after 2 years of live classes with native speakers at our local college, we decided to try Rosetta Stone. Honestly, I wish we had just started with it. It is a much better fit for my students. I am amazed by how much they have improved this year vs the previous 2 years.

We have a schoolroom, but do most of our schooling in the livingroom. We used to do more in the schoolroom; now it is mostly used for storing all our school stuff. I bring down 2 milk crates each am. I have two 4' folding banquet tables in there that we set back to back so they are a square and the kids are facing each other. I found that it was very important for the tables not to touch as they start getting irritated with eachother for making the table move. They also can not sit at the kitchen table together. We have a small, taller coffee table in the living room that I slide in front of the couch to put my laptop on as needed. I missed my white boards too when I stated reaslizing we were doing better out of the schoolroom, so now I actually have a smaller one we prop up in front of the fireplace. Well, unless we are using it in which case it gets propped up in front of the coffee table. It does seem kind of wastefull not to use the school room for working in but I need a central place to keep everything organized and put away and it is nice to sit up in there in the quiet when lesson planning. The kids do craft projects on their own in there often too. It really does get used frequently, just not as I originally envisioned. =)

I set my kids up with gmail accounts and have everything they send or receive forwarded to my outlook. I have it siphoned to a folder and rarely actually read what is in there, but feel more comfortable knowing I do have access if necessary.

I was never allowed to play with Barbies, and never understood why it was such a big deal. My DD was never really into them, she did play with them with a few friends. She had some H2O Barbie-sized dolls she liked. She discovered WINX when she was 4. They make Barbie look downright chubby. LOL In the last couple years she has aquired a few of the Monster High dolls. She still prefers the WINX though, even though she says the show has gone way downhill from the original.

We used to dot it on yellow cake when I was a kid; on the batter before baking so it would kind of melt in.

super hero capes, snowballs and embroidering some stuffies for the cousins towel toppers & embroidering kitchen towels a couple hooded towels a tree skirt and I am pretty sure my kids asked for something else I forgot oh, a WINX tote bag =)

LOL, if I take away the Wii my 2 don't care. If I take away their swimming they are devestated!

We recieved one as a gift from the grandparents; it is not something I would have bought. It really does not hold my kids' attention well at all. They will play a little and then not touch it for a month or more or until a friend comes over. We have Wii Fit and a couple sports games and they are ok, but again, they hardly play it. My daughter likes the dance games and some of those work up a sweat. They do like the Rabbids games too, some of those are pretty active and use the balance board. ITA re the second wii mote. We had to get a couple of the nunchucs too in order to play the games that came with it.

yeah, suddenly I thinking I need to make better use of my kindle.....

We've only done the South America one. I like them but the kids found them dry and tedious. Our compromise was to take our time and do it in small chunks.

wow :ohmy: My 2 are on a community swim team and we don't have anywhere near that level of cost/commitment. They practice 90 min 3x per week and I pay $40.50/kid/11 practices. We don't have to pay for meets and team suits etc are optional. All our meets are local, maybe every 2 months or so. It works out really well for us, I don't know that we would be able to handle a bigger commitment right now. I was wondering about how it might step up when they get to highschool in a couple years.

Jealous! Our library only allows kids under 18 to check out 1 book at a time. Adult cards have a 50 book limit. I seem to hit that far more often that one might think, especially when they are SLOW about checking one set back in as we are trying to check another set out.

Winter Wonderland

I used both, different one with 2 different kids and they basically ended up at the same spot. I sat down with each and let them decide which would be the better fit. I should add we used it as a supplemement to MUS and not primary curric.

My daughter was in a parade with a bunch of other girls and they were supposed to dress like "100 year old women". In discussing what that might entail and how to interpret it one girl interjected, "Easy! We just need to find some clothes from the 80's!"

The last time I was tempted to do a really thorough culling my husband pointed out that with the increasing prevalance of digital books, these books might not even be available in print form for our grandchildren. As a result, when we need more space on the bookshelves I find myself choosing a few to keep in storage rather than giving away all that I cull. I've also found that our library's selection seems to be continually veering towards the Disney and Nick Jr type books and the quality books seem harder to find. For literary/art purposes etc I am also glad to have kept the better "below grade level" books.

We did Beta testing for Writeshop Jr E & F. My childen felt that the program was too young and talked down to them despite being in the target age range. The assignments were very formulatic to the point where my children tended to get bogged down in the details. They would finish a paper that followed all "the rules" but wasn't cohesive as a whole. Some of the sample papers sounded really forced to me as well in that they were trying to make every sentence and every paragraph fit a mold to the loss of the overall paper. I thought it was an OK program. If you want lots of hand holding and box checking it might be a good fit. Everything is scripted and highly structured. We did it faster than recommended due to Beta testing which might be part of what we did not like about it. The program has 10 lessons, each broken up into 8 parts. Some days we were done in 30 min, some days what they wanted us to get done was 2+ hours and I ended up splitting it up over 2 days and working on the weekends to get the program done in time. My children did not like the program and were glad to be finished. The did like the grammer portion of the program and the way editing was addressed. You start by having them find things they did right. I really didn't see any improvement in their writing from using this program, but part of that might be that they would have benefitted from having more time to spend on it.

ITA, we have been using LOF as a supplement slightly behind where we are in their main curric and even then sometimes concepts are thrown in so fast and furious that my 2 have struggled with. We all enjoy it and I think it is helping to strengthen their math reasoning skills. We have been going at a pace that is comfortable for them. As a main or sole math curric I think it moves too quickly and does not have enough review for most students. Maybe a math prodigy who just needs to see it once and gets it would find it adequate.

We did A LOT of supplementing. My DS and I enjoyed the Landmark book but most of it went right past DD. She was at the young end of the core and he was in the mid-range agewise. One book she really enjoyed was The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History by Jennifer Armstrong and Roger Roth Honestly, there is a ton of overlap from one source to the next. I think it sounds like you have it covered =)

Yes, you can print a list of each child's assignments daily. You can generate a report for whatever time period you designate and email it to them or yourself and print it off. It also has an option where you can hide completed assigments so you could tell it to generate a report of all the assignments for the past week or month that were not completed if you are doing a catch up day. You can print assignments sheets or reports by subject too if that works better for your organizational system. I have found this is easier for me to use because it is on my Kindle, so it is with me, whereas all my good intentions of transfering my paper records to the PC were for naught. I actually prefer the way I organized some of the reports in Excel, I just never used it with any type of consistency.

I've been using it for about 2 weeks now after nearly 8 years of paper planners. I still use my paper planner. Part of why I am trying to like it is becuase I think having a tool like this that records attendence, grades etc will really help in a year and a half when we start highschool and need that for a future transcript. It is very intutive, easy to use etc. The batch tools work well. For subjects my children do together I fill out the info for one child and copy to the other. Everything is editable so if I plan out 3 months and 8 weeks down the road we are off track I can just adjust the date to reflect when we actually got to something. I go through at the end of each school day and check off everything that we completed, input grades where applicable and done. Like I said, I still keep my paper record too just because that is what I am comfortable with but I can see eventually changing. Another nice feature is the ability to run reports and email them to yourself in a printable form.

One of my kids has EoE and the biggest pain with it is that the syptoms are delayed so keeping a food diary really didn't help. We tried going gluten free and while some of his allergy syptoms improved (he has wheat, barley, rye, oat and gluten allergies, no celiac) his EoE actually got far worse. We later learned that potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, millet, sorghum and the like that are commonly found in GF foods happen to be some of his most potent EoE triggers. What we substituted for the gluten ended up causing more issues. Granted he is more complex than average, but the fact remains that it is possible to have more than one thing going on at once and based on experience, if you are going to try to find triggers via trial and error dietary changes go slowly and carefully and keep track of what you are doing. Try to change only one thing at a time. I hope you can find whatever your trigger(s) are quickly.

My house is in a cell phone dead zone but I could not justify paying the $80 per month the phone company wanted for local only no frills service. We ended up switching to Ooma which only costs about $4 in gov't taxes and fees/month. I can use it to fax; from the research I did when we switched it was the only VoiP that you coould fax with at the time. I have a prepaid smart phone that cost $15 per month for unlimited talk & text. I have found that there is wifi everywhere I need it so have opted not to pay for a data package. Between the 2 we have been very happy, In a power outage I just need to go to the end of the driveway to make a call and we have a good generator to keep it charged The emergency situation was one of the biggest factors that kept us from switching sooner, but e911 seems to be improving and that $80/month was really adding up!

Warefare by Ducttape http://warfarebyducttape.com/ is currently high on my son's wishlist. I got him the armored glove book and the gloves he made turned out really well. I was impressed.

My children were at about the same point earlier this year. I bought Fractions and after reading through it did not think my son was ready for it. I chose to go all the way back to Apples because I could get it through the library and my oldest especially really neaded a confidence boost. We have gone through the books very quicky - about a book a month. My children look forward to Fred; it is one of the few things they actually ask for. I don't think we needed to go back that far, however it was good in that it let my children learn how the books work very gently. As they ramped up to more challenging work they were very accepting of it. Although the first 8 books are elementary, they include quite a few concepts that my children had not encountered elsewhere yet such as union and intersection of sets, functions, ordered pairs, exponents, and sigma notation. It started off very easy for them, but they did not ever feel like it talked down to them. There are also story archs that continue from one book to the next and sometimes allude to other books in the series. Although each book is freestanding, it does add a little to have read the previous books. When math topics from a previous book are reviewed there is often a reference to the previous book or a quick reminder of how to do the problem. My son's math has greatly improved over the past year, however, we changed his main math curric at about the same time as we started Fred so it is hard to say where to place the credit. In any case, he enjoys it, and it definately enhances his understanding of various topics so we plan to continue using it as a supplement.