I'm using the free Spelling Connections worksheets with DS8, a rising 3rd grader. We finished level 2 a couple weeks ago, and are "supposed" to be starting level 3 for 3rd, but DS has had another leap in abilities (or maybe just motivation :glare:) lately and orally tested out of the first 14 weeks over the last couple of days. I'm planning to let him test orally until he finds a stumbling point, but considering he's a natural speller, that might be several grades above where we're currently at. Do I just keep on until he finds that point and go on from there, or is there another FREE option that will work better for an accelerated/natural speller who's starting to get bored with the "easy" work?

Yup. Last time we had 4... 100% metamorphosis... didn't lose any. It's a good thing, too, because DS can be rather sensitive about losing his bug "friends".

We have dill that has gone native in our yard and reseeds rather readily despite all my attempts to contain/eliminate it. The upside to this is that we can count on having tons of swallowtail caterpillars every year. Today, we found five of them in 3, maybe 4, different stages of development, and my boys are thrilled. Problem is, we've raised caterpillars before. They still love it, but I'm getting bored. What else can we do (for free, preferrably, as we're out of school money at the moment) to make this project more fun for all of us?

Ooops. Wasn't very clear... the Easy & Fun book covers letter formation. The Twist book starts them on writing sentences, then the other two are great for cont. practice. Taken as a 4-book set, it's a good cursive writing program.

If you're willing to wait until Scholastic's next Dollar Deals sale, you could get a set of 4 books that would take you from basic letter formation through copywork: Cursive Writing Made Easy & Fun Cursive Writing With A Twist Cursive Writing Practice: Jokes & Riddles Cursive Writing Practice: Inspiring Quotes

I'd say add in Cursive Writing Made Easy & Fun (also on dollar deals) and do that one first, then the with a twist book, then the quotes and jokes books if you want a "from the beginning" cursive program. That's what we're doing, and DS8 is nearly through the twist book. I highly recommend all of these.

Oy... I have a TON of recommendations. Too many to link, but I'll try to use exact titles so it's easy to search. DS8 is currently doing Cursive Writing Practice Pages with a Twist after having done Cursive Writing Made Easy & Fun, and will follow up with Cursive Writing Practice: Inspiring Quotes and Cursive Writing Practice: Jokes and Riddles. The Hands-on History and Easy Make & Learn books are amazing, and we've liked the projects we've done from them so far. Enough of them line up with SOTW 3-4 that I'm not going to buy the activity guides for 3 & 4. Although they're higher-level (usually 4th or 5th grade and up) we've enjoyed the Read-Aloud Plays series so far. And again, they have many, many different books that line up with our history rotation, which reduces my need for the SOTW activity guides. Instant Habitat Dioramas was not a total bust... DS8 loved the worksheets, but wasn't keen on the coloring and detail required. The final projects looked very nice. Algebra Readiness Made Easy has been a complete hit so far. DS has done Gr. 1 & most of Gr. 2, and will be starting Gr. 3 soon. He can plow through one "packet" in a single sitting if I let him. I bought all of them, books 1 through 6 and book 7-8. Menu Math (2-3) has been good so far (just started, really). We'll use it all year as a fun supplement, then move on to the next book in 4th. We haven't started them yet, but there is a series of Analogies books that starts out teaching explicitly/step-by-step how to solve analogies. They're leveled 2-3, 4-5, and 6-8. From reading through them, they look fantastic. I have snagged quite a few map skills and geography skills books in these sales, but none of them stand out enough to mention. They are useful as a reference and for the occasional activity/project. I can't really review them yet, but I've picked up quite a few of the Pre-K Early Themes items for my not-yet-3yo DS. Guilty admission: I'm up to 99 ebooks now and 10 ePages, all purchased from dollar deals sales, some with discount codes on top of that. :blush: Why yes, I am a curriculum hoarder... ETA: The sale ends the 18th.

I don't believe the TEACHER50 code is working anymore. It won't let me use it, anyway, or any variation of it. Too bad, too... I had almost 30 ebooks in my cart... now to narrow down to a more reasonable budget...

Just a heads-up, Right Start has released a new Money Games Kit. It's a small kit: a new Games book, a chapter from the Math Games book, and the money cards. They had a contest on Facebook, and I won one of these... when it gets here, would anyone be interested in a review and a comparison to the money games/lessons already in RS B/C?

It looks like some books are in this sale that haven't been in the last several dollar sales. I'm really glad I saved back some of my windfall money now!

I'm not worried about US history at this point. We'll supplement with plenty of other materials (Scholastic Teacher Express $$ sales have been a godsend!) and I tend to buy all the US history/historical fiction I can find at garage sales. He'll get a lot just out of his regular independent reading. We'll also stop and do several "unit study" blocks in the middle of SOTW 3 & 4 to cover the wars and major events in US history. Add in the 50 states project he'll start after we finish studying the Revolutionary War, and I'd say we have elementary US history pretty well covered.

Nice! It looks like the 2-pack with the World and USA/Canada puzzles is a good deal. I'm putting it in my cart for now. :D

We do have a big laminator (thanks to a long time accumulating MyPoints... rewards programs make things so much easier sometimes :D) but I should probably check my stock of laminating pouches! Thanks for the remider! Thank you all for the advice. I'm leaning towards putting together an explorers kit (like the Backyard Safari brand stuff, but probably cheaper and better quality), buying the geography and maps book, and then using the rest to buy a gift card, like pitterpatter suggested. That way, the money doesn't "disappear" and it goes toward its intended purpose. I can also step up my SwagBucks earnings and add to it. If you have any additional suggestions, please share! :D Thanks again!

Thank you, Charlotte!

We school year 'round with regular planned weeks off, with the longest being 2 weeks at Christmas. We also take "sanity/sick days" as needed. DS thrives on routine, and anything else leaves the entire family (and house) a wreck! Even if it's just the core subjects, we have to do something consistently or it all falls apart. I've also found that it's harder for *me* to get back into things if we take more than a week or two off.

We LOVE these! We don't have all of them yet, but I find them at garage sales a lot. The Nouns and Adjectives books were only $.25 each. :D I'm tempted to use these as a gentle grammar intro with my younger DS before we start FLL1 in a few years.

I hadn't even thought about a globe! We have plenty of dry erase markers, and both a large wall board and three personal dry erase boards. They're cheap, but effective. Maybe I should think about getting another board for the basement, though, as we school down there during the summer. We already have two microscopes. One is more toy-quality, the other a bit better. That does make me think, though... maybe I should use some of the money to throw together a nature explorer kit... notebook, magnifying glasses, containers, etc. The boys would have a blast with that!

I have the chance to spend $100 for school stuff this month, no questions asked, on whatever I'd like from Amazon. Our budget has been tight for a LONG time now, and that isn't likely to change, so this is probably the only chance I'll have to buy *new* fun stuff for my boys for a while. I buy ahead whenever possible, and will be hitting garage sales over the summer with other budgeted money. This money is a one-time thing, spend it or it goes elsewhere. We start our new year in July, doing 3rd grade with a tag-along pre-Ker. All of our core subjects are covered and then some. Here's what we have already: DS8, 3rd: WWE 3, FLL3, Daily Language Review 3, ZB spelling 3, cursive (Scholastic resources), lots of good literature, RS C/D for math, extra supplements for math (Scholastic, others), WTM-style chemistry plus Chemistry for Every Kid and some assorted science kits, SOTW 3, supplemental activities for history (Scholastic), Geography for Every Kid, Analogies 2-3 (Scholastic), GSWL, Matin Latin 1, and How to Teach Art to Children. DS-nearly-3: C-rods and TONS of manipulatives, MEP (maybe), lots of books, more art supplies than I think we'll ever use up Here's what I have in my cart so far: The Complete Book of Maps & Geography The Blast Off with Logic series That brings me to almost $40 with tax (I'm in KS, they tax me :glare: ) What would you buy with the remaining $60??? There's so much I *could* buy that I'm at a loss!

My responses in purple. :D

Wow! Just a quick thank you for the ZABAsearch link. I never knew my (supposed) father, and have started thinking about how to find him. It complicates things that I have THE most common last name in the country, and my birth state (the only clue to where he may have lived) is pretty dang big. On the other hand, I found the name and location of someone who was very dear to me and to my family when I was a child. Her last name is also a top-10 surname, and the only location I had previously was a state. Searches always came up with too many results, and no way to know for sure. Now, through a few minutes of searching and the online white pages, I have her phone number and address. I know it's her, because her MIL (who has an uncommon name) is apparently living with her now. :D Thanks so much! It will be such a joy to reconnect with this person, and I don't know that I'd ever have found her this easily without the free ZABAsearch link!!! Now to see if there's any way to track down my father...

We school most days, taking off a week near Labor Day, two weeks at Christmas, a random week in March for Spring Break, the week after Memorial Day, and the week of Independence Day. That's 6 total weeks off, plus unscheduled days whenever we need to take one/some. We're on track for about 218 days this year (our state counts 6 instructional hours as one school day), which will "end" June 30. Other than keeping attendance records for CYA purposes, I don't really care much about start/end dates for our year... we keep going in what we're doing, and move on to the next thing when we finish. At this point, most of our subjects don't line up neatly with the "normal" school year.

Finished: RightStart B WWE2 (w/o workbook) Spelling Connections 2 On track to finish between now and the end of June: Cursive Writing with a Twist Daily Language Review 2 FLL 2 Algebra Readiness Made Easy 2 SOTW 2 w/ activity guide (most) of our Astronomy plans (WTM-style) What we didn't finish, but I'm ok with it: Earth Science (WTM-style) -- He just wasn't very interested, so I let him do the readings, watch lots of documentaries on Netflix, and generally do this on his own time Writing Strands 2 -- Ummm... yeah. Not a good fit at this time. No big deal, though. I'm pleased with our progress. Most of the extras I planned, we used. I'm fairly certain the extras I have planned for next year will be used/finished, too.

Not Amazon, but ereaderiq.com will allow you to search for free books, and you can sort by genre, rating, etc. There are a TON of new books added daily, mostly indie publishers, but occasionally you'll find a gem. I find a lot of kids' books that way, and even some things that work for school, like "flashcards" and ABC books. ETA: Oops, looks like I posted at the same time.

Actually, those two are real, physical books that I bought from Amazon. I think I paid about $8 each. My DS loves jokes, so that one's a no-brainer, and the inspiring quotes come from a wide range of historical figures. They even include birth & death dates after the name. If you can catch them on the Dollar Days, I'd definitely recommend them!

Well, if you're finishing C with one, and starting C with the other, why not just have them play the basic games together as part of math time? DS and I (he's in early-middle of RS C) play one of the games a couple times a week at least. Right now, it's the Skip Counting Memory game, which takes us no more than 10 minutes a round. When we were doing corners (for review on adding 5, 10, 15, 20) it took us about 15 minutes to score 100 points each. Other games have occasionally taken as long as 20-30 minutes to start with, but they have gotten faster as we mastered them. Really, the games are really where it's at with RS, or at least I've found that is the case with my wiggly, visual-kinesthetic DS. All that said, I did supplement a few things in B -- time and money, for example, because DS needed more hands-on practice, not just card games. Now that we're in C, which has the scheduled review lessons, I just pull in some of our "fun" math... Menu Math, for example, and the Algebra Readiness books from Scholastic. That way he's practicing his facts and math skills but still doing something "different". I also just play with DS with polyhedral dice (multi-sided dice, known to gamers as dX, where "X" is the number of sides on the die :D ). You can easily practice basic sums with two d6s or a d6 and a d4, then once those sums are mastered, start using the larger dice (d10, d12, d20). Just roll and see who can add the two numbers fastest. Or take turns, whatever works better. For subtraction, use a d10 or d20 and a smaller die, roll, and subtract the smaller number from the larger. Hope that helps!