Last year (2015-16) I did pretty much what you did. I planned out the first six weeks in exquisite detail and then had everything half planned from there. I figured it would be easy to just take a few days and plan the next 4-6 week chunk and move on with life. Hahaha... yeah. Not so much. This year has worked so much better for us. I've just embraced my inner crazy - ie: the need for a super detailed, all laid out plan - and managed to give it the flexibility that I need and this year has flowed so well. So well. We've had even more family drama, major happenings, and outside craziness but we've kept on track in a relatively stress free manner. These are - more less - the steps I followed: Singled out the "every day" subjects - the ones where if we get to absolutely nothing else that day I can feel satisfied (and honest!) in saying "We did school today." For us this was math, handwriting, and reading. Later in the year I also added a geography workbook and spelling to this for Mr. Inquisitive. All of these are generally just do the next thing subjects and unless a concept needs particular reinforcement we move through at a set pace. For example: my 2nd grader always had to do 3 pages of math, 1 page of handwriting, 2 pages of geography, and 2 pages of spelling. Planned out the rest of the subjects by subject (as other have mentioned). I made up detailed plans for the subjects that needed it - History, Science etc - and divided them up by week (36 weeks total) and days. These plans were not dated but merely labeled Week 1: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 etc... Things like FLL and WWE which were more do-the-next-thing simply got broken down by weeks and days. Printed out all the printables. All of them. This meant all the student pages for WWE, SOTW, Science, etc. For the spelling that we had originally been using I simply took all the student pages out of the workbook. Wrote down non-printed assignments on note cards. For example: FLL2 Lesson 34; Read SOTW 2 pages 78-83 etc Created file folders for weeks (1-36) and then days (1-4). Filed everything under the appropriate week/day. Every school day started with the "everyday subjects". After that they were allowed a short break and then I simply pulled the next folder and we did the stuff inside of it. Easy peasy. Everything was already there and ready to go - no thinking or planning required. Things about this that didn't work well for us: While I left everything undated sticking everything in the folders, while gratifying and easy to grab-and-go during the school day, was somewhat restricting. There were about a dozen or so times when we'd only get to half the stuff in the folder before it was obvious that we were d.o.n.e for the day and then I'd have to refile it (and remember!) to grab it next time. The original plan called for filing all the completed work in a binder. Mr. Inquisitive is not a fan of binders and loose paper. I am not a fan of binders and loose papers. Largely because the latter hardly ever make it into the former and then I'm left with a bookcase full of completed work that will attack at any moment. Things that I didn't realize were missing until I did: A record for me and for our "official" (not technically required) records. I tried several times to take the "record what we did for the day after we've done it" approach but I could just never get it to stick. A "planner" for Mr. Inquisitive (who could also be nicknamed "Mr. Independent"). Using a blank notebook and just writing his assignments in a bullet list everyday worked well enough but it got really old for me really fast, lol. A plan for read alouds Time for foreign language and art/music. It just continually got bumped as we all reached the end of productive thinking/focusing. For the upcoming year I'm largely planning on doing the same thing except: I'm going to print and file all my lesson plans in a 3 ring binder along with a bunch of undated planner sheets. The planner sheets will be filled in with the day's assignments - in pencil! - a week in advance. I think this will give me that tiny bit of flexibility that the folders were missing as well as giving me a record of the year at the end that I can bind and keep. Make a basic planner page template for Mr. Inquisitive and Mr. Engineer with the givens already filled in (see "everyday subjects") and then I can just fill in the rest a day a time (making it easy to erase something and bump it to the next day if necessary). Pre bind all of the loose papers into booklets by subject. If I can get rid of 90-95% of the loose papers in our school day we will all be much happier. Set aside time and plan read alouds. Go to a 4.5 day week and have the half day be exclusively for Foreign language lessons (with small, 5 minute bites of review added to their "everyday" stuff), literature discussion, art, and music.

Me three. :glare:

Curriculum that worked: Math. Math Mammoth continues to be a favorite with Mr. Inquisitive. He loves that the teaching/instructions are right there in the text (he's a "let me do it myself" type). I frequently have him "teach" me the lesson to make sure he's got it before turning him loose on the rest of the problems (I usually have him complete between half and two thirds. So far that has worked very well with excellent retention.) Mr. Engineer whizzed through Singapore Essentials. It was all review for him but I wanted to make sure. He's now working through MM 1A and, despite have a drastically different learning style from his older brother, also loves it and is doing very well. First Language Lessons - If I never have to hear the definition of a preposition again it will be too soon but the program has been quick/painless/easy to implement and Mr. Inquisitive has retained it well. Spelling Workout - just enough guidance/independent work for Mr. Inquisitive. Teach Your Child to Read in 100EZ Lessons - After working on a more "traditional"(?) phonics approach with Mr. Engineer for over a year we have finally found something that clicks with him and is getting him from that "know your letters and sounds" stage to actually blending the sounds together and beginning to read words. Story of the World​. It gets done and the kids love listening to it. Mr. Inquisitive particularly loves doing the maps. Other things that worked: Breaking everything down into daily lesson plans, printing out maps/worksheets/various other printables, and organizing everything by week and by day (undated!). It was a lot of work in bits and spurts over the summer but our year has run so smoothly because of it. Will definitely be doing a similar thing for next year. Breaking up history and science and not doing them everyday. We've done 2 days of history, our break day, and then 2 days of science. I think I'm going to take this a step further next year and go full block schedule with those two and do 18 weeks of history and then 18 weeks of science. Finding that sweet spot between "relaxed" and "rigorous"... and letting it change day to day depending on the mood of the room. Curriculum that didn't work: Real Science Odyssey. I really liked the idea of it but there were just too many experiments and not enough reading (and our library is great for the community involvement/community center aspect and not so much for the actual finding of books). I think it would work really well for someone who learns via experiments/doing and then has the concept reinforced through other means but Mr. Inquisitive is just the opposite so it really killed his love of science there for a bit. ​A Reason For Spelling​. There was nothing wrong with it, it just wasn't a good fit for Mr. Inquisitive. Stuff that was so-so: Writing With Ease. This was a weird one here. It worked in that I could see him picking up the concepts and trying to apply them but at the same time it greatly frustrated him. We took a bit of a break from it for a few weeks and I made up my own copywork/narration/diction exercises on the fly from our history and science and those worked so much better. I'm not sure why??? because outside of source material and being integrated into other subjects it was the exact same thing but now he likes writing and does it without complaint? So... method win but resource fail? ​Real Science 4 Kids​. This leans a little more to the win column. After the tear inducing fiasco of RSO I just needed something easy and simple for my book and science loving kid to just read. No pressure. No experiments. So I just bought a couple of the textbooks and have let him read through them and do some narration or draw about what he's learned. He loves the "read this and then come teach me about " approach, but despite initial plans I don't know that I'll keep with it for next year. I think all involved want something that's a bit between the two approaches. Especially because Mr. Engineer is definitely more hands on. Read Alouds. We've definitely improved over the last year but we're still no where near where I want to be or where we were a couple years ago. We've firmly established the half hour before bedtime as "picture book" time but we're still struggling to find a good time to get to chapter books. We used to listen to them in the car but Mr. Dramatic, in his younger days, took it upon himself to feed a dollar or so in odd change to the CD player and the kids don't quite have the same focus on audio books at home as they did when they were trapped in the car. So we'll keep working on that... Over all its been a really good year for us :hurray:

Sorry for the late reply! I just saw this. In general I have been very happy with HWOT but I decided to make the change for child #2 for two reasons: First, ZB has the three lines vs just two or even one that HWOT has. My oldest loves to write and would happily practice handwriting on any paper he could get his hands on but Mr. Engineer definitely needs a more guided approach and feels much more confident in his writing practice if there are the multiple lines to remind him where things need to go. The other reason was simply that the format. The more colorful books were more appealing to him than the simple b&w of HWOT. I don't necessarily think that one does it better than the other (though who knows, I might fall madly in love with ZB when we actually do it next year???) and imagine that I'd be happy using either one with my other kids.

100EZ has been a miracle worker for Mr. Engineer but​ we've been working on letter recognition and phonics through other programs for almost 1.5 years. He had all the tools/pieces of reading but he could not, for the life of him, figure out how to string sounds together and 100EZ is what finally got that to click for him. We've finished up the first 20 lessons and the amount of reading growth and confidence I've seen from him in the past 2 months is nothing short of amazing. So from me the program gets a big two thumbs up. I do plan on supplementing it with readers once he's got a better grip on his confidence - which is something I would do anyway, regardless of the spine program used to teach reading.

We school year round and love it! Summers are disgusting​ here so we tend to do the bulk of our days then and in the "winter" months. While we don't take off all the days in spring/fall we definitely move to a much more relaxed schedule. When the weather is really nice we tend to just do math, language arts, and fit in read alouds and science/history reading or videos when we feel like it. For instance, this week we took Monday off but had a great day planting in the garden and having a picnic. We did full days of school on Tuesday and Thursday. Wednesday we ran errands (per usual for our schedule this year) and today we're just doing math and reading and then everybody is playing outside while it's nice (we're supposed to have t-storms starting around lunch and going through the end of the day tomorrow). Mr. Inquisitive will probably end up doing some Khan Academy this afternoon and everyone will probably want to watch some of Planet Earth 2. I'd say this definitely an average week for us during the nice weather times of the year (end of October through the end of November, and mid march through the end of April/beginning of May). On paper, for the state, we follow a traditional school year. I'm not required to actually track days but every year when I file our intent to homeschool I have to give them a starting date and a general schedule outline. Schools here start sometime in August depending on the school (or type of school - there's a few local ones that school "year round" as well). So I generally put something like "Starting [first Monday in August] we will school 5 days week/36 weeks for 180 days for [insert hours per day - I stick to 1 hour per grade level]." While not 100% true this is the format they prefer to hear it in. Our first year here I put a more honest "4 days a week/ 45 weeks" but they called me and asked if they could change it to the 5/36 module because it was less confusing to their file system. So now that's what we go with, lol. In your case I'd either give them a traditional summer break and then just start year-rounding it at the start of your next school year OR I'd just jump into it now and take a shorter "summer" break and continue on as usual. I think it really just depends on how burnt out you and your kids are feeling.

First, thank you so much for your replies. It's given me much to mull over the past couple of days. I also sat down and talked to Mr. Inquisitive about writing in general and then sounded some ideas/thoughts off of DH (because I've reached that point of pregnancy where my brain is either on point or I couldn't tell you up from down if my life depended on it, lol). And I've pretty much decided on this path... ... more or less. Plan A is to do our own WWE inspired narration/copywork/diction for the first third to half of the school year and then move into Fable. Plan B is to do the first half of WWE2 and then move into Fable. Plan C is to just do the whole year as WWE (or our own via the first part of plan A) if he turns out to need it. I, honestly, would be surprised if we needed to do C - mainly because narration is this kid's thing. He spends half of his waking time in narration mode. Half of our conversations begin with, "Mom, I want to tell you about [x]! Do you want me to narrate or retell it?" (Narrate will get me the quick and dirty summarization. Retelling will give me all the juicy details that he wants to impart.) Anyway, I figure this plan covers all my bases. I honestly think that his skills/maturity are just fine for Fable as is but it definitely won't hurt anything to spend 12-18 weeks beefing up those skills some more. (In retrospect I think we could have straight into WWE2 for 2nd grade, or at least done half of 1 and half of 2. But 1st grade ended up being very "unschooly" - or at least it seemed that way in the face of my initial plans - and I didn't have much faith in the stuff that we had done. Apparently I should have because Mr. Inquisitive's #1 complaint was "It's too easy. It doesn't make me think.")

Like others have said the ability to tailor things to each child's learning style is one of the big perks of homeschooling (if sometimes a little exasperating in practice). My older two, Mr. Inquisitive (current 2nd grade) and Mr. Engineer (K) have very different learning styles. Mr. Inquisitive thrives on workbook/textbook style approaches. He prefers to be as independent as possible and likes a clear, concise list of "This is what we are doing today" that he can check off as he finishes. Mr. Engineeer is a very visual, hands on learner. He needs to be able to physically see and feel it before it goes click​ in his brain. But once that click happens he has amazing recall - I can frequently "see" him building out scenarios in his head to solve problems. I've been lucky in that I've been able to use many of the same materials (math and handwriting) that I used with Mr. Inquisitive but I've just implemented them differently. Reading, on the other hand, has required an entirely different approach and I can see signs that further down the road they're going to need different approaches in other areas as well.

I'll be ordering the bulk of next year's curriculum in the next couple of weeks and a recent "let me just run through this and make sure it's what we want" moment has me rethinking a couple of things - especially writing for Mr. Inquisitive. Background: He just did some gentle narration/copywork in 1st that I made up more or less on the fly and just integrated into our work. This year (2nd) he's been working through WWE1 and is fine with it. He doesn't love it, he doesn't hate it, and it gets done. My original plan was to do WWE2 next year for 3rd and then move to CAP W&R and do a couple years of that before diving into WWS. Now I'm just wondering if I should just jump to W&R now? The main reason I'm mulling over this is I think that while WWE is doing the job perfectly fine (and I can see his skills improving) I think he might enjoy W&R more. Specifically, I think he would enjoy the layout and the "retelling" quite a bit more. As the teacher I'm fine with either one. The price and pdf availability of WWE definitely appeals to my practical side more but those aren't deal breaker sort of things. I'll probably show Mr. Inquisitive the sample chapter of W&R later today and see what he thinks but I thought I'd toss this out there and gather opinions/experience on the matter? FWIW, Mr. Inquisitive is a very straightforward by-the-book child. He likes workbooks and lists. He prefers to work as independently as possible. He loves writing and often spends an hour (or more) every day crafting stories, novels, and comics for his younger siblings to read. He's very analytical and very creative at the same time. He is my "Why?" child. He wants to know the big picture and whys of everything. (Which, I guess, is the other reason I'm looking at jumping to W&R for him. Just from a glance through the sample it seems like it does a better job of saying why he is answering these questions, doing that copywork, retelling that story etc... at least that was my initial impression!) My main goals for writing at this age are to equip him with a good set of basic skills and foster his love for writing - or at least avoid killing it. So... if you were in my shoes would you stick with "it ain't broke, don't fix it" or take a chance on "possibly better"? For those that have used both WWE and W&R for this age (bonus if you've got a similar learner!) what was your preference? And, practical question, for those that use W&R do you have your students write in the student book or do they do work on another piece of paper/notebook?

I have a copy of the main book because I like to read through it from time to time. It's great for picking up ideas. However, for when I'm actually using WWE I need the open and go of the workbooks. I just bought the pdf and print it all out at the beginning of the year.

Oh, I hear you. I really, really do. No one here is special needs, technically, but both Mr. Inquisitive and I have some anxiety issues that are most definitely made worse in many social situations. We are also a houseful of introverts - ranging from myself (a self described "introvert among introverts" and perfectly content to go days, if not weeks without going anywhere/seeing anyone) to my DH who is an outgoing introvert (very charismatic, likes to do things with people but definitely, definitely an introvert). So far all four of our kids fall somewhere in between. Right now we leave the house at least once a week (to run errands). Church used to be another guaranteed, built-in social activity but we recently (about 3 months ago now) left the church that we have been with for a very long time. We're still friends with many of the people we know from there but...it's harder to see them now that we don't have the built in surety of "I'll run into you at church". This has 100% been a fantastic decision for our family but it does have the unfortunate side affect of nixing a "freebie" social event for people (us) that don't really like to do social events. I also usually try to get us out a least once a week more for something more social - a meet up with friends at the park or even just go hang out at the library during story/activity hour. In reality this happens about 2x a month. I wouldn't mind belonging to a co-op for purely social reasons but the only ones I can find around here are religious groups - which isn't something I have an issue with but I wouldn't be able to/can't sign the statement of faith required to join the group. I haven't been able to find a secular or more open group. The kids do play with the neighbor kids on a daily basis and we have extended family nearby that we see 2-4+ times a month. We also like to hit up the local children's museum and zoos fairly often - by ourselves or with local friends. And, honestly, we're perfectly happy with this. We like being home and with each other and not going places. Ask any of my kids who their friends are and they'll name off their siblings first, then the neighbors. No one's lonely and no one is..."weird". (Ok, we're a whole family of weirdos, BUT... ykwim). The older three are all comfortable talking to people of all ages about a variety of topics, are reasonably well mannered and polite etc... Still, with the absence of the church freebie we will be trying out a few things next year. Music lessons of some kind for Mr. Inquisitive. Probably official swim lessons for everyone later in the year (the older three all have a good basic grasp given that my parents, who live nearby, have a pool but I figure they'd enjoy swim lessons anyway) and possibly community soccer in either the fall or next spring - or both.

We've used (and loved!) MM since about halfway through Mr. Inquisitive's kinder year. In K and 1st I aimed for 2 pages a day. This year, in 2nd, he does 3/day and that seems to be the sweet spot for him between not enough and overwhelming​. Like others have mentioned we don't do all the problems - I'd say on average he does between half and two thirds of the problems on a page. This takes him 25-40 minutes per day depending on difficulty and/or level of distractedness. I want to say that we averaged a solid 15-25 minutes for most of K and 1st.

I might add some non handwriting writing - even if it is just a gentle narration/diction worked into science or history a couple times a week. Other than that it looks pretty much like what we've done for 2nd and I feel like we've had a really good, solid year. Mr. Inquisitive is, as his nickname suggests, very inquisitive so I like to leave him lots of time to read books or explore various science/history/other subject topics beyond the scope of our formal schoolwork.

Everday: Math Handwriting Writing and Grammar Reading and/or Phonics Spelling Weekly: Science x 2 History x 2 Right now we operate on a 4 day school week (M-T and Th-F. Wed is errands day). For the every day subjects we just "do the next thing", for science and history I have things divided by individual days and filed in folders labelled something like "Week 18, Day 2". So when it comes time to do those subjects I just pull the next folder and we do whatever is in it. This helps us keep on schedule even if for some reason (vacation, illness, field trips, just a bad "nothing is going right" day) we don't actually miss anything or mess up my schedule. We just do the next folder. Next year everyday subjects and history/science will stay the same but we're going to move errands to the weekend and use Wednesday as our art/music/foreign language day.

DH and I both firmly fall into the "as long as you're not tripping over them or in danger of ending up on an episode of Hoarders there is no such thing as too many books" camp. We both love to read and our kids love books - though Mr. Inquisitive is the only one that can read fluently on his own right now. At any given point a clean up of the boys' room will yield a dozen or so books that they've squirreled away in there to look at during quiet time/after they're tucked in bed. We used to make generous use of the library for "reading for pleasure" books but Mr. Inquisitive has a hard time returning books (and by that I mean books seem to be a comfort or "safe space"/grounding object for him and his anxiety so having to ​give back ​books is...traumatic). Plus, while they have a fairly decent number of books (I'd consider it solidly a mid sized library) the selection is very haphazard. They do have a great used book store inside the library that is open 4 days a week so when we do go I definitely aim for those days. Almost all of our other books come from amazon or thriftbooks (my new love!). I already budget for buying any school related books that I need to have because I have zero patience for making sure our library has it and/or trying to orchestrate actually getting it when I need it. DH and I make use of our library's online lending service and I keep considering an audible account to use with the kids but I haven't pulled the trigger on that yet. Occasionally we have books that we either no longer need or don't think we'll read again and I donate those to the library bookstore.