Make royal icing and practice cake decorating? Or make a gingerbread house? That will use a lot of powdered sugar. If the packages were unopened, I would probably just donate it. I don't use much powdered sugar at all.

Wow, you're good! :thumbup: How about that initial struggle many new homeschoolers fear about trying to go between the "mom" hat and the "teacher" hat? I remember hearing about one homeschooler who actually wore different clothes to be "teacher". I could see some comedy there, as mom goes between the algebra and the chili on the stove and the toddler in the living room, trying to keep her "role" straight.

Does the book really write it that way with equal signs all across? Yikes! When I taught college algebra (years and years ago), I used to think that if I could just get my students to use the equals sign properly, at least half their problems would go away.

This is not in a bundt and it's not very pretty to look at, but it is SUPER lemony with a ton of glaze. My family's favorite cake! Sir Percy's Sticky Lemon Cake

I walked about 7 miles today.

STRATEGY, people. We should have started right off with, "We'll answer your poll if you tell us what the habit is." Now we'll never, ever know. :lol: I have no idea how to answer. I should probably track it and find out. I think most of my non-essential spending is for eating out, though, which doesn't count for the poll, if I understand correctly. I hate shopping, so I'm not about to spend extra time doing it when I don't have to.

What's your goal? If you already have enough writing in your dd's curriculum, I wouldn't add more just for the sake of adding it. If you have trouble being consistent, then I'd keep it as simple as possible. A couple of keep-it-simple plans for current events: 1) Watch CNN Student News every day and discuss. Easy, free, online. 2) Have your dd select one news article per week to read. Have her find the spot on the map and orally narrate the article to you. You could have her do a local story one week, national story second week, international story week three, and then repeat. 3) (a little more work) Have her select three news articles every week (one local, one national, one international) and do the same as in number 2. 4) Have her select one news story to follow for a length of time, say several weeks or months. This one is a little harder to do with "keep it simple" and "not very good at being consistent" but it might be the one that she gets the most out of. Good luck!

Hi Mary, First off, I wanted to say that your story sounds SO much like my son. We went through the exact same exercise of "learning paragraphs" when he was in third or maybe even fourth grade. Weeks of graphic organizers and topic sentences and stuff. And his paragraphs sounded JUST like your son's. And I despaired. I'm not convinced that this type of writing exercise is all that helpful for beginning writers. I've been doing lots and lots of research about writing. And nearly every source I've read begins, not with expository writing, but with narrative and description. A narrative is telling a story in chronological order. I'm sure you know what a description is. This is in many, many systematic writing programs (all the way from Writing With Skill, a middle-school program, up to college writing handbooks). Only after narrative and description have been thoroughly practiced do they move on to expository writing. So the type of paragraph in which you state a "thesis" and then give reason to support it, though we often think of that as the most basic type of paragraph, is actually rather advanced. He clearly got the concepts you were teaching, and he can throw together a paragraph that fits the formula. Call it a home run. ;) You have tons of time to work on lively prose style, and sophisticated sentence structure, and smooth transitions. A lot of that will come with time and maturity, and the rest you'll be able to teach him. Personally, I would strongly recommend going back to narration and summarizing. You said he has trouble with putting his thoughts into words. I think that is where you should put your energy.

When I was in school (in public school in Virginia), a science project was required every year beginning in 4th or 5th grade. We were given a packet of information and perhaps a session or two in class on choosing a topic. Starting in 6th grade, I believe, the project had to be an experiment, not merely a demonstration (no baking soda volcanoes!). For the rest, we were completely on our own. It was, to be honest, very overwhelming as a student and stressful for my parents. They didn't have much time to help me and no scientific background for providing support. I suspect that's why so many of us ended up with stupid projects like, "What brand of paper towel absorbs the most water". Not surprisingly, the kids with highly involved parents had by far the best projects. And I don't mean the parents did the work, though that did happen in some cases. But they did mentor closely, as you did with your boys. I think that's the only way the type of investigation you describe can happen.

I'm not sure I understand the difference between modern and vintage arithmetic, but there are mountains of free online worksheets for practice (or for putting on the board, if you wish). One site I've used is math-drills.com. They are separated by topic. In division, for example, you can find sheets to practice division facts, long division without remainders, long division with remainders, or long division with decimal quotients. Within each section there are many, many worksheets.

I saw people doing this on a lake this summer when we were on vacation. It did look really fun. Too bad we don't live near water! I've been lurking on these threads recently, trying to get my motivation to start exercising again. I stopped somehow (why? why? why?) last May and have hardly done anything since. I did go for a walk today, about 3 miles.

That makes sense. A few times I have wanted to do this but by that point I had already marked up half the paper before realizing it really needed to be a total do-over. Just saying "do again" would work unless it was a worksheet. Thanks for explaining!

Have I annoyed you somehow? I'm just trying to understand better how this system works. Feel free to ignore my questions if they irritate you.

So you do that (just one of those methods, I presume?) every time, just in case the score falls below the 85-90 threshold?

I've seen this suggestion before, and it makes me curious about the logistics. If you know that they scored less than 85-90, then you must have checked the answers. And if you checked the answers, didn't you mark somehow the right/wrong ones? I don't quite understand how you can both know a paper has a particular score AND hand an unmarked paper back to the student. What am I missing?

How funny! No, I'm in the northeast, and it's just called "February Vacation Week".

Wow, I'm impressed! How far did you all carry the division?

To how many decimal places? ;) It took my 7th grader about 45 seconds per digit. When he got to three decimal places, I told him to stop. That was about four minutes.

Yup. When I grew up in northern Virginia, we had school days off whenever the federal employees did, since so many parents worked for the government. In other places, they may not have off for MLK Day or Washington's birthday, for example. Where I live now, the schools are off for a week every February. I never heard of such a thing growing up, but here it's a tradition. My hypothesis? People here like to ski, so they have a week off in the middle of winter for ski vacations. It all depends on the local population.

Stop comparing him to his twin. Obviously to him this isn't the easiest part or easy at all. I would (a) teach him to type pronto and (b) have him do *small* amounts of copywork daily to build stamina. If that means spreading the final draft over several days, fine. If that means not recopying every piece of writing, fine.

Do you mean the school won't grant *credit* or the school won't grant *placement*? Those are two separate issues. I would not expect a school to grant high school credit for courses completed in 8th grade. But I would absolutely expect placement in the appropriate course, i.e., NOT repeating Algebra I.

Someone took a picture of our garden once. I couldn't believe it, as I'm a terrible gardener. But we did have a huge vegetable patch in our front yard in the middle of the city, and that's unusual, I guess. I just wish it had been better weeded that day!

Google's cars have car-mounted cameras, like this one. It's not some guy sticking his head out the window. (Edited to delete image) I don't think it's creepy to take a picture of the house you grew up in. If I did it, though, I'd knock on the door first and chat with the current owners. I'd ask them as a courtesy if they minded my taking a picture. If nobody was home, though, I'd snap away. I've had people do the same at two houses I've lived in and once in California my whole extended family visited the old family home. They invited us in for a tour!

Welcome, and thank you for your offer to answer questions about Latin!

Well, to be fair, it does look from the poll that your way is definitely an unusual one. I would probably be surprised myself to see egg cups at a picnic, just because I think of picnic food as simple, easy fare without extra "stuff" required. BUT, I can totally identify with your feeling of annoyance at others' surprise. Or perhaps you weren't annoyed, but I have definitely been annoyed at times when people just assume that their way is the only possible way of doing something and seem absolutely floored that others might do it a different way. Your egg cups sound lovely and quaint to me, and your lunch sounds delicious. :) Oh my, when is lunch?? I'm drooling here. :D