Yes, it is regularly. This is squirreled away under returns and refunds section on the Math Mammoth's website's FAQ: "Homeschool Buyers Co-op: I traditionally do a full-month long group buy at Homeschool Buyers Co-op twice a year (March and August). In recent years the co-op has also offered Math Mammoth on sale for shorter periods of time in other months (such as January or July). Because of the deep discount offered in the group buy, Co-op does not offer refunds or returns." Here you can sign up for an email when it returns.

Currently with my eldest we are working different ways to appropriately entertain themselves in group settings and entering conversations because it has become clear that he lacks those and his mostly school-going cadets have. He is great at making games and such for a group but it didn't click that if everyone is sitting and talking during their extra time, running around with a coat on his head trying to make a game happen when it obviously wasn't isn't appropriate. This likely is more him than general home ed but I think it could fit a list. Locally, the things some home educators do that gives the rest of us bad names and problems is flakiness/not showing up which has resulted in some places not wanting HE groups to set up education tours, parents being overly demanding/wanting special changes made without following already outlined stepped for accommodations which has resulted in several places no longer taking HE private candidates for qualification testing, and - likely because I live in a very unschooling area - most high schools and sixth-form colleges have expressed that HE student that come typically are not prepared for GCSE level work which has made it difficult for some who are to get where they should be.

True. I also think some of the pressure is coming from what became 'necessities' for some of the older generations that the younger generations either do not want or cannot afford or have for other reasons for not getting. More so when it is the latter, it's hard to not feel like either we've failed or not living up to some abstract baseline. Home ownership and cars particularly are things that for me were held up as 'adult' that for the former took me a while to let go of as a marker of 'doing well at adulthood'. My step-father-in-law is a overly obsessed example. He will find out that we don't have or are not planning to get something he views as a need and he will not stop talking about it. Anything from satellite TV and tablets to cars. He literally spent hours at his last visit here talking about us getting a car/people carrier. He doesn't understand that we don't even want one. We've set up our lives for living without as neither my partner or I can medically drive which step-FIL always laughs at as not important [mostly because he hasn't seen my partner's fits/blackouts or my leg numbness and panic attack in years as he's stopped seeing us very such with his bio-grandkids now around]. We also could not fit it into our budget even if we could - our finances are not set up for it. It's harder to be happy when important voices are constantly telling us that we're missing out even on things we do not want. edit: I also find the acronym they chose to use really contrived, forced and generally off.

If you want a wide range, I've found http://my.newonnetflix.info/ really interesting and helpful. You can look in your region and it has lists of both the new stuff and - more useful to me - things that are about to expire. I typically check it a couple times a month, usually near the end, when the new month's lists come out to make sure I don't miss things I kept meaning to watch and have found a few other gems (and of course duds) along the way.

I have had 3 out of 4 removed after each of them went really wrong. They all just popped/cracked. I got really upset at the last one because it was about a month after the second and I had been trying so hard and it just cracked in half while I was eating dinner one day. I just have very bad teeth/bad dental luck. I was over 25 with all of them.

I like the Tea for One. I usually just say I'm 'on the red' -- usually just to confirm what my partner already knows. My partner always knows often before me [with my erratic perimenopause cycles, he often comments if I'm getting typical back and head pains], he also knew I was pregnant each time before I could tell him. He says I'm not that different, but I get more achey and/or less like to keep quiet about feeling achey. We're big on privacy here - but we had to put in a no secrets rule in for a bit with my eldest. His language issues means he took them very seriously, couldn't tell good from bad secrets and they were all causing him stress. So I set the rule and then asked about it for a while until one particular "friend" [the one that he adores because they treat him really nice at first but then treated him as back-up/a toy but because he adores them we can't say anything bad about them or do anything overt about it even when he's miserable] stopped giving him ridiculous secrets [like staying up to late watching youtube videos]. I still ask occasionally when they've hung out. My eldest is pretty tight lipped about almost everything, both his personality of not wanting to say anything bad and not wanting to talk about anything awkward as well as language issues where he often doesn't have the word for things, so if he didn't want to there would be no way to force it, but giving him that rule to use with this problem seemed to help him a lot. If only the rest of his social problems were so easy solve.

Oh dear, my 11 year old is suppose to go on one of those tours next year. I can't even imagine how he'd react to seeing that. I see those signs a lot - hospitals, shopping centres, and especially on new build businesses [might be a new planning application requirement or just they really don't want to deal with it]. I imagine the reason there isn't on packs is like their websites, that part isn't their priority much like cigs didn't have warning until required by law and it not being on water bills or posted by many water companies because the energy/money for that is limited compared to dealing with fat, grease, oil which is an industrial level problem that makes any of the smaller that shouldn't be flushed problems much bigger. I do recall getting leaflets by our water company about not doing so - and a quick google shows that they have leaflets and website pages dedicated to teaching people what shouldn't go down the drain all of which seem to include sanitary products. They refer to it "sewer misuse" which...seems a funny but sensible official term for it [i guess it's what they use for businesses that break the laws on disposal but it pops up now and then throughout the website even on the household side].

I used MEP with 3 of mine for a while (Year 1 to Year 5, Year 1 to Year 3, R to Year 1). It's good, solid, tweakable - but hard to speed up if you start later if you want to use it as a main. It's very puzzle based, very spiral in teaching method. There are lesson plans along with the books. In early years I would do it 'normally' - the lesson plan and then go through the workbook. Year 3 on, they'd often do the workbook themselves, I'd check, then I'd pick through the lesson to see what was new or needed. My older 2 asked for a change this year for maths - I think they were just tired of it after years of the same [puzzles get harder but many puzzle types repeat a lot and I think they disliked there being more than the workbook]. I showed my eldest MEP secondary. He tried a few things and he likes the look of it, it's quite different to the primary, but he wants a year off so he is using Math Essentials this year with Math Mammoth as a add-on for areas he needs more practice on. While it can be used for a wide range of ability, I found the level of frustration using it as a core really showed in my less mathy and younger when started not working. A lot of people use this a year down or just worksheet add-on because of that I think. The lesson plans are designed for schools so some tweaking will be needed. Joining the Yahoo Group is recommended. MEP can go all the way through. Math Mammoth is what my current Year 4 and Year 1ish kids are doing this year. It's mastery. It good discipline for my Year 4 child as she often skips instructions and such. MEP is instruction light on page - the workbook assumes either the teacher will give the instruction or the child will recognize the problems enough to do them themselves. Now almost all of the instructions are on the page so now I can just point at the instruction and have her repeat them. My Year 1 child prefers the look and format of MM compared to MEP [she's doing Grade 1 after doing most of MEP 1 which she struggled a lot with]. They both enjoy and want to continue with it which was not true for either of them with MEP. It does involve printing which I'm still getting used to [i'm in the UK so I bought the MEP books] but the printing means for my eldest I can just pull out what he needs to work on. As recommended on another thread on it, I took my older 2 through the chapter end reviews to see what gaps and what level they are at and it worked really well for us to do so. We're going to do a measurement unit study of all the measurement pages in a couple of months - MEP really only covers metric, so their knowledge of imperial/customary is pretty weak, I'm just waiting to get all the measuring tool in the January sales [it recommends a bathroom scale that does kg and lbs]. I'd really recommend waiting for it to go on sale at homeschool buyer's co-op so you can get a big set so you can tweak as needed to suit a student. I out of the ones I've experienced, it most flexible for varying abilities, many people do not like how many problems/pages there are (my youngest loves this - makes her feel proud that she did aaalll of those) so tweaking may be needed - as it is for all programmes I think. It goes from Grade 1 to Grade 7/Pre-algebra. Not as useful for you now or next year, but last is Math Essentials is mainly mastery - it's hit and move on. There is Book 1 for 4th and 5th, Book 2 for 6th+ - oddly Book 1 has more topics than Book 2 so we're kinda meshing them together. Each day there are review problems but once you get past the first chapter it can be a while before you see certain problem type again so I use MM's creator's worksheet generator to create problems on areas he needs more practice. It has 4 problem review, speed drill of addition and multiplication facts, video for page with new material, helpful hints, a couple of samples that I have my eldest do out loud for me, then 10 problems and one word problem. I then add in one problem for each he missed on the last review page until he gets so many right on the first try that it is deemed done. If he gets low on a section, we use MM pages for a few days. The teaching in the videos is good and the helpful hints are solid but it's still pretty brief and as written in the manual seems to be more designed as start to larger lessons than on its own so would recommend for a solid maths student that wants to move forward quickly with parents who are happy to add-on as needed. They also several other books, but my eldest is treating this as a one year 'get er done'/firming up on foundations before going onto MEP Y7 and I think it will give him a solid basis for it. I quite like it for that. My Year 4 tried it but needs more than that so it wasn't a good fit for her.

Maybe look into Dynamic Work Spaces. There's been a few articles about them floating around lately - here is one that has ideas that could be used I think.

I used to pay a lot of attention to the National Curriculum and what they would be doing because as an immigrant in a new system that wa different to what I was raised in, I wanted to understand that and where they needed to be for the GCSEs they will take with their school going classmates. Eventually, I found it too draining and not a good way to spend time - in the seven years my eldest has been officially HEing, I think there has been a major change on average every other year that I would wind myself up about understanding indepth to make sure everything was fine. Instead, I copied the list of KS3 [Year 7-9] objectives for English, Maths, and Sciences that I'll use over the next few years as a guide and found a place that sell study guides (and updates them with each change) for KS3 to schools and parents that we'll use in Year 9 to prepare for UTC and GCSE study in Year 10. That's as far as I want to pay attention to it right now.

...I don't know why you haven't heard of any and I do not know how I could be expected to know why you haven't. The media is selective with it's posting of these things and, like I said, they tend to come on a cycle. I hear of them regularly, but I have a specific interest in representation within education and media both professionally and personally. I follow relevant places that openly report and discuss such things. There is the whole 'read the whole speech, read all the speeches' that comes up regularly. I see people posting up lists of reading recommendations to deal with how badly he, and the wider civil rights movement, is taught regularly. I see people posting about John Brown and how he should have a place in public school to counter the very issues you brought up previously about White people not being represented as working towards racial equality. I saw the protests and the reporting on them more regularly when I followed a lot of media websites. I follow less now so hear it less. It all happens, it just doesn't all happen where it's broadcast broadly and I find that the media has it's bones it throws on these things and other than that it doesn't bother. It depends on what you're listening to, I guess.

There are tons of protests on how Martin Luther King Jr, and civil rights movements in general, is taught throughout school. It's just generally not heard outside of January or February [or when big civil rights issues come up where he is often used to tell off activists] just as it is rare to hear about the issues many have with how American Indigenous people are represented in education, or anything else, outside of late October-November unless you're someone actively into these issues.

There are better ways than myths and false heroes that leads to a lot of young people who internalize the message that the truth of their heritage and history is so bad that all the adults and all of the media actively lied about it all. And - as a USian who left - the US isn't exactly an example of inter-group harmony around the world. I don't think the whole positive myth building to create unity and collaboration and positive identity that many have mentioned as vital to a strong country seems to be working. At all. Many other nations with horrible histories are working on it, I don't see why the US needs to stay stuck in the 'we must teach these myths to build identity and peace' ideas when there is no evidence that it is working. There are many better ways that people have been working on for years and often gets dismissed as 'too academic' or 'PC run amok'. There is actively putting forth actual people who worked for social justice in the spotlight throughout history. Discussing how the movements that has brought us forward were not really peaceful - Martin Luther King Jr, who is so often used to beat modern Black activists, had to deal with being arrested and threatened by authorities. John Brown, a White man who actively fought against slavery and died fighting for that, is so ignored when he easily could be used to show that there were White people of that time who willing gave their all on the issue. There are so many others who have been erased for national myths of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln. We could do better. Another one is actively discussing identities. We all have identities. These identities affect how we see ourselves, how we feel other see us, and the representation we see - or do not see - of ourselves. Discussing them, showing how much broader they are than the images around us, that we all have layers of them that make each of us different even from our own family -- and then into how with all of those we can work together. Encourage literature and history that shows the many layers of identities being represented in different ways. We really do not need past fantasies to teach our kids that we can build a peaceful tomorrow or that we can be strong together. There are plenty of other ways of doing it.

When I was in the baby/bfing season, I had previously noticed that the other homeschoolers were often crunchy, often Christian and often had larger babies. At the time I mainly put that up the boards/groups I was in which was main eco-living groups. Adding to the numbers, with no diabetes but a history of anemia, hyperemesis gravidarum, and other things that do not easily lead to weight gain: O: 7 lbs 7 oz, A: 7 lbs 9oz , M: 7 lbs 10 oz, F: 9 lbs 1 oz [and midwives said he had the biggest placenta she'd seen]. Thinking about it now, we officially/by law started home educating when O turned 5 which was between M and F so I could fit your pattern...

I've seen this trend go from loud niche teen communities on livejournal to mainstream 30somethings on Facebook. More guys posting odd cartoons comparing newborns to cats or guinea pigs and how awesome their pets are on my wall, but I cut out most of the high school/childhood people likely to be in the group to do so it's now a few sprinkled here and there. I actually had one ask why we do not have a cat and try to convince me that we *need* at least one. I just said it was a nice idea, and the kids did enjoy their hour at the cat cafe, but our situation right now means it would be unfair on any cat and the 3 year old - and said 3 year old's health problems mean I have no desire for more body functions. The cat guy would not have it. I had to bite my tongue on the whole 'your flat smells so strongly of cat litter box that it makes me eye water so you're really bad advertising for this argument'". He really did not get how he was acting just like those he complains about.

I've always found more girlie favourites than boyish names. I keep huge name lists at behindthename.com for writing/fun (cause I'm a big name/etymology nerd). These are the longstanding favourites: Girls: Abeni, Adalet, Eleni, Esperanza, Mercia, Mirabelle, Salome, Valora, Zosime Boys: Franklin, Gratian, Lovel, Merrick, Rhys, Wilfred Either: Alexis, Evren, Innes, Jaimie, Kelley

I still have a birthday to get through at the end of this month. Thinking it is that close to the end of the year is mind boggling for me - feels like I was just planning for summer birthdays. I do have a some books and a few gifts (mostly things that arrived late for birthdays) squirreled away, but need to get cracking soon. I haven't even got my lists yet...

:grouphug: to everyone. Mostly, my family is not interested. I wasn't entirely shocked - my mother was very clear throughout my youth that marriage and kids had held her back - but it still really hurts. Only my grandfather, an uncle, an aunt, and one of my grandfather's cousins have ever met the kids -- and only my grandfather is in regular contact. My mother made it clear that she had no interest in coming to see them or us going there and part of what caused me to stop calling is that every. single. call. had long period of her discussing birth control or how I couldn't want a third like my younger sister which just seemed mean. I couldn't take her negativity anymore and didn't want her talking to the kids like that as they were getting old enough to understand. I didn't even tell her about our third until after M was born - and then through my grandfather as I could just not take talking to her. I debate on whether our situation with my in-laws (MIL and step-FIL) is worse. In the past, we went on holiday with them - kids and all. Regular visits and everything even when they are over 3 hours away. We had rocky time at times as we're very different, but we tried and they seemed really interested in the kids. They would get them individual presents and took interest in what they were doing. Then my partner's step-brother had kids. Now, we might see them once-twice a year at a pub and if we go see them, step-FIL will stay for maybe a few hours at most and then take off for the rest of the time as if we're babysitting MIL while he goes see the kids he really likes. There was plan this last summer for my eldest to go up and stay with them for a week. My partner wanted to rent a place the week after so we'd could see everyone and step-FIL made it clear that he would take off again if we did that. My partner was, and still is, really hurt and feels like step-FIL doesn't see us as family. It's like a switch has been flipped now that he has other biological grandkids. At their last trip down, step-FIL didn't ask about or really talk to the kids - he spent the time mocking us for this and that - particularly for not driving or having a car (can't for medical reasons and neither of us want to, our bestie-lodger does drive which we've used in emergencies and he and partner use it for shopping and work and such at bestie-lodger's suggestion). When I said I was fine walking, he literally joked about my death by being hit by a car to my face with the kids present which he wouldn't have done before. I don't know how to deal with him now. MIL calls my partner weekly and ask about the kids sometimes but even she seems less interested as we've had more/they've gotten older. At least she still knits sweaters and talks to them on the phone sometimes. No interest at all from the start vs used to have a lot of interest and then having it mostly dropped - I'm unsure which is worse. I hope I'm able t give far better if my kids will let me.

We have a tall, thin drying rack. My partner made it after we got fed up of the space and lack of sturdiness of typical drying racks. He took the shelves off of our old one and with fixed them to two long bits of wood going up. It's designed in such a way that during the winter we can fit a convection heater underneath the shelves.

:iagree: This goes times infinity for twelve year olds. Nothing kids that age do should ever be considered that they are signaling they want sex or want sex before marriage - that's downright gross and creepy. Makeup doesn't sexualize them, people looking and thinking of them like that does. At that age and throughout my teens until I left home - even when raised in a very right wing cultish Christian household - pretty much all beautifying things were done mainly at the recommendation of the other women in my life. My mother thought I would better with blonde hair so it was (naturally, I have very dark charcoal brown-black hair which is how it has been since I left home), it's a special occasion so you should wear x and y, you need to shave so you don't look like a cactus and so on. Many will wear and do these enjoy doing so and those that do so for others are more likely to do so to meet women's expectations rather than anything to do with wanting that kind of attention or sex. I say this as someone who only wears loose long skirts (I find them more comfortable and easier to use and move in with my disabilities), covers my hair when I go out or when anyone who doesn't live here comes over (I love my hats and gain a lot of freedom not worrying about hair frizz), whose entire makeup collection in this house is medicated chapsticks to treat my 6 year old's eczema around her mouth and nail polish my kids have bought with their pocket money, who stopped shaving or even wearing bras over a decade ago (bras and shoulder joint pain/stiffness do not go together). I am the queen of flying my freak flag. And if anyone told any of kids that wearing x or y meant they were signaling they wanted sex, I would call them many bleepable things and that they shouldn't think of kids like that.

We spent the morning listening to history videos and readings of the Guy Fawkes poem (without that verse in it). The older 3 worked on memorizing the first two parts for their father. We talked about it for a while. We didn't do fireworks this year - my partner came home from hospital yesterday and is still recovering from severe lung issues - though we saw some through the windows and have been hearing them for weeks. I'm told the graphic novels of V for Vendetta in getting across the message than the movie that to me seems to miss the point by a few galaxies, but I haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

O-11: "Engineering job" then specified robotics to help people. A-8: Doctor Astronaut Painter M-6: Horsey job Fr-3: Fire Dragon Slayer

I'm also having this problem. It mostly happens when I search for anything either on this search engine here or using google.

They has been used as a singular pronoun for centuries. Chaucer used they as singular, Jane Austen used they as singular, Shakespeare used they as singular. It's nothing new or about "being PC" or a thing now anymore than you being used as singular rather than thou is a thing now. While they as singular may sound odd in some places, saying "he or she" will sound odd and clunky to many others. That one makes my teeth itch, to me it reads someone trying to desperately boost their word count (and that is before we get into intersex people or non-binary people).

That would have been around sunset where I am so I wouldn't have seen an issue though we don't tend to get the few we do get here until around 6:30.