Emba
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Posts posted by Emba
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Yarn sold as sock yarn usually has a small percentage of nylon to make it wear longer. Which after you've knit socks with teeny tiny yarn on teeny tiny needles, you definitely want. A lot of sock yarn is also superwash, which means it can go into the washer (on cold?) and the dryer.
I've knit two pairs of socks, but for my mom, not myself. I knit one pair of house socks for myself, out of big yarn, and they wore out pretty quickly, so I think having the nylon content is probably a very good idea.
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What about the Fancy Nancy books? There are some chapter books, I've only read a couple but they didn't seem scary at all. Or the Arthur books?
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I do think a lot of the difference is choice. When I saved a bunch of money of school stuff last year by buying secondhand, I bought my son a cool lunchbox he really liked. I told him "See, we didn't spend that money on jeans and now we've got enough to buy this." I could have bought new clothes without straining the budget. When I was a kid, we barely had the money for used clothes, much less a fancy new lunchbox, no matter how much we'd saved by buying used.
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My kids have pajamas, bought new. Two of three children prefer wearing either underwear or an assortment of adult-size tee shirts to bed. I like my kids to have warm winter PJ's and "real" PJ's for times when they will be at someone's house or summer camp, though.
I don't remember having angst over pajamas as a kid, but definitely had a thrift-store clothing hangup. WHen I got old enough to work for my money, I started shopping in consignment stores. My money went further than buying new, but I wasn't subjected to decades out of style clothing that my mom would pick. It was an eye opener for me that when I could actually buy my own clothes new, it didn't actually make me cooler. I just didn't have a good sense of style. :)
What was a big trauma for me was patched pants, which I was made fun of for. I still buy a lot of my kids' clothes at thrift stores because it just makes more sense to me, and we wear lot of hand-me-downs, but I don't make them wear patched jeans in public. I do sometimes patch play pants to make them last longer.
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I do not use highlighter in my Bible, or regular ballpoint pens anymore. I have a special set of colored pens and only use them.
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I have flip flopped back and forth on this in my life. I used to never write or highlight in books, then I went to college, and it was useful to highlight, so I did. After college, I still highlighted everything that stuck out to me, and sometimes wrote margin notes, but later some of my margin notes were embarassing, and I realized that highlighting made the book unattractive to me, so I stopped. Now, I underline in pencil in nonfiction books that I expect to refer to later, and sometimes flag with post its, and don't write much, EXCEPT in my Bible and cookbooks. I write extensive modifications/substitutions to reicpes and notes on the time that they take to prepare, as well as smileys for good recipes and frownies on bad ones. If I don't do that, I end up re-making the same recipes that I don't like over because something in the recipe appeals to me and I don't remember that it actually turned out bad.
I have an extensive personal color code for my Bible, and take lots of notes/write down thoughts in it often. I realize that many people DO. NOT. WRITE. in their Bibles, but for me it helps so much, to be able to have it written down and not think "Didn't I read somewhere once..."
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Thanks, was just what I needed!
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I seem to remember liking the book Tom Sawyer Abroad. Not as good as plain old Tom Sawyer, but it has a similar adventure feel to it as Around the World in 80 Days, maybe? Or maybe not, it has been a LONG time since I read it.
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Sign of the Beaver, by Elizabeth George Speare
I also second Island of the Blue Dolphins and Julie of the Wolves.
Just read The Cay recently, and it is pretty good, too.
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I do not use a vocabulary curriculum, though I'm thinking I'll start one next year. I have read to my kids since they were small, a wide range of books with advanced vocab. I have a good vocabulary myself, and I've never talked down to them, yet I have one child who has an advanced vocabulary and one who has a terrible vocabulary that negatively affects her reading comprehension. She doesn't pick up words from context well at all, either written or spoken. I have her keep a vocab journal with new words, but it hasn't helped as much as I'd like.
Reading aloud (and reading voraciously) is great, I am a big proponent of reading in all forms, but it isn't going to work for every child to magically give them all the words they will ever need.
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Even good (Prismacolor) colored pencils will get broken lead inside sometimes. It can help to put them into a 200 degree F oven for a few (like 2 or 3) minutes, then let them cool. The lead warms up and melts back together, I guess.
I don't buy Prismacolor pencils for my kids to use, though, because of the cost. I have found the generic Hobby Lobby or Michael brands to be good enough, better than Crayola, and for sure better than Crazy Art (or whatever crazy way they spell that).
I also have a tiny Staedtler manual sharpener that works very well, and cost around $2 at Hobby Lobby, I think.
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I know the feeling, but sometimes kids get over the initial disappointment and later enjoy a toy. I wouldn't rush out to get a new thing. My son got a toy dog from my aunt that initially creeped him out. He shoved it back into the box and wouldn't look at it. Two weeks later it was his constant companion and now at 8 he still sleeps with it most nights.
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I love The Grapes of Wrath, but I have it on my shelf, and it clocks in at 577 pages. But Of Mice and Men is very short, and also good.
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I just started using the cumulative reviews recently. I did overlook them at first.
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OneStepataTime - That might be a good plan. I like the looks of Beast Academy, but didn't think it would be suitable for a complete curriculum for her. It might get more frustrating than fun if that was all we used. I showed her the samples and she liked them, though.
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I do skip problems in MM when I can, if she's doing well. Thank you, Syllieann, for pointing out the pacing thing. I was slowing down for some things, but as a general rule trying to cram a whole lesson in each day. I had read quite a bit of her website but hadn't picked up on that.
Her math facts are good, that's one area she's strong in. It's more conceptual things she has problems in.
I don't know about dyslexia. We had her tested for LD (she has none, but does have some areas of lower...function? that will make learning new concepts, esp. spatial ones, hard for her), but not dyslexia. Dyslexia is not something I have worried about, because she doesn't have reversals, and her spelling is pretty good. The consistent mispellings she does make are more along the lines of phonetic mispellings - yoused for used, peaple for people. She reads aloud fairly well, but her reading comprehension is not great. She picks up details, but has a hard time putting them into a bigger picture, figuring out what is important, and figuring out the "why" of things.
I'm going to finish out this year with MM, for sure, trying to set a more reasonable pace, and see how that goes.
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I began homeschooling my daughter this January because of problems she was having with reading and math in fourth grade PS. The PS curriculum would introduce a concept, spend a day or two on it, and then go onto a new thing, and it takes her longer than they were allowing to absorb and retain new concepts. The teacher was making them do daily homework to drill important things, like the long division algorithm, but what happened was that my daughter can do long division, but can't look at a word problem and tell me whether it should be multiplication, division, or addition or subtraction. She is getting better about it, but word problems are her kryptonite. And the PS teacher didn't seem very concerned by this, like it was a normal developmental stage that they could do the algorithm but not understand what it meant.
Anyway, I've been using the 3rd grade Math Mammoth, which I like, though it isn't particularly "fun". I chose it mainly because it was cheap, mastery based, and could be printed at home so I could only print out what we need to go over, since I am trying fill in gaps in her foundation and catch her up to grade level.
I am wondering, though, if another program would be a better fit. To do one lesson a day in MM takes DD forever. The only lessons we get though in 30 minutes to 45 minutes are the ones where she already has a decent grasp of the topic. Anything that is totally new, or something she has struggled with before, takes longer. Sometimes much longer.
At the same time, I feel like sometimes there aren't enough practice problems, and once a subject is assumed to be mastered, it's dropped with only very occasional review. I think DD would benefit with more review. I thought we had multi-digit subtraction with regrouping mastered, but then realized she's still doing the algorithm wrong, though she knows how to do it, she formed a bad habit at school of borrowing all the way across whether it's necessary or not , and she's slipped back into it. There are other examples along the same line of things that seemed to be mastered but haven't been retained.
Saxon sounds like not much fun to me, and possibly would take the same awful amount of time each day, but I think the review would help retention.
CLE sounds good for more or less the same reason, but also as a bonus it isn't a thick textbook, which DD would find very intimidating (am I right that Saxon is a hardback textbook?)
Are there other programs I don't know about that might be a good fit?
Math is not my own strong subject, but I feel like fifth grade math is something I can handle. They put a lot more emphasis on mental math now, though, and I've had years of atrophy because of calculator use, so DD actually has better mental math than me a lot of the time.
If you knit your own socks...Jane? Murphy? Anyone?
in The Chat Board
Posted
That's funny because I am kind of the opposite: I really, really notice the itching at my neck from wool scarves and sweaters, and hardly ever notice from wool on my feet. I can't wear a wool scarf, but I love wool socks in the winter ( the ones I buy, since I just dread the monotony of knitting socks and get severe second sock syndrome).