Beef Bulgogi, seaweed soup, white sticky rice, kimchi and a few other side dishes. I cook mostly Korean food.

Ruth, I haven't been here for long but that is unfortunately not true based on how I got scolded by a few posters on the accelerated board for even mentioning about my personal preference on enriching high school to make my kids competitive instead of sending them off to college early, if it ever becomes my situation. I won't go deeper with it because I don't wish to cause any drama. I was just letting CatWoman know some might take her opinion personal as well. That's all. ETA: Think "advocates" was an inappropriate word choice. My apologies.

It is done on purpose to make it funny. :)

I'm with you. Just be careful there seem to be many early college advocates on this forum. ;) Every child is different and colleges vary across the nation so I'm not trying to make any generalization or judge other's choice. I just want to mention that I did meet a 16-year-old preppy-looking Ivy freshman the other day. I'm sure he's really smart and capable, but I and many people there felt his overall demeanor was rather impatient and immature compared to his classmates'. On the other hand, I was really impressed by the Jewish twins, who just graduated from one of the nation's top high schools, and many other such 18-year-old freshmen there. I had the feeling they will be successful no matter what they choose to do in the future. After meeting these students, I can't imagine sending my kids off to university campus early, not to mention at 12, even more.

Anyone watching Discovery of Romance? It's pretty good, too. :)

I remember I read the article about this family and watched their interview in other thread. I was immediately turned off by the fact that every single one of their 10 kids is/was on the exact same track of radical acceleration, which indicates that it was a strict parent-led approach, and all kids except for one (or two) went to sub-par private colleges that basically accept anyone. I'm glad they are happy with their achievements but that's certainly not what I'd want for both of my kids. Also, in the video the dad confidently argued anyone could do it--sending kids to college by 12--and advertised their consulting(?) website at the end of the interview. This made me frown.

Since finishing HOP and OPGTR (We used OPGTR only for a brief review. DS found it dry.), I've had my DS read easy readers aloud to me everyday, about 3 books a day. He's read most easy readers through all levels that are available at our local library. And I read picture books and chapter books aloud to him at bedtime. As for a reading curriculum, we're using Evan-Moor workbooks, such as Daily Reading Comprehension, Read & Understand with Leveled Texts and Nonfiction Reading Practice.

What Your Preschooler Needs To Know and What Your Kindergartener Needs To Know gave me good guidelines on what to cover.

Yes, you can introduce both languages to her now. If her first language (English) is well established, learning a few foreign languages at the same time won't confuse her. My kids were born in a dual language family and it did cause speech delay for both, but it won't be the case for your 9yo. Foreign language acquisition only becomes harder as she gets older. Just remember it takes a great deal of time and effort to reach fluency in foreign language so it might be more practical to focus on mastering one or two of them in later years. For now, however, let her explore as much as she wants. Self-motivation and long term commitment are key.

Looks like visible likes are back. :)

You can do both for the Amazon Prime's Kindle lending library. I browse lending library books online or from my Paperwhite and iPad, but you can check out the lending library book only from the device. You can read it on the Kindle app of any devices, not just on the Kindle. The problem of the Prime Lending Library is that, like you said, the selection is really bad. 90% of the lending library books are self-published useless e-books. I tried but couldn't find anything worth to rent this month. A lot more and better "real" books are available on Overdrive public library for free. And from what I've seen, the selection of Kindle Unlimited seems not much better, either. None of my favorite authors or books on my wish list was included. Not worth $10/month for me at all.

:bigear:

Wow, that is an OLD drama, lol. 2004, right? I've never seen it so I have to watch the whole scene to understand the context, but if I must guess, I think the female lead character in the drama is married really young at 18 (Most Korean women get married in their late 20s or later.) to an older prosecutor who's considered to be a catch, so I guess she desires to be treated as a grown-up woman by her husband. Welcoming a husband coming home from work at the door is a newly wed wife-y kind of sweetness that she wanted to do for him? I'm not sure... I don't think it's necessarily a Korean thing. :)

I really like this about Apple TV. We are not forced to see anything that iTunes offers. I can just go straight to the channels I want. However, Fire TV is way too pushy. When we got it, our Amazon account was already set up in the device and it comes with a free one-month trial of Prime membership if you don't have one. And their contents are all over the home screen while you have to search and download all other channels like Netflix and YouTube.

Ladies, check out the first episode of Three Musketeers! It got great reviews and I loved it. :)

Yes, Song Seung Hun. :) His acting is not bad though his general image in Korea is a male "Kim Tae Hee."

We have both of Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. We MUCH prefer Apple TV. If you have a cable subscription, you can have an access to HBO, PBS Kids and other channels that Fire TV don't have. (Fire has ShowTime.) Channels are already set up on Apple TV's home screen but on Fire TV you have to search and download "apps" including channels that you want. It's easier to browse through shows on Netflix with Apple TV. The voice search on Fire TV only works for the Amazon's contents. Only after two months we got the Fire TV, it stopped working so we had to reset it to factory setting. We've never had any technical problem with Apple TV since we bought it last year. I really wanted to like Fire TV although we don't play any games nor own any android device, but it is just not as good. The only better thing on Fire TV is that you can stream Amazon Prime shows (as well as its paid contents) on its home screen, but if you have a high speed internet, Air Play on iPad can work well for this, too. Amazon tries so hard to sell vast media contents through their devices.

I agree with others who said fluency in foreign language would be very difficult to achieve without immersion and fluent teachers. I was born and raised in East Asia where people learn English at school but rarely speak it in real life. Both of my parents do not speak any English and I started to learn from ABCs in middle school. My teachers were mostly non-native speakers with bad accents and poor understanding of the language, and the instruction and tests were mostly focused on grammar and reading comprehension. Immersion (or even the first visit to the U.S.) did not happen to me until I was in my late 20s. To make it worse, English and my native language are starkly different syntactically and semantically. After all these years, I'm still not perfectly fluent in English myself. So it was not an easy situation but I still enjoyed learning English and sought out every opportunity to practice it. These are what helped me most to stay on track back then: 1) Self-motivation and strong interest in the language and culture 2) Daily exposure to the language in any way of reading, listening, writing and speaking 3) Making friends and keeping in touch with many pen pals and native speakers in real life (and NEVER speaking my first language to them) 4) LOTS of books, pop songs, movies, shows and other resources in the language 5) Finding an experienced and qualified native-speaker as a tutor/teacher I had also self-studied Japanese and German for years, but I forgot these mostly or never even reached beyond the intermediate level because I failed in 2) and 3). IMO, semi-self-immersion in Spanish can happen in the U.S. depending on determination and effort that you put into it. Good luck!

We're doing My Printing Book (the 1st grade workbook) for 2-4 pages a day, 4-5 days a week. I don't think you need the teacher's manual unless your kids struggle with the workbook.

Thank you so much for your explanation. Didn't realize there could be a broader term. I learned English as a foreign language (heavily by sight) so this was all new to me and I really wanted to understand how Spalding works in teaching reading. Things are much clearer to me now. :)

:confused1: Can someone please explain me what Ellie means by her below bolded sentence? It's still not clear to me how she applies the same rule for e to "she" and "the", when e in both words have different sounds, and how a child will know which sound to use with this rule alone. Or is she saying we should always pronounce "the" as in "the ice"? Ellie, OP was looking for a phonics program that incorporates sight words and this was your first response. It all started from there. Saying how this "true" method worked better for your children is different from saying there's no need to do the other. Oh, Ellie, I wouldn't have to follow you around and read "enough" of your posts here so that I could understand your stance. You just need to be clear about what you're saying in each post and able to support your argument with explanations/logic/details that make sense to even a newbie like me. Too many contradictions and not enough explanation on "how" and "why" can confuse anyone. You kept just saying that the "true" intensive phonics method can teach a child how to sound out even all "Dolch and Fry sight words" phonetically so there's no need for memorizing any word by sight at all. But I see very little difference between this and "basic phonics + sight words" method because in your method you'd still need to memorize which sound to choose for each word. Maybe I misunderstood, but I just don't understand with what you've said how every sight word can be taught phonetically. I just looked up the Spalding rules and to me, they don't seem to be a magic key for every word, either. The rule 4 (Vowels a, e, o and u usually say a, e, o and u at the end of a syllable. e.g. navy, me, open, music.) you suggested does not explain anything for the common pronunciation of e in "the" except for when the first letter of next word is a vowel that makes e in the has a long e sound. And if the rule says "usually", what do you do for such "exceptions" without memorizing them by sight? This is what I meant with that a 100% "pure/true" phonics program for English can't exist. Believe it or not, in linguistics, English is generally not considered to be a highly phonetic language compared to all other languages. If you read my posts just in this thread, You would know I actually completed the full phonics programs (HOP and OPGTR) with my son and used flash cards as supplement only for some "DF sight words" as the phonics lessons proceeded. I never advocated the method on rote memorization alone (like when learning Chinese), either. When I said "memorizing words by sight", I meant it is at least based on the basic knowledge of letter sounds and, of course, only for those few exceptions. I was just saying the whole time that there is nothing wrong with memorizing or picking up very common "sight words" and combining it with the basic phonics instruction could work better for some kids, and that's what OP was looking for. Again, there's no need for "ad hominem" here. If I were an experienced homeschooler who have seen many different children thriving in many different methods, I'd be most careful not to talk down on other methods that are controversial or widely used by other parents, even if I don't agree with them, and certainly not to say my children are better taught. Yes, you described my son and how I've done with him. He reads very well and we recently started spelling instruction. Thank you for your insight. :)

Do you realize that you just repeated the exact same rule for two different sounds in "she" and "the"? If only your explanations were clearer for my questions or made sense to me, I'd have not kept asking or assumed so. You're the Spalding expert, not me, and I was genuinely curious about your method. I still have no idea how you taught your child to be able to figure out the sound difference between "she" and "the" with the Rule 4, and sound out more new words of the same phonogram but different sounds (that are "Dolch and Fry sight words" for others) with 27 rules, without any memorization by sight, but I guess it worked for your dc that way. Just don't like when someone insists using a certain method exclusively in teaching is always better/efficient/more useful for everyone.

What about "she"? Why is it pronounced with its first (or third) sound at the end of a short word or syllable? And what other words share the same rule with e in "the"? Ellie, I know what you're saying. "e" in "the, be, great, were, there, here..." is applied by all different rules and second, third, or fourth sounds of its each location, which is clearly proving my point that English has very low degree of phonemic orthographies and it's not necessarily most efficient for everyone to go 100% with phonics since there're very few one-on-one correspondences between letters and sounds, thus, too many rules. I don't know everything about Spalding, but it is honestly tiring for me to even hear about all those "rules" and "decoding" while it took my child less than 5 minutes to memorize all these 6 words by sight.

What I'm saying is you can always add a new rule to the same phonogram even for a sole case and name it a phonics/spelling rule, but that only makes it less "phonetic" and there's little difference between memorizing the word by sight or by the rules for such rare cases. For some kids, simply memorizing those few number of "exceptions" by sight could be much simpler than learning all those "rules" for every different sound the phonogram makes.

So do other phonics programs. So I guess Spalding teaches more different ways of sound a phonogram makes. But that doesn't follow to saying "a *true* phonics methods doesn't need to teach children to memorize words by sight" at all or arguing English is a highly phonetic language, which is against a general linguistic consensus. Even with Spalding, a child still needs to memorize non-phonetic words like "the" by sight and which sound to choose for each word even for all "exceptions", which could be equally confusing. I used less than a hundred of sight word cards, which don't seem to be that much anyway.