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We used it in 9th grade for my DS who needed a *lot* of improvement in his writing and was reluctant to do the writing program I thought he needed (IEW). We didn't use it as written at all, because it included a lot of vocab and comprehension questions that were busywork on my opinion. Basically we ignored thise sections and he re-read the books and used the extra info units as springboards for writing projects he was actually interested in and his writing really did improve that year. What he still doesn't know 2 years later is that I created the writing assignments based on IEW's units and he got the writing program instruction I wanted anyway 😎 For us the best part about LLftLotR was that it generated excitement and got his buy in to doing high school level English.

My Dr suspected endo when I was a teen because of severe cramping and heavy irregular periods, so he did a laparoscopy (this was 1990 I believe). Didn't find endo, but did find ovarian cycts which he said would twist and cause the pain I experienced. Put me on bcp and I stayed on those for 7 years til after we got married. After that I didn't have a period for 18 months and new Dr said I would likely need fertility treatments to conceive. But that didn't end up being the case, just heavy and irregular periods for the rest of my adulthood.

Lol well, I wasn't exactly worried I was depriving them of some essential life skill exactly ... But I am wondering if I'm being a little too helicopter-ish - or maybe jusy lazy because it's easier to just do it myself than wait for them to do it - by doing it for them when with a little perseverance they could do it themselves.

No, not really. The 7 year old is a little bit like oldest DD but not nearly as squeamish. The 11 year old is pretty stoic. That's why I'm wondering if this is my issue, not really theirs, and I should just be more patient and encouraging.

Or do you wait til they do it themselves? I never did it for my sons. I just told them to wiggle it amd wiggle it and wiggle it and give it a good yank and it would come out. But my oldest daughter hated (still hates) any type of medical or dental procedure, pain, or anything involving blood and her first tooth actually was wiggly for so long because she refused to pull it that it began to grow back into her gum and had to be extracted by the dentist at age 8 which involved a tantrum of epic proportions about the needle until I finally told the dentist to just yank it out without the shot and I had to pay $80 for a lost baby tooth. After that when her teeth got wiggly I would just take care of it myself. So now I think I've just lost patience with the whole process and when I see my next 2 daughters peering into the bathroom mirror hemming and hawing and dawdling and worrying over their wiggly teeth I just roll my eyes and grab a Kleenex and yank. But now I'm worried that I'm depriving them of some necessary rite of passage od childhood or self care/awareness skills by doing it for them. 😛 So I'm curious what everybody else does ...

I used to get cold sores (big clumps of about 5 or so all in one spot and they would get infected) every single month with my cycle for a couple years. A pharmacist told me to take L Lysine daily and it really helped a lot! I still get cold sores occassionally but not several at a time and only a couple times a year now, so now instead of taking it daily I only take it when I feel one coming on. I take 500 mg but not sure how much would be right for an 8 year old.

I read the first few responses and started to panic thinking we must be really stinky smelly dirty people, so posts like these made me feel a lot better about my parenting! Lol When I had fewer kids I was better at doing a daily or every other day bath, and in the summer I have them rinse the chlorine out of their hair after swimming (pretty much daily) but I figure soap isn't necessary after they just soaked their skin in chlorine for hours. But in the winter they just don't get that smelly during the week so it's once or maybe twice a week tops for the younger girls. My teens shower every day although DD only washes her (very long and almost always worn in a bun) hair every other day or every third day. It was a learning process - not to mention a huge time suck - to get them to go from 30 min showers to 5-10 min showers so now it's not as big a deal for them to shower daily as it once was. And during that learning process ﹰI had to remind them and nag them and argue with them every day, which was a pain. I'm glad it has become a habit for them now. But I can't imagine how much time I'd have to invest in supervising my elementary kids in bathing every day.

Bluegoat's comment is what I was getting at. Regardless of how many teens are actually engaging in this type of sexual behavior, most of them don't think it's abnormal for their peers to casually hook up with several different partners during high school. In fact, from what I've gathered by talking to teens in my area, most of them think that not engaging in these behaviors is what is abnormal. And I think the opposite held true in times past like the 50's. Perhaps a lower but roughly similar number of teens were still active, but it was most definitely not considered "normal" behavior in those days to have several partners, as many diaries and primary sources and just interviewing your grandparents and other of their generation would tell you even if the statistics don't. I am not advocating we go back to the 50's, don't get me wrong. That's not my intent at all. And I'm not advocating for abstinence only sex ed either, as I've said several times in this thread. It is just astonishing to me that someone could claim that sexual norms nowadays do not include casual hookups much more than they did in times past.

I agree with both of these responses. Field trips are a very important part of learning, even for high schoolers. However, it would be depend on what they were doing on those field trips. If this is somewhere she goes frequently and has already seen/read/understood all the displays but simply enjoys going, then I would be hesitant to count it. But if on the other hand she participates in a certain program where they do labs or investigations once a week or once a month or something like that led by a docent, then I would certainly count it.

My DS is currently in CS at a major public university and he is in the honors college. He CLEP'ed out of Spanish and US Gov and US History and AP'ed out of English Comp so the Honors seminars that he's required to take are his only humanities. They drive him crazy because he'd prefer to be in all CS or math or physics classes LOL BUT - he did tell me that being in the Honors college was worth its weight in gold when it came to priority registration. He *has* to work ~15 hours a week in order to pay for school, and if he wasn't able to pick and choose his class times he wouldn't be able to work at all (it's an 8-5 office job doing programming, so no evening or weekend hours available). He is hoping at some point to be able to join the CS honors program and drop out of the all university Honors College, but that is only open to upperclassmen and is by invitation only. It also comes with priority registration perks. That's a possibility for your DS to consider as well.

Extracurriculars can provide great natural and organic opportunities for collaboration if that is something you feel your kids need exposure to, but as others said there are no real requirements in that area.

No, I didn't look up stats for that

I guess I assumed that was common knowledge that didn't require a citation 😉 But a quick Google search turned this up. I didn't read the whole article but it does clearly state that premarital sex went up every decade from 1950 to 1990. I do understand that it has gone down some from the 90's to now. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1802108/#!po=1.25000 "Figure 2 and the Table show premarital sex proportions using data from all four surveys (for women only) by 10-year cohort. The figure and table show a trend from the 1950s through the 1990s toward a higher proportion experiencing premarital sex"

No, that's not what I meant. I was simply responding to some (can't remember who) who seemed to suggest that the media has played no role because "teens have been having sex forever". I do however think that on a solely emotional health level (leaving spirituality aside) having one stable partner and multiple encounters is far preferable than one casual encounter, regardless of age. My great grandma talked about hanging them on the line to dry *and reuse* in the Depression 😂

Than in my day (in the late i9's ealy 90's after casual hookups in media were already the norm), yes. Than in my grandparents day (well before that in the 40's and 50's), no.

That's great, I'm glad to see that it's declining from what it was when I was in jr high and high school. But that's not really the time period I was referring to. The studies you cited gave data from the late 80's to 2015, when hookup culture and the media's celebration of that was already well established and had been thriving for some time.

Yes to this. Teens were still having sex back in my grandparents' day but it was typically with their "steady" and they usually ended up married to them more often than not. Casual sex wasn't a thing for teens, by and large. Nowadays casual hookups are considered the norm, which is a big change, and the media has had a huge impact on that phenomenon.

I don't spend much time on the theme books each day, honestly. Maybe 15-20 minutes on a day when we begin a new type of unit? Then she usually does the rest on her own with me just reminding her what the next step is and looking over her work with her and editing. I ooh'ed and ahh'ed over the Narnia books too, but when I looked at the lessons, I think they require a bit more depth of knowledge and analysis than my 4th/5th grader knew about World War II. I mean, she knows who Hitler and Churchill and FDR were, but she couldn't have compared and contrasted them very easily with characters from the book. I think that requires a logic stage brain and she's not quite there yet. Maybe your 6th grader is there, but I'd be surprised if the 4th grader could do it very well. I've used All Things Fun & Fascinating for 3rd (great), Geography Based Writing lessons for 4th (ok), and Fables for 5th (great). I'm going to try the Fables for 4th next time and Ancients for 5th with my next kid and see if I like that better than the Geography.

I'm not Desert Blossom, but I think one of the main reasons that the emphasis on purity in some Christian circles doesn't work is because it does not go along with a frank and healthy discussion of how awesome sex is and what an amazing privilege it is, mostly because a large majority of Christians are too embarrassed to talk about that stuff and because a lot of them have negative shameful ideas about sex and do not really in their heart of hearts believe it is something designed by God to be enjoyed and celebrated (albeit within limitations). They focus on the "you'll sin and go to hell" consequences instead of on the very real and more emotionally relatable consequnces, which many of these parents have experienced and that's why they want their kids to wait so much. But instead of being honest and telling them their own story of sexual mistakes that they regret and being real with their kids, they fall back on the purity thing. And so they pass that attitude to their kids and it's just not effective. That doesn't mean that teaching abstinence isn't effective, just that the mainstream way that a lot of Christians approach teaching abstinence isn't effective. And yes I believe an emphasis on abstinence and the emotional/physical consequences of sexuality should be coupled with frank and honest info about STDs and birth control. I think too many times people think it has to be one or the other (abstinence or other) when really a combination is probably best.

I totally agree. Most kids are not not going to want any adults in their lives to know that they are even thinking about sex, let alone planning ahead about doing it. So I just really can't see the logic in having them sitting out in a nurse's office as being a real preventative measure at all. It might make some people feel good about what the school is doing about the problem, but it doesn't really result in anything definitive.

I went to the health clinic in college and grabbed 2 handfuls and used them for my Halloween costume. Only time I ever took advantage of the "free condoms perk" 😄 Not directed towards Bluegoat, but just general comments: I think it is ridiculously inconsistent that we can't give our kids simple medications but they are allowed to hand out condoms without a parent ok. I also think it's horrifically naive to think that teens don't typically use condoms because they can't afford them. As if the only thing standing in the way of teens becoming somehow magically responsible abour their sexuality is the availability of free condoms. Realistically free condoms maybe help like 5 kids. Comprehensive sex ed that includes a heavy emphasis on waiting - and all the health and emotional benefits of doing so - as well as practical info on birth control and STDs from a source that the kids trust and like and feel comfortable asking questions to is the only thing that will long term make any difference. In an ideal world that would be provided by 2 loving parents of course and no need for any outside teachers. However most kids don't live in that ideal world. So I get why they have to have it in schools. But it's one of the many reasons I'm glad to homeschool my kids - I'm quite sure our frank and honest and accurate discussions about sex are superior to whatever crap they would get at school that somehow manages to assume they should be treated like adults on this topic while simultaneously assuming they are imbeciles who cannot possibly control their own urges.

If you go with the SWI/SICC route, you don't need the TWSS because Mr. Pudewa does the teaching for you. If you do a theme book, it is really really really helpful to have watched the TWSS (AND written the assignments yourself!) so you understand where the lessons are going and what their purpose is and how they build on each other and how they progress from year to year - otherwise it just becomes a checklist and a mishmash of assignments. They do have a cheap "overview" dvd that gives - well, a quick overview 🙂 of all the units. If you plan to purchase the TWSS in the future, watching that will probably give you enough info to understand the program enough to start ATF&F and then you can watch the complete TWSS when you have enough funds to purchase it. We do theme books in elementary, which I think is plenty of writing for them. By the time they get to middle school (~6th grade), my kids have ready to have someone other than mom tell them about writing and we do SWI and SICC B, and they enjoy Mr. Pudewa's quirky cheesy oddball humor. After that, we do Elegant Essay and Windows to the World and maybe Writing the Research Paper in high school and they are very well prepared for college writing.

I think that's a fine plan. As long as rhey are ready for the significant amounts of reading and writing they will need to do and for the faster pace than a high school class (one year's worth of work in one semester), it should work out great. My oldest also wanted to avoid as many humanities as possible in college 🙂 so he chose to do AP English and CLEP for Spanish, US History, and Gov. DE would accomplish the same purpose. Just make sure to check with the individual schools you think they might end up attending and whether or not the specific courses you are thinking about will transfer or not. It can vary a lot from school to school!

We are doing Fables this year with my 5th grader. The book is about 1/3 fables a la Aesop, 1/3 Greek myths, and 1/3 fairy tales a la Cinderella and Hans Christian Anderson. So far we've had plenty of variety.