Recorder sounds lovely. A much more beautiful tone for beginning musicians. I can confirm that a room full of eight young children learning to play the tin whistle is indeed terrible. In fact, one of the first musical terms they learn is "cacophony." The tin whistle unit is a helpful way to introduce music theory to children who do not already take music lessons. I found that it was less helpful for my own children who could already read music and play an instrument. If I were doing CC at home, and was already taking private music lessons, I would just skip the tin whistle unit each year when it comes up. I spend enough time on music and music theory practicing violin with three children each evening!

I will plan to watch some of those YouTube and Khan Academy videos for reinforcement of the RS left-to-right method. It seems that this approach is worthwhile to teach, but that I don't need to insist on it if my son prefers the other way. I do like that it will reinforce the concepts behind multi-digit addition and subtraction so that they are not just applying a rote formula and sticking little ones on top of columns just because the math program said so.

Thank you for the suggestions. I'm not on the RS mailing list, but will see if I can figure out how to get on. They are used to the right-to-left way from Saxon, and had no trouble with it; so the RS way seems odd to them as well. I was just wondering if there is value in continuing to show them the RS way, or if we should just get on with other things. We are in an odd position, as we are re-doing 2nd grade math. My son did Saxon 2 in first grade, and is now doing RightStart's 2nd grade program, as I felt it covered some additional material that he needed, and I didn't want gaps in our transition.

I was wondering if it is the new thing to teach multi-digit subtraction by beginning at the left with the highest place value, and then proceeding to the right. RightStart Math Level C teaches it this way, but Saxon 2 and Singapore 2 seem to teach it the traditional way, which makes more sense to me (eliminates the possibility of a student subtracting numbers with different place value, makes trading easier, etc.). Would I be doing RightStart all wrong if we subtracted ones first? I do like the rest of RS Level C, but have just run into this one problem.

I haven't done this for my birthday yet, but this year for Mother's Day, I asked for the afternoon off. I went downtown, took myself out to a nice sushi restaurant, browsed around in the art galleries, went to a book store, read a bit, picked up the Sunday Times, sat down with a cappuccino and read as much as I wanted, got up to get some gelato, and then read some more. I sampled cheeses, olive oils and vinegars at the oil and vinegar store. As my present, I bought some books and art supplies (which I was able to select slowly and carefully with no children tugging at me). It was so delicious to just walk around all by myself with nothing that needed to be accomplished.

My toddlers and I once went to a swanky Noon Year's party at noon at our local art museum. It was lovely, with a balloon drop, mocktails, crafts, parade (with instruments), and "fireworks" (jumping around in a room lined with bubble wrap to make loud popping), but too, too crowded. I actually ended up losing a child for a few minutes in the press of people in the gallery for the balloon drop. Since then, we have recreated the party at home. I serve a special meal of finger foods and sparkling juice beverages, we have a parade around the house with paper hats and instruments, bubble wrap fireworks, and a balloon drop. For now, it is just a parent at the top of the stairs dumping laundry baskets full of balloons, but soon I hope to get one of those in-home balloon drop nets to string up on the cathedral ceiling.

My husband does not take time off from his job, but is around a fair bit during the day as he works from home. He does have a very separate office in another section of the house, so his work is not disturbed by the visit. And I do think a fair bit of the excitement around Grandma's visits is due to the vacationing, day-tripping nature of her visits -- no school, go to the zoo and children's museum, eat at the American Girl Cafe, play video games on her Kindle! It is getting out of hand, and I know I set up this situation by trying to make things special for the kids and MIL. This visit, my hope is to include her more in our daily life, and maintain at least part of a school schedule in the mornings.

Well . . . that is the issue. Personally, I feel it is a little bit long for two such visits during the school year, and then another one during our summer vacation. But then again, relationships take time, and I can see how this is important time with their grandmother. For now, I am just trying to minimize the impact on our school year.

I like the idea of a gradual transition, rather than an abrupt change.

Oh -- the library is a good idea! We live three minutes from our library, so that might be a place to take the older kids to do some concentrated work for a short period of time. I get so self-conscious being observed when we are doing school, and then the kids get all silly and start performing . . . I really appreciate all of the comments about allowing the kids to have this precious time with their grandmother. It is so kind of her to make a long flight out to build relationships with them. Apparently, when she gets back home, it is all she talks about for months.

Thanks again for all of the advice. I am thinking now that I need to scale back the trips outside of the house during the visit, and focus on memory-building and time with Grandma doing things at home like baking cookies, art projects, reading, and sewing. The field trips are a lot of fun, but probably contribute to the crazed behaviorally-challenged kids that result from all of that running around all week. MIL does enjoy sight-seeing while she is out, so we will still do a few trips. I also just thought of a small, finished room we have in the basement with a table and chairs. I use it for standardized testing, and my husband uses it for teaching the older children Hebrew, but I don't use it much during the day as my 2 and 4-year-old would destroy the house if left alone upstairs. With MIL here, though, I might be able to do school with the older kids in the "basement office" while she watches the little boys upstairs (reading, doing play-dough, or even playing Angry Birds on her Kindle, which they would love). We could accomplish things with much greater efficiency, and have a nice separation between home/Grandma and school/no Grandma.

That's true. I guess time with Grandma doesn't always have to involve complicated trips outside the house. It would be less disruptive to do things together at home some of the days. In warmer months, she enjoys gardening with the kids, and will spend hours outside with them; but that doesn't work in New England in early March. She likes to play video games with them on her Kindle, but I don't like to encourage that. She sews, and might be able to do that with the older kids. She also enjoys birds. We have included her in our poetry teas in the past, which she liked quite a bit. She would probably also like to do some art projects, if I could keep things from getting overwhelming (which art projects can with five kids).

I know some would say I do not have any "big kids," but with my 6/7/8-year-old elementary-aged children and 2- and 4-year-old little boys, I feel like we very much have a big kid/little kid split. I have the little boys do their painting and play dough while the bigger kids do school. I also make use of drop-off programs at the nature center or science museum to drop the older kids off for a snow-shoeing/animal tracking trip or Lego engineering class for a few hours and take the little boys off to do something fun on their own -- like visit a petting zoo, go on a little-boys-only hike, order chocolate milk and pastries at a cafe, or just play at the science museum. True, my older kids aren't very old and would still enjoy these things (and sometimes get upset when they hear we went to the petting zoo without them), but I do feel that too often the agenda is focused on their needs and not on the little ones. At our co-op, we recently scheduled one mother each week to do pre-school/sensory-type activities with the younger siblings while the other mothers teach the older kids. Previously, we had just let the littles run around in the playroom, and checked on them once in a while (as we are a small co-op and did not have a lot of extra mothers to spare); but now they get songs and stories and craft projects, which they really seem to love.

I am an introvert as well, and MIL has a difficult personality (although she really loves the kids, and tries so hard to be as helpful and agreeable as possible). I really just wish she would not visit so frequently, but then I feel unkind for not appreciating how much effort she is making to come out here and build relationships with her grandchildren. I do realize now that I need to schedule time for DH to take MIL and the kids someplace else one day on the weekend; and I also try to disappear in the evenings once things are cleaned up just to maintain sanity (and allow MIL and DH to visit while I stay in bed and read). Last visit, I had to leave the house suddenly to "run errands" because I was afraid I might explode. Maybe it is a fantasy to think we can accomplish some schoolwork. We *have* tried in the past, but it is difficult because there are interruptions, and the kids misbehave, and the schedule isn't quite the same and I'm afraid she wonders just when school takes place. She hasn't said anything, but I feel disapproved of.

Thanks, Junie, for that perspective. This is my other line of thought, and why I have always just skipped school when she visits. My MIL's health is failing, so I do feel badly ignoring her and just going ahead with school -- and am thankful that homeschooling allows us some flexibility to spend more time with family. But then, I am feeling overwhelmed by the thought of losing all of that school time in February. The kids also tend to develop behavior problems when the daily structure of school is taken away, as I have some very intense personalities who do better with structure. And then it is tough to have behavior problems and confused, unstructured kids when we have a houseguest observing everything. I think I will go ahead and do some morning lessons with the older ones, and plan some fun things for the afternoons.

Thank you for the advice. I wish I could structure our time as Cosmos suggested (with Grandma taking the children individually on little trips while I do school with the others), but she does not drive, and does not have a lot of energy for supervising children. If the children were in school, it would be so easy. Grandma and I would take the little boys to the zoo in the morning, she could spend time with the older children when they got home, and then we would do something fun on the weekend. It is just that it is difficult to be mother, teacher, hostess, and cruise ship operator/tour guide all at the same time and still get school done for my older kids. I think that I could drop some afternoon school as pehp did-- Latin, History, Science, so that we could be more free in the afternoons (replacing them with some read-aloud that maybe Grandma could do). She does like to read to the children and do flashcards or similar, so I could use her help with that. She might be able to watch the littles for limited periods of time in the morning, but I know they can be overwhelming for an elderly person, so I can't have her do that all morning every morning. The problem is probably one of transitions. We used to take all the time off and do many, many fun things when she visited. Maybe too much. Now, she is doing two school-year visits per year (instead of one), the kids are older, and we need to scale it back, and get our school done. I want to communicate that ahead of time, before she buys her tickets, so that she understands that she is welcome to come, but needs to allow us to do school (and if that's not all right, she can wait until the summer).

My mother-in-law loves to fly across the country to spend time with her grandchildren -- staying for 8 or 9 days at a time. In the past, I have dropped school and taken her out sight-seeing with the kids, calling it a "field trip" or school vacation. As her visits have become more frequent (two such visits during the school year, and one in the summer), and the kids have grown older, I feel very stressed about taking all of this time off. I like vacations to be . . . restful, and having a houseguest is not restful for me, and does not allow me to catch up on everything I want to do while not schooling. I also feel it is unfair to the children to suspend their lessons for such a long period. This fall, we started school early in anticipation of her scheduled visit, and took the time off; but now she wants to visit in late February, and we have had e-mails back and forth about how we can take a day off for a field trip, and will try to complete our school in the morning, but we can't take vacation during her visit this time. I don't think she is understanding this, and keeps talking about all the day trips the kids have told her they want to take, and asking about school vacation. I told her that the kids are taking a winter break earlier that month to attend a program at the nature center, so we cannot take another winter break. Please tell me if I am being unreasonable. I *love* that she wants to come and build relationships with the grandchildren, and I do feel a bit arbitrary telling her when our "school vacation" is and isn't. It would be so much easier if the kids were in a traditional school! Any advice for handling these visits and trying to get school done?

Yes, the children have decided that she should adopt them. They think they will be able to luxuriate in her comfortable home with no school or chores, and she will buy them Star Wars things all day.

I think we were all just confused about "tiles" and OPG. Do you mean the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Reading, or does OPG stand for something else? Were you talking about All About Reading (AAR) instead?

Oh ThinkGeek! We have a close relative in high places over there, so we are swimming in unique gifts. For Christmas, she sent us a Death Star waffle maker ("come to the dark side; we have waffles"), along with various geeky cutting boards, tribbles, an R2D2 cooler, a Darth Vader purse, and plates painted like planets. Here is a link to the waffle http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/huik/?pfm=Search&t=star%20wars%20death%20star%20waffle%20maker

This was our first. I cleared off the homeschool table so that we could eat in the dining room -- champagne, sparkling apple juice for the kids, broiled salmon, green beans, and some pre-made latkes I found in the frozen food section -- served with sour cream and applesauce). We lit the menorah, played dreidel, opened Aunt Julie's Christmas gifts (and called them Hanukkah presents), and handed out chocolate coins. The two-year-old liked the last part and kept asking for "Mo' chocolate money, peese!"

Thank you. Of course posting website references like that is fine! I'll check it out.

I think AAR4 is wonderful. My two oldest completed OPGTR by first grade, and were reading kids' chapter books for pleasure at that point, but I still felt that some more practice with larger and more complicated words would help them. Maybe we went through OPGTR too quickly -- but for some reason, I didn't feel "done." After taking a break from reading instruction for a year or two, I gave them the placement test and bought AAR4, which I am going through rather quickly with my second and third graders. After the first lesson, which took us quite a while as we were new to the program, we have been going at a rapid pace, and really enjoying the strategies and the stories.

We just received a Lego Advent calendar as a gift, and it looks great. With multiple children, though, how do I divide the spoils?

I had a 3-year-old in a similar situation. We actually continued with AAR Pre because he loved Ziggy and the coloring sheets, but added in OPGTR. I began after lesson 26 and continued in order without skipping or condensing. Some was review, some was new -- and it was difficult for me to know in advance what would be easy for him, so we just did it all. I only had him do one lesson a day, even if it only took 5 minutes, as he was a wiggly little boy.