The Liberal Arts Tradition

We do GSWL followed by LL1. There is some review in LL doing it that way, but there is so much more vocab in LL. I feel it is a nice gentle ramp-up and makes LL easier for my kids to do somewhat independently. GSWL sort of scratches the surface of Latin, slowly enough to make it understandable, without overwhelming the student with a lot of memorization. And then LL covers a lot of of the same concepts, but with extensive Latin vocabulary, Roman history, and practice with English vocabulary derived from the Latin words they are learning.

55% graduation rate. 25% drop-out. 3% take AP courses, and 14% take the SAT.

Have you seen the new series by Jay Wile? I doesn't follow the cycles in the WTM, but it does follow science through history. It's an open and go read aloud with simple experiments using household objects. I like it waaaaay better than Apologia. And I like how it ties in the history of science. The publisher is Berean Builders.

Congrats! I had twins in the fall of 2011. For the first six months, dinner generally consisted of a small loaf of sourdough bread for with butter, a hunk of cheese, and a bagged green salad. Maybe some sauerkraut or apples, too. Lunch was usually some sort of frozen chopped veggies and meat or fish that I put in the crockpot first thing in the morning after breakfast. Then I used the crockpot again after dinner to do overnight oatmeal for breakfast. We had some fruits around for snacks, and that was about it. After the twins were over a year old, I switched to once a month freezer cooking. It's a huge lifesaver for homeschooling with lots of littles! I also use Amazon Subscribe and Save, to cut down on trips for things like detergent, paper towels, and diapers. Prepare for extreme sleep deprivation. I was unable to drive anywhere many times because of it. Just something you may want to think about if your older kids have classes or other things outside the home.

We also do Getting Started with Latin followed by Lively Latin. I'm very happy with this progression.

Sometimes a family of 8 can't fit in one parking space safely. I consider a safety issue to be forced to leave my babies unattended in the parking lot while I pull my van out of a too-small-space in order to load my kids. Taking two spaces is sometimes a necessity, and I've never done it just because I felt like a queen. Small parking spaces are meant for small families with small cars. If your'e not a small family, you have to just make things work somehow.

I don't have a problem with people parking in the middle of the space next to my big van, but the problem is that people do NOT always park in the middle of their space, and won't re-park their car more evenly. They might be technically "in the lines" but if they're 2 feet from the side of my van, that's just rude. It happens a lot in my city because they make the parking spaces really tiny so they can fit more in the lot. I have been sitting in my van nursing my babies and watched people pull up next to me, a couple of inches from the white line on the side next to my van, with TONS of room on the other side. They just squeeze right of their car and don't bother re-parking. And then I have had to go re-park so that I can get my kids out of the van. It should be common sense that if you can hardly open your own car door to get out, the car next to you is going to have trouble, too!

I have a 15 passenger, too, and my problem is people parking so close to the passenger side that we can't open the doors all the way. I have no idea how these people get out of their own cars, since I don't think they can open their own driver's side doors all the way . Baffling! The first week I had my van, I parked at the doctor's office in the outermost edges of the parking lot. There were several empty spaces around my van. I had newborn twins in carrier seats, along with four other kids. I came out after the appointment, and some idiots had parked so close to my van on both sides that I couldn't get the doors doors open far enough to get the car seats into the van. So I had to leave my babies and kids (the oldest was 6) on the sidewalk while I completely backed the van out of the parking space and then load up the kids. After that, I started taking up two spaces in any parking lot with spaces narrow enough for that to happen. I got a lot of dirty looks for doing that, but I had 7 people for two spaces. So our person-per-space ratio was still pretty good ;-)

There are some fun ideas here.

I use the Google music player download on my computer to put all my audio on the internet. I downloaded the SOTW audio files, uploaded them to Google Play, and now I can access them from all our devices and Chromecast it right to my TV. As soon as I get an audio CD with any curriculum, I copy it to my music section of Google Play and file away the CD. I'm not very tech-savy but this is pretty easy for me.

Jay Wile has a new science series in the works that sort of lines up with a 4 year history cycle. Science in the Ancient World and Science in the Scientific Revolution have been published so far. You can see how it would line up with Story of the World, The Mystery of History, or Tapestry of Grace here. Or you can use SWB's recommendations to cover science in this four-year cycle order: Biology (with Ancient History), Astronomy/Earth Science (Middle Ages), Physics (Early Mod.), Chemistry (Modern). Of course there a lot of different types of books you could get to do it that way too.

Honestly that sounds just like my daughter before we found out the cause.... moodiness, messy handwriting..... plus bladder problems. Her issues stemmed from the inability to handle salicylates. Food coloring, arificial flavors, and most spices, herbs, amd fruits and vegetables. We put her on a low salicylate diet and all the problems disappeared. We give her No Fenol enzymes and extra magnesium and fish oil now, and she can tolerate a normal diet now (minus food colorings). I'm not saying every moody kid has this issue, but I thought I'd share since it took a very long time for us to get my daughter figured out.

I would take California off the list... the only affordable places to live have a very high crime rate and would look ugly, not very scenic. You pretty much have to be a two income household to live here. And with this extreme drought, I don't know how long the economy can hold up.

I don't think anyone believes it's neglectful to prep your children for a trade instead of university. I brought up the topic of trades because I have seen parents use trade skills as an excuse to provide little more than a 3rd grade education. My husband's assistant is a fellow like this -- a smart guy who slipped through the cracks and can't hardly read. My husband had to teach him how many inches are in a foot and how to read gauges. It happens, for a lot of different reasons.

I'm just going off my personal experience, too. In my extended family on both my side and my husband's, there is a common assumption that our families are not smart enough for college. On top of that, going to college is not supported or encouraged because of the strong emphasis on working independently as young as possible (and staying out of debt). I grew up in heavily religious homeschooling circles and the families with the least educated kids were families with parents who worked in trades like construction or landscaping. The thinking seemed to be, well my kid can love Jesus, build a shed, and run the family business without writing essays or learning geometry, so who cares? But this is just my personal experience. Obviously homeschooling can help break cycles like the ones in my family.... my hardworking blue collar parents did it. My parents homeschooled me for educational reasons. My friends were homeschooled for religious reasons. The only ones that had a better overall education than I did were those whose parents had professional degrees. So that's where my comment about the blue collar workers was comming from. I didn't mean to offend blue collar workers. My husband is a blue collar worker, neither of us have a degree, and our kids score very well on achievement tests. So now I basically have no idea what I'm trying to say, and I sould probably go to bed because I am a morning person... I think my brain shut down mid post! :huh: ETA: I believe that educational neglect can be rooted in cultural preferences mental health, or just plain selfishness. Seems complicated. And much too complicated for the government to sort out.

Another issue that will have to be addressed culturally is *why* we pursue a liberal arts education in the first place, or bother to learn anything other than bare vocational skills. Our society is asking that question and not getting a good answer. So when the rubber hits the road, and school gets tough, there's not much motivation to continue something that is viewed as ultimately useless. I think this is a bigger deal in traditionally blue-collar families where it's simply not expected that anyone will need a professional degree. This may seem like a separate issue, but I think it does have some influence in families who don't value education enough to make hard sacrifices for it. I think many truly neglectful parents don't properly homeschool because they have mental problems, but there's a lot of grey area where what constitutes educational neglect may just be a difference of opinion about what education *is*.

I said that I think pastors should address it *also* -- I mean as one aspect of increasing the social unacceptability of educational neglect. That has nothing to do with how many homeschooler actually have a pastor. The fact is, many homeschoolers attend very conservative churches where homeschooling is pushed as a way to raise more godly children. (Many doesn't mean most). I was reading some comments on a Facebook post today in a popular homeschool group about why we need to learn grammar terminology. It seemed like most of the replies were something along the lines of, "heaven, not Harvard," or "Moses didn't know grammar and God used him!" A few people tried to explain why it could be important, but there was quite a reaction to it. Many religious communities, especially those who push homeschooling, buck up against "intellectualism." As if having a "worldly" education will make you part of the evil world. That's why I think well-respected pastors could have some influence in this area. Generally though, I think having conversations like this are a good thing. I believe that the state answers to the parents, as stated above.... but there should be a new movement socially to shame parents who don't educate their children. The problem in our society today is that people no longer place a high value on education. This is why some public schools are failing, and this is why some homeschools are failing. That's why I think it has to be a social problem addressed through the change of culture, not government.

I think it's going to take a lot of push back from people like us who care, speaking up and public condemning and privately expressing concern directly to people who don't educate their children. I think pastors need to address it, too.

This is my difficulty, too. The public elementary school in my neighborhood only has one out of four students able to meet the bare minimum requirements for grade level. Only 1 out of 20 can read and write at a 3rd grade level by 3rd grade. I just don't get it. I especially don't get people who think my kids should be tested every year and if they're not meeting the state standards, they should be put in that public school instead -- where the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of them never meeting the standards anyway (at least not without a lot of help from me at home). Our local high school is so bad that many teachers don't bother to assign homework because the kids won't do it anyway. The whole thing is so complicated.

The local Weston A. Price Foundation chapter is where I get my leads, too.

I am pretty sure none of my kids would have been able to do three pages of Math Mammoth in 2nd grade without a LOT of fidgeting, inability to focus, plus nagging from me. There are a lot of problems on those pages. If it were my kid, I would: 1) assign half the problems on each page, like every other one or something. 2) give a reward for finishing a page in a set amount of time. 3) do the work with him to make it enjoyable -- a fun social experience.

I would think most people wanting to stay in a cabin in that area would be more interested in the Tahoe National Forest, which may be why you can't find much in Reno itself. Truckee is beautiful, and it's only half an hour from Reno. But I'm not too familiar with Reno, so I don't really know much about what you're asking.

Have you seen readingbear.org ?

I recently switched my kids to Sequential Spelling because my son was failing every spelling test in a traditional spelling book, no matter how much he practiced. Sequential Spelling seems to be working very well and my kids are happy with it. My son has had extensive practice in phonics, but he applies it wrong in spelling. "Lake" comes out "laeck" or some such thing. But for some reason Sequential Spelling helps him out quite a bit.