I think the key to good sound is not to blow too hard. But explaining breath control to children can be challenging. :laugh: Have you seen the Recorder Power video? It's fun, and nice to hear what the goal is supposed to sound like, lol.

We might be married to the same person, indeed. ;) I'm trying to objective as I think this through. Because passive-aggressive and/or rude is how it comes across very often. I tell him "It's very hurtful to me when you do X" and he is very sorry, though he doesn't really understand where things went wrong, and says he didn't mean to hurt me. Well, okay, that's good. But still, there's the adage that you believe what people do, not what they say. Remembering that that may not apply to him is tough. Right now we're running on a code word "blue" that was generated out of the keys incident (I wasn't the one looking for the keys, I just observed the incident, and I think that emotional distance helped me see the problem, and not just take it personally). When he does weird things I just say "blue." Because when he's in the middle of a weird thing, rational reasoning has left his brain and taken a vacation on the moon or something. Arguing just makes us both upset. I talked to him the other day about the possibility of him being an Aspie, and he wasn't sure about that. He said that if that was the case, then it meant that he could "never change." As in, never be cured. He said that all his life he's felt like a bad person. Not like an evil person, but bad like he's wrong, a wrong sort of person for this world. I think he has been still waiting on life to fall together and be "normal" for him. That hasn't happened in his 40+ years, but I think he was still hoping. I sent him some links about some local ASD support groups, including one for gifted aspergers. He didn't want to read them, he was afraid to read them. But he read one with morning with a story of a woman who was diagnosed as an adult and at first he was like "I'm nothing like that!" but as he thought it over today he saw some things, especially social not-understandings, that he realized fit him perfectly. I'll also send him the socialthinking link. I think just knowing that he's not bad, and that there's people trying to help, would be good for him.

This is my understanding of traditional classical (as opposed to neoclassical). The grammar years are spent learning languages, so that in the upper school the students could use those languages to learn content. And not just history or literature either. Reading Euclid or Newton required proficiency in Greek and Latin. We've side-stepped (mostly) that issue today, people who went through the old system added on to Euclid and Newton and we have their results in English now. So, then, we can say "oh, well in that case we should just change grammar school to mean learning the `language` of everything" and we get to neoclassical. I see the value in both points of view, but I do have more sympathy for language-early/content-later. But for me languages also includes a modern language or two as well, also starting early. I don't know how it will work out in the end (living in an immersion environment gives a different level of experience), but as a guiding philosophy I'm just rolling with it. I have the LCC book, and I poke around on the MP website, but...I use very little recommended by either. But I still feel I'm in the same stream as them.

The bolded is where I am sort of stuck at. I'm not sure how the points I mentioned above fit into the DSM description of ASD. Or if it fits into enough check marks to get a diagnosis. But what if the specific traits are severe enough that they can be overall debilitating? What if the Person's strengths don't really function that well because of the weaknesses? Getting a formal diagnosis probably won't be feasible, though there are probably a few other specific LD's lurking in the Person as well. Oh well. So whether he would meet the criteria is just hypothetical wondering. But it's just so....it's frustrating, not knowing.

Okay, so, one thing really bugs me about the documentary. The exchange students are placed in one of the top of the top high schools in Seoul (and presumably the country) with wealthy parents paying for afterschool tutoring. And then they make a huge deal out of the fact that the students there all passed the math GSCE, and the fact that poor, rural Welsh students find it difficult. Um, that's not a fair comparison. At all. Compare the GSCE performance with Eton or the like. PISA rankings really don't say much except for the level of achievement gap, not between countries, but within countries.

I'd x-post on the LC board. There's other resources you can do at home besides Megawords to remediate dyslexia. Yes, Megawords is usually used in schools for remediation of a language disability. You're already doing it. I'm sure the experienced folks on LC can help you out with it, and discuss if there's other things you can do to help your daughter. But if she is dyslexic you need to make sure you work with her brain, not against it.

Those people. Yeah. "Well, I noticed that you didn't have any X, so I got you some!!" :huh: Maybe, just maybe, I don't have any because I don't want any? But no, I mean, who ever could even live without great thing X! Of course you want one! :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: Really, I don't want a toaster. I have a toaster oven. We're low carb and low wheat anyways. No, it's not because I'm too poor to buy one. No, it's not because it will "make my life so much easier." No, it's not even because I don't know how to use one (you press down the thing on the side to put the bread right, is that how it goes? really?). I just don't want one. And I have absolutely no judgment against people who do like their toaster. Really I don't. ^ Just one example out of so, so, so many.

Is that only for children or teens? The Person is an adult. Sigh, this is why I don't get people wanting to get evals for their kids. Wait too long, and the problems don't disappear, the help most definitely does.

That's really helpful. When I read descriptions of ASD/Aspie I'm sometimes not sure what exactly they mean. When I hear over-literal or lack of empathy I think of someone like Sheldon. This Person is not always like Sheldon, but there's some similarities. But there's also the word "sometimes" as in sometimes over-literal and sometimes lacks empathy. I'm not always sure if that means the same person can be both, or some aspies are emphatic and others not. So, let's say a person can care about some things quite meticulously. Always thinking "what do I need to be doing about X? how does this other thing relate to X?" Is that rigidity, obsessiveness, or something else? If the X thing stays a priority, even if there are other urgent but short term issues that surface that need to responded to? This Person also has EF-issues. Trivial but typical example - Person decided to make coffee and some eggs for breakfast. He fried the eggs first, and then started the coffee maker. I mean, it could be an honest mistake, "oh shoot, I forgot to start the coffee first, ugh, I guess we'll have to eat the eggs before they get cold and pour the coffee after." But I just asked him why he did it, and his response was that he just decided to make the eggs first, and then do the coffee. When I explained that the coffee maker takes time, and that if he did that first the coffee would be done when the eggs were, he saw the logic in that, but that he "just didn't think of that." And I suspect that in the future if he makes coffee and eggs, whether or not he starts the coffee first will be purely accidental. He doesn't have a good sense of time, as in the time things take, or how to overlap the times things take to complete.

I think one the issues may be that since it's so low-budget, lots of people run their club out of their homes. My club met in the coordinator's basement. That makes it hard to bring in strangers. We were involved because of word of mouth (another local homeschool mom we knew found out about the group from another contact she knew). But secret group is right - my brother (who was an officer) really wanted to move our regular meetings to the free library meeting room so we could advertise and get new members, but got a lot of resistance on that from the coordinator. :confused: I don't know how hard it would be to form your own group in your county. Our meetings weren't super magical, we just talked about the 4H's for a moment, then played along with Robert's Rule's of Order to talk about upcoming 4H events, any events our group was planning for ourselves, the budget, and had someone present about their project or play a game or something. Our group was super small, only 3 or 4 families really.

Being over literal is what I was thinking. But the Person gets jokes and word play and figures of speech fine, and says those sorts of things fine on his own. And the Person does have a lot of empathy, but another issue is that the Person doesn't always clue in that a person is seeking empathy unless it is perfectly clear or bluntly communicated. But once he's talking to someone in emotional distress he's very warm and inviting and caring. When other people tell the Person that his behavior is unexpected he will seem to be honestly confused. He understands that people are telling him that putting laundry in means starting the wash, but he doesn't really understand where the connection is - "I don't get it. I don't see it." When told that other people find his behavior upsetting he is very sorry, but then he gets frustrated because he then tries really hard to think of everything and do everything right, but he still somehow manages to do something else to "screw up" and all his effort is "wrong" anyways.

One thing that got me through the middle school years was 4H. 4H is cheap. 4H is more than just animals. There's also writing and sewing, and nature studies, and whatever else your state office has thought of. And then you get free admission to the county fair every summer (at least, that's how it worked for us). Kids can do projects on their own, or an adult can coordinate a class if it's something they have expertise in. I did a writing class in 4H that was taught by a 4H alumni, and it was almost exactly like Bravewriter (that's how the teacher taught it, not how 4H designed it, but 4H isn't picky about how the end project is done). 4H was really flexible, but had enough oversight to keep a group on track and goal oriented. I'm really surprised more homeschoolers don't plug into it, especially secular ones aching for a social group. Has it really fallen apart recently? Is it hard to start a group now? Or did I just really luck out with living in a county with a really good extension office?

That likely means that he will not be required to issue refunds for services not provided. Just an fyi for those who have a lot of money tied up there. Unless Landry is super nice (like that restaurant owner upthread) you're probably not getting any money back. Totally stinks all around. I get the purpose of LLC's and why it's a good idea to make one if you start a business. But as a consumer, if I see "LLC" after the name of a small business I have little more caution. It stands for "limited liability company" for a reason.

Well, I did find one showing of 2D rather far away. But, grr, we're going with SIL and her family, and her husband doesn't like that theater. So she bought tickets for the theater they like (which is 3D). I tried to suggest that there's a reason why we didn't want 3D, but DH was embarrassed, and just said he didn't want to go. and Crazypants piped in and said he wanted 3D (cool tech appeal, I guess). So, ugh. I hate that DH feels he can't self-advocate. I hate that I'm the one trying to calm things down when they're "polite" and overextend. I hate that I'm the only one who is going to tell my kid that it's okay if you don't feel comfortable doing something everyone else thinks is normal. Crazypants has never used earplugs. I think he would hate them. He has his headphones he uses for his computer, maybe I can pack those in. And I'll have him wear a sweatshirt with a hoodie. And we can have quiet time when we get home. At least I will.

So, I know a Person (a person, lol, this person is not me) who seems pretty normal, but sometimes does weird things. Does this pattern of weird things have a name? 1. Person was sitting on the computer doing something. Someone else comes in and rummages around the cabinet where the car keys are kept, can't find them, starts wondering out loud where the keys are. Leaves, comes back, still wondering out loud where the keys are. The Person on the computer notices the someone looking for the car keys. The someone asks the Person on the computer if he know where the keys are. That Person says "yes, I have them in my pocket" and then carries on on the computer. When the other person says in a huff "give me the keys, I have to go" the Person looks shocked and surprised, and hands over the keys. 2. Someone is cooking Christmas dinner and the Person comes up to them and starts bothering them. The someone tells them to stop bothering them and go open the wine. The Person says "No." Just that, "no." Odd, the someone thinks they're fooling around. The Person goes and sits down at the dinner table. When dinner is being served the someone asks the Person why the wine isn't open yet. The Person looks surprised and confused and says it's because no one gave him the wine opener and he doesn't know where it is (this was at a close relative's house, btw, the Person has been in the kitchen cupboards there before). 3. One time, someone was headed out, and asked the Person to put a load of dirty clothes in the washer while the someone was out. The Person puts the dirty clothes in the machine, and that's it, nothing else (Person knows how to wash clothes, and had used the machine previously). When asked the Person says that he was capable of turning the machine on, he has fingers and can press the buttons and all that, but he just didn't think of it. When told that "putting a load in the washer" includes turning it on, he looks doubtful and confused. There's other little things like that. But those are the most obvious. Is there a name for this sort of behavior? I mean a technical term, something other than "clueless" or "lazy" or other not-nice things.

OP, threads here can be quite free-wheeling, can't they? We all have our issues, sorry. I understand the desire for physical books. But I think the posts here are bringing up a few issues that's you'd need to decide how they fit with your own situation. Independent learning from books at the higher grades used to be the norm, yes. It worked well for some kids. I'm one it crashed and burned on, especially for math. So the question is, can your child even learn independently? Can she learn all subjects independently, or would she need guidance with a few. And no, saying "come to me if you have any questions" isn't guidance. I mean, it makes sense, but kids are weird. Also, in the upper grades is where dialectical learning really takes off, and many teens appreciate that way of learning. You miss all of that with independent self-study. There definitely a lot you can do with some good subject encyclopedias and second-hand lit books from the thrift store. The practice of outlining from an encyclopedia is a good one. You'd have to teach it at first, but then she could do it on her own and you could spot check. There's websites which have "questions to ask about any book" lists. With an on-level lit book from the thrift store and a grade appropriate list, you can have her write up really good book reports. Spend a few moments talking about her book, the report, and any writing issues you can see, and you're getting pretty good. The key here, though, is to do it a lot. Make up for not having the luxury of expert targeted questions and writing advice by doing more, more, more. More content, more variety, more pages. Deep learning is great and all, but there's something to be said for breadth learning as well. This is all assuming your student doesn't have any learning disabilities. That's another ball of wax. Of course, scour your community for any and all free or cheap enrichment. Free zoo days. Free museum talks. Free backstage tours of the local playhouse. There's transport cost of course, but there's so much value to just getting out and exploring the things others take largely for granted. You probably already know that, but just mentioning it. Also, I would caution you not to be penny-wise but pound-foolish. DE looks like a great deal, but it can cost more in the long term. If you stay low income, and your student gets high SAT or ACT scores and applies to University as a freshman, she could get an absolute free ride at super-pricey schools. DE can be great as a stop-gap for the last few years of hs, but only if she doesn't over-extend or over-reach and garners a high GPA. This eventual full need scholarship will cost less (long term) than just shunting a bright student into CC. I would think about test-prep more than I would think about counting on the CC. As for particulars - for Spanish I would get everything I can find at the thrift shops and just try them all out. I'm such sticky fingers at thrift stores. Even if I don't think it's perfect at that moment, the luxury of just turning around and grabbing a resource off the shelf is great. For language learning multiple resources are great. Do you have a park nearby where Spanish speakers congregate with their kids? Go hang out there. Take an old phrase book and ask a friendly looking person "excuse me, but how do you say...???" Then practice it. Learn their different dialects and she'll be awesome. Grab a simple Spanish book and an old bilingual dictionary and make translations. They'll be bad translations at first, but this is where doing more more more comes in. Do more, and more will come. What is she interested in studying or doing? Nurture it with everything you've got. Build a solid base, sure, but really nurture that passion. That will carry a lot of other things along with it. Curriculum resale events are awesome. Most of the pricey things in my signature I got for a few dollars at things like that. Some are run by closed groups I wouldn't join, but they usually let anyone come to the curriculum sales. But it makes it hard to find out when they're holding these things if you aren't in the loop, kwim? They're usually in the spring, so I would start trying to hunt them down now. Send an email "are you having another used curriculum sale this year? can you tell me when it is?" You'd think they'd be advertised better... but sometimes no. But in the end, you've got the student you've got. If she's passionate, if she can sit and read and study for a good amount of time each day, if she's active in going out and using the resources she has available to her, it can work well. If she falls into the habit of doing nothing, and you can't make her get anything done, it's time to cut the moorings and find a different schooling method.

Here in NL, kids who enter the school system who don't know Dutch are given different points of entry. Very young kids could be just stuck in the regular classroom. As kids get older they could get various levels of direct instruction, from a self-contained class to a special language class to weekly tutoring sessions. Older kids can enter a language intensive class for a year (and thus graduate secondary a year "late" in theory). There's bilingual schools, for those interested. Also, the practice here seems to be to immediately place a foreign elementary child a grade lower. So the content is easier and they have more time to catch up.

It's not a totally free transaction if one partner is holding the money, and the other partner is trying to feed their kids. People will do any number of things of money, that doesn't mean it's right to take advantage of that. It's also not really voluntary if when you apply to the job your're not told that you won't get a W-2 until after you've gone through the whole interview process, and accepted the job. Was Landry and the other online providers hiring at the same time? Did workers for one company feel free to leave and work for another company for better terms? I'm just asking. But unless a company really goes head to head with another company, whether they're a monopoly or not doesn't really matter. They can set their own terms because they can. And we don't know that the IRS didn't give Landry a chance to make a payment plan, or to put the fine against future tax holdings. We also don't know if Landry's response to this was helpful (seeing a tax specialist, an employment specialist, working through the case with the IRS case manager) or unhelpful (not doing any of those things). But the IRS is not the Chamber of Commerce. It doesn't care why you broke the law, or what the impact will be if your company ends up "in jail" because of it. But if you break the law that's that. You can regret it all you want in retrospect and curse the people who gave you bad advice, but you still have to deal with the consequences. I'm sorry that there's this mess, don't get me wrong. I'm just so sick of people thinking that since they're doing "the higher good" they can just do whatever they want. Can you tell I'm sick of it? Lol. I'm just SO sick of it. I'm also sick of people telling me that if I work for God I should be able to magically gain my daily calorie requirements from the air. I'm totally sick of that, too.

Okay, my DH was sharing an opinion with me of a language related to his own, and I thought it was interesting. If you want to discuss this with him detail and tell him why his opinions are misguided, be my guest. Languages absolutely can atrophy. It's obsolescence. If you don't let your language adapt and change to meet the needs of the speakers it will die. If you don't encourage any higher written work and grammar study in language, it will get confused, complexity will fall out, and speakers will find it unworkable, and it will die. If the workability of a language is confined to only one context, it will die. I've worked with minority language speakers, this is a real issue. DH's family language is a minority language, they run into it quite a bit. Anyway, this is totally off-topic. The latest Scientology episode was really scary. Forced abortions? Because the mom wouldn't be able to work so much if caring for a baby? I thought in previous episodes sea org members said they had children while in sea org, but the children were raised mostly separately? Or am I remembering that wrong? Anyway, the line between a religion and cult. I keep noticing that there's things in Scientology that "normal" churches do, but in scientology it's just so twisted and controlling. Like the "auditing" is a lot like confession, but in confession you aren't charged $800/hr and you can choose your confessor, and you aren't stuck there and interrogated. And the sea org seems quasi-monastic, but in churches with vowed monasticism it is very rare to find actually life-professed monastics, certainly not promised for a billion years, and life profession is usually not accepted from the young, and usually there is a few years of discernment and outright discouragement to make sure that the person actually wants to do it. Scientology seems structurally designed to be disordered, which is my book moves it from a simple religion to a cult. I also found it interesting that Scientology seems to operate on the principle of exclusivity. Besides the celebrities and black tie events being fancy, being a part of something "exclusive" makes people feel good. And people tend not to question the value of things that come with high price tags, if that thing makes the exclusive.

My Dh's issue wasn't so much that it was different. Goodness, every village here has it's own dialect of the local language, even if the village isn't big enough to have a yield sign. He found the intonation and word use weird. I don't know how best to explain it, because he wasn't sure how to explain it to me. But he's used to a lot of dialects, a lot of dialects here are odd (one local village here calls everything a "he") but he found Amish really odd, that's all. And he also noticed the lack of adapted vocabulary. If language users don't create new words for the things they encounter, even off limits things like microwaves, the language will whither, not develop.

Sensory-friendly movies sounds fantastic. We all get a bit twitchy with noise and hate 3D here. DH was trying to figure out a way he could NOT go see the movie with us, because of the 3D. I just get worn out and have to rest after seeing a movie in the theaters, whether it's 3D or not. But DH and I have impulse control and can quietly step out if we need to. With a kid it's such a gamble. We talked to Crazypants about it, and he he says he still wants to go see it, even in 3D with the glasses. Apparently, he's totally forgotten about the Avengers movie experience. Not important? Or blocked it out? DH remembers that at Avengers Crazypants took off the glasses and watched most of the movie "regular." Well great, then you're paying premium ticket price for a bad quality picture. I edited the title because as it turns out we can't go today after all. So whew, have a few days to figure it out. Maybe when they release next weeks showings a 2D will be included. crossing fingers

I agree with you Hunter. I also get annoyed when I read magazine articles about "the poor" and I'm left wondering what planet the author lives on. But I also agree that homeschooling takes at least one of the four things listed above. A homeless mom can homeschool, sure, but she's going to have to put in the time. Grab the day old newspaper, even a local rag of a paper, find a good article, read, discuss. That's fantastic, absolutely. No matter where it's done, in the library, in a shelter, under a bridge, in the laundromat, it's fantastic. But if the mom can't do anything like that - and can't swing the other three, I think it's dicey. I mean, growing up I wasn't homeless or even in poverty per se, but we definitely bumped against the bottom more than a few times. What money we did have was spent on Gothard or other "character" books which we either didn't use much, or weren't good quality. We got cast off text books, but my mother never tried to help organize them into a coherent plan of study (I tried to do that myself, and failed). We went to the library plenty, but my mother mostly just browsed the video section and never looked at the books I selected. I've mentioned before that I think she has a language LD, so I try to keep that in mind and offer grace when I mention these things, but the best homeschooling year that happened in my house was the year my mother bought Lifepacs for my older brother (that was good for him, not me, I was jealous of him). They got done, my brother loved them - she never bought them again. So yes, the resources were there for us to have an awesome education within a small budget, except for the hampering LD, but it was squandered. So that's the thing - resources plus will. You can do a lot with a resource as small as an old newspaper, but there also has to be the will.

Did they only release this movie in 3D or something? All the theaters near us are ONLY showing it in 3D. Ugh. We promised we'd take Crazypants to it for his birthday a while ago, but now we're freaking out. He has an initial diagnosis of Sensory Processing Disorder (though he may have more issues than that) and is especially sensitive to loud sounds and overstimulation. I mean, we went to a Christmas concert at a small-ish church last night of a Russian singing quintet and sat in the back row, and he said it was too loud He does regular 2d movies fine (though he dislikes the surround sound and decibel level). He went to a 3D movie before, we think it was the Avengers movie that came out last summer. He did just okay - didn't like the 3d part, and the glasses bothered him - but then there was the novelty factor. Pus, as a stem-y boy he thought the 3d technology was cool. And there was the interest factor. He's highly interested in seeing Rogue One, but the technology isn't novel anymore. Avengers was pretty CGI-active and intense, and I hear that Rogue One is also pretty intense, is that right? Has anyone seen it in 3D? Just how crazy is it? How did you kids react to it in 3D, whether they're NT or not?

Exactly. A lot of the church work my DH did was as IC. Sometimes that made sense. But one time we were at a large church where he absolutely was a salary employee, and the church had the knowledge and ability to pay him as a W-2, but they just didn't want to. I brought up the unemployment and other issues with them once and they literally smirked and laughed and said that unemployment was for baby losers, so why should they pay into that! So yep, DH could be fired on a whim and our little kid would be homeless on the street, but they got to thumb their little noses at the IRS! Whoopie! Yeah, crooks and scrooges. I got us out of there as fast as I could. I'm really glad the IRS is cracking down on IC abuse. People can do what they want with themselves, but as soon as you start involving other people you really should double check that what you're doing is legal and fair, not to mention ethical and moral. I'm a little put off about the Landry letter posted above. It looks to me to be all "me, me, me, I worked so hard, me, me, woe is me." I get it, you worked hard for your company. But then you got other people working hard for your company, and if this is really about IC then this is about THEM not you.

There's that, and also that words can change meaning. Which can sometimes only show up when dealing with groups that have different ethnic and political histories than "normal." DH's family language is a form of Low Saxon, and he's heard clips of Amish speaking and finds their language super strange. He can understand it partly, but the syntax and other things are "off" to him. Plus, he thinks they speak strangely. That could be a dialect variation, but it could also be a sign of the language atrophying. As for why the Amish get a free pass - one big reason could be because of the huge subgenre of Christian Fiction for women which idealizes the Amish, most of which are written by people who have never actually been Amish. I believe a good majority of Evangelical women would never support sanctions or regulations on the Amish, especially if it came from "the government."