We went to the Hartford, CT Tea Party today. They were reporting between 3,000-4,000 in attendance. My husband attended the New Haven, CT Tea Party and guessed that there were about 1500 people there. Crowds at both Tea Parties were very peaceful.

Checking the textbook first is a great idea. I started my 3rd grader with level II. He could have even backtracked a bit and done Level I, but is fine now with Level II.

We are using WWE I w/ the workbook and FLL. In FLL we skip the narration since there is plenty in WWE.

Enjoy! It's been very successful here.

That's it! That's exactly what I was looking for. You can send me a PM. I have a few questions about the allowance and how you use it, etc. Thank you!!

I know, lots of conditions, right? I have some questions for anyone that is military and living in an overseas location that does NOT have a DOD school available. :) Thanks!

I looked at ZB for cursive, but ended up going with Cursive Connections and my boys have been very successful with CC. http://www.cursiveconnections.com/

I'm okay with math at this level (1st and 3rd grade) and will probably be fine up until 7th or 8th grade. Then I may need some refreshers. So far we love Singapore. I've bought the IG's for each level, but I rarely need to use them. I like having them at the ready though . . . just in case.

I'm registered!! Can't wait!

My boys' first introduction to math was in Montessori school and this is similar to what they experienced there. I am highly impressed with the Montessori method, especially when it comes to math. I try to keep that element available to my boys, but we have also transitioned to traditional math in our home. They are working through Singapore math. We're lucky so far in that math is not only not painful, my boys love math and do it without any distress. But, I think that has to do with that foundation that they received in their Montessori school and I believe that their school did a wonderful job bridging the concrete math (using the classic Montessori materials and lessons) to the abstract math (problems on paper or in their head). Sometimes I'm amazed at how well my boys "get" their math problems because they "see" it and truly understand it, it's not just memorized.

Here is what we are doing for my 3rd grader: FLL 3 - we skip the poetry because my son is doing the IEW poetry program and we skip the narration exercises because he is doing WWE 2 WWE 2 Building Dictionary Skills (by Laura Wagner) SRA Reading Labs - it's not a lot, but my son's SRA reading labs highlight some grammar in each lesson

What if I brought their handheld game's (Nintendo DS's, with headsets) They are silent and motionless when they are playing those things. Can I admit to being even the tiniest bit embarrassed that my kids would be sitting there glued to a video game system during a homeschool conference? Would that be wrong?

I am very seriously considering attending this conference, but I will need to take my 2 homeschooled children with me. I read the information on the webpage and it mentions "older children" being okay. What does "older child" mean? What ages? My boys will be almost-7 and almost-9 at the time of the conference.

I'm 99% sure I'm going and will be taking my two homeschooled boys with me. My preschool aged DD and my DH will stay home.

I voted "other." I've been homeschooling for one year and 2 weeks now and it's been a wonderful choice for our family. I would have never guessed that HS'ing would be such a great fit for us and work out so successfully. That said, we are on the move again this summer. We are a military family and we are headed back overseas to a European capital city. My children will have the opportunity to attend a well respected International School or perhaps even attend a local private school and have the opportunity to learn a 2nd language through immersion. And truth be told, I have no idea what we are going to do for school year '09-'10. I feel like I can't even fairly make the decision until we get to Europe and check out the other options. I LOVE that I know I can successfully homeschool my children now though and I love that I will always have that to fall back on. It's killing me to not plan the '09-'10 school year right now, but I have no idea what decision we will make in the end. You can bet I'm reading, researching and thinking about it just in case. :)

I've had my eye on that for a while too. It looks fun! Would love to hear some reviews.

We are doing both and it's working out well. We are doing WWE1 with our 6 year old and WWE2 with our 8 year old. We do WWE "to the 'T'." Meaning, we do exactly what it says, 4 days a week. I am using FLL (the original?) with my 6 year old and I am NOT skipping anything because my 6 year old DS refuses to skip anything - he's very thorough and he actually wants to complete all of the work, even if it's redundant. I am using FLL3 with my 8 year old and we are definitely skipping the narration exercises, because my 8 year old is stressed out enough about writing that I don't want to overwhelm him. He gets plenty from WWE and history and science narrations, so I'm not worry about what we skip in FLL. We are also glossing over the poetry memorization in FLL3 because DS8 is doing the IEW poetry program and that is plenty for him. We do take the time to read, discuss and sometimes illustrate the poems in FLL3, but we do not memorize the as he is busy memorizing poetry from the IEW program.

Does anyone know if something like this exists? I would love to have a template I could type on to create my own narration pages (like those in FLL and WWE). I want to be able to write a question or statement on the page and then have printed, blank lines for my children to write their narrations on. You guys always have a list of great resources, so I thought this would be a good place to ask.

My absolute favorite for cursive is Cursive Connections. It's inexpensive (just a simple copy book) that shows the proper form AND focuses on the connections between different cursive letters. It's been very a very successful method in our home.

I wanted to add that I do worry that my DS8 is missing the complete and accurate meaning of what he's reading when he does this (skips words, changes words) and I do catch it and correct it when he's reading aloud. Sometimes the substitutions he makes completely change the context and that worries me. I worry that when he is silent reading that he misses out of details that are important to the story because of the skipping. I fear that he may do it to an even higher degree when he's silent reading because he seems to read so quickly. That said, I have DS8 using SRA Reading Labs for comprehension exercises. He used to use these in his old Montessori school and loved them. I probably would not have bought them for our homeschooling, but when I noticed this reading "issue" (the skipping and changing), I decided that it would be a good idea for him to check his reading comprehension and to encourage him to read the selections accurately. The reading labs offer a short reading selection and then just a few questions to see if the child understood what he read and caught some important details. There are also some brief spelling/grammar activities to go along with each reading selection. I love that DS8 can self administer the lesson. He goes to the box, chooses the next reading card in the level he is in and reads on his own. Then he answers the comprehension questions and the completes the additional exercises (all of this is no more than 15-20 questions) and then retrieves the answer key card for that lesson and checks his own work. If there is a problem, we go over it together. I require him to do 3 of these a week and they never take longer than 15 minutes to complete. Needless to say, I think the SRA reading labs are wonderful for checking comprehension, but they are very expensive. I had to comb ebay for weeks to find a used version of set I needed and it still wasn't cheap. :glare:

Add us to the list. My DS8 does this as well. I've been VERY worried about it and keeping an eye on it, but it's refreshing to hear that other young readers do this as well.

I haven't checked in here in a while and just wanted to share my excitement over WWE. I'm using WWE1 with my 6 y.o. and WWE2 with my 8 y.o. and all I can say is that it's working!! I love how straightforward it is. I love how easy it is to implement and use. We are easily keeping up with the 4-day a week exercises and my boys are not resisting this work at all - so far. ;) I'm very hopeful that using WWE will help them with their writing.

Did you order your WWE II workbook from the Peace Hill Press site? I ordered from amazon and the shipping estimate has been backed up a few times and now says I won't get it till October 15th. I may cancel my amazon order and just order it from PHP. I need it ASAP!

We do cursive "early." My 1st DS started in 1st grade (he's now in 3rd) and my 2nd DS started in preschool (Montessori) at age 4, because that's just how they do it. He's homeschooled now and a 1st grader and he still needs some fine tuning on his cursive, but we are using Cursive Connections. I highly recommend it.

You are definitely not alone. I started replying to this thread earlier today and my computer crashed - probably my hard drive. Hold me. I haven't backed up in ages and if it's the hard drive (we are 100% sure yet) I will have lost my precious photos and my homeschooling documents that I have spent HOURS preparing over the last few months. I'm sick to my stomach. I'm trying to remain hopeful that the hard drive is okay - of course that means that we need a new computer. Anyway, we started on Monday and things are going well enough, but yes, this first week has had it's challenges. I planned this week as a "warm up" week, so we haven't cracked open a bunch of our work. We're starting with the basics - math, grammar, spelling/phonics, reading, handwriting and we've done some history read-a-louds. This is our first full year homeschooling and I just knew that we had to have a slow and easy warm up week. It's SO hard to break out of summer mode. I've already noticed that my plans are too aggressive in some areas and not aggressive enough in others, so I have some tweaking to do on our plans and goals over the Labor Day weekend. We start the "fun" stuff a little bit next week - history, art, music, science, chess. I think that will help my boys get a little more fired up about learning as I plan to integrate the "boring" subjects into the "fun" and bring it all together. The week after we will really dig in and get to learning. I had to give us these two weeks to ease into our year.