amyrobynne
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Posts posted by amyrobynne
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Has anyone with a big family purposely stated that the kids should/could be split in a will?
Right now we have my sister/BIL marked as guardians with my BIL/SIL as money handlers. But with boy #4 on the way, I'm wondering whether it might make more sense to ask one family to take the older 2 and another to take the younger 2. Or friends potentially. Our families are all Christian but not Catholic and the older the kids get, it seems like keeping them with a Catholic family we trust might be better. It just seems like a lot to ask anyone to take in 4 kids knowing none of them have homes where that would work long-term in addition to the kids they already have.
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I do, both because I'm a lover of spreadsheets but more because my state has a tax subtraction for homeschool expenditures. Every OfficeMax pencil, nature center class, and historical fiction book gets cut off our income before we calculate our state taxes. It's worth it.
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Me, I just took my kids out of school because they were always behind, had 4 hours of homework every night, and were generally miserable. Our family is Christian. (I'm a pastor.) But for real, in this house, it's all about education, teaching our kids to love learning and figuring out what they want to be when they group up.
Sounds like my reasoning. The kids were at a great Catholic school but the hustle and bustle of getting them there and forcing the endless homework wasn't working for us.
I feel all cool and trendy now, being a new-ish homeschooler :) Even if our suburban chickens are becoming passe.
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My 7 year old is like that. He read 12 chapters of Dr Doolittle in 20 minutes the other day. I've started asking him comprehension questions on books I've assigned him. I don't usually do it formally, I just flip through the chapter and ask him what happened. I've found that sometimes he's skimming (he did with Doolittle), but he does read crazy-fast and often can tell me what happened.
For fun, he reads a lot of non-fiction. Things like DK Eyewitness books. He'll go through them a few times, probably picking up different facts each time.
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We walked out on Leaving Las Vegas. It won awards and accolades. It was, for me, just too horribly hopeless/despairing. I was early 20's and newly married at the time. Maybe I'd feel differently about it now, having seen more the dark side of life.
I saw that and wished I hadn't too. I was in college and had gone with friends and probably would have left if I'd been alone.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I went because Johhnny Depp, and left because I didn't get it. Possibly because I've never been high.F&L was the first movie I saw in a long time in college - someone finally offered me a ride to the theatre. I was so excited to get out of the dorm and then I didn't get it either. It was really disappointing.
My mom, sister, and I walked out of what Dreams May Come. Too weird! We went to see Life is Beautiful for the 3rd time instead.I tried to watch Life is Beautiful on a DVD and I turned it off halfway through. I just couldn't get through it.
Whoever mentioned Election -- I convinced some college friends to go because I really wanted to see Reese Witherspoon. Then 2 of them walked out right at the beginning. I felt so terrible!
I don't think I've walked out of any movies at the theatre but we gave my grandparents such a hard time because they walked out of Forrest Gump. My grandma hated the swearing. I think they walked out of another Best Picture winner too - we started joking that they could pick the winners by which ones they hated the most.
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My 4th and 2nd graders are just now joining Cub Scouts (look at that, we have time for Scouts now that we're homeschooling!) and at the first meeting tonight, we found out that of our popcorn sales, 35% goes right into my kid's account and the rest pays for popcorn. They don't make us sell, although they encourage it. Clearly, the more you sell, the less I have to pay. I think I'll talk to immediate family, who have all said they'd buy (I think they're just happy my kids haven't had fundraisers until now.) If they want to go door-to-door, I'll let them go to people we know. I will encourage them to do the table sale on Saturday since that seems pretty low pressure.
Our pack makes most of its money by collecting aluminum cans. They empty a trailer a few times a year and that pays for badges and some dues. So I think fundraiser money goes toward camps and extras. I'll understand better next year.
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I use the big store laminator - are they going to crumble in there?
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A month ago, my boys and I gathered leaves from neighborhood trees, identified them, and put them between pages in a dictionary. I'd like them to put the leaves into a binder somehow, with extra pages where we'd name them and write significant info like when the leaves changed color, when they fell, etc, possibly going forward many years so we can see the differences year to year.
What's the best way to save the leaves? Contact paper? I don't suppose I could easily laminate them. What preserves the color best? We have green ones but I'll have them get colored ones soon and flowers in the spring too.
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That seems a little goofy - shouldn't the end of 1 year and the beginning of the next look pretty similar? If I was going to test twice, I'd think about Jan and May, not Sept and May.
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Wow, this thread is full of awesome ideas for my poor 3 year old who keeps asking for More School!
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At the parents info session shortly after my son's private kindergarten started, we were told that usually, a couple kids entered fluently reading. By Christmas, they expected most kids to be reading CVC words. This is at a school where most kids go to the very academic pre-k in the building and the vast majority of students are either upper class or teachers' kids (mine was option b).
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My husband read it to my 1st and 3rd grade boys at bedtime last year and they enjoyed it.
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I started this fall with my 9.5 year old 4th grader, although I didn't hear about it until after I'd made my 3rd grade plans last year, so 3rd grade or earlier wasn't really an option. However, I think I'll wait until 4th grade with my middle son too. Writing isn't the strong suit of either of them (although they were early readers and my oldest thought FLL3 was painfully repetitive last year) and I'm not sure they'd be ready to move straight into Town if I did Island in 3rd grade. This way I feel like I'll be able to go through the levels with them, one after the other.
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I signed up for HomeschoolTrackerOnline this year at least partially because of how easy it makes it to keep track of books used, both textbooks and fun books. We started school a month ago and my boys are already up to 84 books used as part of their school day or fun reading.
Last year, I printed out a template from donnayoung.org
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Last year, my MN district (Robbinsdale) provided speech therapy to my 8 year old until he tested out in December. He attended a private school 2 suburbs over before that and the district his private school was located in (Wayzata) provided therapy but it took them 4 months to get everything together to start it up. There's a 30 day limit in which they are required to start services, but there were piles of excuses. When we started homeschooling last fall, I called our home district, told them we would be homeschooling, and they got him started at our neighborhood school within a few weeks.
They are definitely required to provide services but it does seem that some districts make it easier than others.
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I think I have a plan worked out. He has almost gotten all the flashcards now, although I'm sure he could use more practice with the larger digits so they're really ingrained. I found a site with word problems at different levels (http://www.mathplayground.com/wpdatabase/wpindex.html) and I'm going to have him do a group of 5 problems from there every day for awhile. There are tons of printable worksheets to practice 2 and 3 digit addition and subtraction and I think he'll do one of those sheets every day for a while. All he has left in 2B is the Intensive Practice end of the year review, so I'm going to have him do the various other sheets and practices, then have him do the end of the year review. If he struggles with any topics at that point, we'll spend a few days focusing on that. Within a few weeks, I think he'll be starting 3A, which does more review for a month or so. He did really well on the last workbook review today, so it seemed promising. Once he finishes 3A, he'll join his brother doing Beast Academy on Fridays, which will provide more practice. He'll probably be about halfway through 3B at the end of the year and that's fine.
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We use the Peabody test - a tester comes to our house and asks the kids questions for 60-90 minutes and she goes over the results right away. It's $55. She's able to tell us how they compare to other kids their age and at what grade level they'd be at the 50th percentile in each subject.
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My son was one unit short of finishing Singapore 2B when we quit for the year in June. He did all of Saxon 2 between Sept-Feb (he knew most of the addition facts so we skipped ahead until it stopped being super-easy), then the placement test said to go with Singapore 2B. When we stopped for the year, he was pretty solid with his x2, x3, and x5 facts and had to think a little with some of the x4 facts. He prefers doing addition and subtraction mentally, which was a big reason we switched to Singapore. But when I make him write problems out (because he gets stuck/wrong in his head), he struggled sometimes remembering the proper way to borrow. At the time, I think he just got sloppy.
Now that we've had a 2.5 month break (I meant to do more review but hey, best laid plans...), he's forgotten a bunch of the multiplication facts, and particularly when I state them as division. He's getting as many problems wrong as right in written out addition/subtraction problems. And some word problems, when stated in a not-obvious way, are tricking him.
I was looking at Singapore 3A and it does do a fair amount of review, but at the moment, it doesn't seem like he's learned 2B to mastery. Over the past few days, I've been having him do mult and division flash cards (which he prefers over writing them down or doing Xtramath because he can bounce up and down and do it orally). Once he gets the card right, quickly, I remove it from the next day's pile. Over 3 days, he's gotten most of the multiplication facts but still has a sizable number of division ones (we're just doing x2 x3 x4 and x5).
I'm not sure what else I should do before moving on to 3A. Make worksheets with 2 digit addition and subtraction and require that he write them? Buy the 2B Extra Problems book so he can do a bunch of word problems? (We normally use the textbook, workbook, and intensive practice) Just write a bunch of word problems myself? Go on to 3A but pause indefinitely whenever he gets stuck on a subject?
He's really quick to grasp big concepts and mental math that I've pushed him ahead so far but this seems like a good time to reevaluate. He's just starting 2nd grade with his other subjects.
Any ideas?
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BS in engineering, although my 3 yrs of full-time work were as an economic analyst. I like to play with numbers.
Husband has a BS in physics and has taught middle and upper school science for 9 years.
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I'm in MN, which does seem to have a Tekiela guide :)
I'm not too worried about exact kinds. Last fall we sort of tried this and got hung up on exact species and I'm going to be happy this year if we figure out maple, oak, elm, birch, etc.
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This sounds great! I also figured out before we started this year that I was trying to do too much at once. We're still working through BFSU1 (so we're "behind" for my 4th grader) but I'd rather have it that way than try to rush all the way through.
I'm using volume 1 with my 9 and 7 year olds too. We started last year and expect to finish it this year. My husband's a physics teacher and I have an engineering major so the kids have a pretty good grip on science without our teaching them much formally. There are some topics I've skipped through pretty quickly and others like air pressure and life cycles where we went really in depth beyond what the book did because they were interested and I found fun ways to engage them.
Biology and nature study are not my thing so that's where I have to force myself to find ways to teach.
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I want to do a seasonal tree study with my 9 and 7 year olds this year for the nature study portion of science (we use BFSU, so it would be for B-4A). I think we'll pick out 6-8 trees from our neighborhood and gather leaves now, once they change color, and when they flower in the spring. We'll press those in a book and I'll have the kids draw what we find in a nature journal. I'm terrible at identification. I have the adult Audubon Society field guide but I think it would be nice to get a simpler one that's friendlier both for them and me to understand.
I found these on Amazon:
Peterson First Guide to Trees http://www.amazon.com/Peterson-First-Guide-George-Petrides/dp/0395911834/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Audubon's First Field Guide to Trees http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0590054902/sr=8-1/qid=1378269396/ref=olp_tab_used?ie=UTF8&colid=&coliid=&condition=used&me=&qid=1378269396&seller=&shipPromoFilter=&sort=sip&sr=8-1
The Tree Book for Kids and their Grownups http://www.amazon.com/Tree-Book-Kids-Their-Grown/dp/1889538434/ref=tf_cw?&linkCode=waf&tag=harmonyfine01-20
Given that we have the detailed one already, how best should I spend my money so we can get something that will help us with the basics?
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I ended up giving him a notebook (wide-ruled) and he did great! He numbered it clearly and although the first assignment was writing, in words, numbers up to 1,000,000, he was able to write small and neatly enough.
Now I'll have to figure out whether my 2nd grader's ready for that or not. He writes tiny when he wants to. Maybe I'll do it but number the problems in it for awhile.
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We're starting in 8 hours. I'm a month behind where I'd like to be as far as organization, but we'll manage. 3 day week now, 4 day week next week, and by then we should be ready for the first full week. I'm doing all the every-day work this week and adding in the once-or-twice-a-week stuff next week.
It's been 90+ degrees all week so I'm hoping we finish soon enough to spend most of the afternoon at a pool.
I haven't put anything into HST yet but I've been copying, scanning, and laminating all week so I think I've got all the physical stuff I need. I just won't have pretty printouts of work to do right away tomorrow.
Not ready for Monday
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
Not ready here. When the governor cancelled all public schools in the state, I gladly declared Monday an off day for us too.