Actually....... there are 613! :)

:iagree: As a longtime former teacher, that's always my first thought. An involved parent (nearly always!) lead to an involved student. Period.

:iagree: I can't imagine not letting the parents know. This is a very serious matter. I would be very upset if someone withheld important information about my child from me. This situation REQUIRES a parent!!!!!!

We used a separate room for a while, but moved back to the dining room table after a few months. Higher ceilings, better air circulation, a big fan, more light. It just felt better. And it's handy being right off the kitchen since we always have cooking/baking/preserving projects going. It just worked out better. And my oldest DD wasn't too sad that that meant she could have a room to herself. :)

Okay... I spent 5 minutes pondering why everyone else seemed to get the joke and I DIDN'T. Maybe it was a tv show reference? Maybe a book? Maybe a ????? Then I fell off my chair in a heap of giggles. Guess I'm a little slow tonight... :001_rolleyes:

For seeds, we LOVE Baker Creek. Bets germination rates of all the different sources I tried. Excellent, healthy plants coming along. Their catalog is worth requesting... I can't stop reading it even though I can't possibly squeeze in anything else! :)

That's what we've been doing, pretty much (oldest finishing 3rd grade). Story time is for science and history (alternating) + whatever readaloud we're doing. Every other Wednesday is art/music/history/science day so that's when we do more involved activities. Frequently, Sunday works for science activities as well. Works great for us, and my kids are science FANATICS. :)

That's what we have now too! The tomatillos are just now giving enough for salsa and our 3+ feet tall (not staked). :) In the tomato bed, I put posts every 4 feet. Then I took twine and wound it once around each pole at 1 foot above the ground, then wound back the other way so that there were two lengths of twine to go on either side of the tomato bush at 1 foot. Then ditto for 2 feet, 3 feet, 4 feet... Haven't needed 5 feet yet! :) It's very cheap and easy and keeps the tomatoes up. I've never staked my peppers.

We always buy ±10-year-old cars for ±$5K, and we've NEVER had $8,000 in repairs in any 3-year-period (the age difference of the cars)! We take very good car of our cars and have had VERY low car expenses over the years. I personally wouldn't get the $10K car, because that's too much money, but given the choice I would absolutely get the car for $10K.

Thanks! I used it, and it worked. You have to type FREESHIP in all-caps though. Hooray!

We do about 10-15 minutes per day (OPGTR) and one page of Explode the Code. Successful formula so far! :)

I figure their little minds are learning from the moment they wake until they go to sleep, so we do 14 hrs/day, 365 days/year. So, let's see... We finish our required 180 4-hour learning slots in, er, 8 weeks. An exaggeration, of course, but really whether it's formal or informal, they're learning! So, no, I don't find it burdensome in the least.

The book series is one of our all-time favorites, and I wish the movie hadn't tried to condense so much into one short movie. And I CANNOT BELIEVE they left out Twilight's battle poetry. That was one of the major highlights!!!!!

I thought that, starting this fall, we still had to turn in our attendance records, but only once a year to the state instead of every month to our school district (?).

OH, can I empathize! Our family just went through a round of that. For the kids it really wasn't so bad, but it really nailed my DH and me! I was nauseous and had many, many bathroom trips for about 10 days, and am just now getting back to normal. It's a doozie. I was sooooo tired too. Wishing you a very fast and complete recovery!

We have fun adding up the costs of homemade items. I figured out that our homemade veggie burgers are only $0.35 each, including the bun and all the fixings. So - math time - I have the kids add up the cost of our dinner, the cost of buying frozen veggie burgers, then the cost of eating the same meal in a restaurant. BIG EYES! :)

My DH jokes about selling our chickens' eggs and buying grocery eggs. :) Actually, we figured the cost of our eggs is about $0.12 each, based on the average egg-laying amount of a chicken's lifetime + their retirement benefits. :D We feed them lots of table scraps (we scrape our plates onto the chicken plate in the middle of the table at every meal). We also have plenty of edible weeds in the yard, and they get all the bolted greens or anything else past its prime. We cut our chicken feed costs in half this way, and they're still getting a really good diet since most of the food we scrape is great food for them too. :)

Hey, we could save a LOT of money if we didn't eat this month! :)

One way I'm pretty sure most people can slash their budget by 30% is to only buy 1-ingredient items, with a few 2- or 3-ingredient exceptions. We make virtually everything ourselves or do without. We eat a lot of legumes and whole grains. We also only have meat 2x/week. We keep kosher, so we also can't just buy the cheapest products, but I was able to slash our budget by at least 30% when we switched to doing this. Pretty much, either I make it or we do without.

History - we definitely prefer chunks; we do it as bedtime stories + 2x/month we have history/science/art/music day and that's all we do Science - chunks is better here too, like above Writing - 3-4x week of formal effort does it for us Latin - I think foreign languages need to be daily Spelling - 3x a week does it for us Typing - since it's a physical skill developing, I would think daily would be better Spanish - foreign language, daily Literature - daily Geography - 2x a week should cover that... :)

We adopted 2 children from Ethiopia in 2008 (and had 2 bio kids too), then moved from a city that was 6% black to one that was 55% black. Best thing we ever did. In our former city, people would over-compliment my ET kids on how beautiful they were and it was kind of weird. Here, no one looks twice at our mixed up family of six. :) I think the more diverse you can make surroundings, the better. I, personally, would homeschool and get the rest wherever I could. Ethical behavior in public schools is, um, lacking... My ET kids are also EXTREMELY social, so we have to keep them busy with lots of playdates, whereas the others are happy to have a friend over once or twice a week. All the best! It's a terrific journey.

Also, larger tanks are MUCH easier to take care of than smaller ones...

Three of my four kids have gone (or nearly gone!) through OPGTR and I've just never done review at all. Nothing. Never had them read anything else, other than having plenty of reading material available for them to read as they are moved to. (And they've always picked other reading material up several times per day.) We just do 1 lesson per day until we're done. That's it!

We just finished ITBS grade 3 last week. We just do it because GA requires a test, it's cheap, we can do it at home on our own schedule, and, to my delight, the whole thing took us only 3 hours to finish! :) For me, personally, I see nothing useful in the scores. I really don't care what DD gets. I know she's at least at grade level in everything, so I'm not worried about her skills. The social studies part had me most intrigued, because we really haven't done formal "social studies." We've been doing history! But everything that was covered she could answer just based on hanging out in this life of ours. So........ I'm glad we're done with it, and it really would be nice if something useful could come out of it, but... OH WELL!

I LOVE the tofu/chocolate chip recipe above. You can also use it for cake frosting. :) How about a pastry cream tofu??? I once made pastry cream and a cheese sauce for macaroni. I had them both in the fridge. I pulled out the pastry cream thinking it was the cheese sauce. I usually whiz a cake of tofu into the cheese sauce so the mac and cheese has some redeeming food value. :) Of course, I whizzed it into the pastry cream by mistake and WOW it was good (but not what I expected when I tasted it!!). :)