:iagree:

I LOVE these books! We have two - the dinosaur book and the tree book, I think. I need to make a list of the rest and start adding to our collection. Schmooey loves the Cat in the Hat and I know he will love these books, too.

Thanks SO MUCH for posting this, Nance! I have TT4 to follow our MUS 3 - I have a dd who is not at all "mathy" and this seemed like the best solution. I've read other things that made me second-guess. Your post tells me that she will most likely do very well. Phew! :)

You are so smart! I had no idea. How cool to know that now. Thanks!

:lol: I know it's not funny, but the way you describe them becoming dinner is. One of the only good memories I have of my grandfather is that he killed the rooster that attacked me and we had him for dinner.

I have been madly working on finishing the second Hedwig sock, which has been in progress for nearly a year. I think it took me a year to finish the first one, too. :lol: I also nearly completed a WHOLE PAIR of socks (not only in March) for Abbie; I just have to knit the toe. I have several knitting projects in the works. I really, really need to finish the snake and nesting dolls I had nearly completed for my nephew & niece's birthdays in January. I only have details. I am such a slacker.

Oh, dear, dear me. That child needs to (a) USE A SPELL CHECKER and (b) remember that the spell checker isn't always right. Then, she needs to learn to capitalize. Ack, ack, ack. It makes me want to force my children to work through multiple grammar and spelling programs simultaneously!

This is an all time favorite of mine! :lol:

:lol: You are not alone in your book addiction! I do the same things - but I have to stay away from Ebay. Ebay is too dangerous. I hoard yarn and cross stitch stuff. I used to hoard quilt fabric but I gave a lot away when we moved. :svengo: I'm also a hoarder of scrapbooking stuff. Chocolate and caffeine - what a beautiful combination. I need to give them both up but I gave up Facebook for Lent, so they are what is getting me through that withdrawal. :D

This is a really good plan. My girls ask sometimes when they can have a cell phone, and I tell them, when they start going places without me! :lol: Right now they are eyeballing my current phone, because I will get a new one in June. I will ask dh what he thinks about a family phone for as-needed usage. They really don't need one, but if they were going to do all-day camps in the summer and I didn't want to hang around, it might be good if they could call me on their own without depending on someone else's phone. ETA: I didn't vote because I don't have a specific age in mind. I have to believe it won't be much before they're driving themselves places.

The best thing is when the general board goes down, and we all go hang out on the curriculum board and whine that the general board isn't working. We're quite the entertaining group of people. :D No worries, everyone panics when the board goes down! I don't know who those people are who actually teach. I do this: :willy_nilly:

:smilielol5: Ahem. Okay. Sorry. If you go to blogger.com while you are logged in, you will see your "dashboard." Below that is your "Reading List." Bottom left corner, there is a button that says "manage." Click that, and it takes you to the list of blogs you're following. When you get to the list, click on "Settings" and you will be able to click a link that says "Stop following."

:lol:

Sometimes it's fun to mock bridal registries, you know. As if they really think people are going to purchase that ridiculously expensive widget. Not that *I* would ever do that, of course, but it might make you feel better. :D When we were looking at stuff, dh made me choose china. I didn't really want to, but neither did I want to be stuck with the china his ex-girlfriend had decided they wanted from his grandmother, so I chose some. When I went to choose silver, I fell in love with a beautiful sterling pattern. Then I nearly fainted from sticker shock. I still love it, but honestly, we needed more than a spoon when we got married, and that's probably what we'd have ended up with. My family either would have gone together to get us what they could afford, or laughed out loud and bought something else. My MIL assured me that she would continue to give me pieces throughout our marriage, but I have a big family and needed actual silverware for when they came to dinner. I just could not imagine registering for silver, when one FORK cost more than an entire place setting of my china! (I just Googled the pattern I love for fun. A four-piece place setting is $740. A dinner fork is $240. I'm giggling. A lot. You can get really cool coordinating accessories like magnifying glasses and cheese graters - because everyone should have a sterling silver cheese grater. :blink::smilielol5:)

:lol: If you do find brown macrame at Good Will, will you PLEASE PROMISE to take a picture of you with a beatific smile and the bride trying to look grateful and not horrified? Pretty please?

When we got married, we registered at Hudson's, mostly for dh's family, and then at Target for the rest of the (more normal) world. It was fun registering at a nice store, and fun getting gifts from there, but we were not offended to get things from Target! I think, if someone chooses to register at someplace and you can't buy off the registry, a gift card is a wonderful idea. I like to buy actual gifts, but we were able to get a lot of things we did not received but needed, with returns and cash. (I don't think gift cards were all that widely used at that time. That, and the fact that I registered at Hudson's, tell you something about my age. Let's not discuss it, OK? :D) I understand where you're coming from. I do. I remember being a bride, though, and not thinking about much beyond my wedding and my fiancé. My mom did bring me back to reality occasionally, for which I was grateful, but left to my own devices, I would have been off in la-la land. I try to give brides a little grace in that area. At that time in life, things often seem so important, and I'm sure it feels very special to register at a fancy department store.

No, it's not wrong! Charlotte Mason taught spelling with studied dictation. You need to do what works for your son. The idea behind dictation, I think, is forming the habit of attention, and also learning the form of good writing without having to create it (I just read this in the FLL 4 sample pages). It teaches them to picture the sentence in their mind. As they do it more, they will get better at it. I know mine would cry too if we did dictation this way all the time (we're just getting started with it so the sentences are short). I think it's important, though, and if you can tell them to just do their best each time without stressing about it - spelling is not all that important here, for example - hopefully they will be less emotional about it. My girls tend to freak out about new things, but they get calmer as we go and they realize I'm not going to let them out of it just because they whine. (This tactic does work for them sometimes which is why it still goes on, I am sure.)

MAGNETIC ONES. I have a dd who is SUCH a perfectionist - she freaked out when her pattern blocks would not stay exactly where she put them. It made me want to scream. Someone here suggested the magnetic ones and it was a lifesaver (hers or mine, you decide :D). Schmooey likes the wooden ones - we have a bulk set that we got at a school supply store, I think. He builds roads with them and such. I am not sure what he will think when we get to pattern pages. I think I should try to locate those magnetic blocks, just in case...

We try to do CM composer study. We're using Living Books Curriculum, year 3. This term it's ancient Greek music/Pentatonic scale and Palestrina. :glare: We did have a lot of fun watching the Bobby McFerin video on YouTube about the power of the pentatonic scale, but I can't say any of us are in raptures over the ancient Greek stuff. We're trying to listen to it though. Palestrina isn't so bad but it's not easy to sing along, which we all like to do. I think next term we get to move on to Vivaldi which is at least pretty and soothing. ETA: Piano lessons. Piano lessons are wonderful. We found a fabulous piano teacher, and I am THRILLED with what she is teaching the girls.

I really, really loved MFW K. It was such a fun program, and it told me what to do every day. My dd loved it too; it made teaching her SO much easier. I loved that everything was integrated; there was no "now we will pull out the phonics primer," etc. She cried when I brought out Phonics Pathways. :) There was a definite routine; some don't like the repetition. It worked very well for us. I have to say that MFW K definitely minimized conflict in our homeschool! I don't know if it would work in your situation, but it's worth a look. It really doesn't take that long, and I bet your 4th grader would enjoy some of the science things too.

I will have to check out that last book, Jane - it looks like fun! I already have AP so that's probably what Schmooey will get to use. I think the Usborne book could work well if your K child is not a perfectionist and does not care if their project doesn't turn out looking exactly like the picture in the book. Alas, that is not the case with my children. However, I did discover this book after the girls were out of K so I didn't try it with them when they were littler. Perhaps their perfectionist tendencies were less developed in K. :D

I love the idea of AAS. My kids think AAS is tons of fun. However, my oldest especially was not retaining anything. She did fine with the lessons and scored nearly perfectly on every dictation/test, but there was no application in the rest of her work. The repetition didn't bother me so much. The teacher time did, once Schmooey came along. I agree with Kalanamak - do something less teacher intensive and see how it works. We're currently using Spelling Wisdom, which is CM - spelling learned through studied dictation. I like that it forces my girls to pay attention to the words and how they are spelled. It was VERY hard for me to let go of a more "modern" spelling program, if you KWIM, but so far it's working really well. My 2nd dd would spell fine whatever we used. I may try to pull out AAS again, just because they like it so much, and because I have FOUR LEVELS of it. :lol: Like I said, I love the idea of it.

I have a book called The Usborne Art Treasury that is similar - talks about famous artists, shows an example of their work, and then gives a project based on their work. I think it would work best for older kids, though.

I made timeline pages using MS Word that look like the horizontal format at Homeschool in the Woods on their Timeline Helps page. I use their figures, so I color-coded them like they did: Yellow - Beginning to 1st Century AD Red - 0-1799 AD - World History Green - 1750 AD to Modern Day Blue - Explorers to 21st Century AD (American history) Actually, if you look at their index file method, blue starts in 1900 so that's what I did. I also used their suggestions for how to date the pages. I put lines in the background for writing guides. I printed them off, single-sided, hole punched them and put them in regular clear-view binders. They recommend using cardstock; I used regular 20 lb paper because I had it (and I think I may have misread - they say to print the figures on 20 lb paper). It didn't take me all that long. It seems like a crazy amount of pages, but really, once you get your template it's east to change the years & colors. I'm happy to send you pages if you like.

Artistic Pursuits is what came to my mind, too.