Thanks! Glad to give you a chuckle. :)

How do you parse the phrase "Ave Maria"? Ds and I were listening to Christmas songs, and Ave Maria came on. Because we are learning Latin, we began speaking about the language, but I admit I was stumped right from the first line. So, obviously the title comes from the Ave Maria prayer and is generally translated "Hail Mary". I suppose I always sort of assumed this was an imperative command -- (you) hail Mary. But I can't find that verb in my Latin dictionary. Google translator, by the way, translates "ave" as "fowl". And anyway, if it were an imperative, then Maria would need to be in accusative case. So clearly I've been wrong all these years! Is it just as simple as "ave" being an interjection? Then it would be more like "Hi, Mary!" Now I'm quite curious. Please help!

I wouldn't say Turkish delight is exactly like gummy candy (or wine gums). It has a softer, stickier texture. And I've never seen it covered in chocolate but usually covered in powdered sugar. I'm a big fan of Turkish delight, especially rose flavored or with pistachios. Yum!

Excellent post! I do think kids need help in learning to deal with difficult people, whether they are bullies, or people without boundaries, or whatever. Luckily (or unluckily, perhaps) difficult people are all over the place -- neighbors, friends, sports teams, bosses, and yes, sometimes even in our families. Homeschoolers have no disadvantage in this area, as far as I can tell!

WARM UP? Pumpkin pie is eaten cold by all right-thinking people.

Baked russets, yes. Mashed russets, no. Mashed yukon golds or reds, yes. Roasted anything, yes. Soups and stews, it depends.

This thread makes me happy. I don't know anyone IRL who likes to study. I'm working my way through calculus again. It will be useful when my ds gets to that level, but I'm mostly doing it for my own enjoyment. Did you take dance classes or learn this in some other way? Curious.

Thanks! I haven't seen that every-day-edit before. Looks useful.

KISS is strictly grammar, right? No mechanics, usage, or the other little bits and pieces that comprehensive LA programs include. If you use KISS for grammar, do you use other resources for the "other stuff"?

Well, I'd say both of you pronounce it wrong. :lol: I pronounce it EYE-URN, and I don't think I've ever heard any other pronunciation.

This is what I recommend too. The TM is very helpful for some of the Problem Solving sections. They often discuss multiple ways to approach a problem.

We aren't using the workbook here. There's a lot in the text if you do all the parts. Plenty for my ds, anyway. We supplement with some MathCounts practice problems, but that's about it.

Yes, sometimes you can chalk it up to a different dialect. Watch out for the chapter on financial transactions -- I did a lot of translating there. (I still say this is a bad problem, even without the wording issue. But it's only the second bad problem I've come across in several years of doing Singapore, so I guess I'll cut them some slack.)

Ugh. I hated that problem. I don't know if you had the same problem I did, but I found the wording confusing. What they mean to say is that you are going to put eggs in a bundle and sell each bundle for 80 cents. How many eggs should be in each bundle? Does that help? I dislike this problem because it's not a realistic scenario. A seller wouldn't decide the price before deciding how many eggs go in a bundle. He would decide how many eggs to put in a bundle and then decide on a price. The only scenario that does make sense if it's at a dollar store or something, where everything costs $1, and he's trying to figure out how many eggs to sell for a dollar. But for 80 cents??

Hey, fantastic. Thank you! And thanks to whoever created it!

Oooh, good idea. This is the kind of thing I never think to do. We're in the middle of Egypt right now. Any particular recommendations for an Egypt doc on netflix? TIA.

WWS has been such a godsend here. Ds is writing more and better than I would have imagined a year ago. I'm sure some kids and parents would look at it and think, "Who needs so much detailed instruction?" To a natural writer, I imagine it could feel stifling. But for us it has the perfect amount of guidance. We've tweaked it just a bit by adding a revision process a few days after doing the writing, just because that seems to work better for my son.

Probably not what you meant, but the Getty-Dubay Italic program uses science as a unifying theme in their 4th grade book. Samples here. The other grades have themes as well. Fifth grade focuses on figures of speech, sixth grade focuses on the history of writing.

Just watch out for the cost if you're printing in color. A couple of years ago I had a KISS workbook and answer key printed and bound at Office Max. I knew it would cost a bit, but since the curriculum was free, I splurged and did the whole thing in color. When I went to pick it up, the price tag was over $100. :eek: How stupid of me not to get a precise cost ahead of time! However, since the store had not quoted a price for me, as they are supposed to do, they gave me a substantial discount. Very lucky! I like the KISS approach, though I would prefer traditional diagramming to the sentence marking method. We're doing sentence diagramming this year, and grammar is really clicking for my son. He's a very visual learner, and I think the graphical layout helps him a lot. He says sentence diagramming is his favorite part of school!

Henry Reed, Inc. Gone-Away Lake (and its sequel Return to Gone Away) The Westing Game Surviving the Applewhites No More Nice and No More Nasty by Amy MacDonald From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler Frindle and others by Andrew Clements Some of these may be a little young for an 11yo, but they are what popped into my mind. My son recently read Operation Redwood too and liked it a lot (as did I).

Wow, I didn't even know it was available yet. Some of you all are such detectives! I'll be getting the IG.

Try Scratch. It's free and easy to use. A google search will get you all sorts of lesson ideas, if you want to approach it in a structured way.

Why would you need to start over again at the beginning? Can't you just start with where you are in the spines?

The thing that's hardest to replace from HO seems like the maps. I really like that part of it: having the beautiful, clear black-lines with the just-right amount of information showing. It wouldn't be worth it to buy it for just the maps, though, would it? But in some ways I'm resonating with you and redsquirrel about what I'd like our history to look like. I've like what we've done with HO so far this year, but simplifying sounds good too. (Of course "simplifying" would actually mean a lot more work for me. :lol:)

Your description is very helpful. How do you combine that with History Odyssey (from your sig)? Does your ds do the summary and outline assignments from HO as well as the 6-step process?