I would recommend All about Spelling. I have a son who was a late reader (7-8), and every attempt at phonics failed, but as he was finally reading, I didn't worry about it. However, he still has severe spelling problems. After trying all sorts of things with little success, I started him at about age 11 on All about Spelling, and it is having a good effect. I just wish I had done it a lot sooner.

I'll give it a shot. I'm working on the same thing. I ended up putting in various Shakespeare works where I thought they would fit well. 1. Ancients: A. Plato--either The Republic or The Phaedo if you want something shorter. Of all the philosophers, he is the most approachable and really just fun to read. B. Homer--Iliad and the Odyssey. On the other hand, if you expect your children to go to a liberal arts college, they will almost certainly read this there. I actually think it's probably not a great idea to have everything in college be re-reading. C. Sophocles--The Three Theban Plays. I'm thinking we may read these outloud, taking parts. D. I haven't read it, but maybe The Epic of Gilgamesh? E. Virgil--the Aeneid maybe, but I'm not sure I'm willing to put my children through that. I don't think Virgil is nearly as good as Homer. F. Shakespeare - Julius Caesar G. Lewis - 'Til We Have Faces (retelling of Greek myth with Lewis' own twists) 2. Medieval A. Some form of Arthurian Legend B. Song of Roland C. Tristan and Iseult D. Beowulf E. Sir Gawain F. Shakespeare - Hamlet and Henry V 3. Renaissance (I know you didn't ask for this, but I think it's worth separating them) A. Dante - The Divine Comedy B. Milton - Paradise Lost (I found this a lot easier to read than Dante, but Dante is awesome too) C. Da Vinci - some of his notes perhaps? D. Cervantes - Don Quixote E. St. Thomas More - Utopia F. Everyman G. As much Shakespeare as you can stand including Romeo and Juliet and maybe Othello 4. Modern World (post Renaissance and avoiding America until #5) A. Huxley - Brave New World (has non-descriptive sex) B. Austen--everything but especially Pride and Prejudice C. Bronte--any one of them, but my favorite is Jane Eyre. I just roll my eyes at Wuthering Heights D. Dinezen - Out of Africa E. Buck - The Good Earth F. Hugo - Les Miserables G. Lewis - Space Trilogy H. Stendhal - The Red and the Black I. Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment (probably not before junior or senior year) J. Forester - Passage to India (I know this is way more than 6, but I just couldn't stop, LOL) K. Kafka - The Trial or, for something shorter, Metamorphosis L. Wells - The Time Machine or The Isle of Dr. Moreau M. Shelley - Frankenstein L. Shakespeare - The Tempest M. Dickens - Tale of Two Cities 5. American A. Melville - Moby Dick (a great little guide for this is Seascape, Soulscape: Moby-Dick by Gene Curtsinger, a professor from UD)* or maybe Billy Budd instead. B. Twain - Huck Finn and Joan of Arc, assuming one has already read Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper C. Miller - Canticle for Liebowicz (maybe not a must read but very intriguing and immensely weird. Good for a sci-fi fan.) D. Shakespeare - Midsummer Night's Dream or King Lear (just a good place to put another Shakespeare) E. Cather - O Pioneers or My Antonia You might consider involving your high schooler in the decision. I think 6 is a good number for hitting the mean between too much on a surface level and too little, but some of these would take a lot longer than others. *This is not an absolutely objective recommendation as I proofread it for publication. Also, as a parent, you would do well to read it ahead of time as there are a few questionable areas in it.

Thank you for all the insights. They are just what I feared! :-( Speaking from my own experience, I speak Italian much better than I speak French because I lived in Italy and mostly just studied French academically. On the other hand, I can read and write French better than Italian. So...it would seem that, short of moving to a Spanish-speaking country, we shall use a good textbook combined with speaking it among ourselves as much as possible as well as with their uncle who now lives in Spain. I do think it is important to learn the grammar of a language for all but the very youngest learners. If you can't conjugate a verb, you really just can't speak a language. That said, what do you all think are the best texts for Spanish? I'm considering both Breaking Barriers and So You Really Want to Learn Spanish at the moment, but I'm open to anything. The plan is to use one textbook for my soon-to-be 10th, 9th, and 7th graders and then something intended mostly just for fun and to get a feel for the language for my 4th grader and 1st grader.

Just FYI, speaking as a former exchange student, if you are thinking of hosting an exchange student, he or she will be very motivated to learn English, and speaking Spanish to him or her would actual be detrimental to one of the goals of being an exchange student. There may be other ways of doing that where speaking Spanish would make sense, however.

Has anyone found any type of foreign language curriculum that has helped their children attain real fluency? It seems to me that the academic areas that are closest to our hearts are often the ones we have the most difficulty with. At least, I have found that to be the case. My major in college was French, and I lived in Italy for a year and a half, learning to speak it while there. I have also studied linguistics. That's all very well and good, yet I have had no success finding a foreign language curriculum that I'm happy with. This is an area where I don't want to check something off a list. I really want my children to learn to speak a modern foreign language with fluency. At this point, we really want to learn Spanish altogether (though possibly with different materials for different ages). Rosetta Stone was a total bomb for us. I'm looking at Mango and Aurolog (both through the library). I'm pondering PowerGlide, but I have reservations given many negative reviews. I'm also quite open to a good textbook. I know many public school students who have studied Spanish all the way through school yet still cannot speak it to save their lives. I want something better for my kids. I know it's possible. When I lived in Italy, I went to an Italian high school and "majored" in languages. The students were learning to be interpreters, and everyone was studying 3 different languages in addition to their native Italian, and they really spoke the languages. This was done through 5 days a week of what would be fairly typical textbook instruction plus another day spent with a mother-tongue teacher--a native of the language being studied, when the focus was completely on oral usage. The other days were a combination of oral and written, and if you didn't know the answer, believe me, all your classmates knew it, which was a great incentive to study. All that said (more than I initially planned to say), has anyone found and used any type of foreign language curriculum material with which their children have gained a reasonable level of fluency in the language?

Good point. Does anyone have eperiences, good or bad, with using Connecting with History by RCHistory.com or History Odyssey? I also just listened to Susan Wise Bauer's "Literature as History" talk last night, and it made me almost brave enough to go it without a set curriculum. Still pondering. That's what makes this board so wonderful. :)

So far, I haven't been able to find the "perfect" history/literature course for us. We are a Catholic family. I'm open to secular sources that inspire discussions, but I'm not open to sources that spend time Catholic-bashing. I'm also open to Catholic sources but would rather avoid the extremes of Anne Carroll as well. We're finishing up modern history this year and will be going back through ancient history and literature and philosophy and art next year. We'll probably spend at least half of our time on Greece. What I would like is a fairly minimal "spine" that I can read aloud to all of the children (ages 15 to 5) and then send them on their merry way to read primary texts and historical fiction and study art and philosophy in an age-appropriate manner. Along with that, I would like some literature study guides to help them delve deeper than my memory and lack of time allow. What I would rather avoid is huge textbooks that suck the life out of a subject that I only found interesting as an adult. I'm not against textbooks in some cases--I just want them to be a background tool rather than the majority of the study. This year, we have been using SOTW IV for everybody along with lots of great literature. We have the Kingfisher Encyclopedia and use it occasionally, but I would actually like to see something that is narrative-based rather than tidbits here and there. I'm happy to use SOTW I with my 3 younger children, but I think we need something halfway between that and Susan Wise Bauer's adult series for my teenagers. My preference would be for something with somewhere between 30 and 100 pages of text on each of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Chinese and then a smaller segment on each of the lesser known civilizations. I'm considering Connecting with History by rchistory.com, but I don't know if it is much more than a reading list. History Odyssey also looks intriguing, and Kolbe's history and literature courses do too, except that I don't really want to spend a year each on Greek and Roman. None of them is quite exactly what I'm looking for. I don't think I want Tapestry of Grace either. My budget is tight, but I'm also open to The Teaching Company, except that I'm concerned about the number of things we've been switching to non-book-based courses of late. It's not out of the question though. Any suggestions, ideas, or similar dilemmas?

I have been debating (and posting) about geometry for next year, and I'm now leaning toward Teaching Textbooks, but I do have a question. It sounds like lots of kids end up just using the book and not using the video portion. If the textbook has the same examples and it's just a question of format, I would see that likely being the case for my kids. Is that in fact correct--that the video examples are the same as those presented in the book? Second question: The video part that I think would be really helpful if I'm understanding this correctly is the step-by-step solutions DVD, where they can go through a problem that they missed and figure out exactly where they went wrong. Is there any way of getting just the solutions DVD without paying for the whole video course? Or is there a print version of the step-by-step solutions? Thanks a bunch.

Do you think that would be true for year 1 as well, or would year 1 of Tapestry of Grace (TOG) be just fine for Catholics?

The Mother of Divine Grace syllabus does have one great thing going for it--a good booklist. We found that very helpful but didn't end up using Anne Carroll or much in the way of the geography suggestions from it either. We did, however, find a few great treasures from the book list. The one that comes to mind right now is Bold Journey West with Lewis and Clark.

I find myself agreeing with many different posters in this thread and feeling the agony of so many as well. Just a few random thoughts to add if I may.... There is no way that any one human being will ever be an expert in everything, and everything (the sum total of human knowledge) is so much vaster now than it was even 100 years ago in some senses at least. That said, I find myself constantly in a dilemma regarding not only what I should know but also what my children should be learning. Like CathMom said, I don't want to limit my children, but isn't it also somehow limiting to spend hours each week on an Apologia Biology textbook (for example) that makes it impossible for my teenaged daughter to have enough time to pursue her pretty amazing ability to come up with completely new forms of arts and crafts, like crocheting in 3D the first time she picked up a crochet hook? I'm not saying that 3D crocheting is particularly important in the greater scheme of things, but having time to pursue one's own interests deeply, whatever they may be, is important. And there's only a finite number of hours in a day or a week or until the SAT tests or college or life-after-college. I am reminded distinctly of the difference between two people whom I know well. The first is an organist. He knew at the age of 4 that he wanted to be an organist when he grew up. He knew it when his father, a professional violinist, asked him to play an A on the organ, and he first sat on the bench of that grand instrument and beheld it up close and personal. He is now a very successful professional organist who went to a music conservatory and won't ski or do several other things because he could injure his fingers. His art is his life, and it brings him joy. On the other hand, someone else I know well, at least equally brilliant, has held a wide variety of positions and was always happy doing each one. He is interested in everything and seems to "get" everything with ease. He has several strong interests but delves deeply into whatever he is doing at the time with passion, yet he is also happy to move onto something else. Each of these is a model for a good way to lead life, but what is not possible as far as I can tell is to have the single-mindedness of the organist along with the broad-spectrum knowledge of "everything." No one has the time and few people have the ability for the type of indepth study of everything that my friend, the organist, attained. So we have to choose, and I'm not talking about us as homeschooling parents. Rather, I'm talking about the children under our care. There is a certain amount of knowledge that everyone ideally would have in order to be a well-educated individual in all sorts of areas, but how much is that? And what happens if it gets in the way of the ability to delve deeply into one or two or three areas of deep interest? If Brother Mendel had not had time to putter in his garden, we might be a few hundred years less knowledgeable about genetics. If Edison hadn't failed school and had a mother who gave him the basement to use as a lab, I probably wouldn't be writing this at 9:38 at night. I guess I'm arguing for the delving deeply model; yet, partially out of fear, our family continues to live the jack-of-all-trades model with my children, and that frustrates me a lot. The love of learning spark is going out of my 15-year-old's eyes as she aims just to get done before dinner time with all the stuff she is loaded down with. At the same time, it isn't possible to know what one finds deeply interesting until one has at least a rudimentary knowledge of many different areas of knowledge--unless you happen to climb onto an organ bench at age 4. As for the question of high school experts, my husband teaches at a private high school, and he is an expert in his field--one who is passionate about what he teaches and seeks to help his students learn, but he is so often frustrated by the students who just want to know what's going to be on the test because that is the model they have been taught, explicitly or implicitly--that the only learning that counts is learning that will be regurgitated on a test and then forgotten so they can get a decent grade and move on. Over and over again, I see homeschoolers who put their kids in school, hoping that the high ideals they have for their children's education will be better met by someone else, finding that they aren't, taking them out of school, and repeating the cycle, never quite satisfied. For now, we will keep homeschooling. Maybe someday the line dividing the real and the ideal in our educational endeavors won't be so broad. Meanwhile, we'll keep plugging along.

We just started using SOTW in earnest this year with everyone from 9th grade down through kindergarten. We're using the Jim Weiss audio, and the older children are taking notes while the youngest two are coloring the pictures. We're doing modern world as that is where we were in our history cycle. Has anyone ever considered grouping things by country and going chronologically by country rather than throughout the world? It's something I have been pondering for next year when we go back through to ancient history, but I'm wondering if it's just too complicated. Or is it possible that SOTW I is already set up that way?

My 9th grade daughter is studying the following: Theology: Intro to Catholicism from Ignatius' Didache Series Math: Jacobs Algebra History: Modern History using SOTW as spine and taking notes combined with... Literature: Modern Literature, including Lewis' Space Trilogy, Tolkien (again :-)), Pride and Prejudice, Animal Farm, Helen Keller's autobiography, and (coming up soon) Brave New World, Out of Africa, and either The Good Earth or something by Willa Cather Writing: IEW SICC-B (just starting this now) Grammar: Analytical Grammar Season 2 and 3 Science: Teaching Company's Joy of Science Latin: Ecce Romani I Literature is great, theology is very good, math is a big struggle but maybe getting a little better, I have high hopes for IEW as my essay assignments seem over the top for her right now, grammar is awesome, Ecce Romani is great except for our complete lack of ability to find a teaching manual for a reasonable price. My 8th grade son and I are enjoying Joy of Science immensely, but she finds it very dull. Both that and SOTW make great opportunities for learning notetaking skills. I'm a little embarrassed to mention using SOTW as a spine for high school history, but history is something we have always done altogether, and it's working well for us. We just switched from having a big wall timeline to individual notebooks, and that has been very good for making connections.

This is a related but different question. Do those of you who have or have had children in algebra I, do you allow them to use calculators? So far, I have not, but I'm wondering if others do.

Regarding the questions about praying the Liturgy of the Hours, a lot of 3rd orders (lay people living out the charism of a particular order in the world) like the Franciscans and Carmelites and Benedictines take on the obligation/joy of praying morning prayer and evening prayer. Those are the two most major "hours." It can be hard to learn how without someone to help, but if anyone is interested in more info, feel free to e-mail me.

I think spending a month in an abbey sounds like Heaven (and yes, I am Catholic). Silence would be even better. That said, I keep comparing the idea to something like Survivor and thinking how funny it is that they are making a reality TV show out of living in a convent for awhile. On a similar topic, has anyone seen Oprah's interview with the Dominican Sister's of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor, MI? Here's part II. I can't seem to find part I anymore: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25sp-bEo6ng&playnext=1&list=PL44C69C64ED4072FA&index=1 I was actually really impressed by how well done this was--on Oprah's side that is.

We are using Joy of Science this year as well. I love it, and so does my 8th grade ds, but my 9th grade dd looks like she is being tortured by having to watch it. I'm wondering how you split up the lectures.

Another option worth considering is Horizons. We used MUS many years ago. I like that Horizons is incremental or spiral as well, but instead of very long sections of the same thing like Saxon, it splits them up. It's colorful, visually appealing without being crowded, and just pleasant. It is supposedly about a year ahead at the earlier grades, so all of my children have been a bit behind the grade level in it, but I'm okay with that. I would say that the main thing I regret is time spent switching. That really set us back with my oldest.

I have an idea that might solve the dilemma for my children, and I'm wondering if anyone with experience would be in a position to help for all of our common good (admittedly mine included). Of those of you who are in a position to compare TT and Jacobs Geometry, are there particular areas where you think TT should go deeper? If so, would it be possible to expand on those areas a bit by adding some lessons from Jacobs? I know this completely goes against my previous statement of wanting only one program, but it could work to combine minimally if someone with much greater knowledge of math than I have was able to say something like this, "After doing lesson 15 of TT, your children can learn more about that particular topic by doing chapter 5, lesson 2, set 3 in Jacobs." These numbers have no basis in reality--just a thought. I find the simplicity and straightforward nature and handholding nature of TT very appealing, but I don't want to short change their education, so this might be a good option. I don't have the necessary knowledge to know when a particular lesson in TT might not be enough.

Yes, exactly. I don't have any answers and, in spite of a longing for a Lewis/Edison/Einstein/Colfax type education, I haven't the courage for the experiment, so our homeschooling looks far more typical. Perhaps by the time I get to this point with my 5th child, I'll have the courage to be more free form...or not. :001_huh:

Karen, this is an excellent point. I keep thinking of C. S. Lewis' education. As a teenager, he went to live with a tutor and had the opportunity to pursue his own interests, read a lot in Latin, and ponder a great deal. I'm also reminded of the Colfax family who wrote Homeschooling for Excellence. Their "method" if it can even be called such was to work hard on their ranch all day and then spend time in the evenings reading great books, often based on recommendations of one of the brothers to the other. I guess this is a much larger question than geometry, but I have to wonder if the expectations of education today are too much breadth and too much expected depth in every subject to the detriment of real depth in 1 or 2 areas of deep interest. I don't know. I guess I'm thinking outloud. All that said, at this point we may be leaning more toward TT at the moment. I'm glad I have time to decide.

Very interesting article. It seems that it would tend to support the Bluedorn's idea, doesn't it? We are currently using Analytical Grammar and love it. I guess you could say that, other than conversations on grammar (which I really enjoy), we did do delayed grammar, and it has been great for us. I would, however, feel quite trepidatious about doing the same thing with math. Maybe that's simply because I'm not as confident about how to teach math as I am with grammar.

Thanks, Julie. I went to Derek Owens website but couldn't find just the videos. I did like the sample video.

Thank you for the insights. I guess I would like to find one program that is sufficient unto itself for the most part. Isn't it funny? I think we probably all feel more comfortable using multiple resources in subjects where we feel more capable. Also, while it is sometimes just necessary to decide that something isn't working and switch, it's expensive and time consuming too. Based on the various comments, I'm still torn between Jacobs Algebra (maybe with Ask Dr. Callahan to help) or Teaching Textbooks. Of those of you who have used TT, how many actually used the video portion? I find myself wondering if the perfect combination would be just the book plus the video solutions manual rather than the video itself. Here's what the consensus seems to be from this thread and a few others: 1. Jacobs is thorough and requires (and hopefully teaches) real mathematical thinking. 2. Some people love it, and some people find it a real meltdown-causing struggle to get through. 3. TT is more straightforward. 4. For some people, TT has been a breath of fresh air and has made high school geometry doable for non-mathy students. 5. For other people, it seems like the proofs and other problems are not as challenging as Jacobs even though the scope and sequence is basically the same. 6. Many people think that TT overall is rather slow to cover things in their algebra and precalculus sequence, but their geometry program seems to cover the same things that other geometry programs cover. 7. It is of great importance to have a thorough understanding of algebra. One math professor said that when his calculus students had problems, it was usually because they had problems with algebra, not because they had problems with calculus. 8. Regardless of which math program one chooses for high school, SAT math questions really have more to do with logical thinking and figuring out math than they do with more advanced algebra or geometry. Therefore, it is of great importance to use an SAT prep course rather than just depending on the math program if one hopes to do well in the math portion. 9. Several people mentioned the option of choosing one program but supplementing it with another. Am I missing anything?

I appreciate the advice and will definitely think about it. I guess I feel like my 13-year-old is actually the one who is understanding it better. He ends up explaining a lot to my 15-year-old daughter. By the way, I love the quote from St. John of the Cross. He and St. Teresa of Avila top my very long list of favorite saints. More insights are most welcome.