Just to add on to what I posted before: My idea about teaching my kid basic music notation/theory is roughly akin to my idea that I need to sign him up for basic swimming lessons. I don't expect him to become a concert pianist any more than I expect him to be the next Michael Phelps. But I think being able to read notes and also having a decent swimming stroke are two good skills to have in life. Will he really use either of these? Maybe not. But he could if he wanted to.

I think something to encourage the phase-out of plastic bags is good. I've lived in Europe, and even there there seemed to be enough plastic grocery bags to go around to use for trash purposes. I think plastic grocery bags are proof of spontaneous generation. If you have two, somehow you suddenly have more. Where I lived in Europe, if you forgot to bring a bag there was usually a bin someplace by checkout where you could grab one of the case boxes, you know, one of the things the boxes/can of food was shipped in. We would use the box to collect trash, or to collect old paper that we'd take to the paper bin. I like boxes more than bags. Boxes are very useful. Lots and lots of people who never use reusable shopping bags also buy the little trash bags for their bathroom wastebasket. I don't understand it either. But I don't think reducing free grocery bags is going to cause a major buy-out of the small sized Glad-bags.

Yes, it looks like it is Attic. I just looked at GP's Greek sample on their website, and I'm sort of scratching my head with it. From the sample pages, it looks really slow and easy. And it has puzzles! No pictures though. Where are the pictures? I need to admire some Greeks when I'm translating! But then I looked at the TOC and, wow, after Ch. 2 it looks like the pace is super fast. The book is only 160 pages, and according to the TOC on p. 66 you start chapter seven, which looks really heavy. Weak aorist active, plus imperfect and future of eimi, and the present infinitive, and more weak aorist actives and vocabulary, all in eight pages! Maybe someone who has used this book can comment on how that chapter pans out with a 13yo student learning Greek for the first time. To me, it looks more like an exam-prep book than a textbook, the super-simple ch. 1 notwithstanding.

Like I said above, most Greek courses are written for college classes because that's where the vast majority of Greek classes are offered these days. An introductory language course is an introductory language course, imo. Both Athenaze and Reading Greek are laid out with enough illustrations/white space/sidebar notes to make them non-intimidating for younger students. Attic will be helpful for reading the classic Athenian plays, Sophocles and the rest. Homer is in Homeric, which is its own creature and would need its own manual to learn. The classic Histories by Thucydides are Attic, and the second half of Athenaze I begins to introduce these (I am only familiar with the 1st edition!). Some poetry and plays are in Ionic or Doric. These dialects are similar enough to Attic that they are usually read by people who know Attic and then use a "crib sheet" to get used to the differences. Bryn Mawr publishes various Greek texts with "helps" for the eccentric things, and these are a great resource when branching out from a textbook.

I have the goal of teaching my kid at least basic musical notation and basic theory. If he wants to do more, then I'll decide how much more we can do. My husband is 40, and just now he has realized that he wants, no needs, to learn how to sing a basic tune from notes. But since he was never taught anything about music he is really having a rough go with it. Because I had a few years of piano as a kid I'm able to help him understand some basics, but it's a lot harder to learn something completely new at 40 than 7. If your kid doesn't like an "instrument" then they don't need to have one. The most common form of music in the world is the human voice. And most kids like singing. Use a piano or an online program to tune their pitch a bit and then teach them how to sight sing from a piece of sheet music and they're set for life.

Oh, ok. I don't agree. Just letting you know. :)

Um, yeah, that's why I suggested something by Hawthorne that wasn't Scarlet Letter. Walden isn't difficult. He talks about buying boots and watching his pond when he falls asleep. You don't have to read the whole thing to get the point. I found Emerson much more obtuse.

Hawthorne wrote some short stories, which are easier to get through than trying to do the full-blown Scarlet Letter. Walden (yeah...it's annoying, but a good exemplar of numerous things). A Norton Anthology should give some good ideas.

The answers are in the Teacher's Edition. Maybe the reviews were thinking that there would be answers in the back of the textbook??? I don't know very much about the difference between the editions. I used the 1st. It looks like the 2nd they have a separate workbook? Didn't realize that they were so (apparently?) different. So anyone taking my advice above, I'm thinking of the 1st edition! I have seen 1st edition Athenaze at public libraries over the years, so it's worth seeing if you can get your hands on it and page through it. Most Greek textbooks are "college" textbooks because that is when Greek is normally only taught these days. I haven't seen anyone here mention Latin, but if you're worried about struggling with Greek a year with a kids-level Latin book would pave most of the grammar. While I did Greek before Latin, I see the logic of doing things the other way around. When I did Latin I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the ablative case was there for, since Greek constructs that case completely differently. If I knew the ablative case first, both the Latin and Greek forms would have been easier for me.

You want movie versions? Because two more I can think of that don't have movie versions is The Secret Garden and You're a Good Man Charlie Brown. You may be able to find the Broadway recordings at your library. If they're familiar with the story they can simply place the songs in their context.

Yes, if you aren't under time constraints, I think a week is about the minimum. You're looking at at least 14 hours in the airplane, so altogether at least a day of travel each way. Even if you're a good traveler, it's exhausting. Then if you're rushing around everywhere....it could cause a good case of Jerusalem Syndrome. If you can make it ten days you'll have time to go to a church service (if that's your thing, the Christian Information Center will give you all the details), spend some time just floating in the Dead Sea, be able to accept an invitation to come over and visit with some shay (tea), and do something crazy, like hike down the cliffs of Arbel. Make a list of your must-sees, then see where they are and how you'll get to them. And do realize that if you are crossing into the West Bank you'll have to budget time for possible checkpoints. Though usually the road down to Jericho was pretty open. If you want to swim in the Mediterranean, you can try to make it up to Haifa while you're around Tiberius. Or you can go over to Ashkelon, which is another day trip from Jerusalem. That's the best part about a trip to Israel - when you can open a conversation with "So this one time, when I was lying on the beach at Ashkalon..." :D

Lulu.com actually has a good selection of homeschool downloads. Though it's hard to browse unless it's tagged "homeschool" or such.

Some teachers in the link I posted in my previous post say they like Athenaze more than Reading Greek. The difference between them, in my rather on-the-fly opinion, is that in Athenaze grammar is presented more inductively, while in Reading Greek the grammar is presented in a more explicative fashion. Students who have an "ear" for language and have a good understanding of grammar will do fine with Athenaze. But those needing more explanation on these things would find Athenaze confusing sometimes, and might be better off with Reading Greek.

It was my college textbook, but since I was dual enrollment I was 16 at the time. There is another thread here where a member says she is planning on using Athenaze in Upper Elementary, but she has a background in Greek, so that puts a different spin on things. For younger students I think just doing a slow pace would bring it down to a manageable level. Each chapter has two parts, so you could take it as slowly as a part a week and just spread out the exercises and review them thoroughly from the Teacher's manual. Up to lesson 10 the lessons are pretty simple. Here's a link I found of teachers discussing how they teach Greek at secondary schools, with some good tips in there of adapting a textbook to a lower level: http://people.umass.edu/glawall/greeksc1.html Didn't I read somewhere that one of the Classical publishers was coming out with a Classical Greek textbook for lower level? Details are escaping me right now. I don't want to sound all anti-Koine, but many of the Koine textbooks I've paged through seem to simplify so much that they become confusing, if that makes any sense. Plus, many limit their texts/exercises to just the NT text, which limits the storyline and the type of vocabulary and structure they offer. I mean, in the initial exercises they have to use very simple examples, but if you are limited to phrases from the Bible, that means you'll have to change the text to make it fit the grammar you're drilling, and that means changing the text of the Bible, which usually makes the authors uncomfortable, so then things just get weird. And then you get things like at the end of the chapter a number that tells you the percentage of the Bible you can read, which is just odd. Maybe there's a good Koine book out there that I haven't seen yet. It's possible. Just saying that most of what I've seen looks problematic.

5 days. Okay. My suggestion is to rent a car in Tel Aviv and then drive to Tiberius. It's a moderate size city and has a good mix of modern hotels and little B&B type places and good restaurants. From there you can skip over to Capernaum (good reconstructed Synagogue and St. Peter's House). There are a lot of kibbutz's in that area, too. You can also drive up to Nazareth, which in the downtown area is a good representative of a what a "good" Arab town is like (the population is 100% ethnically Palestinian, but they are technically Israeli Arabs). The Church of the Annunciation is there, obviously, but there is also a nice suq and a modern shopping district. From Tiberius you can drive down to Jerusalem, either going down by Jericho or through Samaria. West Jerusalem has the pricey and fancy hotels, but West Jerusalem is where most of the bombing attacks take place. If you think about it, it makes (logical) sense: since the Israeli army has mandatory conscription the bombers hit the places where Israeli young people are apt to hang out, buses, nightclubs, coffee shops, etc. The terrorists won't risk bombing someplace where their own cousin might be, kwim? East Jerusalem is pretty economically depressed, though there are some nice parts. That's why my suggestion is to stay in a nice place in the Old City which employs Palestinians. I stayed here once: http://www.luth-guesthouse-jerusalem.com/ and it was very nice and pretty quiet. I could hear the morning call for prayer, but that's something that you'll get pretty much everywhere. The nice thing about a place like that is that you are in walking distance of the major Jerusalem sites (the Wailing Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are literally a 5 min walk away) and you can easily move from East to West Jerusalem. The employees there will be able to tell you what restaurants and shops in West Jerusalem they would recommend (and would be safe), and also what shops in the suq in the Old City they recommend (but they might just recommend the shops owned by their cousin or uncle, so use your judgment). From Jerusalem you can make day trips to Bethlehem and the Dead Sea. Though the Dead Sea would be an all-day thing, but there's spas there! You are making me want to go back. I miss it so much.

If you learn Attic, you can read Koine no problem. If you learn Koine, Attic will be a bit of a mystery. For example. in my Attic class we read parts of the Book of Acts for our second year literature selection. But I have seen people who only know Koine complain that the Book of Hebrews is written in "bad Greek." Which is a really stupid thing to say, since Hebrews just uses some forms that are more common in Attic than in Koine. There are more types of Greek (Ionic, Homeric, etc) but they are generally only learned after learning Attic. Though I did see a Greek program once that insisted that the best way to learn Greek was by way of Homeric. I forget the name of it now. It's an interesting idea. If your kid is really, really, really interested in Homer it could be worth tracking down just for fun. The Teacher's Manual for Athenaze is VERY thorough. My college prof often complained that it was written for Greek teachers who didn't know Greek. So if you're worried about guiding/grading that might be a good selling point for you. It's a good book for younger students, I think. It has a semi-interesting story and some fine illustrations. There is also the books called "Reading Greek" by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers' Greek Course and published by Cambridge. It comes with an Independent Study Guide and Workbook and Textbook (so you have to buy three separate books which are used concurrently, which is how a lot of European language books are set up, but it might take some getting used to). It is, as far as I can see (I have it sitting on my shelf, but haven't actually used it) VERY thorough. It is for independent learners, so there is a lot of hand-holding and review. The story line isn't quite as (unintentionally?) humorous as Athenaze from what I can see, but it also has some good easy quality selections and good illustrations.

My $0.02: If you want your kid to remember facts to recall them on demand you have to at least make "crib sheets" with the key terms and review them periodically. At least once a month. For history, this would mean reviewing the notebook pages/lapbook/timeline you've made. But, even if they don't recall on demand, the WTM system of cycling through everything three times means that even if they don't immediately recall facts, the repetition will push the information deep into the memory banks. So when they are asked to learn it again, it will just be a matter of quick review and refresh. When the kid gets to college and the prof announces that Newtons Laws of Physics will be a question on the final exam he'll just have to look the information up, read it a few times to himself, and then wander down to see what's happening in the Student Union get a head start on his other subjects.

I agree that you should go up to the Galilee area, or, as the local call it, Kinnerat. Very pretty and very safe. Tel Aviv, imo, is an overpriced knockoff of a cheap European city. I mean, if your idea of vacation is spending the day at the beach and the night at a nightclub, Tel Aviv is fine. But there are better, and less expensive, places to do that sort of thing in the world. In the Galilee area you could visit a kibbutz. They're everywhere, but the one's up there are generally more open to tourists. The Golan heights is very nice, but a bit rural. Dan is amazing. If you are hitting a lot of the national parks there is a pass you can buy that gets you admission to all of them. For Jerusalem - you can stay on the West side in a (Jewish-run) hotel, or you can grab a reputable hostel in the Armenian or Christian Quarter in the Old City. The Lutheran one is very nice and very safe. Much more authentic, if that's your thing. If you do much around the Old City, like go down to the Wailing Wall or go to any of the Christian sites in the area, make sure you pack a "modesty kit." This mean shoulders and knees covered. It's best if your shirt reaches your elbows and you wear full length khaki pants. Skirts aren't terribly necessary, but they are appreciated. I knew some girls who liked to stuff a "sarong" type wrap or quick pull-on skirt in their backpack for situations where they felt they needed more. If you are going on your own, be aware that some sites require you to have a certified tour guide with you. The inter-city buses are safe and reliable. But they aren't really set up to hit the tourist routes. Renting a car is a fine alternative. Most road signs are in English. Getting to Bethlehem can be tricky, depending on what's happening at the time you're there. The Christian Information Center (http://www.cicts.org/) right inside Jaffa gate should be able to give up-to-date instructions on how to go. The Dead Sea should be on everyone's bucket list. It'll be gone in a century. If you really want to see the Red Sea you can go down to Eilat. But there's not much to do there but party, so if that's not your thing I wouldn't spend the time trying to get down there.

If you have kale in there too, then you won't notice the beet greens. Just make sure to wash the leaves really well. Sand in your juice sucks.

You can juice/eat the greens. But they're more like chard, not beet like the root. The greens are super healthy - if you like chard.

It's not quite the style you're looking for, but this one http://www.amazon.com/Alices-Adventures-Wonderland-Austin-Dobson/dp/0670112771/ref=sr_1_21?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362083860&sr=1-21&keywords=Arthur+Rackham with the Arthur Rackham illustrations is a classic. Pretty, but a bit.....eh.

I knew a guy who shipped Media and wrapped the books in t-shirts. But even he said that he wouldn't risk doing that again. If you really want to avoid peanuts/bubble wrap/newspaper, the rattiest white rags you have laying around might pass inspection. I just hoard all the packing material that gets sent to me so I can re-use it in cases like this. With all of USPS's money troubles, they're doing more inspections these days, if my unscientific observation is anything to go by.

I have no idea what educators in your area or doing, or even if what they are doing is because of CC specifically. My point is that if you read the article from the NYT you would know what, exactly, the creator of CC means by introducing more nonfiction into the school curriculum.

I don't understand what you're saying. Did you read the NYT article I linked to? "Narrative nonfiction" is just another name for what everyone around here calls "living books." I mean, really, how many times do people here say, "here's a great living math book! Or ask, "how do I teach science using more living books?" A good part of any good book-based curriculum is already nonfiction (supposing, of course, that one does not fall into the trap of relying heavily on historical fiction, which, *ahem*, does not count as living books). Narrative nonfiction is the new mode of Intellectual Inquiry. I quite enjoy reading books like Omnivore's Dilemma and I wish I had received some training in that genre myself. And no, not even all my college comp classes on how to write a research paper give me the specific set of skills to write a book like that. So I wouldn't expect reading Shakespeare to teach me that either.

Yep, done 100EZ and I did Attic. But the Attic was in college, and with Athenaze. Interesting points about learning Greek with Athenaze. It's good for people who can grasp grammar intuitively, I think, but I'm not that sort of person (though I wish I was). The story kept things interesting, at least until you get bogged down in Herodotus and Thucydides (are we still fighting a war? oh, yes, we are. No, we're making a speech about going to war, oh goodie). I found the verb chart at the beginning of the book invaluable. A classmate even copied it into two legal-sized pages and laminated it for everyone. Sending you a PM.