And my daughter turned 10 on October 1st and is in 5th grade... our district NOW has a Sept. 1st cut off, but when she started Kindergarten, they had a Oct. 1st cutoff. So she was THE youngest in her class when she started (she didn't start homeschooling til third grade). The following year was when they decided to change the cutoff to 9/1. So she's in 5th but came really close to being in 4th this year instead of she'd been born a day later or had come up on the school years a year later after the change. Sometimes I think I should have kept her back a year before enrolling her in K, and I'm still toying with the idea of stretching 6th out over a two year period next year, because like you say, I'm not sure I want her "finished" with school and potentially considering going away from home so young! But I don't know, I haven't really decided yet, and who knows what she's going to want to do with her life anyway (she's been saying since she was 5 that she wants to work with her dad in his tattoo shop and she's still saying that at 10. Who knows if she'll even want college lol).

1. I've only ever used 1.

I agree with taking pictures, displaying for a while, and then tossing- unless it's something my daughter loves and she goes "can I keep it in my room please," then I let her take it up for a while. I usually print some of the pictures and include them in her portfolios. I also put them up on my blog.

Hmmm... I have Oryx and Crake on my bookcase. I tried once or twice to start reading it and had a hard time getting into it in the beginning, so I just put it aside and read something else instead. Maybe I should give it another try! I, too, loved The Handmaid's Tale, and right now I'm reading "The Year of the Flood" and enjoying that... so maybe I should try "Oryx and Crake" again.

I haven't had a chance to check this out firsthand yet, but I definitely will at some point! I read about this in "Secular Homeschooling Magazine" and I'm going to type some excerpts from the very thorough review here. It's in regard to a site called: http://www.livemocha.com This is supposed to be free online tutoring from native speakers. Well, it's partly a program you do on your own, and partly a social thing. It's supposed to be like a facebook type thing (don't get nervous yet, keep reading)- you can have a profile, you can "friend" people, etc. But the sole point to it is supposed to be learning languages. You can benefit from the skills of other students on the site without "friending" anybody. It offers instruction in many different languages. You are supposed to be at least 13 years old to have your own account "but the material is completely appropriate and family-friendly." You sign yourself up as a native English speaker who is a beginning (language of your choice) student, or whatever applies. "They start you off with words or short sentences in your language of choice, but you can click on the "translate" button at any time for clarification." "So: the first lesson in beginning French show a picture of a man. Underneath him is written the word "homme." You hear the word spoken by a native French speaker. You can click play as often as you want to hear it again. When you feel ready, you can move on to the next picture and word. There's a rewind button that will take you back one word at a time, and a forward button that allows you to move ahead. Each section of each language course is divided up into four segments. What I've just described is the first part of each new lesson and is called "Learn." You can spend as much time as you need here mastering the new vocabulary words and working on your accent." Then there's a review part where students are quizzed on what they've learned. There are quizzes you can take if you want. Then there's a third activity: "Write" where you have to compose a paragraph in the language you're learning. "This is where the social interaction aspect of the site kicks in. Once you complete this exercise, you "submit" it, and it goes out to the Livemocha universe. The site offers you the names of some members who would be appropriate readers of your work- native or fluent speakers of the language you are learning. You can send an automated request to these people to please read your work, or you can just send it out to the general Livemocha universe. Anyone who cars to can take a look and leave comments on how you're doing. They will correct spelling and grammar" etc. "Though no-one is required to participate in this commenting and correcting, students on Livemocha are very willing to help one another out. For one thing, it's fun to check someone else's work. It's like a game, or a puzzle. This activity can be especially valuable for young students, and a good chance to hone their spelling and grammar skills. They get to feel like experts on a subject- which they are, at least so far as the accent and flow of their native language is concerned. It's a real boost for children to be able to take the role of teacher for a change." AND students are awarded "points" for helping other students. The last exercise in each lesson is a spoken word activity- you read aloud a short paragraph in the language you're studying and submit it just as you did with the written paragraph. They can give feedback on your accent etc. "While I'm logged in at Livemocha, I have received occasional requests for live chats. I have accepted a couple, and they have been exactly the kind of conversation you'd expect from two people who are not fluent in the same language: Hello. How are you? Fine, thank you! How are you?" "I've had NO inappropriate or unpleasant contacts from other students- as I said, the air is one of fellowship and hard work. I think Livemocha is the perfect blend of privacy, scholarship, and conviviality." So, it sounds really promising! And if anybody uses it, let me know what you think! :) My daughter's only 10, I think maybe when she's a bit older- 12 or 13 maybe- we'll check it out and try it together!

Thanks! I really loved the way it came out :) It is a book shaped cake pan, I put a link to one on Amazon in my post above the one where I put the picture. So we can't really take credit for making the cake look like a book- the pan did that haha. We just baked the cake mix, frosted it and laid the printed image down on it. P.S. Oh, and we added the "bookmark"- a piece of licorice! And hubby used the point of a knife to scratch lines to make it look more like loose pages, which might be visible in that second pic.

And now for those pictures of the storybook cake I mentioned in my above post. Blah! Sorry about that!

Ooh speaking of a story book party! We had one of those the year my daughter turned 8. One of my favorite parts was that we bought online one of those story-book shaped cake pans... http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0000VYYOC/ref=sr_1_1_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1295271302&sr=8-1&condition=new ...and we made our own Storybook Cake (I'll attach pics!). On the computer we did a layout that had a picture of her on one side and text on another based on an idea we'd found online... It said: "Once upon a time Not too long ago Not so far away There Lived a Young Girl Named Alexa Who Loved Books... and the other side was her picture with the text "Happy Birthday Alexa" over it. We took that printed page to Walmart as they can do the edible photo sheet things, and they copied/printed it up for us (careful, they won't do anything copyrighted though as I found out when I tried to get them to do a Dr. Seuss one for me one year for a Dr. Seuss's Birthday Party I wanted to host on Dr. Seuss's birthday as part of a fun class/activity day for our homeschool group). We then applied the printed, edible image to our cake- and it was beautiful! See pics below! In addition to that, I looked up pictures online of various well-known storybook covers and printed them in color and taped those up on the walls for decorations, along with lots of balloons and streamers. (You could also cut out construction paper balloons with colorful yarn for the 'string' and tape the printed storybook images onto those, and hang those up- I ended up doing that for the Dr. Suess party I mentioned, which was a separate occasion, and I thought that was cute, too!) Anyway! We asked kids to come dressed as their favorite storybook characters. I gave a book or two and some candy or whatever as a party favor to each kid (which I bought cheap from Dover Publications online in their Children's Thrift Classics section) http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-children-children-s-thrift-classics.html (Lots of those books are only $1.50-$2.50 each!!) For activities, I gave the kids craft supplies and paper bags with handles to decorate, which I think a bought a bundle of at Michael's craft store, and they brought their books/favors home in those bags they'd decorated with markers and stickers and glitter glue and whatnot. We had a 'relay race' with books on top of the kid's heads. We told stories. (My sister who is a librarian and a good storyteller told them a story, and we had an activity where they took turns going around and taking up where the last person left off to tell their own story). Anyway... it was a really nice party :) ETA: Oh no. I forgot to upload/attach the pictures after all of that, and I can't do it in an edit. I'm going to reply again and attach there. Sorry!

I don't. I don't keep grades for my elementary school kids. TT keeps a gradebook for you, but if you wanted an average grade overall for the year or something, yeah, you'd have to add it up and figure out the average yourself.

Well, we use Oak Meadow which is a planned curriculum, but they give you a weekly lesson plan/schedule whereas, especially in the beginning, I wanted a daily one. So I spent some time in the summer going through each week/lesson, typing up a wordpad document of how I wanted to break each week/lesson down into a daily schedule for that week, and yes, it was time consuming, but I did it gradually, as I had the time and inclination for it, (and I'm a very fast typist anyway). Now, all school year, all I have to do is open up my wordpad document, hit "find" and type in the lesson number I'm looking for and it brings me right to it. I highlight that week's lesson, print "selection," and I have a checklist of what needs to be done each day in a given week. I cross things out as I go and I just found it easier than looking at a book that says "do all this this week" and trying to figure out how to balance the week myself without seeing it balanced out in writing. Now that I've done this for two years in a row though, I think I have a good enough idea of how long all this stuff takes and how much we can do in a given day that I could probably just wing it. But I'll probably get a little compulsive about it (and want that list I can actually cross things off of, what can I say, I've been a list-maker my whole life and I like crossing things off LOL) and I'll probably do it anyway.

We hadn't even actually READ the Curious George one until last night, and I just might buy it myself (it was a library book). It's really cute. I edited my original reply to tell more about it, but not sure if you'll check back on posts you've already read, so I'll add here: It does capital AND lowercase letters of the alphabet, it blends a bit of a 'regular' Curious George story in with him learning all these letters. The man in the yellow hat teaches him the letters by drawing them for him and making them look like animals and objects (really cute pictures), and then that each page will use lots of words containing that particular letter. And in between him learning these letters, they'll take little breaks for George to do his normal monkey stuff. :) I really liked it.

Lots and lots of colorful balloons! We only had a small, family party for my youngest when he turned one but he was fascinated by the colorful balloons more than anything else.

Yeah, really. And I'd love to see them try to hire another babysitter for $2-$4 an hour! Hopefully they will realize how cheap they were- and how good they had it!

Oh, he's adorable! I'm glad that he is home!

Good for you for getting it done on time! Good luck, I hope you get accepted!

That is definitely taking advantage. She's not getting paid per kid, she's getting paid for her time/attention/supervision, etc, regardless of whether it's 1 kid or 3 or whatever. And $4 is already cheap. $2 is ridiculous. We pay $7.00 an hour plus a tip to our teen sitter and I feel like that's a pretty good deal.

This week, I am reading: "The Year Of The Flood," by Margaret Atwood on my own. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers... Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away... By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive. Also, with my 10 y/o daughter, I am reading: "Ida B and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the world," by Katherine Hannigan. It's about a girl who is homeschooled and who is very imaginative/creative/free-spirited, etc. But then her mother develops cancer and she has to go to school, which she dreads. And so she tries to come up with a plan to get her life back to being nearly perfect.

I don't grade anything. As she works, I check her work. If there's a problem or she needs help, I let her know/help her as needed. How do I know she's getting what she needs? Well. I see that she's learning and I work with her so I know what she needs reinforcement with. Here in PA we have to have an evaluation every year and testing in certain grades and have to submit a portfolio to the school district each year, so I guess those things all reinforce whether we're doing a good job, too.

Vanilla Cupcake Recipe (Makes 12 or so cupcakes) 1/2 cup softened butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 3/4 cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 1/2 cups flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees 2. Cream together butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl 3. Add eggs, milk, and vanilla extract and beat well. 4. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt. 5. Add dry mix to creamed mixture, beating after each addition and blending well. 6. Place paper baking cups into muffin tray and pour in batter until each cup is about 3/4 full. 7. Bake for 30 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center of a cupcake comes out clean. 8. Let cupcakes cool before icing with Lemon Frosting (or frosting of your choice). LEMON FROSTING 1 cup confectioners sugar Juice and zest of 1/2 small lemon 2 tablespoons softened butter 1. Grate lemon zest and squeeze lemon juice into the sugar 2. Mix and let sit for about 15 minutes 3. Beat in butter until smooth and easy to spread (if too thin, add a little more sugar to make a good spreading consistency). SNOWMAN DECORATION We used two marshmallows skewered together with a pretzel stick, which was then stuck down into the cupcake to hold it on. We set it on top of the cupcake, after sprinkling some shredded coconut on top of the frosting to look more like snow. We broke another pretzel stick in half to make the arms, used silver button sprinkles to make the buttons (though you could also use raisins or chocolate chips or other type of sprinkles etc), used a sliver of carrot for the nose, chocolate chips for eyes, cookie frosting for the smile, and a hershey kiss for the hat. You can use a little of your cupcake icing to make these things stick to the marshmallow. We made these today (with the lemon frosting as described) and they were delicious. Here's a cupcake my husband decorated and took a picture of. P.S. The snowman cupcakes are cute for January. In February, decorate with heart shaped candies and red sprinkles. In March, use green gumdrops to make a St. Patrick's Day shamrock. In April, put an apricot half on white frosting to look like a trick egg for April Fool's Day. In May make a birds nest with sprinkles and jelly bean or chocolate eggs. In June, make flower cupcakes with gumdrops and brightly colored candies etc.

Pretend Play: Printable Restaurant Kit http://homeschooling.about.com/od/freeprintables/ss/restaurant.htm Pretend Play: Let's Play Store Printable Store Kit http://homeschooling.about.com/od/freeprintables/ss/store.htm Pretend Play: Let's Play Library printable library kit http://homeschooling.about.com/od/freeprintables/ss/library.htm These will be keeping my kids busy for quite some time today! :D

I third Oak Meadow. I love Oak Meadow in general, period (we used the whole curriculum for 4th grade last year, and for 5th this year, and will be using it for 6th next year for my daughter and K next year for my son). My daughter loves Oak Meadow's 5th Grade Environmental Science in particular and I'm sure whatever they have for 6th will be just as good. OM is great, and secular!

Silly me! And I know better! I forgot to check Snopes, just this once!

Those are great!

There's Curious George Learns The Alphabet (which is very cute, the Man in the Yellow Hat gives George a reading lesson and starts by teaching him all the letters of the alphabet- capital and lowercase- he draws each letter for him and then makes it look like some sort of object or animal. The description on that page will include lots of words with that particular letter. In between, it will tell a little bit of a 'normal' Curious George story, like what he's doing when they take a break from their reading lesson and so on). And there's Dr. Seuss's ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book (which I also love, that one's very cute, too).

LOL I tried Times Tales too but it didn't really seem a good fit for us. Still, I pre-ordered the video, just in case lol. LoF Fractions we'll be doing next year rather than this year.