[Opinions about Christmas card signature with adult children]

Many of the young adults in my family don't send Christmas cards, or didn't until they got married. Some of the older folks don't, either. I think that's fine. Signing an adult child's name to your card could be perceived as diminishing of their autonomy and could suggest that there's something wrong with not sending out cards during certain seasons in one's life. Early adulthood is certainly one of those seasons in my extended family! (And I doubt anyone will receive your card and think, "Oh, gee, so her adult sons don't want me to have a merry Christmas? How insulting." I don't think the absence of their names will demonstrate anything other than that they no longer live at home and you trust that they can take care of their holiday greetings in whatever way they see fit!)

[It must be nice]

I resent it, too. I don't actually want to sleep until noon.  But the sight of a slumbering body sometimes is too much to bear, when one has been up since dawn wiping bottoms and serving waffles, and sometimes one does push the roaring vacuum rather passive-aggressively throughout the room in which said body is slumbering.

 

Of course, the other side of the coin is that my kids love me so powerfully that my husband is unable to keep them from me. Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no river wide enough, ain't no playground far enough, to keep the kids from bursting into the room yelling "Mommy! Mommy! I want Mommy! I only love Mommy!" and over who will get to snuggle me. That's probably not a memory I'm going to regret.

[Oxford Comma]

Colons, you need colons.  Commas are weedy and over-used little beggars.

 

Thank you, L.C. Someone needed to speak up for the underdog here. (And as I am in favor of the Oxford comma generally, I was struggling to come up with a good defense.)

I'm in favor of letting my kids choose how they punctuate their own writing, once they understand the conventions.

 

The purpose of punctuation is clarity, and for getting the author's intentions across to the readers in the clearest-- but also, often, the most interesting-- way.

 

Viewed this way, one could just as well say "I love Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump and my parents," couldn't one? And wouldn't one want to introduce the fact that one was the child of two such personalities, if that were the intention, in a more interesting and dramatic way than informing us of one's love for them?

 

Sometimes a stern adherence to The Rules limits one's perspective, and often rewriting one's sentences is the better solution to punctuation conundrums. The language and the punctuation marks are a team and they work together to make words flow properly inside the reader's mind.

 

(Of course, in the case of writing regulations and legal documents, one doesn't mess around with what sounds and looks best. But when it comes to my child writing for me, I am happy with any choice she is willing and able to defend cogently, once she has heard how a reader might interpret the statement.)

[Does this adoption story bother anyone else?]

It's not just the teen mother with an accidental pregnancy who needs support and resources; it's also the mother of five who hasn't gotten more than an hour of interrupted sleep in months and has to care for 2 babies under the age of 2, one born addicted to heroin. I hope these adoptive parents have that kind of support and resources, for themselves and for their other children. Lots of dear friends and a generous extended family.

 

I guess if we can add to the potentially bothersome list of elements of this adoption situation, we could add the disregard of the four biological children's needs or feelings about the situation to the list. At least with a pregnancy or traditional adoption there is an extended period of time to adjust older children and prepare them for the shift in the family, even if they don't get a say in the matter.

 

I also am not a huge fan of the either the shaming tactics taken by the police officer. Not because I'm a bleeding heart liberal but because I do think the job of the police is to enforce laws, not to bully or berate people who have been found breaking it. He overstepped the boundaries of his position while in uniform. If the idea of adopting a child affected by his mother's heroin use in utero occurred to him, he should have shelved that for later. Totally inappropriate.

[Perfect Grades Don't Always Matter]

I would question the assumption that those with the best grades are the most diligent people, the ones willing to work the hardest. (This comes up in the video when they're talking about grades vs. SAT scores.) I agree that they are often the least likely to take risks. 

 

Sometimes middling grades are a sign of one's willingness to do more challenging coursework. To persevere even after one has fulfilled basic requirements, out of curiosity or interest or love of a challenge. To bypass the science classes designed for non-majors in favor of the hard stuff. To pursue a foreign language to its grammatical outer limits. To struggle through a close reading of a difficult text rather than spending your time Googling summaries and Cliff notes.

 

I think getting a few bad grades early on can be liberating. Some of the most successful people I know were made to feel kind of dumb in the early years. That gave them the freedom to experiment and take risks without worrying that they were going to expose themselves as Not As Smart As Everyone Thought. Some As just mean "Already knew that."

 

[Different publisher for each subject?]

I guess it all depends on why you're homeschooling; for many of us, outsourcing our child's education to a single provider-- no matter how good their materials!-- would defeat one of the primary advantages (and, frankly, joys) of education at home.

 

There are situations and seasons in which choosing an all-in-one makes sense, but if you think you're capable of sorting through the options and trying to find the best choices for your daughter, why let a curriculum provider get to have all the fun of deciding what your daughter is going to study this year?

[How to Get Your Mind to Read (NYT article)]

I am not sure why the obvious always seems so enlightening. Being well-educated improves contextual understanding? Does anyone actually disagree with that premise?

 

 

Ha. My equally cynical reply would be, apparently the people in charge of the language arts curriculum at our local elementary school.

[Which standardized test would be best for me? (Test taking skills)]

I don't necessarily think there is a best one to prepare kids for taking the SAT or ACT-- any nationally normed fill-in-the-bubbles test will do the trick, especially if they can take it somewhere other than in the comfort of their own home with a parent proctoring (which really doesn't prepare kids for what can be the most stressful and nerve-wracking part of test-taking in a strange location with unfamiliar people). I'd just try to find out what's available in your area.

 

(I think just getting standardized test prep books, going over testing strategies, and taking all the practice tests is great preparation as well, and typically doesn't require any cash output if you have a good library.)

[Singapore math/beast academy]

Would MathU See give a decent conceptual understanding for a weaker student? I wasn’t a fan of Singapore in that it didn’t have enough built in review. If it did, I would have stuck with it for all my kids

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Well, I'd say that Singapore might be  a good place to start, then. (Also, both the U.S. and Standards edition have some built-in review-- so if you were using the CC in the past, which I've heard has none?-- switching over could give you more opportunities to review.)

 

I have yet to find a math curriculum that (on its own) gives me exactly what I'm looking for, so I use mastery programs (Singapore and BA) along with a spiraling workbook from a different math curriculum (with perforated pages for easy removal) for review-- a page of this review a day is what I use as a warm-up. Would this appeal to you? While it sounds like yet another moving part, it ended my elusive quest for The Perfect Complete Math Curriculum. It also helps me ensure that my kids can transfer whatever they're learning to problems that may be phrased differently or look different from what they're used to.

 

(Also, if you sent your DD to public school partially to deal with relationship issues, which is something I also struggle with here with my highly passionate and feisty oldest daughter, I have to second the idea of deschooling math and playing math games and doing math-y activities together until she can approach it again with a minimum of drama...hey, now at least you know that even if you're just doing the bare minimum at home for a time, that will still be better than what she'd be getting at school, right? Sometimes with my daughter it's hard to tell whether her strong emotions around math come because she's struggling to understand or because she gets it but doesn't care and feels condescended to. Sigh. Games and conversations and activities sometimes help me pinpoint what's going on, because we're both more relaxed and open to hearing each other's thoughts.)

[How to Get Your Mind to Read (NYT article)]

I liked the article. I have one of the author's books - Why Students Don't Like School.

 

I knew his name sounded familiar! I have Raising Kids Who Read.

[Setback for definitive proof of a flat Earth:]

Maybe he wants to get a TV show out of it. Every freak gets one nowadays.

 

What this particular guy seemed to want to get out of it was $$$.

 

I'm baffled by people who are so skeptical of mountains of evidence (including our own sensory evidence) but so credulous of assertions that are so easily disproved. OK: be a skeptic, but your skepticism shouldn't increase in proportion to how much evidence there is demonstrating a particular scientific or historic or any other kind of theory.

[Have I just drunk the homeschool Koolaid?]

Well, people rave about our public school; it's highly rated and the kids get top-notch test scores.

 

However, the neighborhood families I know with kids there augment their kids' education with after-school math enrichment, weekend writing tutors, foreign language and arts and music classes, and so forth. It sounds like a different situation from yours, but I've just come to feel that probably when my friends tell me how much they and their kids love the school, they must be referring to the general culture of the school. It's kind of like how I love my neighborhood even though frankly I would prefer there to be more forested walking trails, perhaps a lake, more common spaces, and a nice cafe and bakery and independent bookstore within walking distance!

 

When you take for granted that your kids are going to school, I think there's a substantial psychological incentive to turn a blind eye to the negative things about school when you feel you can't change them. (And I can understand that. I started homeschooling because I feared that even if we could affect a significant change on our local schools, it would not occur within my children's time there.)

[Sudden Mastitis; Home treatments?]

Oh, no. Sounds miserable.

 

I'd switch to an anti-inflammatory painkiller like ibuprofen if possible, see if someone can run out and get you the lecithin, and keep up fluids and warm compresses-- I found the longest-lasting damp heat (better than dry heat for mastitis) came from disposable diapers, with a bit of water dumped into them and microwaved briefly. Then I could just send someone to re-nuke the diaper as necessary.

 

I just hope your DD is still nursing. The congestion can make it hard. And hand expressing really doesn't cut it for mastitis. That was where I was thankful for my insurance-granted double electric.

 

I'm prone to plugged ducts and fevers-with-plugged-ducts and have had about 3 cases of knock-you-down mastitis that improved without antibiotics; I am not anti-medicine and this is not medical advice, it's just that with rest and the interventions above things generally got better before I could even call the doctor/get someone to the store to pick up a prescription. Hoping you all feel better soon!

[Immersion blender recommendations]

I have a Betty Crocker hand blender, which I bought because it was inexpensive (and it's even cheaper now-- a little over $12 on Amazon currently!). I've had it about 8 months**, use it two or three times a week for soup, pesto and other sauces, or smoothies (originally it pureed some of our food for the baby several times a day, until he grew teeth of his own), and I'm pleased with it.

 

**EDIT: No, I've had it 1.5 YEARS. Double-checked after my inner voice started saying, "Well, the baby hasn't been a baby for longer than that!" Wow. Sob. Well, anyway, the blender is more reliable than my memory.

[Should I take my kids out of PS after Christmas break?]

I think your concerns about forming relationships are valid and so important. Part of why we homeschool is because we want our kids to form strong attachments to us, but we also want them to be able to form and keep those bonds with friends and other adult mentors! I can see why all that moving around would make you concerned about the latter.

 

My kids have never been in public school, but our homeschooling friends who were formerly in schools seem to do an admirable job of maintaining ties to the friends they made in the schools when possible-- my kids have met their kids "school friends" at parties and playdates, and one thing to consider is that the end of going to school with their friends (whether now or later) is the beginning of when you're going to have to actually teach them about the work it takes to maintain non-familial relationships, not the end. My 2 cents is that all my years of schooling (and work) actually dented my ability to do that kind of work, because I was always able to keep friendships just by showing up at the required time and place (and being reasonably affable).

 

In your shoes, I might consider the amount of time and effort I could invest into involving my kids in the community and maintaining those friendships right now, if that were my priority-- which I think is a fine priority when settling into a new home. Being bored in school is a big problem long-term, but for one year in first grade, it doesn't sound like a terrible situation in context. Rather than seeing this as missed moments with your older two, if you do decide to keep the kids in school for the rest of the year, might this be an opportunity to enjoy that special time with your younger kids, who often-- at least in my house-- have to grasp at the here-and-there scraps of maternal attention they can find while their elder siblings are being homeschooled?

 

 

[Adverse Reaction to Donating Blood]

This reaction happened to me one time, when I was in college. I spent the rest of the day in the medical clinic.

 

It has never happened to me in the 20 years since-- not during (routine) blood draws, not during medical procedures, not during pregnancy or childbirth. I don't even feel woozy after shots.

 

When it did happen, it was at a time in my life when I was stressed out, not sleeping a whole lot, and eating very poorly-- before it happened I had gone for hours without eating anything except high-sugar, low-protein foods. (And clearly suffering from delusions of youthful invincibility.)

 

Obviously some people are just generally prone to this reaction (hence them not wanting your daughter to donate blood again!), but I just wanted to offer my anecdote as another possibility. Keep an eye on this, make doctors aware of it before any medical procedures, but try not to worry. (Ha! We try.) Hope your daughter's experience will be like mine.

[A list of classics]

Maybe a book along the lines of E.D. Hirsch's New First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy would contain what you're looking for? The literature section contains books (from Harry Potter and the Little Engine that Could to the Iliad and Odyssey, Macbeth and Julius Caesar) poems, folk tales, and nursery rhymes (as well as sections for history, science, music, art, and more). Actually, I think this is exactly what you want if your goal is what a "well-rounded and widely-read person should be familiar with"! (It's also a great resource for family trivia night.)

 

I love and use so many book lists I've found on the web, and our library's reference section also has numerous books containing literature lists for children, but for this specific concern, the above dictionary is superb.

[A too fast reader...how to suggest to slow down]

You know, I don't think this is necessarily a "fast reader" problem, although it's true that the more you read, the more your brain just kind of learns to prune out all the stuff that seems unnecessary to remember on a long-term basis. I prefer to see that as a marvelous feature of the human brain rather than evidence that a person can't read to learn.

 

In terms of short-term comprehension, that can easily be worked on and tested. I have no idea what the reading comprehension passages I did during my school days and on standardized tests were about-- thank you, brain! they weren't worth holding onto-- but I always scored in the 99th percentile on those. Narration, of course, is another great way to work on comprehension and short-term retention, but unless the ideas are encountered in different ways again and again over the course of time, why would the brain hold on to the information you encounter in a book any more than, say, something ordinary that happened to you last week?

 

We "make memories" not just by experiencing events or reading books, but by talking about them and referring back to them. And this is one of the reasons I think homeschooling (or just involved parenting) will always be more successful than artificial School Exercises. If I can talk to my kids about what they're reading and help draw them out and then find ways to make the things that are worth remembering relevant and meaningful, that will aid long-term retention of the things that are worth remembering.

 

But no kid sits and devours pages and pages of books on a regular basis without having a good amount of reading comprehension. That would be horrendously boring! It can be hard whether you're a good reader or a bad reader to want to read books that you have to slow down to comprehend and enjoy, but that is a separate issue from not being able to. And it's another argument for giving kids enough experiences and discussions to think it's interesting and worthwhile to learn more about certain challenging subjects!

[First and Second Grade Science]

Agree with the reading basket at this age.

 

I really like to add in books from the NSTA Outstanding Trade Books list. The LRaFO books are wonderful for providing basic facts, but I find many of the science books on this list oftentimes add beauty and creativity into our science reading.

 

My true early elementary science curriculum, though, mostly consists of letting my kids ask questions and explore and asking them questions right back, and also helping them work through ways that they can answer their questions. (For instance, they recently buried their Halloween pumpkins in the garden, which was fun because it involved getting very dirty, but they also were able to tell me basic hypotheses for what they thought would happen, and when, based upon their observations of our compost heap and garden in the past, with me playing the ignorantly skeptical buffoon.) I am also one who can't do activities from a science curriculum-- the gathering materials alone is often too much for me-- but if I just pay attention to what my kids do naturally, often I can find a way to make it valuable because they are so busy!

[What is the history like in "What your __ grader needs to know"?]

I think you could do a lot worse than having your kids read these books for pleasure! I think it's wonderful that your 8 year old is enjoying them. (And I know what you mean about leisure reading. I picked up a library book my 8 year old had been reading yesterday, and it was a wonderful history book-- for middle schoolers. For her? It was downright disturbing. At this age, it can be hard because of that age 8-12 middle grade range covers ages that have very different maturity levels!)

 

Anyway, back to your question: these books have no glaring historical inaccuracies that I've seen and nothing that's not age-appropriate. I picked up the second grader version from my shelf and glanced through it because I was intrigued by the critical post above that didn't (unfortunately!) give any examples or details. The purpose of these being "cultural literacy", I think there are plenty of valid arguments swirling around about that and I wouldn't even mind getting into them, but that's not what you were asking about! Some details and events are omitted for age-appropriateness, but that is different from being taught inaccurate history.

 

My bias is that I use a lot of the Core Knowledge materials available online as read-alouds to my kids, and like those-- so the books you're talking about are basically very brief summaries of what's covered in those domains. The other history I use is SOTW. I find these to be quite compatible with one another and neither approach will hinder a child who wants to go on to study history further or become a historian. History can be violent and cruel, and I find both to be fine even for my most sensitive kid (at recommended age level).

 

As to your specific concerns about Columbus and Thanksgiving, I would say that these books attempt to provide an understanding of American Indian culture  and of the voyage of Columbus and the trials of the Pilgrims. Viewed in such a light, some people who are very passionate about ensuring that little kids feel a certain way about Columbus or the Pilgrims or American Indians may be concerned it remains too neutral and either does too much or not enough to propagate certain ideas about this time period. This is the history I learned in school back in the 80s (right down to Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492)-- G-rated with plenty of gaps but an attempt to show multiple perspectives. I was fine filling in the gaps and went on to get an undergraduate degree in history, but if you are critical of this approach, maybe you would feel like the books are undermining what you teach. HTH!

[How can I make you a good cup of coffee?]

I have a personal preference at home (cold brew!), but as a guest, I enjoy the variations and am just happy to be offered a cup of coffee, and in fact if you were my friend, I'd hope you wouldn't go to the trouble of grinding for me. Instant coffee is fine for our visit.

[Beast: Can I go straight from 2A to 3A?]

We went straight into BA halfway through second grade (instead of going into the second half of Singapore Math). I love it, partially because I have Strong Opinions about how much time should be spent mastering mental computations before learning algorithms. I haven't seen 2A, though from the reviews I've heard I do suspect 3A is a big step up in terms of challenge. 3A's multiplication starts out deceptively easy (skip counting!?! my kindergartener can do that!) but does really ramp up.

 

I find it helpful that to have a workbook from a different, spiraling 3rd grade curriculum so that I can rip out a page a day and we can review or go over some of the topics not given a lot of (or any) time in BA3. And it's also helpful to think about the fact that many kids don't go into BA3 until they've completed a different grade 3 curriculum, so starting earlier may require extra hand-holding and attention to potentially missed topics, whereas starting later may make it a more independent program and no less valuable.

[would this seem weird to you? (non-traditional birthday party)]

Sounds fun! The only thing that could make it even better? No goody bags, please! An important corollary to the no gifts policy.

[Can you stand another math question? (1st grade)]

I found for my kids it wasn't so much a curriculum change that made a difference but rather me having to reflect on the point of each worksheet/textbook chapter, and then finding ways to approach it that they would enjoy. In grade 1, that means we do as many games and as few worksheets as possible. And if your daughter is advanced or understands everything easily, I think that's a good excuse to skip a whole chunk of the book and just play games to reinforce what she knows. (Some kids are overjoyed to be accelerated and get meatier problems, but I think it's totally normal that many 6 or 7 year olds aren't yet mature enough to face problems that push them a bit, and it's not a reflection of any character flaw or lack of ability-- they just don't have the confidence yet to struggle a little. Finding the "just right" between too easy and too hard for a 7 year old is something I still haven't figured out, and that's why when all else fails, I turn to games, living books, and more games. Getting it wrong just seems to make them "hate" math more.)

[Juice fast? (Don't yell at me!)]

In terms of healing from surgery, I would try to get in plenty of protein. I basically only had juice, smoothies, and yogurt when I was healing after my wisdom tooth extraction, because that was all I felt like. If you want to avoid dairy, maybe you could add in some protein powder? Personally I'd be inclined to do lots of green smoothies. (I'm generally in favor of the occasional fast, but I think recovery from surgery is one of those times you might not receive the greatest benefit from one.)