Margaret, lol yeah I'm sure they were! Kelli, I love that one, I want to do that pay for the person behind me at a drive-thru or toll thing one of these days! It must be such a fun surprise to pull up to pay and find out some random person already did that for you! :D

No. Have you read The No Cry Sleep Solution? There's one written for older babies and toddlers, too.

My 11 year old daughter does judo weekly on a year round basis, plus periodic Homeschool bowling leagues that run for 8-10 weeks or something like that, in the fall and winter (going once a week). (Then she's got Girl Scouts, guitar lessons, and book club, too)! My 6 year old son plays soccer in the fall, teeball in the summer, and also does the Homeschool bowling leagues in the fall and winter.

Go on walks and bring a trash bag so you can clean up trash in your community. Deliver Meals on Wheels together. Make cards and pictures for hospitals, nursing homes, etc. Start a correspondence with deployed troops and she can make pictures and help make care packages. See if she can visit with someone on a nursing home or vet's hospital.

Yep, I guess time flies when you're being nice lol!

I have found them in Walmart and Kmart.

We are moving into our fourth week of our Random Acts of Kindness Challenge and it's been great hearing about what you all have been doing! To reiterate, it doesn't matter how big or how small your Random Act of Kindness is over any given week. The idea is to just improve somebody's life, mood, spirits, week, or day in some way, no matter how big or small. Happiness is contagious. By doing nice things for other people, you're bound to make not just them feel good, but yourselves, too! And by involving the kids, the whole family, you'll be making THEM feel good, and teaching them to do good, too...it's a win/win! It doesn't matter who the recipient is. It can be a friend, a relative, someone in your own household, a complete stranger, an animal friend. It can be someone truly needy, or truly deserving, or it may be one of those weeks where it is just someone you allow in front of you on the checkout line. Just DO something to brighten somebody's day each week. I hope you'll join in on this challenge and post to the threads I'll be posting each week to let us all know what you did! This way, we can offer each other accountability to continue on with the challenge, inspiration as we give each other new ideas, can share fun stories of what we did and how people reacted and so on, and, okay, give each other a little bit of well-deserved recognition, too. :) This is the place to chat this week, which runs from Sunday, December 11 to Saturday, December 17. Come share your ideas, ask for ideas, tell us about the things you end up doing, comment on other people's stories, and so on. Looking forward to hearing from you!

I am doing OM6 with my daughter. What works for us is her doing stuff like vocab, spelling, grammar, etc independently, but us doing most of the social studies and science together. For the social studies, we'll do the reading together, and then if there's an assignment she can easily do on her own (like paint a picture of a sphinx, she'll do it on her own), but I do give her more direct guidance with her writing assignments and her projects. Actually, as of this year she is getting a lot better with doing paragraphs and such more independently...but we talk about it first. I make sure we talk about the assignment, that she understands the premise of it, maybe we talk about how she will get started, and then she goes and does it. Then I will look over it and point out if she has to fix some minor things, and this only because she's pretty good with her grammar skills and such now and it's pretty much guaranteed that her first draft can also be her final draft. If she was at a stage where she'd just have to rewrite the whole thing, I wouldn't want her to have to do that much handwriting, or get that frustrated, and if she was still at that stage, instead, I'd sit with her and help her compose it and think it out so that I could give her feedback as she went. I wouldn't expect her at her age to just "get that writing assignment done on your own sometime this week." I'm very hands on with her each day...this is what I want you to do now, okay good let me check it, okay here's my feedback, okay here's what we'll do next, kind of thing. So it sounds like he may need you to be somewhat more hands on and/or providing more immediate feedback and guidance on his writing assignments. As for how much he should be writing...you know, you're the teacher. You're in charge. You know him best. You know what he's capable of, what his frustration level his and so on. Usually when OM says to write "1-2 pages" I just have my daughter keep it to no more than one side of a page. Sometimes we just do a few paragraphs. Sometimes I let her type something instead. Sometimes when there are multiple writing assignments a week and I feel it's getting to be overkill, we skip one here and there knowing that this one curriculum isn't the be all and end all to how we learn in our lives. Sometimes we spread it out over more than one day. My curriculum is an older version so not sure if it's the exact same as yours. But in lesson 3 my daughter chose to do the "Gods of ancient Egypt, including their attributes and importance in daily life" for her writing assignment that week. She ended up doing five paragraphs (five gods and goddesses) over I think a period of two days with illustrations and a bibliography, and I thought that was fine.

I'm not sure what your state's requirements say specifically. I live in PA which is one of the most regulated states and PE is a required subject. However, it doesn't say that it is required every single day, just that it's a required subject. Are you sure you have to account for PE every single day? I don't know a school district out there that has PE every single day lol. I think it's fine to say that you have karate and soccer for PE and that your daughter gets plenty of outside play time and leave it at that, rather than having to specifically account for it on a daily basis. As for health, if you're interested, kidshealth.org has a free health curriculum that I use with my daughter. They have it for different grade levels and we just do it once a week or so- we read a couple of the articles, and then do one or two of the suggested activities...sometimes they have a printable quiz or an activity sheet/suggestion to go with the lesson. http://kidshealth.org/classroom/ But in the past I've also just included a "summary" with my portfolio summing up the types of things we did for each "required subject" and for health I might stayed pretty informal rather than doing a "curriculum" and may have just included something like: HEALTH & PHYSIOLOGY We used “The Care & Keeping Of You, The Body Book For Girls†and “The Feelings Book, The Care & Keeping Of Your Emotions†for our Health curriculum this year. We discuss the importance of proper nutrition and food groups (we also did a study on Nutrition as part of our Science curriculum this year and around that same time, our homeschool group met with a dietician at a local hospital). We also participated in a “Healthy Eating Tour†at Giant Supermarket. We discuss the importance of getting enough rest and fresh air and exercise, brushing teeth and other personal hygiene, and we have age appropriate conversations on the dangers of cigarette, alcohol and drug use. Alexa sees her medical doctor, eye doctor and dentist regularly. ...I think it can be pretty easy to do what works for YOU and YOUR educational goals, and then just make what you do fit whatever portfolio or reporting methods you have to work with.

They are (almost) 4 years old and 7. The 4 y/o can't read and the 7 y/o isn't a very strong reader... A DVD player with DVD's. Music CD's/Family Sing-A-Longs. Audiobook that you can all tolerate (we listened to a lot of a Harry Potter audiobook when we drove to Florida last time. Nintendo DS's or other travel video games A bag of life savers (sugar free if you prefer)...you wouldn't believe how handy the "Who Can Make It Last The Longest?" game can be right about when you are ready to tear your hair out. ;) A Checklist, using pictures for your non-readers, of people doing a bunch of different things that people might be doing while driving, so that they can look for people doing those things and see who can find them and check them off first. These might include little pictures (which you can find online and print, or draw stick figures of, or whatever) of people doing things like picking their noses, talking on a phones, eating something, smoking cigarettes, singing, gesturing with their hands, talking to someone else in the car, drinking something, kids in the backseat watching a movie, or whatever. A checklist of all different types of things you might pass on the road from types of vehicles to types of buildings to types of road signs to types of restaurants and so on, and see who can check those off first. The Alphabet game where they have to see who can find the letters A-Z on road signs first, in order. Trying to find out of state license plates from as many states as possible. Stuff to make simple crafts like paper bag puppets or sock puppets so they can make up little silly puppet shows while you travel. Any time you stop for gas or bathroom breaks or food, let them out of the car and get out a stop watch or something and do timed races and stuff that get them running full out to get as much exercise as possible in as short a time period as possible and encourage them to do silly things like "Now run backwards as fast as you can to that sign, now do running jumps, now hop on one foot to that sign and back" etc. There's 20 questions and I Spy, you can all take turns telling part of a story and trying to keep the story going, you can see who can be the first to count to 100 of something (big trucks, yellow cars, people who will wave back to you, etc). Good luck! :D

Usually 45 minutes to an hour before I'm due to go somewhere. I go somewhere almost every day. And it could be at all different times of day. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes an evening thing. If I'm not due to go somewhere, but someone is due to be coming to my house, it'll be 45 minutes to an hour before those people are due to come over lol. And on the rare days I have nowhere to go and no-one coming over, it's quite possible I'll just stay in the sweats and teeshirt I slept in and skip it for the day. :P In that case, I'd be more likely to do it first thing the next morning regardless of that day's plans.

I never eat foods I don't like. I never make my kids eat foods they don't like. I do sometimes make my kids TRY a new food/recipe, but if they try it and don't like it, they do not have to eat it after that.

I would not send my kids to bed hungry. If there are things I KNOW my kids don't like, I don't make it for them and tell them they have to eat it. If I want to eat something I know they don't like, I'll make them something simple separately (this may just mean heating up chicken nuggets in the microwave). If we are making something new that we want them to try and they decide they don't like it, they can have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a bowl of cereal or something instead. It only comes up once in a rare while. But would I just tell them to go to bed hungry? No. Would I force them to eat things they don't like? No. I'm not into food battles. And for the most part, it's a non-issue in my house. My kids are not particularly picky eaters and most nights they are happy to eat whatever it is we make. But like anyone else, as far as I am concerned, they are entitled to have an off night where they just aren't in the mood for something or just don't like something.

:) Aw. That's great! Build-A-Bears are awesome, my daughter loves those! Even just giving people a genuine smile can make them go about their day smiling! And I'm sure giving that young man more than he asked for made his day! Well this week was nothing particularly major for me. I gave a friend from my homeschool group who doesn't have a vehicle rides to any field trips and activities that I was going to anyway, but I always offer to do that anyway since she only lives a town away from me. I let another friend in the group know that I appreciate her friendship, and made a point a few times of letting people ahead of me in traffic. Anyone else have anything to share from this past week?

My brother and I who live on the same street do exchange occasional babysitting services but not for late night out things that would affect getting either of our kids to bed at a normal hour barring an emergency. For that kind of nighttime thing, we would make alternate plans such as seeing if Grandma could come over or if we could hire a babysitter.

I really appreciate all the replies. They sure are diverse. I'm still undecided which I want to go with lol. I am thinking "yo" is what will be commonly known to people we may practice our new-found skills on around here, but, still, it is good to keep in mind that there are other pronunciations.

Nope!

I agree with whoever said just be mommy. Don't be in such a rush to make it formal at three or four years of age. They are learning so much in so many different ways, all you have to do is be mom. Give her lots of time to do her own thing, have conversations with her, interact normally with her, involve her in the things you do around the house and your outings, provide things like age appropriate crafts, board games, puzzles, art supplies, read to her, look at the stars in the sky, the ants on the ground, go outside. Color, cut, paste, whatever. When she's ready start doing a few minutes worth of letter and number activities. But above all enjoy each other and follow her cues and don't stress over any of it or push things. Things my son was way too bouncy for at 3 or 4 he's been more ready for at 5 or 6 and by following his cues it's been a smoother transition into doing more activities (and we are still doing a gentle K this year, he just turned 6) which I'm fine with. I see no need to hurry and push through a young childhood. I can see looking back one day and wishing we had played more and enjoyed each other more when he was 3 or 4 or 5. I can't see ever looking back and saying gee I wish I had made him sit down and do more schoolwork when he was 4... You know what I mean?

We actually like them marinated in duck sauce!

I say go for it! A year apart from your ex is not too soon!

In Getting Started With Spanish they teach that the word "yo," meaning "I," has more than one pronunciation which varies by locale. It basically says you can use whichever you are most comfortable with but suggests that while yo is most common in the U.S. (and acceptable), jo is more "authentic." So which do you use? As of now, it's doubtful we would be traveling to any Spanish speaking countries and don't know any Spanish speakers, this is just for purposes of practicing at home, really. Does it even matter?

:iagree:

Yes, when meeting someone new.

:iagree:

It's risqué but it's not pornographic. And I guess I'm in the minority but it doesn't even really bother me.