I got rid of it years ago. All I can say is good riddance to bad rubbish.

Laugh hysterically when I realized that I didn't realize that I was pregnant until I was 32 weeks along! My belly is big and that baby is kicking a lot. :D

Oi! I'm looking at F6 and it says to use FG poster #1. I just assumed a file must exist because there was one for the Kindergarten year. How ignorant of me to suppose that such a thing existed. :D I suppose that I can just copy the picture. Are there many other such posters referenced? I need this to be easy. I've got too many littles, not to mention to teenagers, to be fussing with math for hours a day.

Can someone please point me to where the 1st grade poster files are found? I've searched all over the CSMP site and just can't find them. Just got to say, I'm excited to start. I think that it'll be good. :)

Or push your bed against the wall if it's not already, put dh in the middle and then sneek in on the outside when he's out cold. If he awakes in the night and notices you made dh could deal with him?

What's wrong with people anyway? Here you go and make a new person and they have the gall to say something rude! Congratulation a thousand times over!

Your search abilities are better than mine. I tried an advanced search of forums looking for CSMP in the titles and only came up with a couple insignificant threads. :confused1:

I just became aware of CSMP math and I'm fascinated. It's amazing how many free resources out there that I've never seen before. Free is my middle name. Normally I'm the biggest MEP fanboy out there but it's not working so well with my keen first grader. I imagine that we'll be able to come back to it in awhile. So has anyone used CSMP math? How does it work? Would it be sufficient for k-6? What are it's shortcomings? What are it's strengths? If you know MEP too how does it compare?

That book look so good. That's really what I was thinking of, just intentional math play. What I'm thinking of doing right now is making a detailed master list of 1st grade math concepts and then on the fly glean play and word problem ideas from different resources, especially MEP because it's what I know, and then have regular math sessions together. I'll sprinkle in a generous amount of written illustration so that that concept isn't lost. The fact that 4+5=9 is equivalent to 9=4+5 is afterall a concept that they need to grasp and isn't really that approachable in verbal form. There are certainly other concepts like that as well.

I'm using y6 with one dc and y7 with my other dc. I skipped y6 with my dd and it was a great choice for her. y7 is definitely easier than y6. That said, you might appreciate the change. It's structured entirely differently. The year is made of 24 units. Each come with a unit test and then there are tests after every five or so units. What I did was have dd do the unit tests at the beginning of the year to see what units we could safely skip. One thing that I really appreciate is the that student book has instructions for the students so it's not so teacher dependent. y6 has been a good choice for my ds though. He has more aptitude than his sister but he's lazy. y6 works a lot of honing arithmetic skills. It's a lot of work. This child needed the drill so that he can move on to higher stuff. I'm actually planning on moving him into y9 when he's done y6. As a side note, there are a bunch of extra files that go with each unit. There are different ways that you can go about using them. The way I've been implementing it is that I sit down with the student book at the beginning of the unit. I circle the problems that I want her to do and hand it to her. The teacher notes are not nearly so valuable in year 7 as they are in the earlier years. The three streams are expected to answer different questions. There are suggestions for what to assign but I haven't bothered too much with that. After she does what I've assigned I mark her work. If she's struggled then I assign her more of the questions. If she still struggles then I go to the extra practice files. I've also used these for review of some of the harder units. After she's competent with a unit I give her a unit test. It took me a bit to figure out what was necessary and what wasn't but it's working out for us now.

I've got a first grader this year. When my older two were little they just didn't have the love for learning and logic like this one does. I had to force them to sit down and learn math. This one asks me math questions. He's inquisitive. It's lovely. We started into MEP1 a few months ago and have been taking it slowly. The problem is that the drill and semantics of math seems to be sucking the life out of him and I'm scared. He had a question like this today: ooooo|oo Write two additions, two subtraction and an inequality about this picture. The original was five dice in a box and two outside of it. The equations were to go in a grid. I've been scribing for him most of the time and trying to break off when he's bored. Some of the issue is that his mind really can handle more complex word problems then this but he's finding it challenging to express how the terms of addition are reversible in equation form. He can easily see this and describe this quality in the context of a conversation about a word problem. He can also intuitively see that a subtraction is the opposite of an addition and that 7-5=2 is related to 7-2=5 but I'm struggling to help him put that down on paper. He really is bright in this area. Just today he asked me what the times symbol meant. I briefly explained it and then asked him what 3x4 equaled. At first he said 16 but I pointed out that that was four fours so he counted again and got 12. He'll tell me that 200+300=500. With our abacus he could probably quickly learn to do double digit adding. I'm really thinking of ditching formal math for 6 months to a year and just trying to intentionally increase his numerical literacy verbally through word problems and through games. Does this seem reasonable? I'm a little scared though because my older two started math late (I'm a repentant unschooler) and I totally regretted it. I'm wondering if I could do this differently by being a lot more intentional with ds6. Thoughts?

I haven't read all the other comments but I agree with those that said that this will cause a rift. I personally would just try to cancel the dinner altogether if I really didn't want to eat with him. You could then have personal meals out with each family member one on one instead. Just consider how you would handle things if your mother asked for your dh to not visit. Also, what will happen when/if they have children. If you want to be in their lives you're really going to have to go the extra mile here. You can do it. Put on your big girl panties and pretend that it's not so painful. When these sorts of situation are done have a cry on your dh's shoulder.

My sympathy goes out to you. I have a friend that has five dc, one with mild autism and one with the most severe autism that you can imagine. You might find a sympathetic friend through her. She has a creative blog here: https://bustedbutton.com/ . From there you could find her FB page. I know that she longs for an understanding ear too and is quite open to contact.

The thing is that Canada is NOT moderate in this issue. If Trump and Clinton had ran here Clinton would have won by an epic landslide. Our current PM has a very liberal and he's well liked. That said, if you still like Canada, you could consider the west coast. The weather is the same as Seattle. Of course, there's always Mexico too... :coolgleamA:

Could the nephew have a different father instead or was related through his mother?

I'm in Canada but it's fascinating to me to see this play out in the US. What I don't know from history is how something like this could play itself out. If tensions continue to rise civil war could be around the corner but how does civil war occur in a country where the two sides are not geographically sorted any more? Would it be like Northern Ireland? What about an "Christian" version of ISIS? What other examples, even far out there examples, are there that we could glean from?

I love these threads. The mailbox question the other day got me wondering what municiple garbage pick-up looks like in other areas. Normally, because we live rurally, we have no pick-up. We just take our cans to the dump and empty them into the GIANT pile ourselves. Metal and wood have their own piles. It's nasty but it works. Recently, we've settled in to a home for a few months in a big city (Greater Vancouver, BC) while my husband does some work. We've lived in this city before but garbage collection has changed. I was surprised by few things. The way it works is that garbage and recycling is collected every other week, back and forth. That seems really minimal for both those things. There is also compost collection now, which is really cool. That's collected weekly. The city sells the compost as a fundraiser. Every house gets 3 smallish, colour coded cans that the trucks pick-up with an arm that comes out the side. If you pay more taxes you can get a bigger can but the default is pretty small. All recycling gets thrown in the can together--paper, plastics, glass, etc. all together. That's weird to me. Who sorts that? So what does your collection service look like?

Just barely the '80s

I will never say a pledge of allegiance to anyone besides God and I teach my children to do likewise. I actually consider doing so to be a form of idolatry. I think that people here need to recognize that patriotism to any degree goes fundamentally against some people's religions. For me, I feel like my true identity is with the Kingdom of God. My fellow citizens are those you are also bringing themselves under the rule of Jesus. My present physical nationality is just by happenstance. I can respect that it's a decent country and appreciate the peace here without wholly allying myself with it. Most people would not expect a foreigner to swear the pledge (I'm assuming), why can't people here choose to consider themselves foreigners as well? Isn't the next logical step to forbid emigration, like N. Korea? Suggesting that if you don't like the pledge then you should stay out of the schools is not much different than suggesting that if you don't like the pledge then you should just leave the country. The gov't and tax money goes to provide much more than schools. They provide safety, roads, employment, security, etc. Should someone who refuses the pledge also abstain from accessing any of those services?

Thankfully we travel to the US a lot so I have the option of ordering any curriculum to a friends address in WA. It saves me so much money, even with the crummy exchange rate. Thank you for the Canadian shipping options though. I'm going to have to go shopping. :)

I'm eating humble pie here. I don't know how many times I've done this now. I don't realize the wisdom of doing a whole plate of curriculum, I cut stuff out, and then I regret my choices when my dc struggle. I didn't appreciate the value of Latin/Greek until recently. I have a 14yo boy that is struggling with spelling and I would like to introduce more word roots to his studies so that he can associate words that he knows with new words that are related. I've also thought that roots would help him make more educated guesses for his spelling choices. I also want a resource that won't brake the bank, isn't to immature but can be used with my younger dc later and will be a just get 'er down sort of resource. Even just a reference book that we could build a notebook from as we go through spelling words would probably be sufficient but maybe something more would be better. So what's out there?

That was a great article. I think that I'm inspired. :)

Maybe there's a business opportunity here. Someone needs to start a day care for all the expelled biters. You could call yourself "Biter's Daycare: bite or be bitten". Something catchy like that should work. :P

I'm in BC. I honestly think that I smell more marijuana then I do tobacco when I'm in public. When my two oldest were 5 I can distinctly remember one of them shouting out rather loudly, "I smell marijuana!" when it was just someone smoking a cigarette. Those two had/have a knack for embarrassing me. In BC it's really an underclass sort of activity. You typically find that it's the most dysfunctional people in society that are smokers. Those that are "higher class" do so quite secretly if they can't stop. I was absolutely shocked to learn that two of of the students in my dh's med school class smoked. I had a midwife that smoked too and that surprised me greatly as well. I just haven't seen enough of the world I guess.

In terms of Ehlers Danlos in particular, I don't know if you realize this but it can range from very mild to quite serious. My mother and brother both have it. My mother is quite mild and my brother's is moderate. My parents had six children and only one of them has issues. Just because it's in the genes doesn't mean that you're even somewhat likely to have a child with a bad problem. I'm glad that my parents had me. ;)