Sounds like a schedule for more joyful teaching! Have a great time...I'm jealous of your one child right now, just so ya know.

Thank you all so much. This is most helpful. Ds will so appreciate the heads up.

Thank you so much. We is DH, ds and I. This will be his first contact with the recruiter. West Point is ALL ds's idea :D. Military is his passion and in his blood. I'm sure of it! We're just gonna do what we need to to help him meet his goals.

We have a meeting with the West Point Recruiter in a couple weeks. What should I bring? I'd like to be properly prepared, without seeming overly prepared...if that makes sense :)

YEAH for you! I've been saying what a bargain TOG is for ages :) It is great to use something just as you like, but still have other options already waiting for you! We love TOG!

Weeeelllll.. .I suppose that depends on your philosophy. PR's approach is to grow into writing. Level 1 is the first step: spelling words. After they get a good foundation, you'll go to sentences. As you grow with PR, you'll get to paragraphs, etc. Since I'm in PR4, I have confidence that the program is perfectly wonderful all by itself. *I* don't add a thing and I have excellent writers (see my blog). So my advice is, yes, that would be overkill. At this tender stage, love of learning and skills are on equal planes for me.

tried to get it here via attachment, but it's too large. Bummer.

This is a generic weekly checklist/schedule for my upper grammar school students who are in either 3rd or 4th grade. Am I forgetting something? Even after all these years, sometimes I just blank out. I feel like I'm missing something. FWIW, we are not memorizing poetry this year, instead opting for the Veritas Cards and the rest of the presidents song. WELL...that didn't work! I posted it here on my blog. Sorry for the inconvenience. For whatever reason, the table won't show up here.

Did either of you fit all the additional reading (outside of the text) or movies in your week? How did it pan out?

PR simplifies my day greatly. One binder means no stopping between "classes" to grab multiple books. I don't know about you, but moving about to get different books and notebooks ALWAYS takes my grammar school kids forever. B/c the program grows, when I use levels with the next kid (after already using it), I spend no time preparing. I totally grab and go. It makes LA seem Whole; whereas previously, my dc saw spelling, AND grammar AND writing as separate subjects. Now they know their pieces to the same puzzle. Since there are days of crossover, it also saves me time b/c I'm not having to use application tools (like sentence writing) for several subjects...just for one program. The greatest simplifier is I will never look at another program. LA is a case closed for us! No need to glance anywhere else! My blog gives several examples of "a day in the life" Perhaps those will give you an idea if it will simplify your day.

Enjoy the study. It's a great story!

Thank you all so much. I will probably end with the Kindle b/c I too am an Amazonian :) I get so many giftcards from there using Swagbucks b/c they cost fewer Swagbucks. I will keep my eyes open for the price drop and for the library book feature. Before I decide, I will go and play at Best Buy...great idea! Thank you!

Thank you. I had some really nasty soup for lunch today. It sure made me enjoy my salad more! I can do it, though. I practically inhaled the soup and followed with a quick drink to wash it down. Not the best eating method, I know, but the soup was pretty bad.

Thank you, Ellie. I was hoping for all those fresh veggies! It's kind of out of my "box" to eat processed food, so this is great news! THANK YOU!

I do what works at the time, which seems to change annually at our house. We've done both and now do an incorporated version of the two. For grammar school, we don't schedule start and stop times strictly, but we do a few "timed activities" like...study your math flashcards for 10min.; personal free reading for 30min.; memorization practice 5 minutes each thing (15 min. total). Otherwise, last year, I dropped the exact time schedule b/c I felt like the Rabbit in Wonderland...I'm late! I'm late! Too stressed and rushed to actually enjoy or project joy. Just knowing that we have Language Arts, computer work and History before lunch and Math, etc. after makes for a complete, but stress free day! For Middle School, I do something a little different. I often refer to it as block teaching. I have a 2-hour block with Darling, yet Diva, so I know that I will focus my time on her for 2 solid hours and then she can move on (she's rising 6th grader). I teach her for 2 days of school. The next day, in the same "block" I teach the other middle schooler, who doesn't take as much time, and needs less instruction, but still needs some teacher time. For the high schoolers, who will dawdle the day away, I do "periods" like public school. This ensures they will get to each subject daily and shows them: get your work finished and you have free time; don't get your work finished and you have homework. It has helped them with time management and also to respect MY TIME. They know that once they hit homework time, Mom is off the clock. I will not teach them anything new, although I will help them through a trouble spot. They also have time with me daily, about 45-1hour for accountability and we spend discussion times for science and history, and Algebra for the struggling math one, but otherwise, they fly solo. They also share the time block for accountability, so I follow behind them every other day. I guess, you just figure out what works NOW. As you can see, that means something different for each of my children. Enjoy that about home schooling. Do what works best for you and enjoy the journey. Before you know it, they're heading off to College (mine will this coming spring). Boo hoo, sniff sniff, waaaaa!

Hi. I was just gifted 6 weeks worth of bk, lunch, dinner, and dessert for Nutrisystem. Can someone tell me how to use them, please. How much water in a day? Can I drink coffee? I often do about 8oz in the morning and it's black. Fresh fruit or veggies...can I have them? If so, how much, when? I so love salad, which I eat w/o dressing already. Thank you. I'm hoping this will keep my current weight loss moving forward effortlessly. I'm planning so much that I've eaten pretty poorly this week. That's easy to do when you want sugar to push through the next hour. I can stick to this...it's easy!

I'm going to use the text and the suggested reading for my 2 girls (6th/8th grade). Does anyone have a schedule designed so I can shorten all this lesson planning? I'd prefer no more than 20 weeks, but the convenience of a schedule will outweigh that desire! I have seen the one posted in the Yahoo group. THANK YOU!

I agree. It's important to choose well. I have found that the investment in PR goes into my teaching training so much that the price is justified pretty much daily. It really is that good. The program will dive deeper into word origins as you go along. Mrs. Beers will give instructions through the DVD that you will share with your students. You'll learn the origin of the Days of the Week, for example, and that words ending in a silent b are most often German (climb comes from climben). Your children will understand what Elizabeth said and that the Rule TUnes apply to the English language, all the while helping you and your students to understand how many words come from Latin, French, and German. The word study really brings our language to life.

Campmom, Cursive is taught in the end of Level 2. It's called connective cursive and it's really, really easy to teach. As a teacher I preferred the method over HWT. My blog has an example. It's also very easy for the students to learn b/c it takes out some of the very fancy loops. Good stuff :)

I agree with your assessment. Give yourself a few weeks to get a feel. Keep in mind, PR1 is mostly phonics/reading/spelling with a pinch of grammar. Level 2 starts the grammar and lit/writing portions. If you would like a peek at day to day, check out my blog (in siggy). There are many posts on PR levels and should give you a nice idea of the progression and content.

Help me out? Pros and Cons of each....is it worth getting one now? Will they be ancient history in a few months and will I lose all I buy from upgrade to upgrade?

That was our road, too. I started with a library last year, then when I converted the garage, I put all the books in one place. It is pretty satisfying to teach in the same room as all those books!

We've gone both ways. As they get older, they spread apart and we didn't want a school room. Now that I really have 2 "schools" The Elders stay in the house and we have converted part of our garage into a school house for the Little League. Most importantly, this offers a quiet house for the older kids and also gives the little people lots of space, a neat looking area, and the structured environment that will help them learn order and independence the same way it worked for their elder sibs. So as they grow up, they can eventually do school in their bedrooms or the couch or the roof....yes, the roof. DS likes to tan his amazing teen abs :) Oh, to be young again!

Oh, now I get it :) Yes, they learn the sounds in that way :) The same order of sound for each phonogram. Yes, there are cards with sounds and word clues very similar to SWR.

They learn the same phonograms, but I think in a different order. Here is the sequence: Day 1 a,c,d,f Day2 g, o, qu,s Day 3 Drill and test circle letters by sight and dictation Day 4 b,e,h Day 5 i,j,k Week 2 1-l,m,n,p 2-r,t,u,v 3-w,x,y,z 4-Test all letters by sight and dictation Week 3 1-er, ir, ur 2-wor, ear 3-ay,ai,oy,oi 4-aw, au, ow, ou 5- reDrill and review all letters: sight, dictation, games. Add week 3 Vowel Teams to Bldg Code 2 Week 4 1-sh,ee,oo 2-th,ea,ng 3-ch, ar, ed 4-ck, or, oa The rest, or more complicated ough/augh/etc. come periodically throughout level 1 & 2. They will first learn to parse sentences; i.e. they will mark a simple subject with one underline, simple predicate w/ 2, place an arrowhead after an adj., etc. As they learn the parts of speech, their dictation will then be marked, which applies spelling, sentence composition, and grammar. Without glancing, I don't remember if the diagramming takes form at the end of level 3 or in level 4 (they all run together in my planning mind right now). In any case, I have found that parsing is MUCH less tiresome in the younger years than diagramming (which we did in RS and was not a happy time), serves the same purpose, and has been painless.