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UrbanSue

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Everything posted by UrbanSue

  1. FLL 3 starts at the beginning with the definition of a noun so it's fine to jump in at grade level with it.
  2. . . . do you think there is benefit to doing some kind of standardized testing anyway? I'm not that interested in checking my kids' grade levels or anything, I'm more concerned with the cya aspect. I'm in New Jersey where there is no home school regulation at all, which is great. But I think that the big legislation void is very tempting to fill and there seem to be fairly frequent attempts to get more oversight on the books (any other NJers who have better info and want to weigh in, I'm all ears!). I'm slowly getting better at some basic record keeping of what we've accomplished and days we've "done school" but I wonder if some kind of test scores at select points would be wise. Thoughts?
  3. My New England-raised dad was stationed in El Paso one summer and said it was 113 or whatever. He said, "I know they say, 'Oh, it's a dry heat.' But 113 is 113. It's hot out." And I agree though the humidity on the East Coast is sucking the life out of me this week.
  4. You look for different levels of engagement and output depending on the age of the student. The reading level increases with each volume but you might add more additional material for an older student, or require some kind of writing, etc. Some families use SOTW 1-4 in grades 1-4 and then repeat them again in grades 5-8.
  5. I was also going to suggest the Radians. We fit two and one regular seat across the back of a Hyundai Elantra for a few years. They are very, very narrow. But very comfortable and built like tanks. Great seats. Pricey but cheaper than buying a new car. Yes they are definitely heavy--steel frame construction--but still worth it, to my mind. And I have messy kids and my 2yo sometimes has accidents. We deal.
  6. Do you do this? Because at Costco yesterday there were NO handicapped spaces left. I parked in Siberia in order to have unloading space and my son still had to scoot across the van getting out and getting back in later. And by the time we got out from shopping even the spot next to us had been taken and we only barely could get his chair up next to the van. I was very close to having to leave my son in a busy parking lot, back out my van into the traffic lane and then load him. I totally get that there are lots and lots of perfectly legitimate reasons to need and use handicapped parking but PLEASE, don't take the last spot if you could possibly manage not to. Some of us have serious logistical concerns! Rant over :) When I'm alone I gladly park far away so I can pull our van through two spots and be pointing out when I leave. I could always use the extra exercise anyway :)
  7. I always have several books going at once though my mother did her best to drill it out of me as a kid. My 8yo reads constantly--sometimes several hours a day. He generally has several books going at once and he reads them out of order! Like, just picks up a current favorite, flips open to a random page and starts reading! I totally get if it's a book he is re-reading (and right now, thank goodness, he is a big re-reader or we'd have run out of books long ago) but he'll do it with a mystery he's never read! It makes me crazy to look at him. But I'm the type who always reads the introduction and can't even read a magazine out of order. And ds can always relate the story, in detail and in order so I let it go. That's interesting that some of you say your kids can do an audiobook and read something else at the same time. I always do a read aloud during lunch and by the time I get to the table, ds usually has something else he is reading. I always make him put it away but maybe I'll just see what happens next time. I'm curious.
  8. I would do either a maid service--maybe a set of gift certificates they could use one at a time as they have need?--or food gift cards to someplace healthy. I'm a from-scratch-all-the-time-wholesome-food-person myself. But when I have a baby I just want to eat. With Whole Foods gift cards they could pick up healthier-than-average convenience foods.
  9. The Habit of Being is her letters so it's not fiction. I have her Mystery and Manners as well which is a collection of talks and essays. I love those. I love her thoughts on faith, writing, regionalism, etc. But how that translates to her short stories? I'm still a bit stumped. But I'm determined to read (or, in some cases, re-read) her fiction through the summer. Perhaps now that I've read all her letters, some things will make more sense. I feel challenged by it, too. She is often complaining in her letters about how misunderstood her work is. I want to be one of the smart ones who gets it! But I'm not. At least not yet :)
  10. I was also going to suggest looking at the LCC approach. We do skill subjects in a rigorous way but I'm very relaxed about content areas, at least in elementary grades which is all I have experience with so far. I would especially not worry at all about your kindergartner, academically. You could teach reading this year but if things are really stressful and/or you need a year to just regroup and rethink approaches, you'd probably be fine to wait until next year. It's generally easier to teach a 6yo than a 5yo anyway. I do think read alouds for your k'er and toddler are fairly vital but you or either of the older kids could do this. You might even come up with some interesting literature studies using picture books if you really need it to be more official "school" for them.
  11. Yes, so far. It jumps around quite a bit but I'm liking it. I generally really like McCullough--nice, light history. So it's easy to read before bed without tempting me to stay up too late (as novels do).
  12. I don't know how it works in Canada but, in the States, the SELLER pays a commission to both the seller's and buyer's agents. Generally this is about 3% of the purchase price each. If this is the case where you are, and you aren't working with a realtor, you might mention this savings to the seller and use it as a negotiating tool. If it is legal to just come to an agreement with the seller and go straight to the lawyer to write up the contract, that is even more savings for the seller and that should be reflected in the price you pay for the house.
  13. I'm late to the party here. And Bill's son is, I think, older than my kids. But I just wanted to throw out there that my two kids who are old enough for math absolutely shut down if I give them more work to do than they need to master the concept. They shut down in very different ways: ds who is 8 acts kind of dumb and lazy and it took me almost three years to figure out that he just didn't need so much review and I was killing him with math. He is a slow worker but quick to grasp concepts. He needs a well-designed program that challenges him in an efficient way. He internalizes the material (really internalizes--it's like pulling teeth to get him to explain how he knows something sometimes) and then runs with it in his thinking later. BA is really, really ideal for him. My dd6 learns concepts, for the most part, after one or two explanations. If I then assigned her an entire page (or five, or ten) of practice she explodes. She sees it as mindless busy work and I don't really blame her. We just learned addition with renaming. She didn't need to learn it first with two digits, then with three digits but only renaming in the ones, then with three digits with renaming both ones and tens. She figured out how to do it all with one or two example problems. I'm not pushing you to accelerate or skip anything, just throwing out a different approach so you can, maybe, better asses what is going on as you try various things. My dd6 is very intense as well. It can be quite a ride!
  14. You need to find some comps: recently sold homes in your area that are similar to the one you are looking at. In my neighborhood the assessed value has nothing to do with market value. When we bought every home was selling for way under assessed value. Everything was just reassessed this winter so we'll see what happens but, so far, things are selling for way over assessed value. That's really just a property tax question and doesn't necessarily reflect what the market will bear because the market is much more flexible than city governments. A fair price for this home is the one you are willing to pay and the seller is willing to take. That's what negotiation is for. We paid 82% of the asking price on our home. Not that it matters unless you live in my neighborhood but there is no magic percentage number.
  15. I'm not sure I've posted since about week 6 but I'm still hanging in there. A bit behind--maybe at 21 books? But our huge summer vacation/road trip is coming up and I generally knock out three or four books even when I'm not motivated so I fully expect to get back on track. My most recent big finish was Flannery O'Connors The Habit of Being. I really, really loved it. And I really, really don't get her fiction still. Dh has taught some of her stories before so I just got her two novels for his new kindle to read on the road. And I'm planning on reading through her complete short stories when we return. I'm planning to finish David McCullough's The Greater Journey before we leave on our trip.
  16. We also just do time. Generally about 45 minutes/day though sometimes if we are in a guide section he wants to go longer. For further accountability, divide your year into quarters and shoot to finish one section each. But sections take really different times. We blasted through the first, slogged through skip counting, snd are now moving quickly again at the end of 3A. Maybe all the books average out like that, though.
  17. I am currently using BA as the only program for my 8yo who is finishing third grade. He is an extremely quirky learner and hated math with Singapore though he could do it all. He just loves BA. I thought we would outpace the publishing schedule quickly when we first started but we ended up having a spring with so much sickness in it that we're just now finishing 3A. So he'll be using BA a year "behind" but I don't really care since he loves it and it is plenty challening. I'm still not sure what we'll do if we end up with publishing gaps with BA. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I'd missed Lynnita's thread so I'll check that out, too. My 6yo dd who is finishing first grade will be in SM 2B or possibly 3A by the fall and she is dying to do Beast. I'm more inclined to run both programs at once with her because she moves so fast. I'm not really sure yet if she really has an amazing grasp of math or is just a really quick learner (is there even a difference? I don't know.).
  18. Muddy Brown for Bernadette? That's pretty funny. What other names have strong color associations for you? Dh is kind of nixing the Ada route because he thinks it won't sit well with some members of the family. But Genevieve Clare. Hmmm...
  19. Some of us are just etiquette junkies. I've read all of Miss Manners. More than once. But it is also regional, to an extent. Not that it's okay to be rude some places but some places are just a lot more formal than others. I'm from New England and have pretty much always lived on the East Coast. My one year living in the Midwest or visits to my dad in CO always leave me sort of rattled from an etiquette standpoint :)
  20. Someone else mentioned that it is fairly board-specific that some programs are called "discovery" here and it doesn't seem to mean quite the same thing. Now I know!
  21. Thanks for the feedback. We would call her Ada after a family member but I want my kids to have more formal, longer names as an option, too. The family member in question was just named "Ada". Middle names we are less fussy about. Clare is in the running, as is Bernadette. But "Clare Bernadette" is also a possibility. Something like Rose or Rosemary is also a middle name option.
  22. I agree that just reading older books is probably going to get you pretty far. We just finished Heidi as a read aloud and started Anne of Green Gables (the orignial, unabridged) and the vocabulary in either of those challenges me once in awhile--more so than Austen, I think. And the more complex sentence structure is important as well. But those plots are both really fun for kids. So I would just pull out any decent book list that values older literature and start at the bottom. Things often mentioned as read alouds for first graders might work well, too. Winnie the Pooh is great reading.
  23. We found out yesterday that baby #5 is a girl. My one daughter is ecstatic. My three boys, slightly less so :laugh: We've been tossing around names for awhile and two we really like are Genevieve (possible nickname: Ginny) and Adelaide (nickname: Ada with the first A "long"--this is a family name). First thoughts about these names? Our other kids have names that are a bit on the traditional and old-fashioned side but definitely pretty normal. Older people always say, "What nice names!". These two girl options would be significantly more old-fashioned (to my ear). We really like them but we don't wish to inflict weird names on our children, either. Oh, and our last name starts with a J.
  24. If there is a preferred dress code, word of mouth is the polite way to spread it rather than printing something on the invitation. If someone else attending told you it was black tie, I would look into it. The country club may have rules the bride can do nothing about. If the bride and groom would simply prefer a black tie event, you are certainly within your rights to attend dressed as nicely as you are able. Just be aware that many guests will be dressed more formally (probably). Also a 4:00 wedding can easily mean a 6:00 or later reception. It seems silly to wear "dinner clothes" to the afternoon ceremony but, I suppose, in this day and age it is silly to assume that guests will change between the two events.
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