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Sammish

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Everything posted by Sammish

  1. This week it's mostly baby things. This morning I finished making two bibs with ties on them (so ridiculously cute!) and am about to start making a couple of large, flannel receiving blankets, both for a baby shower on Saturday. I have two more receiving blankets to sew and this hoodie to knit for another friend who's due in October. My take-along small project is a pair of socks for DH. And last night I also finished knitting a ponytail hat (hat with a hole in the back for a ponytail to go through) for my mom. Apparently I'm feeling very crafty this week :)
  2. Home Science Adventures. There doesn't seem to be a lot of reviews of this out there, but the people who have used it seem to love it. I stumbled across it while reading the Rainbow Resources Catalog, and am seriously considering it for this year.
  3. Loved this thread! I just ordered Archaeology, and am bookmarking this for future reference. I didn't see this mentioned, so I just wanted to point out that Catan can be played with two players. DH and I play using these rules, and which work nicely. Games are shorter (20-30 minutes?) but still fun.
  4. I'm a whopping three weeks older than DH, which makes me much wiser and more mature. Or so I tell him. ;)
  5. I've been doing it for about 9 weeks now, and this is the longest I've ever stayed on a diet (and the happiest I've ever been on one :)). Yes, there is a definite religious slant, but I find it pretty easy to skim past those parts (homeschooling has given me lots of good practice doing that ;)). I love that it talks about all the other diet plans/lifestyles I've read about in my quest to figure out what, exactly, is "healthy eating." It gives their pros and cons, talks about why they work or don't, and sort of combines them. And I love that there's no counting necessary (they do give guidelines for fat/carb counts if you want to know, but it's very easy to do without paying any attention to specific numbers), which makes it doable long term for me. The on-plan sweets rely pretty heavily on stevia, and I would recommend trying out the types they recommend before assuming you don't like the taste (some types have way more aftertaste than others)(and don't get the NuNaturals kind - they just reformulated it, and it is not nearly as good). I regularly eat things like chocolate muffins and chocolate peanut butter shakes, and I'm still losing. I get enough "on-plan" sweets that I don't really crave other ones. This is a pretty good overview of the book, and has a nice "quick start guide" that I found helpful (and she has a few other recipes that are really good, too). The FaceBook group is also very helpful, with advice, support and lots of recipes in the documents section (the Fuel Pull brownies are a family favorite around here).
  6. Math on the Level - all the math you need through pre-algebra, at your own pace, with built-in review, lots of different teaching ideas, and an active Yahoo group. Simply Music - we have the learn at home dvds. Start learning to play real songs before going through the hard, slow, process of learning to read music. (You do learn to read music, just later on.) I can't say enough good things about them!
  7. This is the biggest reason we decided not to follow AO. DH and I had a big discussion about what our goals were for DS, and we decided we wanted more "modern" books, that were a little more relevant to the times. I also see lots of posts at the AO forum about kids using old-fashioned words and phrases because of their reading. Which is cute, but then again, does the homeschooled kid really need another way in which he's "different"? I also wasn't a fan of the history - all that British history just didn't seem relevant to us. I much preferred the history (and, frankly, book scheduling) of HUFI, which is a tweaked version of AO.
  8. My DS6 is at exactly the same place, and he's read most of the books you listed. Recently he's also enjoyed on his own: Jigsaw Jones series Andrew Lost series Junie B. Jones series Franny K. Stein series Dragonslayer's Academy series Cam Jansen series Max Archer, Kid Detective Clementine Judy Moody series (Stink's big sister) I like having him go through a series, because it makes it easier to just grab the next stack at the library. :) Books that we've read together (most of which he's gone back and reread himself): Pippi Longstocking The Wizard of Oz (we listened to on Librivox) Half Magic by Edward Eager Mr. Popper's Penguins Dr. Doolittle Paddington Bear series
  9. Math on the Level- created by a homeschool mom for homeschoolers.
  10. My son is 6.5, and this year we did cursive. His cursive is beautiful, but he still prefers to write in print when doing his own thing, and that handwriting is pretty atrocious. So a few weeks ago we started working on manuscript, using HWOT. I bought the first grade book, and so far we've gone pretty quickly through the capitals, just pointing out the right way to form them, and the right order. We're still doing cursive for copywork, but also spending a couple of minutes each day working on manuscript. I really just wanted to get in there and show him the "right" way to print, before his own (slower, messier) way got too far ingrained.
  11. After reading this thread, I went to my library and borrowed this book - so thanks for the mention! I really enjoyed it (although this morning I am paying for having stayed up late last night to finish it :glare:). The whole time I was reading it, I could just picture it being made into a RomCom movie. I'm picturing someone like Meg Ryan for Alice, and, I don't know, maybe Marc Ruffalo for Nick? ETA: Just looked it up, and apparently I'm not the only one who thought this should be a movie. Liane Moriarty sold the movie rights. I love this quote from her, "I’d cast Brad Pitt for the role of Nick. He’d be entirely unsuitable, far too good-looking, but I think we’d all learn to live with that."
  12. Not a specific movie suggestion, but I've found Common Sense Media to be really helpful when evaluating movies (and games, tv, books and apps) for my DS. It rates them by age, "educational value," "violence and scariness," "sexy stuff," "language," "consumerism," and "drinking, drugs and smoking." They also have lists of reviews for different ages and topics.
  13. Another vote for Scrambled States of America. My DS6 really enjoys it, and quickly memorized where the states are and their shapes. I don't know that it's helped much on capitals, except for a general exposure to them. I've been looking at the "10 Days in..." games, and would love to hear reviews of them. We've also enjoyed Ticket To Ride Europe, and it's helped for European geography, so I imagine the original Ticket to Ride (which is in the US) would be good for US geography?
  14. I've purchased and started some of "next year's" curriculum, just because I am so DONE with this year! This year we did a very loosey-goosey kindy, and I am ready for more structure. So we started CHOLL and WWE 1 a couple of weeks ago, and have also started in on the list I designated "first grade read alouds." I'll probably hold off on science (NOEO Physics, I think, which I haven't bought yet) for a couple of months. And we're just continuing on with LoF, although I may start adding in a little MotL as we get to trickier concepts.
  15. You have my sympathy - we went through pretty much this same thing about 4 years ago. The new tenant downstairs had her daughter and hoodlum boyfriend move in with her, and they all smoked like chimneys. I called and complained to the landlord, and he said it wasn't against the lease. I went downstairs and talked to the people themselves, explaining that we had a baby, and our living room was actually visibly smokey. They couldn't have cared less. It ended up being the push we needed to move out, but for the last few months we were there we ended up buying an ionic air purifier, which did help some. Sorry, wish I had better advice.
  16. We used their "Intro to Science" (for k-1st grade) program this year. Well, we *tried* to use it - I dropped it after a few weeks because it drove me crazy. No particular rhyme or reason to it, it just jumped from subject to subject (crystals to colors to magnets to inclined planes). The tie-ins to nature study were often weak (we're studying solids and liquids - go find a pine tree, because we did an experiment with wax crayons). And worst (to me), was that there was no explanation of what we were doing. It would introduce science words, but give no definition of them, just throw them out there and hope you figured out what they meant from context. I'm not expecting deep, complicated definitions, but some explanation would be nice! Maybe it got better (we only made it to week 9), and it's entirely possible the older grades are better, too. But I was very disappointed with the course we tried. :glare:
  17. I'd been thinking about getting the Intellego Astronomy unit for a while now, so this is a perfect risk-free way to try it. Thanks for the link!
  18. I've had this book bookmarked for a while now. It's actually a soap carving book (an easier, gentler introduction than using actual wood) and you make your own tools out of Popsicle sticks.
  19. I've got one chapter left, but I wanted to get my thoughts down on what I've read so far. In chapter three he discusses how stories can help make learning more interesting, which to me reinforced the idea of using "living books" (a la Charlotte Mason). Apparently we need to do some memory work. Start now, get in the habit, and buckle down and do it. The constant reviewing over a long period of time is exactly what Math on the Level does with their "five a days," so I really should dust that off and take it back out. In reading chapter 6, I kept thinking of lewelma's posts on how she does science with her kids. It seems to me she's able to do just what the author says you can't - get her kids to think and do what real scientists think and do. Is this just an example of something we can do while homeschooling that just isn't feasible in a classroom, and so the author never even considered it? I found his dismissal of different learning styles reassuring - it means I can stop trying to figure out what my child's learning style is, and finding the perfect curriculum to match it, and just get on with doing what's working. The book "Nurture Shock" also has a chapter on praise, and describes some more studies that have been done. I found it very interesting, and felt like it went into more detail. It's still something I struggle with implementing on a day to day basis, so reading this was a good reminder.
  20. I do this pretty much every year for Mother's day and my birthday. They're my only two real "days off" all year (where I don't feel guilty for not "helping out"), and they're wonderful! As someone upthread said, they make me a better mother - I'm much happier and more relaxed and ready to get back into the thick of things after my little mini-vacations.
  21. I'm a newbie, so no particular advice/expertise, but might I put in a request for articles on teaching science from lewelma? You know, in her spare time? :)
  22. Hmm.. My son has been reading chapter books for a bit now, so I think I'll stick with just getting The Writer's Jungle, reading and digesting that, and then see where I feel like going after that. I'm also trying to get WWE from my library, to see if that might be a good fit for us, for introducing some of the earlier grammar. And we might try Jot it Down, just because it looks like fun! Thanks for the help.
  23. Okay, people who are familiar with this - can you tell me what the difference is between The Wand/The Arrow and Jot it Down? My DS is 6.5, and has been reading for three years, but just learned to write (cursive) this year. He read the Dr. Seuss books two years ago, so The Wand seems too young. But looking at The Arrow lessons plans, and that seems too advanced - we've never covered parts of speech or anything formal like that. So would Jot it Down work for us? Or something else? So confused!
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