notice, and then let her compliment herself? "I see that you used yellow and green over here to give the tree's shade color. That's interesting. What made you decide to paint it that way?" etc. Also, the "trick" where you praise effort instead of result is sometimes helpful. "You worked so hard on learning that piece. You practiced every day for almost an hour! You must feel really good about all the effort you put into this recital."

The California Science Center is free (for the main exhibits - there's a charge to see the Shuttle or the rotating IMAX films), and pretty fun. We really like the habitats exhibit, especially the ocean area. The Natural History Museum (next door to the Science Center, both are on the excellent new Expo light rail line) is not free, but is really, really good. The butterfly pavilion may be open for your visit! For large groups, I love to get dim sum (Chinatown for easy-to-get-to, San Gabriel Valley for more authentic). It's fast, nobody bats an eye if you show up with 12+ people, and it's really affordable.

Thanks so much - these are all great ideas. I've ordered MATH POWER and taken a look at AOPS. I am embarrassed to say that I think I need to do some fundamental work BEFORE I can tackle that! I took a look at some Alcumus practice problems and experienced intense math fail. Well, something to work toward! Letsplaymath, your blog is amazing! Thanks so much for the link. I'm going to obsess over your posts now. :)

Oh, this kind of worry is so unpleasant! For myself, I think part of that anxiety comes from the speed and intensity of modern American life, which often feels kind of winner-take-all. So if your kid isn't doing Korean and pre-algebra by 7, they might never get a job! (Says your panicked first-time-mama brain.) I've also observed that ladies tend to really take the performance of their children personally in a way that a lot of dads do not - I notice that my husband and his dad friends tell funny stories about their kids, whereas the moms have a lot of conversations with each other about how great their kids are and how they're in the advanced tumbling class or are "very advanced in art" or what have you. And I think this is compounded on the internet, where everyone is showing you a carefully-curated version of themselves. I have found a couple of things helpful in backing off my own perfectionist tendencies: *Ruth Beechick's book The Three R's. (She is very religiously-oriented, but that part is easy to skim if you want. And she has a lot of really helpful things to say about early childhood education. After reading this little book I totally quit any notions I had of formal reading instruction at this stage. I found especially useful her notion that you can either take up the young child's learning energy with learning to read, or with learning about science or the natural world or God or whatever you think is important.) *Reading about Finland's education system. It really pushes me toward the better-late-than-early camp (to a degree). I am not exactly unschooly, but I think that for a lot of kids, you just don't need to worry about formal academics until six or seven. (I get the impression that this used to be the norm in the US, but that cultural changes have pushed the start date of formal school back more and more, so now we think it's ordinary for five-year-olds to be learning to read, and if yours isn't, he's behind.) *Reading about Charlotte Mason, Waldorf, and various types of unschooling. None of these are necessarily my bag, but I find it helpful to read about worldviews that discourage very early academics and why. *Reading books like Nurtureshock and The Good School, which have convinced me pretty soundly that the big jump is between a child raised in a low-stimulus environment and a child raised in a medium-stimulus environment. My good-enough efforts are probably, well, good enough!

YES! I'm glad that's A Thing for other people, too. I find this mildly overwhelming about pondering homeschooling at times, that instead of handing my child over to someone else's philosophical framework, I have to construct my own.

I'm tired of being ignorant about math. My background is that I received an excellent education with your garden-variety Western math pitfalls, so that I can perform algorithms all day long, but my deep understanding of what I'm actually doing is really, really lacking. (I hope this makes sense. Basically, I can memorize and perform operations, no problem, but because my deep understanding of what I'm doing is so crummy, if I miss a step or flub an element, I end up with numbers that make no logical sense, and I am essentially unable to spot the problem intuitively.) I also have a young child, and when he's ready for formal math, I would like to at least not hamper his progress with my own ignorance! So I'm really motivated to deepen my understanding, and I'd like to start over from the very beginning and build a solid foundation. Any thoughts on where to start? My ideas so far: Read Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics Read some Miquon materials? C-rods and Education Unboxed videos? I've tried Khan Academy, and I enjoy it, but I found myself floundering at the same places I started to flounder in school, and not really making conceptual progress. So I don't believe that "more practice" is a good solution for me; I need to find a way to deepen my true understanding of what I'm actually doing. What else am I missing? Thank you!

My little dude will be about four this fall. I've fooled around with Wee Folk Art, but ultimately I find myself using them as reading lists and not actually following through with any of my more-formal notions. My guy is kind of intense, and I've found that learning really happens through play and through conversation about things we're reading. So mostly I try to keep up, follow his interests and find high-quality books I think he'll enjoy. Reading: This is semi-scandalous here at WTM, but I'm actually more concerned about math and science than I am about language arts at this point. I feel pretty comfortable letting his reading skills develop at their own pace. We play rhyming games and pick out letters he recognizes, and so on, but I don't plan to introduce formal reading instruction for quite a while. When we eventually do, I'm eyeing AAR, but that could change. Math: I picked up a set of C-rods, but after agonizing over a thousand (approximately) "wood or plastic" discussions here, I bought the plastic ones - they bulge, and the kid instantly called me on my "See, six of these make one of these!" claim. So they went back and I'm looking at the wooden Mathematics Made Meaningful set now. But I want to read some Miquon materials (and definitely the Liping Ma book) first, just to be sure I get off on the right foot. I feel like I myself am a classic end result of Western math instruction (can perform algorithms, but poor understanding of what I'm actually doing) and I want better for the kidlet. Science: in addition to whatever we're reading at the moment, I'm always (very slowly) working my own way through BFSU to (I hope) be able to help him follow his interests.

I suspect we're into (mildly) offbeat stuff,so in addition to the CM/FIAR/Sonlight lists, I browse a couple of blogs fairly regularly: http://www.buildingalibrary.com/ http://www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com/ I've also liked many of the selections from Wee Folk Art, which are not just the same 100 books you see everywhere: http://weefolkart.com/content/homeschool-companion-guides We're in a small urban apartment, and I rely on our library a lot, too. And I'm another person who keeps a spreadsheet of recommendations, like the giant nerd I am!

We read lots of picture books, but the first "real book" to capture his attention has been Winnie the Pooh (we have this edition). We've also tried Wind in the Willows (which he finds very interesting, but can't quite stick with - he needs a lot of recapping, so I'm holding off for later) and Little House in the Big Woods (no interest) and Mr. Popper's Penguins (no interest). Pooh is a huge hit. He's been requesting it almost every night for a month. I think the language must be perfect for a 3yo? It's whimisical, but straight-forward, and the conflicts are things a very small child can understand - or at least that's my theory!

Wow, that is pretty intense. I would be upset, too. I think this probably depends really strongly on what kind of kid you have? I'm guessing some people don't have especially sensitive kids, and so the child's response wouldn't trip any warning bells for them, you know? But my little boy is very sensitive to emotion and content, so I think if someone said "This person was killed by other people", it would be way, way too intense for him at this stage. (He's a few months younger than your DD.) How does this make you feel about this preschool? Do you think it's the kind of place where you could have an honest conversation with the leadership about the content of the religious instruction?

I have a three-year-old. For reasons I now no longer understand (first-time mama panic?) I used to have vague thoughts about how you needed to do pre-academic work with a three-year-old. While I know there are some kids that works for, my kid is not one of them, so I've done a brisk about-face on this topic. :laugh: The things I think are important for this age are playing ("the work of childhood"), being outside, and being exposed to a lot of rich language. I use the Wee Folk Art guides, but just use them as themed reading lists. We do basically nothing that looks like "school": we read, he plays, he asks a lot of questions, we go to the library a lot, I try to lead him to high-quality information as he asks for it. It's mostly driven by him. I'm also working my way through things like BFSU, because he asks a lot of science questions, and I want to be sure I'm helping him find accurate answers. I looked at a lot of preschool/homeschool things, and was left lukewarm. A lot of it seems awfully worksheety and not really all that valuable to me, especially for children under five.

These sound so interesting! Is there a particular book you'd recommend someone check out to see if they like the series?

I think there is a huge difference between "Waldorf-inspired" (whether it's a preschool, a co-op, or a homeschool) and an actual Waldorf school. My family was good friends with a couple of Steiner families, so I got to see the full anthroposophical lifestyle up close. There are many very unusual beliefs in anthroposophy that are really far out of the mainstream, but I think many people who are Waldorf-curious don't really notice the unusual beliefs until they're in it, because Waldorf looks so wonderful. I am as susceptible to the Waldorf esthetic as anyone! It's just so restful and beautiful, isn't it? And I think that a lot of "Waldorf-inspired" preschools, or co-ops, or homeschool materials, are basically doing that kind of thing. A lot of natural materials, low-media, calm rhythms, a lot of music and storytelling and beeswax, no pressure on the child to read at four. Fantastic. I love it. I am down with all of these things. But a real Waldorf school is very different. There are things happening in that environment that go into areas I am not comfortable with, and I think I am pretty comfortable and open-minded about a really wide array of educational philosophies. For me, I can't get past things like using anthroposophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy) as a basis for teaching science, or interpreting conflicts between children. I know the gnome thing is cute (see: the delightful esthetic) but the gnomes, in a Waldorf setting, are not just cute. They are not metaphorical. Waldorf children are taught that gnomes and fairies are literally-true components of their environment. (I don't think this is cute. I think this is weird.) Of course, in a co-op, "inspired", homeschool situation, you can pick and choose what you think is valuable and what, like telling your child that gnomes are real, is not something you want to teach. But in a Waldorf school, because they are regulated by a Steiner oversight group, there isn't as much leeway in terms of what they can teach. I considered Waldorf when looking for preschool options for my son, because I really wanted to avoid any academics for very little kids. But ultimately, I felt like there are way, way, way too many downsides, and I just couldn't keep thinking about it. I don't know that I would necessarily go so far as to say that Steiner is a cult, but I am very understanding of people who do feel that way, which, for a skeptic such as myself, is enough to steer me away. I completely someone whose gentle, sensitive child needs a slower environment thinking about Waldorf, but... I would at least read about some of the philosophies underlying what's happening in the schools and see if I felt like they were close to my values. I think, at least in the US, you are probably unlikely to run into straightforward anti-Semitism or karmic racism in a Waldorf school at this point, although I know this has - somewhat incredibly - not vanished entirely from European Steiner schools. For younger kids, if you are not really very concerned about things like math and science, I would feel that my main concerns would be if my child were the type of kid who felt okay about only being allowed to wear certain types of shirts, or not being allowed to use a black crayon, or only being allowed to draw the same thing everyone else is drawing, or if Eurythmy will strike them as outlandish, or fun. Waldorf often seems "free" to people, but I really feel like formal Steiner environments are actually extremely, intensely rigid, which I think works well for some kids and not at all for others.

This is a great thread. Can I ask a side question? If your goal is to the first pass of history in a secular, non-Eurocentric way, which resources should you particularly seek out, or avoid? I picked up the first volume of SOTW, and it looks pretty good, but I'm wondering what else is out there.