My kid likes it, though I think the grammar crossword is by far the most useful. I'm not convinced of the educational value of word searches (though I like them). Parse strings is tricky but good too.

My MIL commented recently that she never made any of her kids (all boys) help her out with the housework, and that she regretted that. It explained a lot! My (wonderful) husband is not much good with housework except dishes, which he did growing up--no dishwasher. So my vote is: make them do those chores, your future DILs will thank you.

I like Land and Literature of England: A Historical Account by Robert M. Adams, but it might be too in-depth for your purposes.

IME Saxon K is great for a 4yo/preK. It's very simple and fun. It starts with things like "let's count to 5." I'm using it right now with my 4yo and she loves it and asks for more. We started when my older daughter was just 5, and she demanded 3 lessons at a time--the next thing we knew we were using Saxon 1 for her K year. Edit: and yeah, you can skip anything that's too hard. It won't matter.

Ha! What a good idea, though. I'll have to start doing that in high school. I've heard a lot of professors complain about students who don't read the syllabus.

We're in Chico! Nice to see some locals here. Are you getting snow in Paradise by any chance? Hey Daisy, I was born in Bakersfield. I went to Norris School.

We've enjoyed Musikgarten and kung fu (not at a studio, but in a guy's garage; very homely and inexpensive).

I was at Target yesterday and they had cute playdresses and skirts for $15 and less. My 7yo loves to wear dresses, so we bought two. The dresses are sleeveless, and we'll use them as jumpers.

SWB said at a recent seminar that you could tell when a kid started saying "How do you know?" :D Kids enter the logic stage at different times in different subjects, so you have to watch carefully. A kid who's good at science might be in the logic stage there but still in grammar in something else.

I've read the essay until the beginning of the "Classical Christian Education" part, and I disagree with the premise. She overstates a lot about WTM's philosophy. I'm not sure I'd really call Hirsch a "classical" guy anyway, and I think she's describing classical education all wrong. But the big thing is her insistence that a student must learn from first principles; that true learning can only take place when you have gone through the entire history of a subject. So she claims that a child should not be taught about the solar system before he can understand Copernicus and Galileo, and atoms should not be taught until the end of an entire physics course. This is nonsense (which would result in very few people knowing anything about atoms). There is no particular reason that the order of discovery should be the order in which a subject is taught, and indeed I should think it would often be counterproductive. As an example, I offer calculus. A student can learn a lot of calculus and do solid, useful things with it by, say, 17. He can go on to study higher-level calculus in college, may even use it daily in his work as an adult. Yet the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is a vastly complex proof that is well above the abilities of most people who learn calculus. A math major would learn it in college, but not a physics major or an engineering major. My husband uses high-level calculus in his work and thinks it's fun, but he's never even read the proof (though it's on a shelf somewhere around here). If we didn't teach calculus to anyone who couldn't first understand the Fundamental Theorem that underlies it, it would be limited to a few people and modern engineering would simply not exist. Besides which, it's ridiculous to say that a child shouldn't be allowed to learn neat things like the solar system. Think of all the fun we'd miss! The author says that teaching students anything without doing it from first principles is not education, but indoctrination. Then, at one point, she happily describes one of her students catching her teacher out in 'bad teaching' by presenting a conclusion before all the evidence. But why does the student believe that such a method is bad teaching? Because she's been indoctrinated to believe it, right? She then goes on to say that values or morals cannot be discussed by younger children at all, since one needs to know pretty much everything ever known before one is able to talk about honesty, justice, and so on. That's just silly. So. Classical education isn't for everyone, and it isn't the only way to get a decent education. But (as the all-knowing mother of a 7yo) IMO it's got a better chance than many ways. I'm hoping that this method will help me to raise kids who are curious about the world, able to think and speak clearly, and generally well-equipped to be productive, articulate citizens of our country.

We do use grade levels--my daughter is in 2nd grade. She likes to know what to say to people, and how she relates to her PS friends (which is most of them, there aren't a lot of homeschoolers here). That has very little to do with the actual work that she's doing, but it's a convenient way to tell people where we are and make them happy. So I don't know that you'll miss anything; it's just a convenient thing to say. I am confused by this comment.

I too think it may have something to do with all the chemicals and hormones we've poured into our environment. Our air, water, and food has a lot of stuff in it that we don't fully understand. Autoimmune problems generally seem to be on the rise, though we have also learned to diagnose them better. I think a few generations ago, a person would just have been considered "sickly"--or would have died sooner.

When I dictate, I read the whole selection out loud to start, then the sentence, and then I break the sentence up into sections.

"Classical" as in Greeks and Romans. Classical Studies is when you focus on Greek/Roman mythology, history, literature.

Oh thank you. We will miss him very much.

I mostly like sewing blogs, like Sew Mama Sew and Thimble. I've got 4 or so I read regularly, and they link to others. They often have great little tutorials in making various fun projects. Oh, and Modesty Zone. I love them.

I'm a CW person, but I'm no expert, we're in Aesop A. You could try looking through the previews on Lulu--you can look at several pages in each book. Also, you can ask questions on the message board. It took me a while to wrap my brain around what they're trying to do, but once I grasped it, I got very excited about it.

We're now in Saxon 3, started with K, and I have always modified the Meeting part according to what I think she needs. As far as I'm concerned, all the scripting and repetition is there for if you need it, but it's optional. So I skip sections, pick and choose, and it goes a lot faster. We enjoy Saxon as a result, IMO. I also skip whole lessons if it's too easy. Now that we're past the halfway point of this book that happens pretty rarely, but I think we skipped most of the first 20 lessons or so and several in the middle there. It gives us space to slow down when necessary and it's more likely we'll finish the book! With Saxon 1 a lot of it was very easy and repetitive, and we finished it before the year was over. No one died, it was fine, and we just started 2, which gave us more space the next year--I didn't feel worried that I should be rushing things more.

Yup, that about covers it. :)

That's another joke; a Mormon would of course never actually call a Jew a Gentile. Unless he was particularly clueless, I guess.

Hee! No, not any more. We still use it as a joke, but that's it. We call non-Mormons non-members, as in "not a member of this particular church." Or usually we call them by their names, actually. ;) Mormons do consider themselves to be part of the House of Israel, but they don't use the term Gentile any more. Of course, if your book wasn't written by a Mormon and it's from 1912 and about Mormons, it's probably chock-full of howlers.

I do think that this would be the best thing to do, and also the hardest. I don't know that I'd be brave enough! But if it was me, I'd have a really hard time feeling the same way towards them unless I did do it. You may well be better at letting things roll off you, though.

We could do some bonbon math--graph the different types of bonbons, have a chart and everything. And then there's the science of candymaking, how the sugar reacts to different temperatures to produce different textures...I'm envisioning great things for this bonbon unit!

Ew. I'd be mad too. I mean, yeah, we homeschool and it's some extra work, but really--I don't know anyone who sits around eating bonbons or anything. I am lucky enough to have a lot of SAHM friends, and they all work at least as hard as I do. I don't know what I would have done, but it might have involved dumping the bean dip on some heads. :mad:

We liked them a lot too! Yummy.