OP if you have a lot of Spanish speakers around, see if you can work out something to have someone come spend an hour speaking with your kids. My 7yos are good with an hour, for my 4yo that is too long. In previous years I had someone come for an hour and speak with my dc for 1/2 and then with me for 1/2. They play games, identify and talk about pictures, etc. and ALWAYS read a Spanish book that I get from the library. Sometimes a board book, sometimes a longer story book. Just hearing the spontaneous use of the language is so helpful. IMHO, this is a valuable place to spend your limited funds - if you can find someone you like. In addition to this (and without any intentional connections), we also watch Salsa once a week, do a basic vocabulary program twice a week and then on the fifth day we read a book or play computer games or watch Pocoyo on Youtube. Another forum user recently posted her plan for beginning Spanish here with weekly plans. There are so many ways to integrate it into your life in a fun, easy, cheap way! Go for it!

I read the other thread and I wanted to add that I think the point of writing verbatim is not for taking notes (that would be more like outlining and summarizing which we are all working towards), but rather to help the child learn to create a sentence and then hold it in his head while he writes it down. This was in the WWE text. One tip I read (maybe in that thread?) was if there are some particularly tricky words you might want to write them somewhere visible for reference. We don't have this problem because I apparently resemble the human form of spell-check. If there is any question in their minds they ask me. I've had to start prodding them to self-spell or else the whole thing becomes me spelling out most of the dictation. :tongue_smilie:

I, too, became disenchanted with SWO. My kids weren't retaining it, if yours are I stay stick with it! We switched to Spelling Power at the beginning of last calendar year. They did OK, but after a long break over the summer I decided to just start over, and they are doing great - so either they really did learn it the first time, OR they are more prepared for spelling in second grade than they were in first. We spend about 15 minutes a day and the book has something like "H" levels so I don't feel pressure to match certain levels with grades. It's working for us. Don't feel like spelling is "must do" at 6yo.

I went to educationalfontware.com picked out a few I liked and showed them to dh. He eliminated a few and I picked out of the remainder. You might give a little thought to how you want to teach it. If you are going to want them doing ready-made worksheets you will want to pick a font with that available (there are lots, but not all). OR you can decide to pick one where you can make your own worksheets. This is nice because, as in our case, we quickly ran out of time/patience to just work on handwriting for its own sake. I wanted it to do double duty as handwriting/copywork practice.

We just finished doing the Native Americans one, and we didn't do all of them (after a brief internal struggle :D) but concentrated on ones where we are likely to visit, and any that the kids were interested in. It took some up-front cutting and pasting on my part, but the activities were at the right level for my 2nd graders. I also found some related non-fiction books at the library and used The Indian Book for a few of its fiction and non-fiction stories. We're doing Colonial Times next and I see the grade level for that is 4-8, so I expect we will scale back some of the activities. On a similar note, my kids have also enjoyed some of the "Moving Maps" from here.

We are half-way through BFSU1 and loving it. I get tons of supplemental books from the library and add in my own occasional experiment (probably cheesy). I can't add much to what has been said above, BUT if you are still leaning toward self-directed science, you should really read this post by forum member lewelma. She has a great DIY approach to science and I have bookmarked a few of her posts for reference as we go along. Really I think you could probably swing BFSU AND her science project approach if you and your kids were so inclined... I hope to. Someday.

Funny! We are doing something similar here. We are studying the Middle Ages with STOW, and doing our own thing for American History. The American History has more tangibles (crafts and moving maps) and a variety of sources. STOW is fewer crafts, blackline map work, questions and narration. FWIW we are going to do American History over three years, so that last year we'll be doing Modern World history and Modern American history. I'm hoping to meld the two together somewhat by then...

Thanks for posting the follow-up! Lapbooking is a nice bridge between my art/craft-enthusiastic dd and my ds who is not enthusiastic at all. As we work through SOTW2 I'm thinking that I will need to finish out the last 16 chapters of the lapbook myself and this is a timely reminder.

The Betsy Maestro books are good. I've also been interested in these couple of books in the USKids series...

:iagree: What is the trouble with Spelling Power? You've already paid the $$ for that and if you can find a way to make it work for you it is intended to be able to take you all the way through. Perhaps the Hive can help!!

I give the most "help" to the one who is having the most trouble keeping up (which often means the one who is faster starts day-dreaming). Then I try to have short things for them to do (spelling, finish some phase of unrelated on-going work, do their chore for the day, get dressed, etc.) I do NOT let them leave, I will never get them both back at the same time. :001_smile: Also, I try to schedule work together for just after lunch so we've had time for a reset. None of this works all the time and I only have two, and they are twins so most of our stuff is together. :tongue_smilie:

Spend some time thinking about how you want to approach things, and what feels comfortable for you. You won't "fall behind" in Kindergarten! If it suits your style, and you want to keep the learning vibe going, you could get some cheap K-level or 1-level workbooks to do a few pages from a day while you do some studying of your own (but you don't have to!) :001_smile:

One thing I was amazed to see in practice was that reading the selection 2 or 3 times every morning out loud is an amazingly simple way to commit it to memory! I guess it has been too long since I memorized anything myself (decades). Why don't you (and dd?) think about what you want to accomplish with memory work. One goal I like is that I think it is important to build the confidence that you *can* memorize things - even long things. Another goal might be to memorize things that would be useful later, "30 days hath September", "In 14 hundred and 92", etc. Presidents? maybe, prepositions? perhaps, latin vocabulary or verb declensions? could be. I might start with a short, cute poem that appeals to you both. Then maybe a second, and then decide from there. I like things that we might be reminded of in daily life once in a while. I have little kids, so we all know the S. Silverstein poem Eyeball in the Gumball Machine You and your daughter might like Langston Hughes' Winter Moon or, if you have stairs in your house, Hughes Mearns' Little Man Lastly, keep a record as you go - handwritten or on computer so that you can flip through once in a while and review some of the older things you haven't seen in a while. I'm trying to reconstruct one now that I can use in the car once a week to review poems, definitions, lists, etc. It occurs to me that this might be a nice gift when they are older.

Skip ahead to the next lesson you think is appropriate! Saxon has a TON of review. If you skip ahead and then run into a problem on a review worksheet that you haven't seen, or want more depth on, look back to see how it was introduced, and then look forward to see the next time it is covered and decide if you want to do the lessons separately, or glom them together, or just add the old lesson onto whatever you are doing tomorrow. You are right, Saxon K was a waste. I wonder if most homeschooled kids could skip that. When we hit a whole lesson teaching what a "triangle" was I realized it was time to move on. We skimmed through it and then made it mid-way through Saxon 3 before I put it aside this summer. For 2nd grade this year I'm using MEP. We all needed a break.

We have Poetry Speaks to Children which is a book and a cd. The cd is recordings by the authors. Oddly, there are more recordings on the cd than are listed in the playlist. I don't know that I've listened all the way to the end because I got sidetracked trying to update the track numbers for all the performed poems...

Stomp Rockets are my go-to gift for boys.

I recommend "Kids Learn to Crochet" by Lucinda Guy. We used the knitting version last year and my dc were intrigued by the projects (although didn't have the staying power at 6yo to make it to the end). I found the knitting book at the library, although her website has a lot of sample pages.

We all loved the Dodsworth books by Tim Egan around that time. I don't remember the picture/page ratio though, and I know that is important. My son also liked the Commander Toad books by Jane Yolen. Mouse and Mole books by Wong Herbert Yee Henry and Mudge books by Cynthia Rylant They were all good, early chapter books with high picture ratios and as an added bonus if he likes one, there are more in the series! :001_smile:

Interesting. My dd does this during math if she is feeling slightly stressed. I've watched, and for us it appears to be just that, a minor stress response. From the other responders, though, it sounds like that isn't the only possible cause to look at. Unfortunately, it quickly escalates as we get into a tense discussion about covering her mouth every time. Even when I can see my buttons clear as day it can be hard to avoid them.

I'm late to the thread, but I was just looking through the free CSMP and I see that geoboards are introduced in the first 10 lessons, so presumably they will have some lessons mixed in, if you are looking for something that integrates them with other lessons...

Thank you for sharing!! Not only will I read through it to see what I can add to our own Spanish studies, there are often requests for this kind of guidance here and IRL. I look forward to passing on your site!

My dh would be heartened by this discussion. He often complains that a lot of engineering-related papers are written in PV. "(in droning voice) The experiment was performed to determine....", "It was discovered that...." etc. 8's examples were less extreme (and perhaps harder to catch on the fly?), but anytime you are left wondering, "Who? Who did that? How could it have done that by itself?" that is another clue.:D

I, too, own 5 different math programs and spent most of the summer circling between 3 of them. :tongue_smilie: Along similar lines, I told my dh this morning that the school schedule we had last week and this week is AWESOME! Now, next week I just need to squeeze in WWE, FLL, Spelling and Spanish. Great! :tongue_smilie::tongue_smilie:

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I will have her dust the baseboards wherever her older siblings are sweeping the floor. In my defense, the baseboards are square and have two, nice dust-catching levels. If no one is sweeping then she is using a micro-fiber cloth to wipe glass in whatever bathroom they are cleaning. I wanted her to have regular tasks like everyone else, but I did not want to add to my own work by having to hold her hand for the job all the time. I envision the chores becoming more important as she gets older and more capable.

Thanks! I'm always on the lookout for ways to spice up our Spanish study. We had this exchange recently: "Mom, Señora trys to make us talk to her. In Spanish!" "Um, yeah, that's what I pay her for..."