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mamashark

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Everything posted by mamashark

  1. I like this idea! Because you're right - parents of the 2-4 year old age range seem to be the most willing to spend money!
  2. Oh I hadn't thought of that! That's great idea!
  3. I was trying to think of how much I could pay for it, lol. So what would you be willing to pay?
  4. Subbing on his day off would bring in only a max of $400 a month. I never thought about camp over Christmas holiday, that's an interesting thought.
  5. would $30 for a 6 week general music class seem like a reasonable amount to charge?
  6. He's not legally allowed to teach lessons to his students at the school... conflict of interest the district says. We're in a rural area where the median income is 35k/year. Thanks for the other ideas!
  7. He might be able to - but neither of us are great marketers... this is probably the first thing he'll try. He was toying with the idea of offering a homeschool music class too but didn't know how much anyone would be willing to pay because we'd never be able to afford something like that! lol! He's a music teacher, with a masters in educational technology. He's handy with his hands too, and can fix just about anything that breaks in the house.
  8. My husband accepted a teaching job that's only 80% - but it's a job! It's tight, but we can pay the bills and make the budget work on the income. The thing is, he LOVES the school and the coworkers and the situation is so good for him after some not-so-great situations in the past. I know he's going to feel obligated to look for a fulltime position if one came available to provide for our family, but I'd love to think of a way for him to make up that difference on the side so he wouldn't have to! He's very particular about me not working and him providing for us... He'll have one full day off per week. But he'd need to make nearly $1000 a month to make up the difference of a fulltime job and the last part-time job he got paid only about half that for a LOT of time away from family. He could teach music lessons but he'd have to find 10 students to make enough. He makes around $200/month already, doing freelance writing. What other ideas haven't I thought of?
  9. one thing I'm experimenting with is "filler foods" with dinner - I was reading a book recently about Yorkshire England and the off comments about how they would use Yorkshire pudding (and one family used rice pudding) as the first course helped to fill hungry bellies and stretch the meat further. The Yorkshire pudding recipe was easy and everyone loved it, and I didn't need seconds of the main dish to feel full (and I tend to need a lot more to eat because of a really high metabolism). Also, write down prices of foods you spend and where you buy them - I recently figured out that 2 bags of apples at Walmart cost more than 3 bags of apples at Aldis. Makes it easier to know where to buy what foods. (We feed 6 people gluten free and partly dairy free on $600 a month) Regarding giving/offerings - we don't give 10%, but we give something. Regarding the "crispy" clothes - if you give the clothes a vigorous shake when you take them off the line, it can help - also try vinegar in the rinse cycle. (and if all else fails, movement from wind or a fan can help prevent the crispiness), You could also try line drying then throwing his clothes in the drier for a "fluff" (no heat) cycle to see if that helps!
  10. I need your creative educational gift ideas! Inexpensive ($20 and under!) ideas for "back to school" educational gifts for 1st and K. I was thinking about getting my astronomy loving 4th grader a miniature set of planets as a cool extra to go along with her science, but I can't think of something cool for the other two. We'll be doing the standard WTM 1st grade schedule... Ideas?
  11. Interesting, thank you! I'm glad to hear how much it helped in your situation. I wonder if I could make a version of the flash cards myself for now and spend the money on the brain training manual. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
  12. Great thoughts, I need to consider that some. My goals would be to improve learning ability... So not sight words but if sight words made reading easier, then yes sight words, if that makes sense. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
  13. I was having a discussion with my sister-in-law (who is a public school kindergarten teacher) about my 6yo DD who has dyslexia. We've completed Barton level 1 and it was amazing - took a while to get through but she did well. I then opted to try Phonics Pathways again with AAS letter tiles after we finished instead of going on to level 2, and she's made more progress in the past month than she did in the previous year now that we have completed Barton 1. Anyways, my sister-in-law highly recommended the sight word cards from Dianne Craft; they made a huge difference for her kindergarteners this year. They do look amazing, but I'm also noticing her brain integration therapy manual and wondering something - if the cards are like a bandaid while the brain integration therapy gets more to the root of things? That's kind of the way I'm reading the website, but at the same time I am having trouble with the idea that the therapy manual will be the amazing fix she's claiming it can be... even though it sounds like it would benefit a couple of my other kids as well based on the description. So without finding much about it while searching, I'm wondering - if you didn't have the money for both, which would you spend the money on - the brain integration manual or the sight word cards? (Or would you not bother with either?)
  14. I totally missed this comment until this morning! But yes, option 1 is what is annoying me at the moment, option 2 is what I want and I feel like option 3 is not what I'm going for here at all. I need to allow her to have more of a hand in designing her courses and selection of books like this. And the Nasa Space math mentioned upthread is an amazing resource, I'm excited to see everything available there!
  15. My DD is 9, but advanced in grammar (her retention for grammar exceeds my own sometimes). She's highly advanced and interested in sciences, so that might be my reason right there - to provide additional support for her science interests by providing the latin base.
  16. I'll check them out, thanks for the suggestion!
  17. So I know some of the reasons to study latin, but I am having a really hard time buying into the concept mentally because as much as I feel it's beneficial, it also feels unnecessary to a certain degree. I had it on our schedule for last year, but because I wasn't sold out to it (like, say, math or history), it was the first thing dropped and we never picked it up again. I never took latin, neither did DH but he wishes he had... and yet he's a bit neutral about whether we do it with the kids. So someone needs to give me a reason to be convinced, otherwise I'm pretty sure that latin is just not going to ever happen!
  18. This has been very helpful and interesting - I feel like a lot of my fuzzy thoughts make more sense now! I think the thing that resonates most is the fact that ensuring a well-rounded education does not come at the exclusion of allowing a lot of academic time/focus on an area of talent/interest. Part of those "rounded" bits that may not fit neatly into the main interest will often provide depth and color to those other areas. Like how music trains your brain in various ways that is beneficial for all other subjects. Thanks for helping me think it through :)
  19. So where is that line between arithmetic and higher math? Algebra? My DD9 is good at math. She is quick at picking up concepts but dislikes math as a subject. She's finished Beast 3, and finished in less time than I anticipated for the school year including many math free days for a lot of hands-on learning opportunities. But, she doesn't thrive on math like she does on science. She's been begging to study astronomy in depth ever since she did an elementary level intro to astronomy. So I bought a used copy of the Great Courses Intro to Astronomy for next year (and she's begging to start NOW when she saw me open the package). That plus a bunch of projects that I've found that are related include on first glance a lot of math. The thing is, I feel oddly unsure of myself when I consider not doing Beast 4 next year, instead teaching her the math that comes up in Astronomy. But at the same time, I feel like she would both enjoy the math more and learn more (and fight less) if she could see a direct reason for learning any random math concept that comes up. By taking away "math" as a subject, it feels like I'm breaking some unwritten rule (or rather, it's written in the state's homeschool laws, but through creative portfolio editing I can get around that). This is something I need to ponder more.
  20. So your opinion is that we need to provide a well-rounded base, then allow depth of study on top of that? For the record, I agree that interest does typically come from exposure and that we need to expose our kids to all kinds of things, I guess I just wonder about requiring year-long focuses on everything from a separate course, rather than combining some things together. Like the concept of copywork - you can teach spelling, handwriting, grammar, editing skills, etc. through copywork. So instead of having a book for handwriting practice, a book for spelling lessons, a book for grammar lessons and work on editing skills separately, you combine them all together. And then you can focus the copywork on an area of current study so that it's completely integrated into the day. So why does that concept for young children morph into science, writing, and math as separate subjects, for example? Obviously to some degree the basic foundations need to be taught before things can be combined like that, but where that separation ends and the possibility of blending subjects begins seems fuzzy to me and the typical course of study doesn't blend them much at all.
  21. I've been pondering the concept of when it's appropriate to focus studies and when it's beneficial to ensure a "well-rounded" education. Ebunny's post in the Ideal Humanities thread made me wonder when/how it would be possible to truly focus studies in an area of interest, rather than piece-meal subjects that touch all the "appropriate" areas of instruction. I feel like having a list of largely unrelated subjects (math, literature, science, history, language, music, art, etc.) provides some benefit, by broadening the learning base and allowing our children to have an experience in a bunch of different areas (I am still thankful for my college philosophy class even though it about killed me to pass it and it made no impact on anything in my life), but I wonder how much that concept is actually beneficial to our children when we do it year after year. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that I don't have to pattern my kids education on the public school system, but I don't really know how to break out of that broad base of studies and allow for a more in-depth focus of study. I recently saw a thing on my facebook feed that one of the downfalls of the modern education system is the lack of passion and focus of most graduates. And that those kids who do have passion and focus and become the world shakers and changers, averaged something like a 2.9GPA in highschool because they had trouble conforming to the broad education base required. My DD and I have recently finished reading the 2-ebook series on the Gifted Potentials and the way they set up the course of study is two courses focused on aspects of interest/potential, a third course focusing on a weakness, but tying assignments to the other two courses, and then "intensives" once a week, focusing on something random of interest. The idea is intriguing - allowing for in-depth study in areas of strong interest/potential, focus on a relative weakness to tie it into those areas of interest, and then provide little mini-courses on a variety of "extra" areas. My problem is that I am too stuck in the box and feel like I'm going to mess my kid up by not providing the typical course of study. I've been kicking this around in my brain for about a month now and am still foggy about the concept, and it's probably not helped by curricula available on the market, which doesn't seem to cater to this concept, at least none that I have found. Anyone else have any thoughts?
  22. Thanks for this information - If we choose to get the headphones they would only be used for very specific situations as needed!
  23. My husband recommended Bose too... DD9 is 2E- gifted and adhd, although the OT disagrees and says it's not ADHD, but rather SPD. We had bad experiences with meds for the adhd and better experiences with OT and high doses of Omega 3 as prescribed by her Dr. I wonder if the headphones would be helpful when she's working on her schoolwork at home. (the OT recommended them to us) DS4 - OT that DD sees also recommended them for him for use when we go to the store. We are awaiting evals for him so no official diagnosis.
  24. So I may be dense, but I recently found out that "noise canceling" headphones can mean canceling background noise without canceling all noise and after having the recommendation made for 2 of my kids, I'm trying to figure it out now as an option to help improve focus when background noise is present. Do any of you use headphones like this? Which do you like? How do they work for you?
  25. Never mind, I found the thread I was looking for and figured out the book recommendations! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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