:iagree: Everything goes better when a 10 yo boy gets PLENTY of physical activity (running, football, push ups etc). * Help them learn that each day is a brand new start, things are not as serious as they seem when you are 10, perspective is important. * Enjoy the fact that they are goofy at this age, and a bit forgetful. * Don't sweat the small stuff. Someday they will leave for college, or the military or to get married, and you will miss that baseball cap they hang on your kitchen chair every.single.day. * Know that if the 10 yo boy has a brother they will wrestle and fool around and sometimes fight - but they are bonding. Admire the bond and pray it sticks for life. * Know that if the 10 yo boy has a sister this is the age he will push her buttons (especially if she is 13!), she will roll her eyes and he will get that twinkle in his eye that tells you he loves her and he will stick with her even when she treats him badly. * Enjoy the moments. See and appreciate the bits of him that remind you of his father and maybe even your father and the bits of his personality that are unique to him. * As your pantry empties and the milk consumption doubles, step back in wonder at how fast they grow and how much food a skinny ten year old boy can consume. If you want to feel appreciated, cook some food for a 10 year old boy - it doesn't usually matter what it is - they are so happy to eat! Boys - they are an adventure!

Is this a fairly recent occurrence? Honestly, my first thought from your title, before I read your post, was is the child 9? Not to in any way underplay your concerns, but in my experience (3 times) what you describe is a very typical 9 year old. Many changes begin in their bodies around 9. They do have trouble focusing and they do tend to think they know what you are going to say so they either interrupt with the wrong answer, or tune out and then do the wrong thing. They are a bit flighty and scatter brained and at times a bit lazy. When it began to happen to my first (DD) I was concerned. When it happened to the second I was concerned, but then DH reminded me how the first was when she was 9. Now that my third is 9 I recognize all the symptoms, I remind him before he leaves the room what he is supposed to be doing, I have him parrot instructions back to me and I am more patient because I recognize it as a developmental phase. I also look at my 10 year old and am reminded that they grow out of some of this phase and look at my oldest and remember around 12 some other phases begin. You know your child best, does your Mom instinct tell you there is a medical problem, or could it be that your little girl is growing up a little? Trust your instincts and :grouphug:, it is always tough to have a worry about your kids.

I like many of Creekland's ideas (especially Charleston) and I would add Newport, RI Maine Boar's Head Inn in Charlottesville, VA

IMO the biggest leap in R&S is from 5 to 6. I took 2 years to do 6 with my DD when she was your son's age. We then skipped 7 and completed 8. It was no problem. I am all about rigor, but that book was tough for us. Give me high level math any day over appositives and gerunds! If you think that taking 2 years is the best approach I think it is fine, especially given the additional writing work you have noted.

I'm not sure about the others but ITBS is given orally through Grade 2. It can be administered by a parent. We order ours from Brewer Testing in NC.

:lol::lol:

:iagree: and like Sebastian said in a previous post, we have had to explain to our children what some expressions really mean. Our thinking is that if we let the kids use expressions naively when they are young, how do we then question those same expressions when they are older. IMHO they need to understand how language is heard and perceived. I do think the teacher could have addressed the issue in a much better way. She did not need to use the word to express her point.

One of my boys uses PZ. It has made a huge improvement in his spelling. The program really is self directing, and does take only about 10 minutes. According to my son, for words where there are two spellings the CD will say the American spelling and then say "the Canadian spelling" is .... I have recommended this program to many Moms, especially those with auditory learners.

You can use candle warmers as an alternative to lit candles. I discovered these when we had young children and I didn't want open flames about. They plug in and gently melt your jarred candles or tarts and some will heat potpourri as well. You can get the idea at candlewarmers.com, but you can find them at Bed Bath and Beyond, Yankee Candle, most anywhere that sells scented products.

If you want to use your existing scanner you can scan 4-8 pictures at a time depending on the size of your scanner bed. Then once scanned it is a quick test to crop and save them into individual pictures. It is still a tedious task, but this cuts out tons of time. This is how I scanned all the old family pictures I inherited.

If I were in your shoes I would probably use Rod and Staff for Grammar. It is a solid program, has lots of built in review and if you used the 5th grade book you could easily do grammar with both of them together. Each book up to 5th has enough review that you could start with no prior experience. The 6th grade book is a huge jump. I would pair this one of Susan Bauer's writing programs, either Writing with Ease or the new Writing with Skill depending upon where they tested. You can view Rod and Staff samples at www.rodandstaff.com and the SWB materials at Peacehill's website. If you didn't like the look of Rod and Staff or wanted something more secular I would look at First Language Lessons from Peacehill. For history I would start them both in Ancients, use Story of the World as the spine, and couple it with two different encyclopedias recommended in WTM. It will be an easy read for the 6th grader, but if you add some library books and some other things I think it could work well. They could both do some reading and research on the topic of the chapter of the week, and you could assign outlining or writing based on where they are skill wise. You could add some original sources if you wanted to for the older one, but I would focus on helping them understand the overall time period by building a timeline as you went along. Homeschool in the woods has some excellent timeline figures and a placement guide that help make the process easier. Alternatively you could pick the time period you think would get them most excited about studying history, start there, and circle from there back to ancients as you go along. I think either approach can work. Welcome, you will find lots of help (and opinions :001_smile:) on this forum. It has been a valuable resource to us in our years of homeschooling.

In addition to the schedule changes some PPs have made, I found one of the keys at this age was taking breaks. They were better students when they had 10 or 20 minutes to go outside and run around a couple times during school time, and I was a better Mom. I also found they were more productive, so taking breaks actually reduced our overall school time. On particularly beautiful days we still take our books to the park or ditch our afternoon schedule and just go to the park. Not too often, but we do take advantage of the freedom homeschooling allows. We did it more often when my kids were your age. :grouphug:

We correct at the end of each lesson for both of our kids using Saxon. I hold the TM and the child calls out their answers. When we get to one that is incorrect we go over it. Honestly, it takes very little time and ensures I never get behind in grading. They like to put check marks next to the problems they got correct. By the time the math notebook is put away the lesson is truly complete. I tried other ways over the years, but this has been most effective and has been the method I have used the last 3 years.

In Maryland the cutoff is now September 1st, but the cutoff used to be December 31st. They moved it back a month a year from 2003 - 2005. So in 2005 as long as you were 5 sometime in September you could register for K and would now be in 6th grade. It was a confusing few years for those of us with children born in the 4th quarter.

Both of my boys did this around two and I found it so aggravating. It is hard to go back to getting up in the middle of the night when you get used to sleeping. But we love them, so we get up and love on them and pray they go back to sleep. When that didn't work I took the advice of a friend who suggested we gradually work his bedtime back about an hour. For some weird reason it worked. We did give them a high protein bedtime snack, and I kept putting them down for their nap. Within a week or so of scooting bedtime back 15 minutes at a time they were back to their happy, sleep through the night selves. I never could explain why it worked, but when my second DS started it I followed the same process. Both of my boys then napped until they were about 5.

I try to have mine read a paragraph or two aloud each day. Sometimes it is from the Bible, sometimes a book they are reading for lit, a history or science text, but at least a paragraph and I try for a page each day. What I have found is that although they all read above grade level, there are still sometimes pronunciation problems. They may know perfectly well what the word means, but not how to pronounce it. I ran into this with the word "colonel" yesterday with one of my boys.

We found after years of making hair bows that the hot glue doesn't hold terribly well. After many glue guns, someone recommended E6000 glue to me. It is found at Walmart and Michaels, stinks like crazy, but I have never had a ribbon fall off that was glued with it. We use it to glue rhinestones to dance costumes and for anything else that I need to really hold well. Making bows is great fun, much cheaper than buying the fancy ones and makes terrific use of the ribbon found on clearance at Michaels. Here is a site that has tons of free patterns. I have used many of them with success. Each link in red at the top has step by step free instructions with pictures for a different bow. http://www.girlythingsbows.com/tails_down_bow.html Happy crafting!

Here's how we trained our yorkies (we have two now, and trained two others the same way. I was VERY skeptical of this process - but it works and has made my house much more peaceful. Tie a large jingle bell on a string to a door handle in a main living area, this does not have to be the door where you take the dogs out. Hang it down enough that the dog can reach. (Mine hangs on my sliding glass door handle). Each and every time you take the dog out, take him over to the door and ring the bell with his paw. In a couple weeks (both of my current dogs took 6 days) they will learn to ring the bell when they have to go out. Praise them like crazy when they ring the bell and take them out right away. The bell is now our signal that the dogs need to go out. My kids are trained (I hate to use that word for kids, but they got trained on how to take care of the dogs while the dogs were trained to ring the bell!) to put the dogs on their leashes and take them out when they hear the bell.

:grouphug::grouphug: I felt the same way when my cherry floors were installed. Over time they get more and more beautiful. The bad thing about cherry floors though is if you don't move the furniture or throw rugs around often enough it is very obvious when you do. Cherry cabinets are so pretty.

And let us not forget that the appearance of the PSL means the Eggnog Latte is right around the corner! :party:

My boys are 17 months apart. We started homeschooling when the youngest was in K. Doing some subjects together has truly been one of the joys of homeschooling for all of us. They giggle, they make up silly sentences for grammar, they work together and they often encourage one another. They have two completely different personalities, but (most of the time) it works well. I put them together for science, history, Latin, Bible and grammar. When we first started out the youngest was still doing phonics and the older hadn't started grammar yet. I didn't put them in grammar together until the youngest finished 1st and had phonics well established. I didn't initially intend to combine them for grammar but when I sat down with R&S 2 and R&S 3 there wasn't enough difference in the levels to justify teaching both. I just started the younger where the older was at the time, R&S 3, and he had no trouble. There is so much review at this age. They do writing (WWE) and literature apart, but grammar has continued to work well together. Each summer I sit down with each of them alone and talk about their subjects and whether or not they want to continue together. So far it has been a resounding yes. You do have to watch the competitiveness, especially with boys, but overall it has been a good experience at our house. I do require more writing from the older one, but that mostly manifests in longer narrations for subjects they do together, more difficult books to read on common subjects or him producing outlines when the other is still narrating. Older sister does history and Bible with us, but like a PP mentioned, her assignments are more difficult than the boys. Like many things in the homeschooling journey, I believe this is one you try and may need to tweak as you go along. As their Mom you will have a good sense of what is working and when the circumstances are causing frustration for one or both of them, or you.

I have to reseason my 100 yo iron skillet every few months, especially if I have not cooked lots of bacon or fried anything. The other trick is make sure the skillet is quite hot before you start cooking in it. Preheating it makes a big difference. If I had to live with only one pan (and I have many) I would choose my cast iron skillet.

:iagree:This is what I do, and hopefully will finish all the lesson plans today. I take two weeks in the summer and plan and enter all of our lessons. I have done this the last three years and I have been much less stressed as the year goes along because I am not trying to plan and find books and figure out what we are doing each week or month. I start the year with everything entered and knowing how many days of each subject we have to complete each piece of curriculum. Then I schedule as we go, checking every quarter or so to make sure we are on track to finish the year. If we take a week off, I just don't move anything from the lesson plans to the schedule that week. If we plan a week and then decide to take off I just move the scheduled lesssons to the next week. Everyone gets a daily checklist on Monday morning so expectations are clear, check boxes can be checked as we go, and no one can claim "I don't know what to do!".

We have a similar situation with our boys. I make dinner late in the afternoon. I bought a thermos bowl so I can cook normal dinners and bring them with us or keep a portion hot. Chili, soup, a piece of chicken etc. all fit in there and stay plenty warm. Also I use the crockpot is more during my boys' football season than any other time of year.

We have had rain all day in Carroll County, MD (mid state), and the winds are picking up. We expect the worst of it overnight. But the rain did not keep football games from being cancelled :glare:. On the other hand because the boys are playing football we are not at the beach at all this month. I fussed about coming back so early, but maybe it was for the best. I think the kids would have been rattled by a mandatory evacuation. I just heard that at our beach in Ocean City,MD waves are 12 feet and coming over the dunes and they have made everyone who ignored the evacuation give next of kin information (yikes!). Lights here have flashed a few times, but we still have power. Hang in there everybody.