Hi @WTM. How have things been going for you? In case you didn't get this info elsewhere, Zones is a curriculum to be done with the child. We did it ourselves at home. In many ways, it is a wonderful curriculum because it lays out many ways for a person to self-regulate. The only problem was, my child could not implement any of it because he can never stop at a choice point to start using any of the self-regulation strategies. This brings up a point I've been thinking about a lot, that @kiwik put so well: This is so important that it bears highlighting. In my experience on the road of being a mom of a differently-wired kid, so many parenting strategies that say they are for neurodivergent kids are really neurotypical strategies simply reframed. If a kid can't stop at a choice point, it doesn't matter if the choice point is presented in terms of a color-coded thermometer, or "Plan B", or natural consequences, or upper-brain/lower-brain, or whatever. It's taken me years to understand that this is what @PeterPan has been saying for years about Interoception. The kid has to be able to feel the choice point before he can implement a self-regulation strategy. We haven't started Interoception yet, or even bought the curriculum, but I think it's next on our list. I did e-mail Kelly Mahler (Interoception author) about a month ago, and she sent back a wonderfully detailed and encouraging response to me. I hope all is going well with you and your son, WTM!

Hi again, everyone. Wanted to get back to this. Over the last couple of weeks, here and there in some spare time, I skimmed through all seven of the RS4K books that we own (Years 1-7 - we don't have kindergarten). I just could not find any sort of religious bias like this in the text. Maybe there are code words that I don't know about, but really, I could not detect any sneaked-in "Intelligent Design". I'm not doubting you, @Wheres Toto, but I still don't see it actually in the text. If it's even there, it's so subtle that I've missed it for seven years. (In Year 7, the matter-of-fact teaching is that fossils are millions of years old. I don't know if that squares with Intelligent Design beliefs or not.) Of course, no curriculum is for everyone, and there are plenty of good reasons to want a different science curriculum than this one. No problem! But as someone who actually owns and has used this curriculum for seven years, I'd just like to be fair about what's actually in the books. I don't want to give out too much personal information, but please take it from me that a steeped-in-science family can use this curriculum for a solid science education for kids. Best wishes to everyone for finding the right science curriculum for your family!

WTM, this is wonderful! I think I'll do something like this for my son. Maybe the visual will help him. Thank you for sharing! Oh, well, of course. If Mom is associated with something, the kids aren't interested. (I'm chuckling because this is what my kids are like. At least in our house, if Mommy loves something, the kids act as if they're allergic to it.)

Hi @WTM. Just listening in more than anything, but I want to let you know that you are not alone in this! I really understand the power struggle. @PeterPan has some great suggestions. I'll echo PeterPan and also really encourage you to consider meds, if that's something you and he would be open to. Also, have you done the Zones of Regulation that PeterPan suggested? In our experience, its main benefit was giving us a shared language between parents and kids on behavior. I think it will take a long time for my kids' maturity to kick in to really get a lot of benefit out of the Zones lessons, but it was still worth going through together. Just a thought about your daughter: I obviously have never met her, but from all that you've posted about her before, I bet she's one amazing girl. Do you think that the old saying, "Still waters run deep" applies to her, meaning that she's shy and melts into the background, but that she has an incredible internal life? Some kids like that do really well if they have an opportunity to perform in a way that gets them in front of people but doesn't put their internal life on display. Some ideas would be acting in a play, or performing in a choir - anything to get her onstage and seen, but in which she doesn't have to divulge her rich internal thoughts until she's ready to wow everyone. Even in Covid times, there might be an opportunity. Our local community children's theater just did a play in which even the actors were masked and it worked just fine. So, if it seems appropriate, maybe one of her goals would be some kind of performance-type thing that she could do. Thanks for starting this thread. I'll be following it!

Well, the wonderful thing is that a science-loving child can get there in so many ways. We happen to love the way that we're getting there. What's important is that it's a great, big beautiful world out there to be studied, loved, and taken care of. I'm just happy whenever any kid loves science.

I"m sorry to hear that, too. Do you have a link to it? But, for whatever it's worth, actually using the curriculum, that never came out. As I mentioned above, last year we finished out our science year with a 36-lecture course on decidedly not YE paleontology. We still love RS4K for what it does. Any sort of Intelligent Design bias really doesn't come through in the text.

Just found these: https://bravewriter.com/online-classes I don't have any experience with Bravewriter, but I'm also looking for an online class for one of my kids. These classes seem to go by the quarter, so some of them are still open for this fall!

There are really two main benefits to memorizing anything: 1. It's useful. SWB uses the example (somewhere in TWTM) that every American should know the years of the Civil War, so that you can immediately place a nineteenth century date in context. For me, I memorized all the names, symbols, origins, and atomic weights (well, not all of the atomic weights) of the elements in the periodic table. Saved a lot of time looking up! Every kid who has already been exposed to the definition a chemical mole should know Avogadro's number. My daughter, who has always been fascinated with nuclear physics, decided that she wanted to memorize the decay path of uranium. (You go, kid.) Stuff like that. 2. (More important) It's fun! My husband memorized the digits of pi out to some crazy place value, because that's the kind of thing people like him do for fun. Poetry is lots of fun to memorize. When you can roll A.A. Milne's "Sneezles" off your tongue, you know the fun that words can bring. My daughter loves to recite Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" because she loves the sounds. So don't memorize things just because someone says that you ought to. But, given that, as Longfellow says in "A Psalm of Life", "Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not the goal..." and knowing how much fun life is when you know more about it and dig deeper into it, why wouldn't you? 🙂

Well, I'll jump back in to this discussion. The author of the curriculum, Rebecca Keller, has the philosophy that chemistry and physics are the foundations of all science. Thus, biology is chemistry and physics applied to a living system, astronomy is chemistry and physics applied to outer space, etc. It's a broad brushstroke, but it has some validity. So that's what I really appreciate about this curriculum: the strength of chemistry and physics, and how those two become the foundation for the other "building blocks": biology, geology, and astronomy. With a very strong foundation in chemistry and physics, a future scientist will be in a good position to move to any specialty. It may be that the benefit of her approach is best seen after several years with the curriculum, rather than just one year in the middle, which is why I'm so glad that we started with it in K and are now finishing with it in Year 7. One other advantage that my family appreciates that hasn't been mentioned is that each level has 22 chapters, which means that at a chapter a week for a 36-week year, you have about one-third of the year left for going deep. I let my kids choose Great Courses courses for their science supplement after we finish up RS4K for the year. Two years ago they chose Nuclear Physics Explained, and The Science of Flight. Last year they chose The Higgs-Boson, and Paleontology. These are courses designed for grown-ups. RS4K has certainly not held them back! @Not_a_Number, I understand what you mean about the heavy dependence of physics on math, but it really hasn't been a hindrance. Even in public school, kids can take physics long before calculus. Kids can learn a lot about forces just from thinking and watching, and F=ma is not that advanced. @wathe, thanking for adding your thoughts, but I do believe that if any science curriculum can be genuinely "neutral" and still do a really great job at what it covers, this is one. Of course no curriculum is for everyone. This one happens to work very well for our science-loving family. We're going through the last year of the series, so I've seen it all the way through.

What a great story, EmilyGF! I really think that the opening lines to Paul are among the most inviting in all of poetry. I can always picture some kids crowding in closer to old Henry, sitting in front of a cracking fire, when he starts out, "Listen my children, and you shall hear..."

Hi @Shoes+Ships+SealingWax. What fun you and your son must be having! Here are some favorites of mine that may work for your son. (By the way, I'm assuming that you mean “ballad” in the general sense of a story told in verse, and not the very specific ballad meter and rhyme scheme. I've noted the one that's not in formal ballad form). The Wreck of the Hesperus – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (formal ballad form) Lochinvar – Sir Walter Scott (not formal ballad form, but an exciting story) The Song of the Wandering Aengus – William Butler Yeats (formal ballad form) It's hard to find ballads/narrative poems with lighter themes (most of them are exciting but sad), but if you really want something lighthearted in formal ballad form, you can always look at the lyrics to “The Ballad of Gilligan's Island”. (I'm serious, just in case you're wondering! When I'm looking at a poem and trying to determine if it's in ballad form, it's easier for me to ask myself, “Can I sing it to the tune of 'Gilligan's Island'?” than to remember “four stressed feet plus three stressed feet in an ABCB quatrain”.) (I have to ask – are your selections of “The Highway Man” and “Bingen on the Rhein” inspired by Anne of Green Gables?)

I tried going to bed tonight, but I lay awake thinking about The Hero's Journey…. “[A] farmboy, who yearns for excitement and glory, is given a wondrous sword and an impossible mission. With the help of new friends, he succeeds, saves the princess, and his destiny is fulfilled. Is it Star Wars or is it The Faerie Queene? Both, of course.” - from the introduction to Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, Book 1 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, updated and annotated by Roy Maynard Think of how many children's books follow this pattern: 1. The hero…. (The Redcross Knight, from The Faerie Queene) (Luke Skywalker, from Star Wars) (Aragorn, from the Lord of the Rings trilogy) (Meg, from A Wrinkle in Time) (Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz) 2. ...receives a powerful, magical object… (Redcross Knight's sword – I don't remember if it was named) (his father's lightsaber) (the sword Anduril) (Mrs. Who's glasses) (ruby slippers) 3. ...finds a buddy or two to accompany him/her… (Una and the dwarf) (Han Solo) (Frodo and the whole fellowship) (Calvin) (the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion) 4. … along with a guiding spirit … (Una's love when she isn't with him) (Obi-Wan Kenobi) (Gandalf) (Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which) (Glinda the Good Witch) 5. ...then defeats a bad guy… (the dragon) (Darth Vader) (the orcs) (IT) (The Wicked Witch of the West) 6. … and lives happily ever after. (marries Una) (rewarded by Princess Leia) (marries Arwen) (brings Father home) (wakes up in Kansas) I'm sure there are many other examples from classic children's literature. You could find patterns like this, or explore how the various elements vary between stories…. Hope this helps to give you some good ideas! I had fun thinking about all this.

Hi @Acadie. Ancient astronomy is a topic we dive into every once in a while. These may or may not be helpful to you, but there have been a couple of Youtube talks that I've watched that may help you: Medieval Islamic Astronomy (I know that this is not the right time period for you, but it may be close enough geographically to help.) Sky Cultures of the World (This one was really good.) Good luck!

@macmacmoo, I love the titles of your planned curriculum! What fun you will all have! I'm pretty sure that I might have a few suggestions, but I'm wondering if you would flesh out more of the direction that you see those units moving. For instance, Hero's Journey could probably go in many different directions. Would you tell us more of about how you imagine those topics going? Off the top of my head, one book that would be fine for your youngest in the farming category is an old favorite of ours, The Year at Maple Hill Farm, by Alice and Martin Provensen.

Hi @lulalu. I'm late to this thread, but I think you should go for "Paul Revere's Ride". Nine-years-old is not too young. I was going to start off our year with that poem, but my kids asked for "Charge of the Light Brigade" instead, so we'll pick up Paul later this semester. If your son gets started and then fizzles out after a while, he still has at least the start of a classic American poem in his memory. Maybe you can just try to get through the stanza about the boats in the harbor (which I think has some really neat imagery). For what it's worth, I'm a big fan of Longfellow's poetry and many of his poems, long or short, are wonderful to memorize. He used rhythm very strongly, and kids respond to that. Think of the rhythm to Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith": Un-DER a SPREAD-ing CHEST-net TREE The VILL-age SMITH-y STANDS... Every time my kids recite this they start swinging their arms as if they were blacksmiths striking an anvil, too. It's a lot of fun! Good luck, and have fun!

Have you ever looked into the Usborne Beginners books in addition to the encyclopedias? My kids loved them at age six. In fact, they still pull out the beginners books just for fun every once in a while.

Hi @McSalty. Not denying your experience at all, but mine was just the opposite. I thought that the teacher manual for the experiments was redundant and didn't really use it at all, and I really thought that except for preparing the experiments, the curriculum really was open and go. Oh well! Each family uses each curriculum differently, it seems.

Hi @Janeway. Here is a copy of what I wrote about this topic in this thread about RS4K. The Real-Science-4-Kids Building Blocks series has been our only science spine since my oldest started kindergarten. This year we just finished up Level 6. I'm obviously very happy with it! Here are some thoughts: Dr. Keller's philosophy is basically that you start giving kids foundational science from a young age so that when they hit high school science they aren't caught off-guard and then feel that science is “too hard”. She has a few explanatory videos on her philosophy; here is a short one (three minutes). As an example, chemical bonding is introduced in first grade in a kid-friendly way. Every year the concept is built up. Pro: 1) I think that the text is very strong for what she promises. We almost didn't homeschool because I was so discouraged looking for a meaty science program until I found RS4K. The textbook would work very well as a solid reading text for families that just want a get-it-done science book, but, even better, it also works well as a spine for families with very science-oriented kids (as mine are). We supplement heavily, not because there are any glaring gaps, but because my kids are just interested in going deep in so many areas. 2) The text is intentionally worldview-neutral. You add what your family believes about hot topics, rather than having to explain away someone else's interpretation. Con: 1) It's really expensive. We have felt it's worth it to budget for this program, but if expense were the only hindrance, I would suggest getting on the e-mail list and buying when they have sales, and/or buying only the text and skipping the lab notebooks and teacher manual. 2) Some of the experiments rely on websites that were out of date by the time we got to them, so there has been a lot of modifying the experiments on the fly. For what it's worth, the trajectory of my kids' career plans (which, of course, can change) is right now toward astrophysics or particle physics, and aeronautical engineering. RS4K has certainly not bored them or held them back!

Another vote for this path. It's exactly what I've done with my two and they're doing just fine after a few months of practice.

WTM, I am completely with you, but don't sell yourself short. Your kids have no reason to care what I think, but from all the thoughtful posts you've made on this forum, and your generosity with sharing some of your syllabi, you are obviously a very caring, dedicated mom to pour so much into crafting an education for your children.

Cintinative, what a coincidence because I've been thinking that I should find it and read it again, because my two have been such pills themselves. I know intellectually that when my kids are angry at the world that they think Mom should pay. No amount of talking to them about logic, appropriate expression of frustration, or even kindness or respect gets into them when they're the mood to lash out at me. It still hurts no matter how much I know that they are just being illogical with their words. I spent some time today - before reading this thread - crying on my husband's shoulder. Parenting is tough. Thanks for bring back this thread!

Alicia64, what a wonderful idea for a thread! Thank you! It was TWTM that cemented our decision to homeschool our kids. After only reading a few pages of the book, I turned to my husband and said, “You have got to read this.” SWB described everything I had longed for (but didn't get) as a kid in public school. What she wrote felt so right for our family. I've mentioned this on the forum before, but when I read her words about teaching K-4, “Spread knowledge out in front of them, and let them feast,” (chp. 3, 3rd ed.) I was hooked. Happily, TWTM recommendations always seem to work for our kids, too. SWB has never let me down! Both of my kids learned to read with OPGTR, by Jessie Wise and Sara Buffington, and they are both very strong readers. When my then-8-year-old son, with diagnoses of ASD and ADHD in the future, independently read The Hobbit, I was in awe. I really couldn't have done that on my own. Thank you, Jessie and Sara! I'd also like to put into the Internet-air thanks for a long-gone woman, Jessie's Aunt Meme, who cheerfully taught young Jessie according to the way she knew was right, despite all the nay-sayers who predicted failure for young Jessie. What a brave woman! As I look into the high school years in the near future with my kids, I hope that I will have the same courage that Aunt Meme, and Jessie later, did. (Psst, @Alicia64, just a friendly recommendation to change the title: SWB's mom's last name is Wise. She didn't take on her daughter's married name!)

Seconding @caffeineandbooks' recommendation for WWE. @Shoes+Ships+SealingWax, your son at his age sounds like where my current 10-year-old son was at that age, including the ADHD. We went all the way through WWE, and he really improved on his narration ability, to the point where I would say that his narrations are now excellent. I really attribute this To WWE, because that's what it does best. I would also encourage you to be patient and give him some more time, as well. You're right - 2E kids are all over the place. It's okay if this skill takes a little longer. Good luck!

Strictly Ballroom. My FAVORITE movie of all time. Sweet plot line, gently whimsical, and great dancing!

Does she have a copy of TWTM? (Maybe that doesn't count as a "goodie", but I think it would be the most useful thing you could give her!)