I'm astonished that folk say they've never or hardly ever given up on a day! Maybe my definition of "giving up" is different to everyone else's? Or maybe other folk never had kids like mine ;) For me, when days go really bottoms up, it's a big neon sign that something is wrong. It could be that we need a break or that I need to step back and reassess (my self-care/the curriculum/our external commitments etc) Sure, if I'm just being a bit lazy or feeling sorry for myself, then I need to put my big girl pants on, but to me it's counterproductive to grit my teeth and drag the kids through a bad day if underlying issues remain unresolved. Learning is lifelong, it shouldn't have to be an endurance test, ðŸ˜

I used to, occasionally. Then I read Alphie Kohn's 'Punished by Rewards' and it gave me a whole new perspective on the whole praise, punishment and rewards thing. :)

Often, when the kids were young. :) I'm a parent: I'm not superhuman. I've apologised to my kids a lot over the years and I think they respect me more for it. I used to find that sometimes we could turn round a disastrous day, just by getting out the house for a few hours: stick some sandwiches in a bag and take a trip to the library, a walk in the woods with friends, or just a stroll around the block to post a letter. It can feel a huge effort to get out, but I find that fresh air and exercise tends to help with perspective:)

Accept that it's ok to be a good enough homeschooler: I can pretty much guarantee that your kids will be a lot happier with "good enough" homeschooling than living amidst the unpredictable swings of an anxious parent constantly striving for perfection in their homeschooling. Stop comparing yourself with others. Yes, you will see other families who appear to have achieved the heights of perfection in homeschooling, but it will most likely be a well-practiced illusion, or will have come at the cost of something else, equally important. Listen to and learn from others, but in the end, do it your way. Only you have your children. It's not a race. Learning is lifelong. Enjoy the journey :)

Yes, this! :) It's not a race. If I'd tried to get my kids to fit with everyone else's schedule we would have had tears every. single. day. Sometimes I find it helps to step back, reassess why I am homeschooling, write down what I think is important (in terms of lifelong learning) for my kids. It's easy to get trapped in the daily struggles and lose the bigger picture:) . Good luck.

That might be what you want from narrations, but I'm not not sure that ties up with the purpose of the narration exercises in eltl. Ime narrations improve simply with practice, doing them orally and often and not labouring over them. A few minutes, gently guiding my kids through their recollection of the story/text. If we had to write them down and analyse them in any detail, it would absolutely kill the joy for my kids. Light touch :) (fwiw, my Dd went from being unable to narrate at all, to being able to narrate fairly fluently, using eltl. It's definitely a little-and-often curriculum, deceptively gentle :) )

We just stuck to oral narrations, for ages. If I did transcribe any narrations I used prompts to keep the child on track (I don't care if that's considered an incorrect method for narrations, it was what my child needed.) Oral narrations, plus the copywork and grammar was plenty to do. Also, because my daughter really struggled with narrations, I gave her modelling clay, so she could 'act out' the story, while narrating. It made a huge difference. Have you joined the yahoo group for ELTL? It's worth asking about it on there. You'll find folks use the material in different ways - there are no hard and fast rules - and the author actually encourages a relaxed approach, adapting to whatever suits your family. My daughter did ELTL several years below her grade, some parts we skipped, some we changed out. It suited us at the time and then we moved on to something else. Maybe you're just overthinking it? :)

In the same position. Wish I could cancel and keep my credits to spend when I want to.

One thing I have noticed in the past few years here is an increasing number of homeschooling newbies who expect to have little responsibility for the education of their child. These folk go into homeschooling, assuming that, like school, everything to be provided for their child, with minimal cost and inconvenience to themselves. Maybe changes in society have infantalised people and they now feel unable to do things for themselves? maybe the push for mothers to work and stick their babies in childcare from practically newborn means some folks are totally disconnected from the responsibility of parenting and education? Or maybe everyone is just used to being a customer and making demands of service providers? Truth is, I really don't know how to prepare these kinds of newbies (thankfully still a minority) for the challenges of homeschooling. Mostly I just want to yell at them to get off their butt, roll their sleeves up and interact with their child. I'm not sure that's what they want to hear!

I think the decline of my social life was one of the hardest thing to come to terms with and one I regret not working harder at. I frequently tell newbies that it's ok to sign up to activities because *they* need company, not just because they think they should socialise their kid. Parenting can be a lonely business and homeschooling can amplify that feeling of isolation. :)

Tbh, I think it's like talking to a first-time pregnant mom about what life is going to be like after the baby arrives. Full disclosure isn't necessarily the kindest approach and everyone is so different, that no two parents are going to have the same experience. If anyone asks me specifically for details about the difficulties I've experienced in home schooling, then, yes, I will give them the (abbreviated) truth. But I'll also tell them how we worked to resolve those difficulties and the positives that came out of the experience. I would never portray homeschooling as all perfect, unless, of course, I'm trying to convince someone who is critical of homeschooling in general. (In that case, I'll paint the most positive picture I can!) I'm happy to admit to newbies that it's been a rollercoaster journey for our family, but I'll also say that I have no regrets about choosing the path we have.

I usually say that homeschooling is the easy part. Its all the other stuff that gets in the way of homeschooling that makes it hard! If I had a cleaner, a cook, a gardener...

Why don't you ask her what she would like to change to make it better/more interesting/more purposeful? I would go with the assumption that grumbling in an otherwise compliant child, probably has a valid reason beneath it. If I'm unable to give a child a good reason for why I think an exercise/curriculum/question/approach has a purpose, then maybe they shouldn't be doing what I'm giving them. I think there are times when we get a bit stuck in a rut with what we give our kids to do, maybe choose the option that is easiest or best for us, and sometimes that decision needs to be revisited and freshened up. Edit: hadn't read the rest of the thread and just noticed this has already been suggested. :)

"Both my husband and I did well in math and value it - we want all our kids to do well in math. Our fourth graders are doing well and even my 3 year old has shown some nice math skills." I might be on the wrong track, but looking at the above, maybe that's exactly why she doesn't like maths? Perhaps she knows how highly you and your dh value it, how important it is to you, and that you have high expectations regarding maths that she should meet. I'd imagine most sensitive kids would sense that pressure around the subject, in a household where even the maths skills of a 3 year old are noted and valued. All us parents fall for it in some way, we have our favourite subjects or skill-set that we value, perhaps something we are good at, and we so want our kids to love them, too. Personally, from what you've said, I'd cut down on the maths, use a basic get-it-done approach for her and focus on the things she does love doing. Maybe if she thinks you value those things as much as maths, she'll come back to using her 'maths brain'. :) [Edited to add...A third grader crying practically every day over a subject isn't normal and isn't ok. It's a major signal that something needs to be changed. right. now. If we were talking about a school child, who cried every day when she was sent to school, for a whole year, no parent would keep sending them.]

I'm in the UK. My two eldest didn't really use any curricula until age 10 or 11. We just did hands-on projects, spent a lot of time in the woods, museums, library, etc, and watched a lot of documentaries. We did dabble in Math Mammoth for a short while, and also completed Ellen McHenry's The Elements and Carbon Chemistry when they were each about age 12. My boys started following exam syllabuses and textbooks age 13 and took their first exams age 14. Despite the lack of textbooks in the early years, they have coped fine with exams :) My youngest started using curricula a little earlier than her brothers. UK textbooks are suited more for study in a classroom environment, so she has mostly used US resources, such as Ellen McHenry, CAP Writing and Rhetoric, ELTL and math Mammoth. Galore Park is used by some private (fee-paying) schools and their books are considered to be about a year ahead of the stated age/grade, so keep this in mind if you use them. We tried Galore Park books and found them quite dull,but they do cover the basics. If you use them, be prepared to supplement with more interesting material :) Galore Park English made my son cry, so we gave that up! In terms of exams, most home educators in the UK do IGCSEs, the international version of GCSEs. These are easier to take outside of the school system. However, the exam system is in flux at the moment, so there may have been a lot of changes by the time your children need to think about exams. I certainly wouldn't worry about following the National Curriculum, unless you intend to put your kids back into the school system. It's basically a set of limited guidelines. In the younger years much of it is an attempt to formally replicate the skills that would naturally be acquired by children during their day-to-day life. I would recommend joining yahoo and facebook groups for your area when you move here. The more experienced home educators tend to spend time on the yahoo groups. The newbies tend to use Facebook, so (in my experience) advice on the Facebook groups isn't always accurate or drawn from experience. Both sorts of online groups have their uses :) Depending on where you move to, there are an increasing number of home educating families around, especially around larger cities, and a range of regular groups and activities. You'll find there is a huge range of home educating styles in the UK. A lot of UK home educating families are relaxed educators in the primary years, preferring a more child-led approach. There are some that only do maths and English as formal subjects, and others (often American families :) ) who are more structured and formal in all their subjects. Sometimes the groups are quite polarised, but mostly we play nicely and get along with each other. :) You probably already know, but there is no government funding or support for home educators in the UK. There is also no obligation to register with the local authority as a home educator. Thankfully, due to funding issues, most councils now don't have the money for staff to deal with home educating families and we are mostly left to get on with it without interference (hooray!) If you need any more info, just ask.

If it was me, I'd bring her home. Immediately. I'd hug here, tell her I love her, and totally forget about any school for a few months. I'd go for walks, watch movies, grow flowers, read books or bake together, and focus on healing. I can only go on what you've said, but she sounds a desperately unhappy young person and I would be very concerned about her long term mental health. Some of the things you've said would suggest to me depression, or a learning disorder, or even perhaps aspergers. (IME girls with LDs or ASD often compensate better than boys for their difficulties, but the emotional toll of coping is huge.) Or perhaps that's just the person she is, and that's ok, too. I wish you both the best of luck.

I frequently ask my kids to humor me. They're getting pretty good at it. They're teens. I totally understand why they aren't excited about the same things as me. They really aren't going to get excited about a new ball of sock wool I just bought and I'm not exactly jumping for joy when some guitarist from X band that I haven't heard of has just posted on his blog about their new album. I think humoring each other is a good skill to learn. Some nodding and 'uh-huh' is a bare minimum requirement in our house. :)

"It's mostly how many: pts - qt, qt-gallon, oz-lb, oz-cup, ft-yd, in-ft, ft-mile, quarters-dollar. I think that's most of them, though any others similar are probably included, too." We've skimmed all that stuff with my kids and I certainly didn't make them learn it. Really. It's just a bunch of facts, like memorising capital cities, information which is easy to access, pretty much anywhere, any day, and so isn't top of my list of priorities. If I want to convert feet to yards or miles or some other conversion, I stick it in a conversion program online or on my phone, or I look in the back of a cookbook. If I ever moved anywhere remote enough not to have internet or book access, then how many feet make a mile would be the least of my concerns. Learning number bonds and times tables? Yes, because that's actually useful to speed up mental calculations when I'm deciding what is the cheapest combination of tinned beans in the supermarket or cheapest packs of wood lengths to build a patio ;) If you really want kids to learn conversion stuff, then how about doing it in real life? Get the tape measure out...get the kitchen scales out..or go outside and build something. Ime, doing it hands-on is far more likely to make it stick. I know about oz and lbs because I bake and because I my bathroom scales keep telling me I'm heavier than I like to think I am, lol. Only dh would actually calculate conversion stuff like that in our house...and that's because he's mr competitive who likes to show off his mental prowess, while everyone else is backing out the room, rolling their eyes. ;)

This. We used SOTW, but we never did any of the quizzing or narration. I agree that the books are quite wordy (and in places can be a bit dull). They have quite a lot of vocab that my kids wouldn't be familiar with. The (mostly) chronological order of the books means that there's a lot of darting around from one place/culture to another, so it's not always easy to keep track of threads between different chapters. tbh, I'm not an auditory learner, so I couldn't have answered the quiz questions, or have done an oral narration on many of the chapters. I rarely remember things unless I write them down or do them :) My dd is similar and also had issues with oral narration. I gave her modelling clay to model the characters while I read. It helped a lot. Even her sports coach has notice that she's very much a kinesthetic learner - she tends to use muscle memory to remember things, because lots of words confuse her! BTW, do you do any of the activities in the accompanying activity book? For us this was the best bit of SOTW, and definitely cemented the knowledge far better than quizzing.

Too much :) Now I've come to realise that choice isn't always a good thing.:) I've also acknowledged more recently that the thrill of researching and hoarding resources, web links and downloads, is just a way for me to procrastinate about actually *doing* any of it! I feel sad that I spent so much time and energy when they were young, having dilemmas about *the best* resources to use, that sometimes we missed out using any resources...and now they are too old for those resources. I've always kinda envied people who are decisive and confident and just get on with it...unfortunately, that's not one of my character traits!

We're using ELTL4 and w&r narrative with my 12 yr old. We enjoyed using ELTL2 last year, started ELTL3, but wanted to jump ahead. We're not particularly structured in our days or weeks, but at the moment we're doing 3 days of ELTL4 and 2 days of w&r narrative and it's working well. We don't always do all the exercises in either programme,(that would be too much for my DD, who needs to build up her writing stamina) but so far, ELTL4 and narrative seem to match quite well in content. I havent seen any diagramming yet in ELTL4 - there was A LOT of diagramming in ELTL3 (rather too much for us!) - but I'm told that ELTL4 revises everything in ELTL3. We're used to tweaking: W&r narrative has rather a lot of Christian content for our taste, compared with fable, so we skim some parts. We do a lot of the narrative questions orally, so there's not too much writing. Sometimes ELTL4 explains techniques better, or at least more slowly, than W&R, so we focus on that book a little more. We use audiobooks, and choose our own poetry for ELTL. I think as long as you don't mind tweaking and not insisting on doing EVERY exercise, then the two books can work. Take what you like and leave what you don't need. It's possible at some time we might switch back to only using ELTL, or will move to combine ELTL and UK English textbooks (in preparation for UK exams). While it works, it's good...when it stops working, we'll reassess :)

Agreed, though it sounds as if this teacher is perhaps already overwhelmed and might not be able to offer much to meet parent/child needs. I'd say that any teacher who writes 'time management' on a 6 year-old's homework isn't, for whatever reason, coming from a child-centred viewpoint. If children are being left to work for long periods, with little support, it coukd well be that the teacher is transferring her own time-mismanagement onto the children. In the meantime I would do everything I could to let DD know that this isn't her fault, that she is perfectly capable, just that the teacher is expecting too much. It's very easy for young children to feel they are a failure because of poorly-thought-out comments from teachers. Do they allow parent helpers into the classroom? Although it is not directly your problem, it could be that the teacher needs more support to enable small group interaction within the classroom.

Try using some modelling dough/clay or allow her to draw as she narrates/listens. My 12-year-old dd doesn't retain aural/oral instructions particularly well, but physical actions really help. Allowing her to model the figures and scenery as I read the short stories, and then having her use the figures to retell the story, has helped immensely. After about 10 months of 'physical narration' she can now give an approximate narration of a 4 paragraph story without using the modelling clay. In contrast her brother could have narrated practically word-for-word at that age. They have different strengths :) We've found similar issues in the competitive sport that she does. Instructions just confuse her as she takes too long to process them, but physically *show* her what to do (with repetitions) and her muscle memory and instinct kicks in. Her coach has adapted his methods, accordingly. - minimal talking, maximum movement! I have no idea if it's a development or processing issue, but we've found ways to turn it into a non-issue by changing how we approach things. We also focus on her strengths so her confidence isn't shaken. Good luck. I hope you find ways to help :) [Edit: DD was 9 before she learned to read. Some things just take a little longer with some children. As a parent it can sometimes feel like a kid is doomed to come last in this seemingly very important 'race', but having seen how happy and popular dd is, I've learned that it's OK for kids to be on their own path. :)]

I'm wondering if the teacher's expectations are age-appropriate? I wouldn't leave my 12-year-old for 40 minutes without an occasional check-in to be sure that he is understanding the material and on-task. I don't recall any of my kids physically able to stay in a seat for more than 20-30 mins at 6 years of age, and they certainly couldn't work unsupervised for longer than 15-minute chunks. The ability to manage academic work within a time frame probably didn't really kick-in until age 11 or 12. You can train kids to manage their time, and demonstrate tools and methods to help. However, imo they need to be both developmentally ready (i.e. they need to have a good grasp of the concept of time), and be motivated (intrinsically or externally). For many kids that doesn't come until later.

(BTW, hang in there. In my experience the self-consciousness that arrives with puberty often helps kids develop some control over their verbal diarrhoea...and peer conformity will sort out the rest. At least that's what I've noticed in boys. From what I've seen of girls, puberty can make that verbal diarrhoea get a whole lot worse! ;) )