This is quite brilliant. I am not good at making these sort of plans, but it is something I would love to learn how to do.

At the kindergarten stage, the hard part is that kids are all over the board developmentally. Some kids are not ready for any writing at all at that age. Others will write, but only if the writing is meaningful, meaning that coloring will not make the work fun. So if you have a child who refuses to do worksheets, then you need to find a program that doesn't require worksheets. At some point, he'll need to do worksheets, but he is years away from that at the K level. Both my kids are bright and were advanced in math at that age. But neither was interested in coloring until they were a little older. My oldest still has issues with any kind of worksheets. For her, I have needed a curriculum that was mostly one-on-one instruction with optional worksheets. My younger one doesn't mind the worksheets, but he wants control over what he does, so I use a curriculum that allows him to pick and choose what he works on, and at 6 1/2, he is only now starting to be interested in coloring. But certainly not every day or even necessarily every week. But it strikes his fancy every so often, and he will sit for some time and color and then not want to do it again for a couple of weeks.

One thing I have done is tried lots of pizza crust mixes. We liked Bob's Red Mill the best. But last week, thought I would try adding some Italian spices to the mix, and my family really raved about it. At some point, I would like to make it from scratch, but we are not there yet. Thank you! I would love to know what you find out. I hear you on the health issues. I have Celiac and was just diagnosed with Hashimotos this year, Ive not been well since my last pregnancy (baby is now almost 2). Im finally getting better but it is not a quick road. I have good days and bad, now I have more good than bad and they are better but Im so ready to be better. I have Hashimoto's, too. It is actually how I got pregnant in the first place--2 months after taking thyroid hormones. :thumbup: I will eat almost anything that ds will eat. So if I could get him taken care of, then I will be okay. I would love some Chinese food, but I have always found it daunting to make, GF or not. Too many ingredients. Too much chopping and cutting. I would like to make some potato salad, but I have never found a good recipe that I like (I don't like vinegar), and neither of my children like mayo. In cases like that, I would have just served some bread on the side before going GF. :tongue_smilie: I really need things that I can throw together quickly. Dd9 has ballet 2 afternoons per week, and we sometimes have play dates in the afternoon. So it is going to get harder to cook as we get into the school year. That is most important to me. BTW, I just bought some Kinnikinnick bread. Though it is probably not terribly healthful, it is the softest GF bread I have bought. I can't buy it around here, so I had to order online. They also have buns and bagels that I think I can actually eat. :D

Well, I just asked ds6 what he would like to eat, even it if it weren't GF, and he said a GF bagel and pears, which is what he ate for lunch today. I can never get this child to tell me what he likes. :banghead: What is up with that? Well, I can tell you what he will generally eat enough of to keep him alive. MEAT Chicken (particularly breaded/fried) Canned tuna (the only thing I can add mayo to) Hot dogs Beef (but not steak) Breakfast sausage (How can anyone not like bacon?) VEGETABLES Broccoli Peas Green Beans Raw Carrots Raw Red Peppers FRUIT & Nuts Apples Pears Grapes Cantaloupe GRAINS Mashed or baked potatoes loaded with butter and salt French fries Spaghetti/marinara sauce Pancakes Corn chips Flour tortillas And, of course, bread--for sandwiches, garlic bread, plain bread, with butter, with jam, with peanut butter, etc. None of us cares much for the GF bread, but I just ordered some Kinnikinnick bread and buns, which looks promising. So we may be able to use that for an occasional sandwich or hamburgers. DAIRY Cheddar cheese (or similar), but not melted Cream cheese Milk And if I dare mix anything together, he doesn't eat it. He will always eat a few bites, though, then say he likes it but that he is full. I do make an occasional casserole when time is short, but then that is a day that he doesn't eat much. He will not eat eggs, hot cereals, salads, legumes, melted cheeses or cottage cheese. He will eat only a little bit of rice. He is picky about potatoes. No mayo/mustard. But he likes catsup. As far as meals, here is what I have on rotation: Meatloaf Chili (which ds does not like much) Honey chicken Chicken breasts with diced tomatoes (which ds can pick off) Stroganoff Spaghetti Pizza Enchiladas (only occasionally since it is a lot of work, but I think I finally found a recipe that ds will eat) GF nuggets for when I don't have time/energy to cook, but they are very expensive Lunches are usually leftovers, GF mac & cheese, apples w/ peanut butter w/ cheese sticks, cream cheese on GF bread I know that I need to expand our options. But it can take months of exposure to a new food before ds will eat it, and even then, it may never take. If anyone can add to this list, I would be so :001_wub: .

My biggest problems are that I am a picky eater, and so is my 6yo. (And he will actually tell me that he likes everything and then say he is full after a couple of bites. He is so polite, but it drives me bonkers!) I used to serve bread at most meals, because I knew he would at least eat that. When I browse GF recipes, it is just recipe after recipe that I am not remotely interested in making. I am not sure that there is any solution. There is just going to be a huge adjustment period.

Mary of Mile 18 The Flying Canoe: A Christmas Story

Some people need to be trained to sound out words. My dd was a very advanced reader at age 5. But I noticed that she could not sound out new words. But it wasn't terribly noticeable, because she only needed to be told the word once, and then she knew it. So we started SWR, and it took over 2 years of intensive training before she began to sound out words on her own without being prompted. Now, I would expect that perhaps it would be faster with an older student, but it is also possible that bad habits are more ingrained. I agree with Ellie. Do Spalding or SWR or something like that intensively for at least a few months. I don't care for programs like AAS that use word families, because a smart kid who struggles with spelling will use the word groupings as a crutch and not really learn to spell. A child who reads at a high level but does not sound words out know how to use all the contextual clues to figure a word out, and word families will further ingrain that habit.

Personally, I love SWR and especially the Wise Guide. Everything you need to do with each and every word is spelled out there. It is really unfortunate that the teacher manual is so confounded confusing. It certainly doesn't need to be that way. There is a sharp learning curve, but once you are past it, the Wise Guide makes everything quite open-and-go. It took me about 2 months to get started and a couple more months to feel confident. Now it is my most open-and-go program. If you need a SWR veteran to work with you, I would be happy to help you get started. Just PM me.

I understand that the author has people working on a website that does just that. They expect it to be up sometime this fall.

I have a friend who had some serious health issues that made her lose a lot of weight. She was under a hundred pounds at one point. During the worst of it, she had really bad insomnia that she attributed to her body being hungry. And when she got better the insomnia went away. I am sleeping a bit better since I started taking multivitamins about a month ago. Still not great, but I can go back to sleep after I wake up now. And when I accidentally glutened myself, I had a bad night. So I am really hoping that that this is the answer for ds, too. (I feel terrible making him see the sleep psychologist, who treated it as a behavioral issue, but I am so glad that we didn't stick with it.)

You totally hit the nail on the head. I cried reading this. I am just coming to understand how sick I have been. At first, I was grateful that I was diagnosed so quickly and spared the years of illness. But now I am coming to see that I actually have been very sick for a long time. It is a very emotional thing. I can't even wish I had gotten treatment sooner, because I had no symptoms but insomnia and fatigue. I am afraid to hope for a time when I will feel better, though, since I have had so many other unrelated health issues. It is easy to think that this is just one in a life full of maladies. On a lighter note, my ds6 has slept through the night in his bed for three whole consecutive days. I can count on one hand how many times he has slept through the night in his entire life. We did a sleep study and met with a sleep psychologist for a while, and that didn't work. I don't know whether it is because he is now GF and taking multivitamins or whether it is because we promised that dad would make him a loft in his bedroom if he could stay in his bed, but I am so happy about this.

This is part of why I am nervous. I was never a good cook. So learning how to cook in any way is a challenge for me. And right now, I cannot be on my feet. I started the summer ready to find recipes and shop and cook, figuring that I could have it all figured out by fall. But it was too much for me, and I ended up with severe leg pain. I know it sounds ridiculous that just shopping and cooking can do that to me, but it is what it is.

Oh my goodness. Gardening is not even on my radar. The weeds are all over the place and so high. I don't even have the wherewithal to care.

I have had a multitude of minor health issues pretty much my entire adult life. Allergies, sinus/bronchial infections, weight problems, a heel spur, etc. But ever since I was pregnant with my oldest, I have had severe insomnia and have been constantly fighting fatigue. I thought it was hormones since it was worse when I was pregnant or nursing. I was just diagnosed with Celiac disease, which means that I have probably been severely vitamin deficient for many years. The diagnosis is good because I am starting to feel a bit better. But the road to recovery is a long one. I am currently working on getting all of the gluten out of my house. I have to replace most of my kitchen tools and containers (anything that would harbor gluten, including anything made of plastic or that is scratched), and it is a very overwhelming process. Meanwhile, I have an unrelated leg injury which makes it difficult to be on my feet for any length of time and requires daily exercise. I am so nervous about this next school year. I realize that I have been dealing with this for a very long time and that recovery is now on the horizon. But I am told to expect healing to take a full year. And I have a rising 4th grader for who needs to ramp up her work a bit. She is 2e and needs a lot attention/reminders/discussion. We are adding grammar this year. She will love MCT, but it is teacher intensive. She will be responsible for her own history and literature reading, but I am unsure who much help she will need with this (I suspect quite a bit). I have decided to relax a bit with writing for her. I have bought a few fun things for and will let her choose what she wants to do, but of course, I keep questioning myself on that. And I am adding my ds6 full time. Last year, the only thing I really worked with him on was spelling, and I let him work on math on his own. But now I really have to teach him. Fortunately, he is reading well, so I don't need to teach reading. We are supposed to start in 2 weeks, but I still have to plan out history, and I still have the second semester of math to plan and print worksheets for. My friend and I were going to do BFSU together, but she is also a new Celiac going through the same thing, so I don't think we are going to get to it, which is really disappointing. I am just so overwhelmed. Every time I set myself to doing something, I have a dozen other things in my head that also seem imperative to do. Anyone have a BTDT advice or encouragement?

How old are they?

I respectfully disagree. Certainly, for many students (perhaps even most), explicit phonics is sufficient. But as we see from this thread, it is not uncommon for a student to be able to read well and not spell well. I certainly see that with my children.

Some people need explicit training in spelling. That is, they need to train their minds to think about words as groups of sounds, and they need to be shown how the rules of spelling work. Some people (like myself) can easily and automatically intuit spelling (encoding) once they learn how to read (decoding). But encoding is a more difficult skill (especially in English) than decoding, and some people need explicit instruction, or they do not learn it well. We use Spell to Write and Read for this explicit instruction. My dd9 usually increases in spelling ability by a full year in just the first 3 months of each school year. Last year, by Christmas she was testing at a 6th grade level, even though we did not do 6th grade level word lists until the end of the school year. That is because the program we use explicitly teaches the patterns of the language, which can then be applied to words she has never before spelled (rather than hoping that the student will simply see those patterns on her own). And my dd9 is not at all a natural speller. Over the summer, her scores decrease substantially. So I know she needs the explicit instruction.

I would love to join your co-op!

It is hard to say without knowing the ages of your students. But I would recommend starting by having them learn the single-letter phonograms. Look at the first list (A) in the Wise Guide. At the beginning of each of the first several lists, it tells you which multi-letter phonograms to learn prior to that list. So you only need them to learn the single-letter phonograms before starting in the lists. They will not have mastered the multi-letter phonograms for many lists, perhaps for years if you have very young students. While they start on the single-letter phonograms, get the SWR book. That is where you will find detailed spelling dictation instruction, as well as all of the lesson plans for your reference pages. Also, you will need a log book for each student. This is where they write their spelling words and where the reference pages are. Primary logs are for younger students who are still learning how to write, and Black logs are for older students who are comfortable with writing.

I just follow the prompts in the WISE Guide. If there is a full lesson that should be taught prior to dictating a spelling list, it will be listed in the preliminaries. Those lesson plans are found in the SWR manual. My first year, I followed the Wise Guide prompts for each spelling word, which provides the guidance you need to point out spelling rules as you encounter them. (I do not use the rule cards, though. We do the reference pages and discuss the rules as they come up in the lists.) After the first year, I was able to veer a bit from the Wise Guide prompts. I still use them, but now I know which rules my kids need to work on. So the Wise Guide sometimes provides good reminders, but I will often discuss rules that aren't listed or omit rules that I know my kids are solid on. When we started, my dd was only 5yo, and she did not yet understand many of the rules. But it was quite valuable to have her parrot back the rule anyway. Then when she was mature enough to understand the rule, the text of it was already in her head. My next child started SWR last year, and already knew many of the rules by heart just from hearing his sister do SWR. I was amazed how easy SWR was with child #2.

I like Spell to Write and Read for my verbal but spelling-challenged dd9. I looked at AAS and was overwhelmed with the different levels and trying to place her in the right one. SWR has all levels through high school in one book, and it is so easy to place the child in the right spot. None of it is babyish and can be used with any age up to adults. That said, there is a learning curve, but once you figure it out, it is open-and-go.

We are also LDS. I had a non-LDS friend invite me to an information meeting for a homeschool support group that was being started at her church. I went and was very interested. But they had a statement of faith that was 2 pages, single-spaced. It was so detailed that it was clear that not only did you have to be Protestant to join, but their particular brand of Protestant. I am afraid that this is very common. Statements of faith are usually designed to exclude particular people. And it can be really heartbreaking when I all you are looking for is a community. But the good thing about this was that my friend recognized right away what was going on, and she came to me and apologized. Not everyone agrees with having a statement of faith, but some people are scared that their children will be taught false doctrine and really feel it is necessary. So I have tried to remember my friend's reaction and understand that the statement of faith is not a statement of each individual's faith. There are 4 co-ops in our area. Two require a statement of faith. The secular one is as secular as the christian ones are christian, as in, you better leave your religion at the door. The last one is christian and doesn't ask for a statement of faith, but it is really, really expensive. So as I met people, I collected their contact information. After a year, I had met enough people to start meeting at the park. I am glad that I didn't limit my contacts to homeschoolers, because some people ended up homeschooling who hadn't expected to, and others put their kids in school but stayed in the group. We have a very casual group, and not everyone comes all the time. But people plan outings and field trips when they feel like it, and it has worked very well.

My dh is a public hs physics teacher, and here is what is happening in his school district. He is teaching honors classes to kids who do not belong in an honors class, so he has to dumb down his honors classes. Next year, they are introducing an AP physics class. When he was approached about it, he explained to the administration that they only had a very few kids who could take the class and pass the AP test. They didn't care about that. They want to be able to show that they offer these classes. And when it comes time for the AP test, they will discourage the kids who will not do well from taking the test. That way, they can say that they offer the AP physics class, and X% of students who took the AP test passed it with a 3 or better (without revealing the actual number that took, or didn't take, the test). It is all about how the school looks. And it doesn't matter that more than half of the kids in the class are not prepared for it.

But there is an impression that you are more qualified. I can't tell you how many people have made comments to me that it is okay for me to homeschool since I have an advanced degree and my dh is a teacher. They seem to imply that I shouldn't homeschool if I weren't married to a teacher, or that I couldn't learn how to be a good teacher to my children without an advanced degree. It drives me bonkers, because I don't think that my advanced degree has done much at all for my ability to teach (with the exception of my experience with the Socratic method in law school, which I think is very helpful), and my dh knows multitudes of teachers who are less than competent, and who have gained nothing of teaching ability from their training. I don't know how anyone who has children in a public school can believe that somehow all public school teachers are qualified simply on the basis of their license.

My dh is a public school teacher. His sister worked in the public schools as a special ed aide to be with her autistic son, and she now homeschools. I have 2 friends that are former ps teachers who are now homeschooling, and one that was a guidance counselor in ps before who is now homeschooling. That seems like a lot to me. Then again, because of dh's career, we know way more ps teachers who are not homeschooling than those who are, certainly more than 70%.