Let's say you LIKE meat. I mean, you really like meat. You generally don't eat pretend meat. But you want to try this "Boca Burger" because it's only 2 points on Weight Watchers. Are you (I mean, I!) going to hate it?! Tell me the truth now, I'm a little scared. LOL.

By all means, let her continue playing. Think of it as a "handwriting readiness skill" rather than actual, formal handwriting instruction.

Oh, definitely. But it's embarrassing to ask someone to do something for your group and you tell them you're expecting say 15 or 20 kids, and then 8 show up and you feel awkward, like you're wasting that person's time. And sometimes there IS a minimum number and we end up having fewer people show up. Often they will work with us anyway but it's still embarrassing when it happens! True, but then those of us who DID want to do it are disappointed by not being able to!

Funny story/conversation! Although I agree that 48 problems is a lot! My 10 year old does 5 practice problems, and then between 20 and 24 actual problems per lesson, so always under 30 total!

I'd send it on to her and let her make the decision. Am I the only one who thinks Jury Duty would actually be fun/interesting? I got called once when I was like 21 I think. I'd do it again lol. Yet, anytime I ever hear/see anyone else speak of it, it's always about how to get out of it! Hmm!

My kids mostly only like to play outside if there are other kids (who don't live with us) playing out there with them.

I was going to suggest the Addy books, too. My daughter liked those. We also read a book about Harriet Tubman after: http://www.amazon.com/Story-Harriet-Tubman-Conductor-Underground/dp/0440404002

Well *I* certainly don't think you're nuts- being as I am using Oak Meadow 5 with my daughter this year and loving it just as much as we loved Oak Meadow 4 last year :) Maybe you will find this helpful: http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/126296.html It's a link to a sample week of OM5 for us (our first week). It shows how I broke the weekly schedule down by day, includes pics of some of the things we did, and at the bottom there's a link to my entry describing our first official day of OM5. From there, you can easily go through as many days as you want to see what OM5 has been like for us so far this year; I usually describe our day and include at least some pictures, and we're midway through our fifth week of using OM5 as of now, so there's over a month's worth of entries there to look through.

Oh yeah. That's a REAL "fair" comparison. Because killing somebody is totally the same as finding yourself loving somebody that others don't approve of, just because of what body parts they have. God, I HATE attitudes like that. They make me very proud and glad to be the secular, accepting (and still perfectly moral) person I am.

It sounds great in theory. It really does! But times we've tried requiring payment in advance, we'd still have the same problems- people just wouldn't pay by the time they said they would, or they'd keep saying yeah yeah yeah that they were going to, til the last minute, and then it was no, and in the end we'd still be faced with only a very small group wanting to do something we'd hoped to have a bigger turnout for. If anything, it often seems to get even worse turnout if advance payment is required- maybe because they WANT to be able to change their minds last minute, I don't know. And if it's something that required a minimum number of people and we hadn't met that, we'd end up having to refund money to the few people who did pay- it's a PITA regardless and in the end it almost seemed easier NOT to have to deal with taking and then refunding money or chasing people down for it or whatever.

We're doing Environmental Science now for 5th grade. Looking ahead, we'll be doing Life Science in 6th, Earth Science in 7th and Physical Science in 8th and then, I guess, Biology in 9th with OM (I'm not really sure yet how it's going to work from 9th grade on for us). If you want to stick to a time table so you don't get to biology til a certain grade or whatever, why don't you just stop with an official science curriculum til next year, and for now just let him explore science in his way with games, books, videos/shows, kid friendly experiment books, field trips, nature walks, the planetarium, or whatever it is he wants to do- just keep it informal for the rest of this year?

I think, and I truly do not mean this rudely, that it is not a good idea to combine science (or school, really) for children who are that far apart in age, level of understanding, interests, etc. I would give each his/her own science curriculum even though it would be less convenient to do so. I'm more for meeting the kids where they are at as individuals, and a kid who is of 'middle school' age and a kid who is just starting out their school years just aren't in the same place, in any area. My daughter is doing Oak Meadow 5's Environmental Science and she loves it. She tells me science is her favorite subject. She's read about The Environment (and had to look around her "room environment" and list living and non living things), and she made a multi-media mural of a forest environment which included living and non living things. She's read about Ecology and Ecosystems and had to choose things from a list that she cannot live without in her environment. Then it would say something like, "If you chose a cow, what things does a cow need in its environment in order to live? If you chose grass, what things does grass need in its environment in order to live?" to show that all living things need some of the same things in order to survive. She's read about "Back To The Earth" and then buried some things in our backyard, which will soon be dug back up and examined to see what changes, if any occurred (what decomposes? What doesn't?) She's read about Composting, and we've started a simple indoor worm bin (which I preferred to the idea of starting a compost heap in my very tiny backyard). This week we'll be reading about "Energy In Ecosystems And Food Chains." In later weeks we'll do different biomes (which will include a four week biome observation project) and habitats, water cycle, water pollution, air and land pollution, natural resources, recycling, organic gardening and so on. My son is only in Kindergarten but if he were in 1st grade, we'd be using Oak Meadow's 1st grade science for him. That would include: Observing the Natural World (phases of the moon, life cycle of the seed, animal tracks, cloud formations) The Natural World In Winter (animal behavior, deciduous and coniferous trees, hibernation, Arctic and Antarctic, growing an indoor plant) and The Natural World In Spring (pond life, forest life, bird activity, vegetable garden and scientific inquiry). It's a secular curriculum, I should say. But I really love it.

I guess I don't really follow a strict schedule. I definitely don't block of subjects and times. We get our day's start whenever we get our start, and that varies widely depending on what's going on in a given day. I have a weekly "to do list" broken down by day for school, and we just do what's on the list. When we finish something, we move on to the next thing. If it seems like we need a break, or we have something else to do, we take a break. If we don't finish everything on the list that day, it'll get fit in somewhere during the week. It all just sort of works out, somehow! (But I wouldn't say we are trying to do "a lot"... we're not doing school all day long or anything. This might be a lot harder if we had an overly full schedule). Oh and I do have usually 2-3 days a week set aside for social studies and 2 days a week for science but we don't ALWAYS get to it on the day scheduled and I'm fine with just changing days on the fly if need be.

My 10 y/o has a small TV with a built in VCR in her room. She sometimes rents videos from the library and watches them in her room.

I have a 5 y/o (next month), a 10 y/o, and an 18 y/o. A lot of the parents in my hs group have a pretty mixed aged family, too. But it really doesn't matter to me. My 18 y/o does her own thing. My 10 y/o and 5 y/o are easy to find friends for- they go to the homeschool group, library programs, gymnastics, my daughter's in Girl Scouts, they've got friends on our street, etc. And as for me, I couldn't care less what age someone else's kids are, if I click with a mom, I click with the mom, and we'll be friendly at homeschool group get togethers, and sometimes we'll get together outside of them. One of the closest friends I've made in my hs group has kids ranging from an infant to a 7 y/o so they've got kids in my son's age range, but not exactly my daughter's. But she doesn't care, she'll play with them when we get together, and the adults love to get together and socialize. They always say that one of the GOOD things about hs is the fact that people AREN'T segregated by age, right? :D

Welcome :) I am homeschooling a girl who just turned 10. She, too, had gone to public school up until age 8. I pulled her out of third grade toward the end of that year (in March) and have been happily homeschooling ever since. (We finished homeschooling for third grade, homeschooled for all of fourth, and now fifth). I have a boy who will be 5 next month, and he'll be homeschooled right from the beginning. My oldest is 18 and has gone to school her whole life- she's currently in a special needs/life skills school, which is a good fit for her. We're not religious either. And we've got a pretty relaxed style of homeschooling. But fortunately we've been able to find a pretty inclusive homeschool group (even though most of them are Christians, they are inclusive and the focus of the group's get togethers never has anything to do with religion) and things are going well. :)

It would never in a million years even cross my mind as an issue. :confused:

Ugh I feel for you. It happens a lot in my homeschool group (and I DO organize a lot of my group's events). Not so much that people just don't show up without a word (yuck, that's even worse!!!) but that inevitably a bunch of them cancel last minute. In the past, that's had us show up with only a few families for someone kind enough to make a free presentation to what they thought would be a bigger group, other times it's led to us canceling events, as well as to issuing emails now and then asking people not to cancel last minute if a particular event has someone coming a long way or doing something for us for free or has a minimum number of people expected to attend. Sometimes I find myself calling or emailing an organization or person, telling them "I'm so sorry, I know we were supposed to have X number of people, but now we only have X, should we still come, or would you want us to reschedule....?" It's all very frustrating! Like Pauline said, we start on time even if people are late, and we sometimes require payment in advance, but basically I've just come to expect this sort of thing to happen, unfortunately!

This.

I've never heard of hoofs being used either! Interesting!

We're using TT5 and my daughter loves it. She practically begs to do math every day. And that, for me, makes it worth its weight in gold! Here's a review/description I wrote about it, along with a few pics of it in action, if you're interested: http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/124221.html

I would suggest making things as hands on and creative as possible. Like for instance I don't know how you have your child review spelling. But mine likes to do "bubble letters" and then decorate the letters in colored pencils. Sometimes she writes her words using chalk, on the sidewalk. Sometimes she draws shapes and pictures on construction paper, writes the words in those, and then cuts and pastes those cutouts into her book. She's also made small town maps, naming the streets and buildings after spelling words, made a simple windsock, writing the spelling words on the crepe paper streamers, we chant the spelling words while tossing a ball back and forth, etc. She loves environmental science right now because it entails hands on activities. She's made a really cool multi-media forest mural, we've buried items in our backyard (to be dug up soon to see what started decomposing and what didn't), we started a simple indoor worm bin (while learning about composing) and so on. Social studies, we're reading about things like Christopher Columbus and Jamestown and the Mayflower and the Puritans and so on. But just reading about it doesn't make it all that fun, it's the hands on projects that do that. We've made our own compass, made a wooden sailboat, drew a picture of the Mayflower, made a diorama of Jamestown and things like that. SOTW is good because she likes the hands on project and activities. She loves math because we're using TT now and she finds it fun to do on the computer. Does she love every writing assignment she ever gets or whatever? No. But she gets really healthy dose of hands on stuff to go with it, which is what I love about our curriculum and why she mostly really enjoys school. We also do plenty of outings and field trips and social get togethers with our homeschool group, so our days aren't monotonous. I don't assign a lot of busywork, I give her plenty of time to do her own thing and so on. So I think that if you can either make things more hands on or artsy (if that's her thing), it will go a long way, as will adding in fun field trips and outings, as will asking her what she would like to/be interested in learning about, and then run with that. If it's all worksheets and language lessons and writing assignments and deskwork kind of stuff... then no I don't see an 8 year old loving school.

Right, it's a secular program, which is what I like about it, too, as I am NOT Christian. But so far (I'm still on SOTW1) I wouldn't call it anti-religious or anything, it's more neutral. It does have to at least address religion, but it does so in a neutral manner. We like it for its storytelling nature, the literature recommendations and of course the neat, hands on activities. But can't you just add in your own bible teachings if that's important to you?

LOL. I agree. To me "toot" sounds even stupider than "fart."