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Jenn in CA

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Everything posted by Jenn in CA

  1. Did you apply to Scottish Rite? They do testing. Not "on demand," but you fill out the paperwork, they put you on a waiting list, and when you get in you start meeting weekly, but the first couple meetings are testing. I think you aren't accepted unless they're pretty sure, by your paperwork, that your child is dyslexic (or has any other issues they work with). And my dyslexic child isn't a visual learner at all. Unfortunately, she's not auditory either. But we persevere.
  2. Arkangel Shakespeare. I think they've done all the plays. The full play, dramatized with some sound effects, and some feature big name actors/actresses.
  3. Yes I only fill mind halfway but that's still 4 cups which is plenty. Mine came with two jars so to double something I have used them both. It did not eliminate the need for a food processor for me. Hummus works in the blendtec, salsa works OK, but chopping doesn't work. It goes too quickly to "pureed". I thought I'd use it for a lot more things but pretty much it's just a very expensive smoothie maker at my house. Although it does a good job with smoothies and I like the one-piece jar.
  4. Is Mark Twain modern enough? His short stories are very fun and funny.
  5. I cut almost everything at the beginning of this school year and have never regretted it. We kept only one thing (gymnastics 1x/wk).. Why not try keeping only co-op? If you're sitting around bored after a few weeks you can add one thing back in.
  6. I have Kaiser too. They do not do anything learning-related. The closest I've gotten is some speech evaluations when my girls were younger. Is your child having trouble w/reading or spelling? If so, you can get testing and free tutoring/therapy through Scottish Rite. I'm in the Sacramento area and we go there. LIndamood-Bell does a lot of testing, but of course they want you to use their services. I've thought about doing testing there for a few hundred $$. I hear it's very comprehensive, and they use standard tests (not just their own diagnostic tests if that makes sense). Do you have a university nearby? Check there too. Here we have the Mind Institute which is part of/partners with UC Davis.
  7. Of "unscramble the word" exercises for a dyslexic child. Of course she knows what that scrambled word is ("oucld"), because to her, it looks basically the same as the correctly spelled one ("could") in the word bank! But then she copies down the scrambled one, not the one in the word bank..... I had to have her completely scribble out the scrambled word so she would not use it as the model. You understand, don't you?! :)
  8. I really like the narrative style of This Country of Ours and it is on Audible.
  9. My 8yo dd has auditory processing issues. I finally figured out, last year, she could narrate if I only read 3 sentences, and helped/prompted her with names/places. Also, consistent narration has *really* helped her and, a year later, she can do longer passages. And she enjoys listening to read-alouds a lot more than she used to. Even though she's very active, if she moves around,draws, or plays she can't listen. So I require her to just sit. But it helps and she knows it. I also read with *lots* of expression, and do hand gestures and even act out parts while reading, and that helps her. I encourage her and 7yodd to act it out sometimes while I'm reading, and that helps, although the 8yo can't really do it but gets something out of watching others do it. But the thing that helps the most is requiring narration every 3 sentences (longer if it's 7yodd's turn, and if I suspect 8yo wasn't listening I'll ask her to narrate her narration and that helps too). Hang in there! You can figure this out.
  10. No need to attend training IMO. Buy an older edition manual on Amazon and save lots of money. Photocopy the mouth pictures out of the book and then you don't have to buy them. The script was great and my child answered everything exactly as the book said she would. ;) But it was a lot to read and digest. I did it in the summer when I had some time.
  11. This looks great! Thanks! I wish you had posted it back when *I* asked about math games a few months ago... ;)
  12. I love the RS games. Tons of variety, you can look up the skill you want to work on. However a lot of them are variations of go fish and memory. You can Google "the game that's worth thousand worksheets" or something like that and find out how to play variations of War. I really like that. We also roll 2 10-sided dice, highest total gets a counter, for a cardless War. So they add for each roll the count the counters at the end.
  13. Wow you guys are amazing. I keep things I want to possibly buy on an Amazon wish list. Or the backs of scrap paper. Then forget about them for several months, and when I find them it's like Christmas. And I like that Christmas feeling.
  14. Yeah that was difficult. It seems to me TOG didn't use a spine, rather different books on the various events and then you discuss the connections. Is that correct? I didn't enjoy using discussion questions.
  15. I like the look of wayfarers. I'm curious how it compares to Tapestry of Grace? Does ToG use a spine? I can't remember... I used 1 semester of ToG with my then-9th grader. It was way too jumpy and took too much prep. Rather than going over all the teacher notes to teach my kids I'd rather just read the kids that info from a living book if that makes sense.
  16. It seems a few of you mentioned more creative laundry room placement... I really like having it off the kitchen because, where am I all day anyway? I would not want to go upstairs every time I want to switch out the laundry.
  17. We have an open floor plan and the noise sometimes drives me nuts. No walls + all hard surfaces (low maintenance) + huge windows/sliders (lots of natural light) = echo/reverberation. However, we made sure to have "away" spaces which complement the openness well. The TV is upstairs in the game room, and we have a library too where school happens. With French doors! (however I'm not seeing how French doors are space saving... they take up a lot of floor space imo) And yes, our master bath is a nice normal size, not like in our last house where we called it the 5th bedroom.
  18. Just finished Occupied season 1 on NF... A political thriller in Norwegian with English subtitles. It was amazingly good. It starts off pretty slow if you're still groggy at first. Hope the surgery goes well!
  19. Why would you feel insecure?! The one practical drawback of pocket doors is that you can't have a light switch on that wall where the pocket is. Otherwise we would have a bunch of them.
  20. Ooh something we did that I *love* in our (smallish) kids' bath. Rather than a wall of cabinets for storage, It's a closet fitted w/shelves, and a mirrored sliding door. The mirror makes it feel much larger, and all the stuff is easy to access yet behind doors. I hate opening cabinet door after cabinet door to look for something.
  21. Awesome! We built our dream house 5 years ago and still love it. We love our tankless recirculating water heater. That was worth the money. Our south and west facing windows have overhangs (one's a front porch and one's a covered patio/upstairs balcony) that keep sun from coming directly in and that makes a huge difference in keeping the house cool. Our architect gave us so much good advice about lighting, floor plan, outlet placement, all kinds of stuff. We drew the bulk of the floorplan and he did lots of small tweaks and got it up to code etc. I wonder if it would be worth it to have an architect do a "master plan" for you. All the finish stuff though such as picking fixtures, paint, trim, etc was our own research. gardenweb was also a great resource for me.
  22. A thought I've been having lately. When my now 7 & 8yodds were struggling w/phonemic awareness, I realize I often treated activities such as "Say 'sam' without the 's'" as *tests* rather than just modeling zillions of examples. The result was "What is wrong!? They can't do it!?" and mild freaking out. Now I wonder if it would have been better to just do it for them, every time they couldn't do it, over and over. To just model that phonemic manipulation. The reason I wonder is because my 8yo *still* has trouble w/*any* new task or question related to reading/spelling/language arts. It can be super discouraging. But it seems that if I just tell her the answer, and we go thru many examples like that, she catches on. For her, reasoning thru the steps, and trying to guide thru questions, to the answer just doesn't seem to work. Unless anyone else can tell me why that happens. ;)
  23. Slight highjack: my dd read that 7 weeks prior is the best time to buy. We are traveling in July and the dates are set. I don't want to put off buying plane tickets...I'd rather buy now. Is something magical going to happen and the fares will drop 7 weeks before our travel date? Or is earlier better?
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