I did a mass printing at home and printed everything out. I think in the future, I will send the files to a copy center and have it printed out. It ends up being cheaper per page than it costs to print it out on my home printer.

Michele's Math - Addition

We are about 2 hours east of McPherson...I actually had to look at a map because we haven't even lived here a year yet. :lol: I have to say, I'm with TXmomof4, they say that this winter has been unusual but I'm not sure I buy it either :lol: We got 14 inches of snow on Christmas (first snow was just before thanksgiving, 3 inches or so and stuck around for a week or so then it snowed again in early December and it was the same thing). That snow from Christmas has finally mostly melted away. We got a total over 24 - 25" from the Christmas blizzard and the following 3 weeks. The temps stayed under 15 degrees for two weeks straight :lol: When we first moved here in March of 09, it snowed the day we moved in and a couple of times in April but it melted off in a couple of day. They say last summer was mild, it was only miserably hot maybe 2 - 3 weeks out of the whole summer. It was comfortable to us but we lived in Okinawa Japan before we moved here and were used to 90 degrees and 100% humidity for 2 - 3 months out of the year. :lol: The tornado sirens only sounded once last spring and the tornadoes were about 30 miles south of us. Almost all houses have basements or tornado shelters or safe rooms. Homeschooling has been pretty simple, just register as private school and that's it. Testing is recommended but not mandatory as I understand it. No one has made a fuss about us homeschooling at all. Cost of living is average to good, groceries and utilities and gas prices are about average, housing is very inexpensive (at least to me :lol: ). People have all been pretty friendly. Helpful and courteous, will hold a conversation with a stranger, when we got stuck in the snow someone always stopped to help us out. We've been many, many places around the world. There have been places we liked and places we loved and places that we will never return to if we can help it :lol: but we like it here and plan to stay a long, long time. Dh is talking about retiring here and I would have no complaints about that. ;)

If you have it mailed to a friend or relative and have it overnighted, it will still take at least two weeks to arrive to your APO/FPO. It will get to the central pickup point for your APO/FPO quickly but once it arrives there, it will go only as fast as Priority mail for your location. For us in Japan, it was about 2 weeks for Priority mail. So it's best not to mess with time sensitive material in the mail when you are military overseas. Either ask for an exception in your case from the company (prehaps fax them confirmation that you recieved the tests and then confirmation that you mailed them back in the specified timeframe from the time you received them) or find a company that is more flexible about when the tests need to be mailed. Another option, and as I see it probably the easiest option all things considered when living overseas, is to adjust your school year so that you are ending your year when DODDS schools are doing their testing. Instead of starting your year in September and ending in May, start in July and end in March. Take your vacation in April, May and June instead of June July and August. If you live in an area that has IDEA International, they did their testing in April when we were there. I can't remember if they allowed non IDEA members to test with them but it's not a bad program at all. We would join IDEA again if we had the opportunity.

We've been homeschooling since my oldest was in K (really since they were born but my oldest did have a 6 month stint in public pre-k at dh's request) so we've been homeschooling for about 7 years or so. No one seemed to say anything at first. They weren't over the moon but they didn't have anything really bad to say about it either. Recently, my dad has been making some off hand comments about putting at least my oldest ones (11.5, 9.5 and 8.5) in public school. His reasons? Socialization (the same kids that they would go to school with spending all their non-schooling hours at my house isn't enough I guess) and getting them "on schedule with the rest of the world". :confused: Yes, we hold some non-traditional hours sometimes but that's so that the kids can spend some time with dh when his work schedule is non-traditional. Does that mean dh also needs to go to school so he can be "just like everyone else"? :lol: My dad seems to think that learning to get up at o'dark thirty in the morning when the alarm clock goes off every morning is a learned skill that my kids aren't learning by homeschooling. :confused: Funny, my kids don't seem to have a problem doing it when we do hold a traditional schedule or if we have to get up early for some reason. They are also more flexible and I find that to be a much more valuable skill than being "just like everyone else". ;) We are considering buying a house that is the next street over from an elementary school, my dad actually said, "that will be good for the kids because even if you don't enroll them, they will be on a better schedule because they will hear the other kids going to school in the morning." :confused: :lol: Ummm...bean dip please? ;) No one in our family questions that we provide a better and more well rounded education to our children than the public schools and that they are quite socialable and have more self-confidence than most kids their age. They make friends easily and usually have lots of friends where ever we move to. But even then we are not immune to judgemental comments and the idea that because we are living a non-traditional lifestyle that we are somehow damaging our children. :001_tt2:

I don't know what was said in the original thread but I can think of habits a lot worse than counting on fingers at the age of 7. I think she still has plenty of time to drop the habit when she's ready and can figure out the answer without using her fingers. I would rather she took her time and get the right answer, than try to get the answer quickly and make silly mistakes. Speed comes with practice. My oldest, now almost 12, was allowed to count on his fingers as long as he needed. He's known his addition facts for a few years now without counting on his fingers. I can't really remember when exactly he stopped using his fingers but I know it's been maybe 3 or 4 years, sometime around the age of 8 or 9 maybe? I never told him he couldn't use his fingers anymore, I just figured eventually he'd be able to do it without and he did. His 2 years younger brother is the same way, hasn't used his fingers in a couple of years and their sister, who is 8.5yo, only occasionally uses her fingers when she's a bit unsure and wants to double check. Part of my philosophy on the subject has to do with the fact that I was forced to stop using my fingers around 2nd grade or so. Problem was, I wasn't ready to give up the concrete learning aspect of using manipulatives (my fingers when no other aid was provided). Maybe other kids my age were but I wasn't ready to move from concrete to visual yet. As a result I began to hate math, it was too hard for me to do it the way they wanted me to and they would not allow me to do it the way that made sense to me even though I could always come up with the right answer and when I tried to do it their way I often got it wrong. I remember many tears over math from that point on in my life until late in high school when I was finally ready to learn math visually. I fully believe that I would have been ready much earlier if I hadn't been pushed to learn visually before I was ready. Now, all that said, I do teach my children "tricks" to remembering math facts. +0, +1 and +2 are all pretty easy to remember and even if you have to count the +2s, you can still come up with the answer fairly quickly. When learning doubles, 1+1 through 5+5 are pretty easy for them to just remember. For 6+6, I have them show me 6 fingers. Then I tell them to show me 6 more. We giggle over the fact that they don't have enough fingers and then I hold up 6 fingers. I point out that we are both holding up one whole hand of fingers so we have 5+5 on just those hands and we already know that's 10 and on our other hands we each have 1 finger up and we know 1+1 is 2 and since it's very easy to add 10+2 they quicly realize the answer is 12, without actually counting their fingers. I show them that this works with all the doubles from 6+6 to 9+9. Then we work through doubles plus 1 (easy if they can figure out the doubles and these problems practice the doubles problems at the same time) We play Go To The Dump and other games that practice making 10. Adding 10 to a number is pretty easy and if they can add 10, adding 9 or 8 is pretty easy. Just add 10 and take either 1 or 2 steps back. Lastly, I show them how to "break" numbers to make things easier. I find it easiest to teach this with MUS blocks but fingers work too. Say you want to add 8+5. We haven't covered any tricks yet that would help with this so I ask them if they could make a 10 from this. If they can't see that they could take 2 from the 5, I help them. I have them trade the 5 MUS block for 2 blocks that would allow them to give 2 to the 8 to trade for a 10. Once they've traded the blocks it's easy to see that the answer is 13. Then I teach them that if they come to a problem that doesn't seem to have any kind of trick to it, look for a 10 even if they have to break a number to do it. If any of this results in having to give up my good mommy and homeschool teacher crown, so be it. Rote memorization of math facts in early elementary is not a hill I willing to die on and I will take accuracy over speed.

We use and like Headsprout but I'm pretty sure that your 9yo would find it baby-ish. My 8yo and 9yo both completed the program but they are both they type of readers that I don't think it would have mattered what program we used, they were both just ready to learn when they were 4 or 5yo. My 3yo is completing the program now and she's doing pretty well with it. I've not tried any of the other programs you mentioned and I taught my struggling reader (my oldest, he's 11 now but didn't start really reading well until he was 9) to read with Spell to Write and Read which we still use with all the kids as a spelling program. Headsprout is just kind of "fun with a purpose" for us these days.

Sometimes realtors and sellers list the house as a short sale but they are either still in the process of getting the bank to pre-approve the short sale status or they wait until they get an offer to start asking the bank for a short sale. Like others have said, if you want to close in time for the tax credit, a short sale may not be in your best interest. Even if the sellers approve your offer, their bank (or banks if they have more than one mortgage) have to approve the offer. You often have to take the house in as-is condition, any inspections are for your information only, no repairs will be made, which can sometimes adversely affect your mortgage lender's decision to lend you the money for the house. We've considered several short sale properties in our area but since we'd like to get the tax credit and there is no shortage of homes on the market that are good deals and not short sales, we've decided to rule out short sale properties from our search. It's a shame too because there are a couple of properties that I'd love to put an offer in on but I don't really want to take the chance that we might have to wait too long for the bank(s) to approve the short sale.

FIAR books are very engaging. Most kids enjoy reading them everyday but some don't. No big deal. You can either just refer to the book by saying "Remember in the book we read yesterday..." or just re-read the pertinent part of the book for your lesson on the days you do lessons and not read the whole story. On art days you can just look at the pictures, you don't have to read it if you don't want to. The idea is that reading the story daily is built in review. You talk and discuss while you read after a day or two instead of just reading straight through but that approach isn't natural to everyone. If reading the book everyday doesn't appeal to your child, just use the curriculum in a way that works for you. It's that easy. ;)

Yes and no. "School" is the easiest way to explain it to those who do not want to understand homeschooling. :p I have not problem telling people we are "doing school" or telling the kids it's time to buckle down and "do some school". On the other hand, our schooling is not institutionalized so I do find when I say we are doing school to those who are interested in learning more about homeschooling, I have to clarify that "doing school" does not mean that I set a timer to go off every hours so we can change classes, we don't have classroom desks set in neat rows and I do not own my own scantron machine so I can grade their tests. :lol: The word "school" allows me to weed out those who are questioning me because they are interested in homeschooling from those who are just merely trying to hold a polite conversation. ;)

I didn't like the look of HO Level 1 either. I really like Level 2 Ancients so far but we've omitted the History Pockets as my kids just don't enjoy doing them. I know several people have mentioned they don't like Van Loon's book but I haven't found anything terrible about it yet. :confused: The KHE is a bit dull but I do break it up a bit when I can (we aren't doing the History Pocket lessons so we have some extra time to do this and follow some rabbit trails to get any info we might have missed in the History Pockets :) ) Plus my kids have always liked to read the KHE and KSE for fun. :lol: I've glanced through Level 3 and I have it penciled in for high school. It doesn't look like honors or AP level work at all but for regular A-level classes for the non-history major, it looks fine for me and my kids. ;)

I drove my mom nuts with debating. :lol: My 11yo is starting to get into debating, problem is the things he wants to debate are usually non-negotiable. :lol: Honestly, the best place I've found for debates where people play mostly fair :p are these boards. ;)

Yup, when I had just one or two kids to teach that were in lower elementary school, we were always done by lunch. Now that I have 2 middle schoolers, 1 upper elementary and a K'er (plus a toddler), I have about 90 minutes of free time between the hours of 8am and 4pm and I usually use that to get caught up on household tasks. Yes I can teach them much more quickly than the ps could considering it would take 4 teachers 6 - 8 a day to teach what I teach the same 4 kids in 6 hours or so a day by myself but we are most definitely not done by lunch. Mornings are 3r's for 4 kids plus Latin for the older 3. Except for Latin, all other morning subjects are taught one on one. Afternoons are history/science, foreign language and fine arts/PE. These are all taught as group subjects. We also do chores in the afternoon. We are a one vehicle family so we can't go anywhere during the day. I would love to outsource some of these things and get out in the afternoon and I would be more than happy to re-arrange a little to do it. It would probably require that we get up earlier and/or do some work in the evening though. We've managed to borrow the car a couple of times and do park day afternoon but because we are only able to attend very seldom, we still feel like outsiders there. :( On the one hand, I'm sad we haven't been able to make any good friends here (we've only lived here a year), on the other hand, I'm glad we aren't being invited to every birthday party and social event in town. We just don't have the money or the time to do those things all the time and I feel bad when I have to decline or my kids have to choose which friend's birthday to attend because we either don't have time or money to do it all.

I don't use a handwriting curriculum. I teach them to form their letters, a few letters at time as soon as they show interest or 5yo which ever comes first. Once they have enough letters down to make a word, I have them copy words. When they have enough letters down to make enough words to make sentences, they copy short two and three word sentences. They then do copywork followed by dictation the rest of their schooling days in one way or another.

I second Irasshai. We also lived in Japan for a time and I found Irasshai most appealing because it didn't feel completely Americanized. ;) If she wants to learn how to read Japanese, you need to choose which kind, Kanji, Katakana or Hiragana. Signs in Japan are often written in at least two of these plus Romanji (Japanese words written phonetically in our alphabet). I found learning Kanji the most useful as a foreigner living in Japan. Irrasshai does have some Kanji practice, reading and writing, I think if I remember right. (We are on school break right now and my memory is a little fuzzy :lol: ) But most of the instruction is Romanji.

Yup, huge difference between unschooling, radical unschooling and downright not schooling. We've unschooled in the past. It was great, when I had the time to put into it. We read books a lot and investigated everything. I made sure language arts were covered daily even if we were just discussing grammar mistakes they or others made. I made sure they practiced writing on a regular basis and would go through the revising process with them. Math was easy to include in every day things when they were young. We played games with math and had them help with or do the math in cooking and travel. At night after they were in bed, I would spend time researching different bunny trails we could explore with their most recent interest and always maintained a running list of skills that we were working on and what could be introduced next. Most unschoolers I knew were like this. No one used curriculum but everyone had a plan and kept introducing new ideas into their children's lives. It was a lot of work but I enjoyed it...that is until it became too much and I decided that I needed someone else to do some of the planning. ;) I think I participated in the Mother Unschooling forum from time to time but when we were unschooling I was usually too busy either learning with my kids or doing the legwork to make sure we always had new ideas coming in to spend a lot of time on a forum. My biggest support when we unschooled came from other local unschoolers.

We used to have enough money in our monthly budget that I could have a monthly homeschool allowance to save and spend as needed but due to job changes, that is no longer the case so I'm having to spend from tax refunds this year. My allowance was $100 per month, so $1200 per year for 3 kids. This total did not include things I would have paid for whether they were in public, private or homeschool. Things like ballet classes, sports, music lessons, run of the mill art supplies like drawing paper, construction paper, crayons and pencils. I'm wanting $1000 from taxes but I'm thinking I'll only get about $800 which is fine, I can get the basic things I need for 3 school age kids (5th, 4th and 3rd) and one 4yo preschooler. Our library is pretty decent but it always seems like everyone is trying to get the same books at the same time so I am buying the main titles for our history program (History Odyssey). I'm also spending big money on science kits with all the needed items for experiments so I don't have to try and budget for odds and ends needed for experiements which we always seem to need when we have no extra money for them in the budget. I'm trying to use curriculum we already have as much as possible. My preschooler's curriculum is almost all free or reused items, MEP reception math (free with some reused math games from the older kids), SWR (sorta reused), FIAR (reused and we already own 97% of the titles used) and Learning Page worksheets for busy work when she wants to be like the big kids. ;) The biggest :banghead: cost for me this year is repurchasing SWR. :glare: I sold my materials a couple of years ago thinking I had found something better but I'm now going back to what I know works and telling dh to not let me change spelling/phonics again. Ever. :lol:

My oldest is just now able to do about half his work, maybe a little more, in "assign and report" mode. He's nearly 12. It has taken several years to get to this point. I still have to work with him one-on-one on subjects that trouble him. My next oldest (6/00) can do a few things independently but still needs me for most of the instruction. I can assign book reading or a pretty self-explanatory worksheet for him to himself. He is the most academically inclined of all my kids so far. My oldest needed far more hand holding at the same age. My oldest dd (7/01) can do somethings independently but I can't leave the room. She needs me nearby to clarify things and help her stay on task. She is not ready to work completely independently on anything. She's pretty average academically and attention span wise for her age. However, I am trying to train her to be ready to be more independent. When she askes questions, 95% of the time, I won't just give her the answer. I guide her to finding the answer herself. For instance, unless it's an unusual foreign word she is trying to spell, I won't spell a word for her. I ask her, "What's the first sound? What's the next sound?..." and so on. I ask her the questions she should be asking herself so that eventually, these questions will be ingrained as part of her thought process and eventually she will be able to work more independently because she won't need me to help her think problems through so much. Does that make sense? All that said, it really depends on the child. Different children will be ready to work more independently at different times. Ideally, I think when they begin logic stage they should be able to work in some subjects independently and by 9th grade they should be able to work in all areas with just supervision. They can and would be expected to discuss things with mom and/or dad but 98% of the work would be independent. Those are our goals anyways.

These things would not be covered in WWE 1, they are rather advanced skills and neither useful nor necessary to a first grader or any beginning writer. To teach these things to such young or new writers would be like putting the cart before the horse. Do you have The Complete Writer Instructor's Text or are you just working from the WWE 1 workbook? If you don't have the instructor text, read the sample at Peacehill Press. In the sample from the book, SWB lays out the entire progression of skills for the Complete Writer series, for grade 1 to grade 12. Also the product description tells more about the logic stage component, Writing With Skill.

We just moved to a place where the highs in winter often don't get above 20. We simply don't have enough winter gear yet. They have nice coats but no boots or snow pants. My rule is 26 degrees until we have more/better winter gear. Once they have all the right gear, I think anything above 10 will be fine.

We are also struggling. Dd took ballet and tap from the ages of 3-6 when we lived overseas and it was much cheaper. Now that we live stateside again, not only can I not afford the lessons, but I don't even have a way to get her there. :( My oldest wants to do sports, my next oldest would like to volunteer at the zoo. I have an outgoing 3yo that I'm sure would love to do some kind of activity with other kids but I can rarely get our only vehicle from dh so we can do free park days with our homeschool group. (And they never choose to meet at the park that is walking distance from our house no matter how many times I suggest it. :angry: ) I'm so sad that we just can't seem to afford anything more than a roof over heads and food on our plates, which I am thankful for that but it's still hard to never seem to able to do more when you were once able to. Sigh.

In my opinion, which I believe is what you asking, yes, the publisher's right to fair compensation, which in turn compensates the author, is more important than my right to purchase bootleg material, knowingly or unknowingly. Can I ask for compensation from the water company if my house floods, by their mistake, and ruins my hard copy of a book with my notes in it? Do they owe me anything for that? Not usually. I hope the 17yo in the article has learned that you can't put all your eggs in an electronic basket. Electronic devices fail, if it's important, you need to either use the old standby of pen and paper or create hardcopies of your electronic work. Both in the dinosaur computer days when I started college and the recent courses I've taken, electronic device failure is not a reasonable excuse for being unable to complete an assignment on time. You were/are warned of this at the beginning of each term. In other words, I have no pity for him. Nothing was stolen from him, he was compensated for the purchase of the book. If he didn't keep hardcopies of his notes, that's his problem IMO. Amazon does not have a copy of his notes, they were destroyed with the illegal copy of the book. No different than a college dean confiscating and destroying illegal copies of books. All that said, I would be leary of putting notes in my Kindle books anyways if they were not extractable in someway from the book, like a notepad function. Or electronic sticky notes. I would not like the idea of if the book file somehow became corrupted and unusable or deleted, I could not maintain my notes. I find this to be a file design flaw. But you asked does Amazon have the right to delete your notes, no, I don't believe they do but like I said, this is an easy problem to remedy. Either keep your notes in hard copy or Amazon can update the design so this is not a problem in the future. Amazon has already said that they made a mistake and will approach it differently in the future. Also from the article I linked: Yes, I agree but I don't think open format is the most effective way to achieve this at this time. While open format would make it much easier for the consumer, it would cause no end of headaches for publishers and copyright holders. Open format would make it much easier to obtain bootleg copies. Ultimately, I'm sure open format is the way e-readers will go eventually but right now, we don't have the proper laws or technology to protect publishers and authors in electronic open format. I don't believe my rights as a consumer trump the rights of authors and publishers to copyright their materials and enforce the copyright. They refunded those who purchased the bootleg copy, Amazon admitted that they didn't handle this particular incident well and they have stated that they will be changing their systems so that books will not be deleted in the future. Sounds to me like they are trying to ensure that this kind of censorship does not occur in the future. What more do you want?

I hadn't heard about this incident until this thread. The first thought that went through my mind was, "Surely, no self-preserving publisher or Amazon executive is going to choose "1984" for this demonstration" Sure enough, with surprisingly little effort, I found that it was not a demonstration that they could, they were trying to do the right thing by the publisher. Even Amazon has stated that, in hindsight, they probably approached the problem the wrong way and will approach the problem differently in the future. Is "1984" the first one that has been disputed? More than likely not, but by unfortunate coincidence it is the first one that Amazon was forced to act on. I don't own a Kindle (yet) and I would be highly upset that my Kindle books were recalled but, if my copy of a book electronic or otherwise were illegal, I would completely understand and surrender my copy. Blame Amazon if you want, because I think we are just going to have disagree on this one, but I don't. If anyone is to blame, I'd say it's the publisher who tried to sell the book illegally.

Amazon did not randomly choose to delete a book from all Kindles to show that they could. They were contacted Houghton-Mifflin, who holds the rights to "1984", because the Kindle editions being sold on Amazon were not legal. They were being sold by an independent publisher who did not hold the rights to the book. Amazon was withdrawing illegal copies of a book being sold on their site, not trying to control what Kindle readers can and cannot read. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

Looking at your siggy line, are you talking about your 4yo K'er? Personally, I would be impressed that he has the stamina to spend two hours coloring a page in a coloring book. Even if he isn't sitting straight through it, most 4-5yo would not have the attention span to stick to it that long. I don't think it's a dawdling problem you have, it's partly an age thing, the kindergarten age range doesn't really understand the concept of getting things done expeditiously. You could encourage him by telling him what's coming next. For example, "Dear, when you finish "that task", we will do "this fun thing" next." I believe, as exacerbating as it can be to adults, the dawdling of very young children serves the purpose of reminding us to stop and smell the roses. ;) I think rather than encouraging him to hurry up, which he will learn to do in time, I would really appreciate his stick-to-it-iveness. :)