I hear a lot about combining subjects for kids close in age, and I'm wondering what that actually looks like. I get that they can listen to the same books and watch the same TV shows and all, and that probably takes care of stuff like nature/science and history but is there actually a way to combine kids on stuff like math and/or reading? The younger two are desperate to do more actual school. My preschooler was in tears today because I didn't want to do real math with her. They both really want to learn how to read, and I've been putting them off. I'm not super excited about doing real school with my younger two, mostly because I'd rather they just play dress-up and pretend or build things with blocks or do puzzles or something, but also because it's hard for me to juggle what everyone needs and/or wants to be doing with regards to academics. I'm hoping to figure out a way to combine them so that I don't have to spend much more time doing school, and they can all feel like their learning what they want to be learning. But it’s hard for me to figure things out when one is still learning letter sounds and another can already blend. Or when one can only count and one is still doing counting and patterns and another can already add and subtract. I guess I just need some help coming up with creative ideas of how I can work with more than one kid at a time. I'm sure there are parents smarter or more creative than me who can make this work without expecting too much of a younger child or dumbing things down for an older child, so I'd love to hear what you would suggest for us!

You're all right, of course. I was probably over-thinking things. I think I let myself get stressed out because everytime I'd go look up more information for them, there'd be conflicting accounts and I have at least one kid who wants to know the TRUTH, and that felt like a lot of pressure. lol. We're only doing the timeline because they wanted something visual to look at as we listen to the audiobooks. Two of my kids have very poor memories, so they have very little hope of ever memorizing dates on a timeline, but they like drawing little pictures to glue onto a timeline and then talk about the stories later... lol.

I'm going to throw out a different perspective than most here: I started with summer breaks and have now nixed them. I nixed them unwillingly and gradually, each year giving them less and less but still hoping to give them a summer break. Last year, we did three weeks of summer break before I lost my mind and started school again. We don't school for 6 hours a day - 3 hours tops - and maybe we'll lean the other way and give a longer break again as more years pass and my kids get into middle/high school, but this is where we are now. Our schooling gives structure to our day that my kids seem to need. I love the idea of letting kids be bored and then figuring out what to do with themselves, and I've always had a bent towards unschooling sort of philosophies, so this has been painful for me. But lacking structure does not work for my kids in doses of longer than 1 hour at a time. When they get too bored, they become mean, snide, destructive, whiney, aggressive, and generally start acting like little brats. Furthermore, even my kiddo who doesn't get bored because can amuse himself four hours at a time playing legos or reading or making up his own games and can certainly find something to keep himself busy starts to act out when he gets to spend his entire day in his own pursuits and his day lacks clear structure and routine. I feel like it goes against everything I want to be true, but this has been our experience thus far at least. I was actually talking about it with DH just this weekend; I feel like I'm almost grieving the homeschool ideas/picture I had for us that I've tried to make work for years, and have just found that my kids need more structure/rigidity than is my natural bent. We do frequently take one week off at different times throughout the year or for a summer camp or something, and then usually spend another full week making up for it and getting back into the groove. It annoys my kids to have to tell their friends that they can't do (blank) because they start their days with school still, but they also have chosen to quit their "summer break" early they last few years, because they also hate the feelings and bad attitude they get after a few weeks of break.

Thank you all! I've been reading and thinking and reading some more, so I really appreciate your input!

So this year my kids and I started doing a big timeline together, and I feel like we're hitting a lot of snags. Religious issues aside (because I don't even want to touch on issues of religious history in this thread, please!), I feel like every time we look up more information about something like phoenician glass blowing or the minoan civilization or the invention of silk, the majority of sources I find give different dates than the ones in SOTW. I can accept that there's controversy and uncertainty over some of the dates - that's ok with me and my kids as well. But I'm not sure if it'd be better to list the dates in SOTW, since that's their history spine, or if I should go with the *majority* consensus in other books/resources. I've also been a little concerned about stories (like the one with the discovery/invention of silk) that it seem to be presented as fact in SOTW (i.e., not prefaced as a legend from that time) that most other sources list as a legend. I guess I haven't really thought much about these aspects of history and how to best teach them to my kids (and I certainly didn't anticipate this issue or I might have spent more time researching history curricula/spines...), so I'd just like to hear from others. Any thoughts? Am I opening a can of worms here?

Thank you! ?

My kids do Singapore math workbooks when they want lighter math. Not the IP or the CWP, just the normal workbook.

Thanks, all! I think I've decided to have one mostly for ages 8-12, but with a few very bright 7 yo's (who are working on a 3rd/4th grade level). I found a parent of one such 7 yo who is happy to sit with the few 7 yo's and do a bit more hand-holding with them, so long as I give her adequate notice of what they'll be working on, which seems like a great fit, because my little 7 yo dd seems to think it's only "older boys" who get to be good at math (despite mom here being a girl with her phd in math... ) So I'll start looking at all these books more carefully and buying a few to read through carefully! I have a few of my own ideas to start off with, but need to do more reading because I really don't want to screw up and start wrong right off the bang! ?

Catch phrase, imaginiff, and apples to apples are super popular with the teens around here (I don’t have teens yet but hubby and I lead youth group at church).

Ha ha! I love those questions! I get a lot of similar ones, but I'm a mathematician, so I've never really stopped to realize that they might seem like odd questions from kids! lol. I'm all ears on this one! ?

Yes, this helps very much. I am curious if there were one or two of the books you mentioned that you would particularly recommend for getting started? While I know a lot of math, I don’t know a lot of games that relate to math. I kind of think the math itself is interesting, and have just never learned many games, so that would be an area of particular weakness for me. I do really like the format you outlined here. I am curious if you gave primarily problems that could actually be solved, or if you had them work on any unsolved problems as well? It’s an idea that I have toyed around with, but wouldn’t want to discourage young folks!

DD6 started at more a rigorous ballet school in January, but worked hard enough in the last four months to be able to graduate her class and move up to the next level that usually begins at age 9! She was thrilled. In other news, she slept through the night half of the last six days, which perhaps has me even more excited than her moving up in ballet! lol. DS8 is learning to self-monitor and this week told me he needed to go calm down in bed for a little bit and actually came out ready to have a go at daily tasks after that instead of just picking on other kids or doing a million things that are not on topic. This was a really big step for us. I was also super impressed when he read not just Harry Potter, but then classics like The Secret Garden, Little Princess, and Narnia books all in German. DD3 went from knowing 10 words 1 year ago on her 2nd bday to talking our ears off a week ago on her 3rd bday. She had tubes put in last year (we'd had no idea she was mostly deaf from fluid build up in her ears!) and didn't really talk for about 4 months after the surgery, but then she had this huge language explosion that has been super interesting to watch. I'm not sure DD4 has much to brag about, except that she's a great kid to be around and always lights up a room. ? She'd do a lot more if I wasn't always so busy with the lot of them... Lol. So she's only halfway through Singapore 1A. But she can almost swim half the pool!

Yes! My 6.5 yo was recently diagnosed dyslexic. Her phonological processing and awareness skills are somewhere around the 6th %ile and the way she processes visual information is also weird (when re-creating an image with design tiles, she will often do a rotated or reflected version, and seriously struggles to even *see* that her design isn't the same one that she was instructed to copy, even when the educational therapist pushes back a bit with things like, "Now, is that really the same as what I made? Can you compare them really carefully?"). But it has taken us almost six full months to get to this point, because the first few people we took her to just gave her basic reading and/or comprehension evals, and she passed with scores that were above where she "should" be. I kept telling people that something was still off, and I didn't know what it was, but we got caught in this net of "insurance won't pay for it so we won't test for it." So we ended up having to go to a language disorder specialist who did not accept our insurance but who finally did run through an extensive language evaluation. It was astonishing! This kid who could "read" the passages given her on the Woodcock-Johnson and other basic reading tests by her neuropsychologist and get decent scores (a full year ahead of her age, so not bad, but not great either) could only read basic CVC type stuff with 33% accuracy *when* taken out of context. And when asked to do stuff like name as many girl names as she could in 60 seconds, said kid could often only name 1-2 things in the given category. But she's so smart with such high processing speed, that she was able to con a decent number of people into thinking she was reading just fine!

It is all of life. He is just a slow-moving child. And when I try to hurry him, he just gets upset and slows down even more because he's crying or trying to explain to me details of what's going on (that I usually already understand...) The hard thing is that he *wants* to continue studying music, but also doesn't really notice if he skips it for a day... or two... or more. But when I ask him if maybe we should take a break from music for a while, he gets really upset and is emphatic that he does NOT want a break. But it's also not super motivating to him, kwim? I don't know then. His neuropsych eval said he was not ADHD, because we had some concerns that he was... So I've been working on the assumption that he wasn't. Other than medicating him, what sorts of things help in this situation? Because frequent breaks to get his energy out with exercise or something do *not* work for him - he just get absorbed in something during that 5 min break, and then is lost to me for hours (mentally, even if not physically). He really doesn't mind reading for 1-2 hours, doing math for an hour, practicing piano for an hour, shoveling the drive for a morning, or spending an entire day shoveling mulch, for example, once he gets going. But getting him going is sometimes like trying to move a mountain...

Each of my kids has one of these, with a micro-sd card loaded with whatever they want (less bulky than a flash drive): https://www.amazon.com/TT-028-MP3-Digital-Portable-Player/dp/B00CBD65WG/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1526174922&sr=8-10&keywords=mp3+speaker It's like a "shuffle" in that there is no navigation on the books, other than track number, so it does not work well if you have 100+ books. But my 6 yo has a good 60 audiobooks on it, and she just presses "next" until she finds one she wants to listen to, and my 8 yo has a few hundred classical pieces on it to help him not be distracted by other sounds in the house while he's working. My 4 and 3 yo's use theirs just as speakers, without headphones, usually, and are pretty happy with anything that comes on (I only put on things they'll like, of course :D). Pros: price point, independent speaker, very sturdy (did I mention that my current 4 yo has had hers for over two years?), pretty good quality sound, and a "line-in" so you can use it as a portable speaker. Also, you can have multiple sd cards pre-loaded with content (e.g., one with audiobooks and one with classical music, in our case), so you can switch out the content with very minimal effort. Cons: No navigation (as mentioned above), and it has an annoying flashing light that comes on every time you turn it on. You can turn it off, but I wish it would just *stay* off. For us, the pros far outweigh the cons. But ymmv. ?

Thanks! I’ll start looking into those options!

Nah, he actually tested as hyperfocused. The problem is that he hyperfocuses on his own thoughts, and it's hard to bring him back to what *I* want him to do... lol. Once he's in a grove, things go super smoothly. A few months ago, we actually switched from short lessons to more of a block schedule (e.g., instead of 30 min English reading and 30 min German, he does 1 hr of English reading every other day, and 1 hr of German reading every other day, and instead of spreading out math with his computer work, he does 1 hr of math every other day, and 1 hr of typing and coding on the in between days), and it's actually made things go much smoother. The first two months, he was getting up at 6 and finishing all his work by 1-2pm, and it was glorious. We had the whole afternoon to ourselves. Then other things started getting messed up. Dd started having a bunch of appts (evals for an eventual dyslexia diagnosis, OG tutoring to start remediation of said dyslexia, vision exams, and the start of both vision and occupational therapy for some other issues.) Add that to all of DS's existing appointment, and we suddenly had much busier afternoons. Then a few things changed in his daily work expectation (longer chores twice a week turned into shorter daily chores, he started seeing a new SLP who actually assigned daily homework, etc.) And he started getting super distracted at "in between" times again. Distracted isn't the right word, again, because his "distractions" are usually all about the same thing (that he's very focused on), but it's difficult to redirect him to what he's supposed to be tackling next. ? All that to say that once I GET him working on something, he can usually do it for hours. lol. But he'll start the day with one train of thought, and then every transition period that he faces, he come right back to that same train of thought. And about the fifth time he brings it up to me to discuss it from a different angle, I'm just repeating the mantra, "What are you supposed to be working on right now?"

Thank you all so much for the ideas. You’re right, I need to change my perspective. He begged to start his days with music, because he really does love it, but maybe it really would work better to start the day with a little vigorous exercise, and then end the day with music, since he finds that more intrinsically motivating than some of his other stuff. We used to have handwriting split up more, but he struggles with transitions a lot, and so we try to condense his schedule. I will have to re-think about how to possibly re-distributed this… Also, today went much more smoothly when I shortened the meal times. It helped that I gave them food that I knew they would eat easily, and quickly. I am wondering if I can get them in the habit of finishing in less time by feeding them foods that will go over more easily for a few weeks, and then once the habit of finishing more quickly is established, maybe bring back other foods that are not as exceedingly popular around here. We used to watch more science and history videos at lunchtime, but even a little bit of TV every day seems to really mess with them and their ability to self regulate. I don’t understand it, and I find it frustrating, because I need time to eat too! ? I recently it has been all audiobooks from the library at lunchtime. I’ve never considered using breakfast time that way, because they’re so cranky, but that is a good idea as well. Thank you all so much for the good ideas. I think I’ve just been overwhelmed lately with the amount of therapies that we are going to, and I wasn’t putting into perspective that if music doesn’t happen every single day, and if he doesn’t quite as much handwriting practice in as we’d like, it’s really not the end of the world. I know a lot of what we do it’s just life, but the result is that I often feel like I’m not just failing with school, but that I’m also failing with life right now… I want to do better next year, which is why I’m trying to think through all of this in advance. ?

I'll preface with: I don't like the idea of elementary aged kids working 8 hours a day. I like kids getting outside, playing in dirt, running and jumping and generally being kids. I just want to get my "basics" in, but I'm having a heckuva time figuring out how to fit everything in. The puzzle pieces for my almost 9 yo that I've been trying to fit together are: 30 min daily piano practice (his choice to play) 30 min daily viola practice (his choice to play) 1 hour (roughly) eating breakfast 30 min morning routine (getting dressed, brush teeth, straighten room, etc.) 1 hr reading (half English, half German) 30 min writing/copywork (only one language daily, it's only a few sentences, but he's really slow at writing - it's something we're working on) 1 hr Math/Computer stuff like typing, Code.org (he loves to code, and I feel like typing is important, given his struggles to write) 30 min morning walk/exercise 30 min family time (reading bible, sing a song) 1 hr (roughly) eating lunch 30 min Social thinking and speech homework from his speech therapist and psychologist 30 min daily chores + time wasted transitioning or goofing off, because... you know... kids. That's 8 hours if NO time is wasted, and usually way, way more. Then we hit afternoon, which usually involves therapies (speech, OT, dyslexia tutoring for another child, etc.) and have us running around outside the house. So what's wrong with this plan?? Something obviously is, because we're not getting it all done and I'm not even doing any science or history, other than an occasional audiobook or movie at lunch sometimes. I'm not doing any art, which they beg for terribly. We generally make a little time in the afternoons for fun read alouds, but it's at the expense of other things. I'd say that most days, we get half to two-thirds of things on our list checked off. I'm thinking I might be able to cut mealtime in half, but my kids truly eat a lot (each kid eats something like 3 eggs, sausages, banana, a bowl of yogurt & berries, and a bowl of cereal for breakfast...) and that takes time. If I cut them off at 30 minutes, they spend the next two hours begging me for more food until snacktime. Was it a mistake to let him take both piano and viola? He loves them both and practices cheerfully and cries when I suggest dropping one of them. Typing seems vital since there's no real end in sight to handwriting struggles. Coding is important to him because he really wants to go into robotics as he gets older. I've considered cutting the second language, but I haven't been able to bring myself to that and give up his bilingualism... Any suggestions would be appreciated. Come fall, my other kids will be 7, 5, and 3 yo. I find their (academic) schedules manageable, since my 7 yo has less than an hour total of work, including her violin and chores, and my 5 yo has less than 20 minutes of things on her list of things to do. It's really the 9 yo whose schedule I feel is unmanageable at this point, but am unsure how to handle it. I could do more fun/artsy stuff with my younger three while he does his own work, but he'd be heartbroken if we did that, and I feel like fun/artsy stuff is just as important for him as it is for the younger kids.

My kids like classical music, Story of the World, and foreign language audiobooks in the car.

My kids beg me for science experiments. Literally. And I'm just not "with it" in a lot of areas right now. The last two years in a row, we were more focused on nature (I use the word "focused" a bit loosely here...), and we did lots of group activities with friends that had to do with animals and plants. But they really want science experiments that they can do, so I'm thinking that maybe next year we can just build some sort of science around various experiments. This next year, kids will be 9, 7, 5, and 3. I don't need lots of books (for them), as I'm cool with putting a hundred books on any topic on hold at the library and reading through them whenever we want. But I need some sort of spine that involves lots of easy experiments I can do with stuff mostly from the grocery store. I found a website that lists half a dozen different ideas for growing crystals, that I thought could be fun for a month if we just hit up the grocery store for extra salt, sugar, and borax and get books from the library, but I need more than just one month of crystals to make them happy next year, I think.... lol. Does anyone have something like this? We did do the Inquiry in action for a while, and my kids had a great time with that a few years ago. Maybe I should just do it again?

Does anyone with experience in creating a math club/math circle want to talk with me about what they did? I'm not thinking of something for silicone valley kiddos or anything. My community just doesn't have much math enrichment, and I've been approached numerous times to see if I would be interested in doing something. I guess I talk about math being fun a bit too much.... At any rate, I'd like ideas on having some sort of biweekly (?) math club sort of meeting where we look at fun topics and consider interesting topics that are still accessible to elementary schoolers. A few years ago I taught a bunch of 6-10 year olds some graph theory and we talked about Eulerian and Hamiltonian circuits, along with brief ideas of the proof of when Eulerian circuits exist and the somewhat mind-blowing idea (for them, at least! :D) that even a computer doesn't really have a "good" (efficient) way of finding the least-cost Hamiltonian circuit on an edge-weighted graph, as well as the five and four color theorems of coloring maps. I had a lot of fun, my kid had a lot of fun, but it was clear by the end that maybe the other moms hadn't really read my class description and were more just looking for something to help their struggling student learn their math facts better... Not exactly what I had in mind... Then I tried to organize a Math Kangaroo two years in a row, and not a single person in my community expressed the slightest interest (not even the folks who are interested in a math club??). Given that somewhat disappointing turn, I'm not sure how much I have in me to invest in making some sort of stellar math club... I have plenty of topic ideas: cryptography is always straight-forward and well-liked, coding (e.g., ISBNs, CCs, other error correcting codes), number theory (prime number theorem vs twin prime conjecture, other kinds of cool primes), more on graph theory and/or combinatorics (kids always seem to like Pascal's triangle and its generalizations), etc. But I'm not really sure how to do this without putting an awful lot of work into it. I'd like it to be interesting to accelerated, math-loving kids, while still accessible to non-accelerated kids. I'm just in the brainstorming stages, I guess, because I haven't even decided whether or not to move forward. I was hoping some advice from the hive might help me decide if this is something I actually want to offer or not. ?

She is reading more cheerfully. She is making fewer mistakes And reading more fluently. She is paying more attention and focusing better, as opposed to constantly being distracted by the pictures. She still spends a fair amount of time looking at the pictures, of course! ? But before, she spent more time looking at the pictures and the words, and now she spends more time reading the words, then looking at the pictures.Her working memory is awful, but I find she can remember the sentences she is reading more easily as well. Previously, she would often labor through reading a sentence, only to get to the end, and ask me to re-read the sentence she just read, because she couldn’t remember what it actually said. And earlier this week, she chose to read twice as much as I usually ask her to. Granted, the book was at a very interesting part! Nonetheless, she has never before read longer in an interesting part. Previously, she would only ask me to keep reading. We started just having her do it for 30 seconds per day at the beginning. Just the tapping itself. She can now do it for between 10 and 15 minutes. I don’t make her do anything else at the same time, but I have three other children, so the home is rife with distractions. ? Having a sucker to look forward to you afterwards keep her motivated. Yesterday, she wanted to try typing while jumping on the trampoline, but she found that too difficult. So she sat on the trampoline, bouncing lately she tapped, instead. Her scores were definitely worse, but not too bad still. Eventually, I do plan to add other kinds of training in. We’ve just had sick kids in the house, and a sick mama, so I have not been overly motivated the last week or two. While it’s possible that her results are not linked to the IM app, Because she did start violin lessons one month ago as well, I suspect it is more the app, because she has not learned very much on the violin yet And she has been tapping for around two months now. But I’ll just throw this out there for a full disclosure!

Bump? I found this article and thought it was interesting. I'm just looking for real-life examples. ? https://dyslexiaida.org/literacy-dyslexia-revealed-through-bilingual-brain-development/

I also found these resources: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0255761414546245 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4722115/ http://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Music-Dyslexia-Teachers.pdf I think I'm going to print the last, at the least, and take it with me tomorrow to discuss with the teacher. Fingers crossed! ETA The first article here is actually most interesting I think. And the full text is available as well. Apparently, increasing the size of the music had very strong positive effects, the coloring the notes actually had slight negative effects, despite being preferred by the students. Super interesting!