my younger kids have a time limit (30-60 min) and I monitor. they play games or watch kids tv (like curious george, berenstain bears, etc). my middle schooler looks stuff up, mostly whatever his interest of the week is, this week its identifying neighborhood trees and wilderness survival. my older two can use their devices after dinner and until one hr before bed (they dont usually spend the entire evening online but I leave it up to them) and I dont monitor. mostly because I'm lazy, in theory I feel like I should but.... my dd (16) uses instagram to keep up with her friends and teaches herself to play guitar with youtube videos. my ds (14) found some free learn to code videos and has been playing around with that, but I also recently learned that he's been downloading apps to earn amazon gift cards. he apparantly has been spending hours doing this, just downloading and deleting to earn the gift cards. He's up to $25. I'm not sure how I feel about that... we dont have a tv, so computer time is all the screen time they get.

I'm looking for some resources to help me improve my penmanship. any recommendations? thanks :)

what is NVLD? his handwriting is abysmal. well, actually, that's not completely true, its legible. his letters are mostly the same size and on the same plane and he is spacing words. but very sloppy. as far as how others in my community have accomodated such kids, well, tutors abound. mostly its the same old drill drill drill, with carrot/stick variations.

if you are going straight from 7/6 to 8/7 you might be able to skip some of the early lessons. I think the assumption is that there is a summer break between books, and it seemed to me that there was a lot of review in the beginning. when my ds finished 7/6 I had him take the 8/7 tests, if he got 100% we skipped those lessons. if I he had gotten any of the earlier lessons' problems wrong in the later mixed review, we would have gone back to review those lessons, but it didnt happen. iirc, we skipped close to 20 lessons. he pretty much flew through 8/7, we were also guilty of skipping some of the review questions, but I think he understood the concepts well. he's in algebra 1 now and not really loving it, instead of skipping questions this year, we slowed down and we're doing 3 lessons/week. all that review is a LOT for one sitting, even for a kid who can sit for a while.

Good ideas, thanks

Wow you just described my kid. If I give him more than 5 or 6 practice problems he just says he can't and starts to cry. I learn so differently, I just want to drill until he gets it even though I know it will probably destroy him. So ok, I think I will put memorizing facts on hold for now, I think he will enjoy making his own reference charts. I started reading up on dyscalculia and I'm not sure he fits the description, he can estimate pretty well and definitely has a number sense about him, especially with regard to money. He cannot recite the months of the year and even has trouble with days of the week sometimes, which seems to be similar to math facts? Can you recommend some math story books or games?

thank you, OneStepAtATime. I will look for threads on those topics and do some googling too. its a good direction to start in he was a delayed reader, did not start reading with any sort of fluency until the end of second grade, but now he's plowing through books like the Hatchet series, Julie of the Wolves, things like that. so not exactly advanced for his age, but age level enough to allay any concerns I had about that. I havent had him read aloud to me in a while though, I can test that out tomorrow. his comprehension is good. he can read the history/science assignments without complaining too much and I also assign one article/day from the newspaper (NY Times which -I remember reading somewhere- is written on a sixth grade reading level) and he handles that well too. however, he cannot read hebrew to save his life. he was in a dual curriculum school,half the day was all the regular stuff and the other half was religious studies, including hebrew. hebrew language is probably one of the easiest to learn to read because there are so few exceptions, each letter makes one sound, each vowel makes one sound and goes right under or next to the letter. the hard part is that it is another set of symbols to learn and its read right to left. he pretty much tries to get by with memorizing passages so that he doesnt have to actually pay attention to the symbols, he does alot of guessing too, but when I slow him down and he is forced to go slowly letter by letter, he does know the sounds each one makes. I'm not sure what that is all about or if it is related to his struggle with math. back when he was finishing first grade we had him evaluated by our school district and somehow he scored well into the gifted ranges albeit behind age level in math and reading. our district came to the conclusion that he did not qualify for any services because he scored so high. of course this made no sense to me at the time, but since I am familiar with the state of affairs in our district, and the low quality of services provided, I did not bother hiring a lawyer to fight it. I did not have any further evaluations or assessments done. its nice to know I'm not alone

My ds(11) is really struggling with math. He was in school through fourth grade, this is our second year hs. Right now he can do addition and subtraction with regrouping and all, but still uses his fingers from time to time. He's got about 1/3 of his times tables but for the most part he works to figure it out (ex if the question is 6*4 he'll say 2 times 6 is 12 and then add 12+12 the long way to arrive at 24). So I know he understands the question and how numbers relate to one another, but his ability to memorize facts is nil. He can do multiplication with larger numbers so long as he can refer to his tables, meaning he remembers the steps but the actual math facts are not there. We started some basic geometry, he understands the concept of area and perimeter but never remembers what to do when given a problem. This drives me nuts because I can't imagine what he isn't seeing. When I have him talk it through (say on graph paper or with Legos) he gets the answer quickly but then when I say things like 'multiply length by the height' he looks at me like I have two heads and five minutes later he again does not remember how to find area of a rectangle. So it seems kinda random to me, he remembers some things but not others. I don't really see a pattern to it. One of the reasons I pulled him out of school was because he was so far behind he had basically given up and declared himself stupid and unable to learn, which is of course not the case. We spent most of last year deschooling and the summer building some math confidence (I went all the way back to easy peasy stuff that I knew he knew). I'm feeling a bit lost as to how to help him learn math. I'm not sure what the problem is or what to do next. Any comments,observations,advice welcome and greatly appreciated! Thanks :)

thanks for the rec It sounds like something my boys will really enjoy reading (and me too!)

I was just going to post that!

I read The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me to my ds when he was about 5. It was his alltime favorite. And he still belly laughs out loud to the Twits, I think I read that one to him too when he was around that age.

I just pre-read The Fault in Our Stars for my 13 yo ds, more than the sex, I disliked all the language in it. He wasnt exactly aching to read it in the first place but it got such great reviews I figured I'd give it a go. I had no problem with the Hunger Games though. What about The Book Thief, or Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children? or The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle? Another one of my fav's though not YA (more like tween) is Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. I can read that book a hundred times. I loved A Little Princess too.

he didnt like percy jackson, and he LOVED sign of the beaver. I havent found too many childrens versions of the classics that dont ruin any future interest in reading the book, do have favorites that you can recommend? we do have a nicely done childrens version of Call of the Wild, which he loved. I will look for Crispin, my older son loved Avi at that age, and I never thought of introducing him to Little House, good idea.

never heard of that one either, will look it up. thanks for the recommendation

we did The Giver and Wonder as readalouds last year. The Giver went over so-so (he's not interested in the rest of the series) and he really disliked Wonder. I will look for the Penderwicks, thanks

that looks good, too. I think he'll like that one.thanks!

oh, this one looks good! Its going on my goodreads shelf right now.. thanks

I'm not familier with Peter Larangis, will look for his books in the library. thanks for the suggestions! I'll try Holes too. I think we even have that one somewhere

he read and loved, my side of the mountain which is what led us to hatchet. I think he might enjoy a week in the woods and island of the blue dolphins, I forgot about those two! thanks :) he is vehemently opposed to reading fantasy that borders on sci fi (he's ok with talking animals but no 'crazy stuff' like gregor, not sure why the talking mice is not in the same 'crazy stuff' category, but I'm not arguing the point..he's reading, I'm happy) I wonder if he'll go for mystery...I'll try some of your suggestions there. thanks for taking the time to type it all up

ds is finally reading for the joy of it, he's loving gary paulson's hatchet series. what other books would you recommend that might be up his alley? nothing too challenging, he only started reading a couple of years ago, is catching up quite nicely, so I want this to be joyful, not stressful. I'm totally ok with 'fluff' :)

do you think I could use either tarbuck's or cpo for both of them? my older one is a strong student, and is considering taking the NYS regents exam in earth science this year and my younger one loves science, really 'gets' it but is a reluctant reader. I would supplement either one with a regents review book to prep the older one if he really wants to take the test

thanks Jill, that's a good place to start

I'd like to cover some earth science this year with my 6th and 8th gr boys. what curriculum have you used and did you like it or not? something secular please. thanks

My 10th grader will be taking earth science this year, she's in school but I am probably going to have to do lots of afterschooling/tutoring/studying/etc with her for this course. I was wondering what books/curricula you'd recommend? We are in NY so she will have to take the regents exam, but I will find some NYS regents prep books/sites for that. thus far, her text books have been awful so I imagine I will want to find something on my own. thanks!

I just kinda skimmed all the responses here so maybe someone said this already, but doesnt MM have some youtube videos? I know I watched some for teaching addition facts, they were pretty good in terms of giving the teacher (you) a script. Math U See also comes with dvd's you can watch, but iirc that was kinda pricey. right now I'm drooling over stern math manipulatives and I'd love love love to take a class on how to teach it but I cant swing that right now. I totally relate to buying a curric and not feeling up to teaching it. I wont even tell you how many math curricula I own and right now I'm teaching my younger son (age 11 but really behind in math, so like a first/second grade level) free-style and its so much better for us! more fun for me, more retention for him. honestly, teaching younger kids math probably doesnt need any curriculum. think about what you want them to know and then think up some ways of getting them to figure it out. we've done more in the last few months in 15 min/day than we did in the prior year battling it out with a curriulum. I got lucky with my older son, he likes saxon and it works for him. I wouldnt expect too much self teaching in younger kids, but I'm still new at this, so take what I say with that huge grain of salt.