Can you tell us what the exact assignment was?

some series: Boxcar Children Cam Jansen Nancy Drew Notebooks Madeline Little House, and maybe some of the prequels Animal Ark Betsy-Tacy

Migraines present in different ways; spots and/or pain in the eyes is not a requirement! Are you on the pill? I was on it for years with no problems, then started with the monthly migraines. Moving to the Nuvaring improved them a lot, and getting off hormone-based birth control made them go away completely. Frankly, I'd take 'out like a light' over a migraine/severe headache any day! I don't know of anything natural that will help once you have the headache, but I have a few suggestions for heading them off at the pass. Nitrates are a huge migraine trigger for me (hot dogs, bacon, processed meats), as are all heavily processed foods and chemical exposure in general. Sometimes, a single incident is enough to get me started, but it's more likely to occur as a result of reaching my combined 'limit' - - a bit of extra junk food along with a lack of sleep, for example. If you get warning signals a day or two ahead of time, I would try avoiding ALL processed food to the greatest extent possible, including fast food and most restaurant food (especially chain restaurants like Applebee's, etc). Cut down chemical exposure in other ways as much as you can - - this is not the time to spray for bugs, light scented candles, etc etc. And of course, get some extra rest.

Just my opinion, but I find most of 'social studies' to be a marketing device to sell books. Kids don't need to color in worksheets to learn that firefighters and police officers are our friends, and they can learn about holidays by celebrating them, and watching the occasional Charlie Brown special :D. SOTW (and some of the other history programs, I'm sure) include a certain amount of geography that you can easily expand on. Specific map skills are easily covered via cheapo workbooks and helping plan real life trips. We've found the workbooks tend to have a lot of busywork, though - - lots of coloring in, etc. Because there IS so much important history to cover and so many wonderful stories to read, I find it important to guard our time. Hmmm, I'm chatty this morning, probably because I must work after this!

Most kids will accelerate to a certain degree simply by not taking long summer breaks. Some people schedule a standard number of school days, but take shorter, more frequent breaks. This alone will generally eliminate the need for the 30 lessons of review that most math books start with (so each year, you're getting about 30 lessons 'ahead'). Other people also schedule additional days to the school year, which of course means getting through more work each year. The Swanns schooled pretty much year round, if I remember correctly, rarely taking days off, much less weeks. I don't think you need to be genius level to complete high school at an early age, but you do need to be academically bright. Many kids are not ready for advanced math at a young age, no matter what, and will need to wait for that maturity level to hit. There's also the issue of what it means to complete high school. You can do it with a 'bare bones' type curriculum that satisfies all legal requirements, you can insist on calculus and AP biology, or you can fall somewhere in between.

We somewhat use the LCC method of having a day for ancient history and a day for 'modern' history. So right now, we are in Year 4 of the SOTW history cycle (modern), while also listening to Greek myths. We put the SOTW audio cds and Greek myths from audible.com on my ipod, and we listen and discuss in the car on the way to lessons, etc. SOTW is followed up the next day with map work for both kids and outlining for my 4th grader; at the moment we just listen/discuss the myths. My kids like the SOTW cds, and LOVE the audible myths (Tales from the Greek Legends and More Tales from the Greek Legends, read by Edward Ferrie. He also does Norse legends; we haven't listened to those yet). Audible also has various versions of the Iliad, Odyssey, etc if you want to delve deeper. Using the audio books frees up my read aloud time for other books (ones with names that aren't quite as difficult to pronounce).

I think it might vary by council. In my area, the Girl Scouts membership fee is $10 per year, and you'll pay about $20-$25 for a minimal uniform of vest/pin; a whole lot more if your troop does complete uniforms. Some troops have little or no other costs; some troops do lots of expensive activities. Activities very much vary by troop. My nephews are in a BS troop that does a tremendous amount of camping, sleepovers, sleep away camps, etc. So much so that it's no sense to be in the troop if you don't participate. You can probably get a feel for what activities certain troops are into. Both Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have independent programs where you are not part of a troop - - Juliettes for the GS, and I think Lone Scouts for BS. Some councils are very supportive of independent scouts, inviting them to things and/or making it easy for them to contact other independent scouts; in other places, less so, but you might be able to find other hs'ers who are independent but might want to get together for certain activities.

You can do exactly that in Home School Tracker. You make one 'master' entry - just put in the name of the book and tell it how many copies to make and the wording you like (page, lesson or chapter), and you're done. It takes holidays, etc into account, and you can tell it to do that subject twice a week, every other day, daily, whatever. You can also set it up to copy along the lines of Lesson 1, Lesson 2, Lesson 3Lesson 4, Test, Lesson 5 . . . I use this feature all the time. If you miss a day, simply tell it to move everything forward.

any office supply store should have them - - I was just in office depot yesterday and saw them. I've seen them occasionally at walmart and similar stores, but not usually the nice ones.

The test scores are just supposed to be available, not turned in yearly? I'd play the odds and skip it. If I were ever asked for the test scores, I'd either: *hand in a formal appearing piece of paper that says "testing incomplete due to blah blah blah; anticipated test results based on classroom performance are as follows" *or I'd simply turn in the anticipated test results based on my vast knowledge of her classroom performance You'd need to do that now, because next year you won't remember what her skills were at the time.

What about Dutch doors for the bedrooms? The top half swings independently from the bottom half, so it's like a built-in baby gate. If dh or a friend is handy, you can convert your own. Failing that, I would go with a combination of strategies. Go ahead and try training, but you CANNOT rely on that alone. I'd replace the baby gate, up a bit higher if possible, train baby to climb safely and with permission, and definitely train the older kids to lock the door and/or use door knob bafflers.

I do follow the four-year rotation - - hope you don't mind if I answer anyway! Starting with an area of personal interest sounds good, but I think studying American history for several years is . . . a LOT of American history! I think a year would be plenty. If you do a typical school year, you could spend a full month on colonies/settlements, another month on the Revolution, another month on the civil war, pioneers/westward expansion are good for a month, so is state history, yet still several months left for everything else! So, off the top of my head, this is what I'd recommend for a middle schooler without much history: A year of American history, including lots of literature and projects. You might want to look at Artner's Readers Guide to American History, History Pockets from Evan-Moor, and the Oregon Trail software (if you don't mind computer use). For 7th and 8th grades, I would do an abbreviated history cycle, going in order but obviously spending less time on each era. Use the WTM as a guide and decide which topics to spend more and less time on. For some topics, you will need to restrict yourself to just a quick read from a good history encyclopedia - - you want him to get a rough overview of the flow of history. If you tie in English (relate his reading and writing to his history topics), you can cover more ground. Then I would do a regular 4-year cycle for the high school years.

I think you'll find that there's just a lot of wiggle room and different thoughts among home schoolers. We started kinder at 5, but by no means did we use a curriculum or have a set daily schedule; actually, I don't require any 'academic' work in kinder. The resources are there, and both my kids wound up doing a fair bit, but it was optional. Third grade is when I have found it becomes more important to try to keep to a schedule of sorts and get some work done every day. Some people are concerned about having easy schedules early on, because of having to 'change the rules' later on, but it's not been a problem for us. School rules change as they get older, just as the rules for chores and so forth do. Long post short, I start kinder at age 5 but don't require academics until later.

I don't even find kinder necessary, so definitely not pre-k. I'm not against preschool at all; my oldest went for two years, her sister for one. But it's not needed at all, and I hate to see 'academics' push aside more important things (that is, I hate to see worksheets replace concrete learning). My two were never *required* to do anything in kinder when we began hs'ing, and very little in first grade. They had no trouble making the transition to required school work.

Just for the record, he was single for a really long time. If I remember correctly, he did eventually get married - - she works and has a kid or two, though, so she's not being all June Cleaver on his behalf :D To me, the importance message of his books boils down to two main points: 1) Kids CAN be passionate, inspired learners. 2) There are no shortcuts. Teaching is hard work; you have to put time and energy into it in order to succeed. While it's important to select good materials, there's no 'magic' curriculum that will do it for you or make things peachy keen.

Prima Latina would be mighty easy for a ten year old. I would probably go for Latina Christiana 1 instead - - the younger one is eight, right? My seven year old does fine with it. She moans a bit about the writing, so I usually let her do derivatives orally, and she does even better than her big sis on vocabulary.

thank you!!

nft

If I went with a boxed curriculum, I'd pick K12. They use the 4-year history cycle and take a sequential approach to most subjects, including art. (I haven't looked at it lately, but I don't think there's been any major changes)

I think that would be quite hard to do unless you're fairly fluent in Latin yourself. Memoria Press and Latin Centered Curriculum both talk about starting Henle as early as 5th grade, I believe, but any earlier than that would be REALLY tough, imo. I think adapting a program designed for younger children might be a better choice. When push comes to shove, I don't think the most common issues with Latin programs for younger students are truly 'fixable.' There is always going to be a great deal of tedious memory work, and the grammar will always have to be doled out bit by bit (if the student is ready to dive into the deep end of grammar, then they're ready for Henle). Edited to add: I just noticed you did say 4th or 5th grade (need more coffee!). A strong 5th grade student could do Henle slowly, if you feel up to adapting it. But like Plaid Dad said, Latina Christiana is based on Henle, so I'd go that route unless finances were a big issue.

There's definitely a learning curve, because the program can do soooo much. You'll want to spend a bit of time playing around with it and entering 'dummy' information to see how the reports and so forth work, before you enter all of your real information. I found that there are certain features that work well with my style, and those are the ones I use and know well. I use the Plus version because of the Lesson Plan feature. You can enter lesson plans and assignments that aren't tied to particular dates (so you can reuse the lesson plans for other kids if you wish). When you are ready to use the assignments, you just submit them to the assignment grid (and give dates at this point). The lesson plans make it very easy to see how long it will take to finish a certain book. For example, if we do a lesson twice a week, excluding holidays, we'll be finished on such and such a date (and it's simple to change it around and see various possibilities; every day, every other monday, whatever). After assignments have a date, it is still easily changed. You can adjust the date of one assignment, or move all assignments forward. You can do a lot with grades, attendance, and transcripts as well. I don't have need of those features yet, but it's nice to know it's possible. Let me know if you have any more specific questions, and I'll try to answer. I know quite a few people on the board use HST.

I haven't used it, but it looks like fairly standard unit studies stuff. The excess of educational jargon on the home page is enough to turn me off :glare:

Absolutely. Reminding her to buckle up isn't making a big deal of it. Safety issues aside, YOU will get a ticket if stopped.

Ikea bookshelves and a custom built school room aren't the only two choices, though, right? :D I would probably discourage my mom from spending more than is needed, but if she offered seven grand initially, I'd get something much nicer than Ikea bookshelves. Look at furniture stores, educator stores, etc and get some different ideas. I'd probably go for a mix of built-in shelves and moveable pieces.

Gender wouldn't affect my decision. I'd have some concerns about them witnessing the pain, blood and general mess that go along with a problem-free birth, and I'd worry about them witnessing it if something went wrong. When my two were born, if I wasn't cursing or screaming, it was only because I was throwing up. I wouldn't want to feel like I had to put a good face on things in order to not upset them, and I know I wouldn't be able to take off my 'mama hat' and not worry about looking after them. And I don't WANT to look after anyone while giving birth :001_smile: