Well, Instant Replay :: Anytime, Anywhere Learning is OK, but you really should check out the links posted here: Salsa Spanish Links @ Little Homeschool Blessings: Spanish Series Salsa Have fun!

Despite my lack of motivation, here is what is working for us: Last week and this week we started doing math 4 days spelling once a week, with a review day Language once a week reading aloud (them to me) 2-3 times That's it. It is easy. I keep rechecking my daily list to see what I've forgotten. Next week I will add in history. In 2 or 3 weeks I'll add in science. At some point I will increase frequencies in some things, etc. I'm hoping to have completely eased us back into a full schedule by the middle of August, *and* I will feel like I'm ahead because we are starting some of these things "early". Sometimes I can really fool myself. :)

If you are looking at getting the teacher's manual for WWE (the one that covers levels 1-4), and you are comfortable with using electronic files, go for it. I read the intro. sections when I got the book and then wrote out the narration/dictation info. for the weeks not included in the book. For instance, she gives you day-to-day instructions for week 1, and then says to do the same thing for weeks 2-4, then week 5 is laid out with a minor change and she says do the same for weeks 6-10. I might have preferred to get the workbooks for ease of use, but since I already had the teacher's manual in hand (and I have 3 children) I just spent some time going through our library and writing out the info. for the first 20 weeks (where necessary). ETA: The TM is small, and no, there are no student pages to be copied out of it. You read a selection and then they narrate back or the write down the sentence. As I understand it, the workbooks are open and go and included pages for the writing, but it seems like you don't need both the TM and the workbooks.

What an opportunity! Have you thought about some kind of system that you can (relatively) easily swap out? That would let you change things as you go, and your topics (and kids) change. Even just a large bulletin board (or large piece of poster board covered with material and hung on the wall. You might be able to frame the maps yourself if you wanted to. Some molding or trim cut at an angle and a large piece of cardboard for backing. Although, the PP's comment about using them on the floor might make that not as desirable...

There are some good ideas here that I may try out next year. With my twin 6yos we do a long-ish stretch of school work upon completion of breakfast (1-2 hours) and then they can play until lunch after which we try to finish up for the day (1/2 - 1 hour). Once they leave the table it is hard to get them back (and not grumpy) so waiting until the next eating time is much less stress. My hope is to slowly lengthen the time periods as the years pass. Perhaps your schedule would accommodate some kind of similar "natural" return to the school day - and he might enjoy the extended break in the day.

Sorry, sorry. You are right, 3 years of access. Well, that takes a little pressure off! :lol: Maybe I can add more supplemental materials. :001_smile:

I bought MTM through the Homeschool Buyer's Co-op. You have access to the program for one calendar year - which means we need to do roughly a lesson every two weeks (allowing for holidays, etc.) Another idea for all those clutter-y art projects is to take pictures of them and make a photo-art book on one of the picture websites out there. Some will let you include text, so they could narrate descriptions...

I would do Hindi while you are there and have relatively easy access to fluent speakers. The Hindi your dd learns in year one will be supported by school study in year two. We are studying Spanish here in the States, but finding opportunities where we get good, conversational practice is difficult. It would be nice to go somewhere where we are surrounded by Spanish speakers for a while. I thought I forgot a lot of my studied Spanish, but when I started speaking it again in conversation (my side being mostly appropriate vocabulary and poorly conjugated verbs) a LOT came back. So I think even if they "lose" the language by not speaking it regularly on your return a lot will still be in there, dormant, waiting to be accessed again. The children I know who are bilingual in Spanish often refuse to speak to their parents in Spanish - but when Grandma comes, who doesn't speak English, suddenly they are fluent. I don't know if this is a confidence thing, or a feeling silly thing, or independence thing, or what. So, it may be that even when it is "lost", it is not gone. My last thought is that it seems to me intuitively that learning a language helps you learn other languages, so that even if you spend two years learning Hindi and then never speak it again, the time is not lost.

Thanks for the links! This is better than Instant Replay, but I've never been able to get them to play in anything but the little, tiny search window on the GPB site. Thank you!!!

A friend recommended this book, which I may get next time I place an Amazon order. She thought it really helped them start using Spanish. It doesn't look meaty enough to be a whole program, though. I found a used VHS copy of Muzzy El Grande in Spanish. It is a 6 part (10-15 min. each) video that my kids watch pretty regularly. I think it is effective - to a point. We watch some of the videos from this web site once in a while, they are about 15 minutes each. All these go easy on writing since my dc were still developing their writing skills. I made up some vocabulary games which are well received when I actually get around to doing them. :tongue_smilie: HTH

Sticky Burr the Prickly Peril by John Lechner Has the antagonist (Scurvy Burr) as the main character and narrator. It is a graphic novel about burrs. There is another book starring Sticky Burr, the "good" burr, called "Sticky Burr Adventures in Burrwood Forest". Not exactly literature, but benign fun.

Thank you for posting this! I saw your post on a previous thread, but this is different (and better) than what I had imagined. I'll have to do something to reinforce the connection to the cover, though... Did she just divide the period into an even number of pages, or does she use a consistent time range for each page? We're starting the Ancients next year, and I imagine the timeline there will be sparser than in the Modern era. Do the covers extend past the pages? It looks like the pages don't have holes for the "binding" ribbons. Thank you for the pictures!

2-3 hours/day We are finishing the K year for my 6yo dc. We do math every day, they read to me most days and then depending on the day of week we do FLL (3x), Spelling Workout (1 lesson, 2 review days), Spanish (2x, an hour each), Art/Music (1x), plus occasional science experiments and copywork - both of which are winding down as we get to summer. We do reading and math in the morning before leaving the breakfast table (sometimes I squeeze in language also). Most days we spend about an hour on that and then another hour later the day on whatever rotating topic we have scheduled for that day.

I hope you like it! I just bought supplies before dinner. :) I have access for a year and realized I better get going if I want to keep it spread out. I hope we like it too! :)

A timely thread for me! We are finishing up K and I just this morning printed some speed drill sheets to see where we stand. My concern was that not all the facts are automatic yet. I think I will still try them out to see how the dc do, and how they feel about speed drills, but frankly I would rather spend some regular time over the summer and next year playing more GAMES and just letting that stuff develop naturally. Thanks! You all just nipped my burgeoning concern in the bud by addressing it and lighting a path forward. :001_smile:

My criteria are: minimal effort during the season, able to be stored, we don't let it go to waste. My top three are tomatoes, butternut squash, and spinach. Tomatoes are also easy to can so if you grow a lot they can last you a while. Butternut squash lasts until January in my garage and doesn't need attention during the year (once the vines start to get ratty harvest the squash and be done, it will ripen some as it sits). Spinach is small, easy and if you jam a freezer pint bag full and stick it in the freezer that is equivalent to the purchased 10 ounce bricks from the grocery (I add a layer into meatloaf). If you want a perennial, you might consider rhubarb - big leaves, pretty stalks freezes easily. You can snip off the flower heads if you don't like them.

:iagree: I feel strongly that the script (in language, math, reading, whatever) is there for guidance. If my kids get it, we don't waste time with the script. I do try to pay close attention that they actually do get it, and that I'm not leaving out something that will be used later and I'll have to go back and find it to explain it, but other than that I don't feel tied to the script.

Isn't it crazy that they don't always learn things in a step-by-step process? I remember being amazed at this when they were potty training - "But last week was accident free!!??" We went through 100 EZ lessons, but I ended up breaking it into something like 300 easy lessons. Yours is older, so perhaps it won't take that long. Also, there is nothing wrong with reviewing/repeating. With one of mine we dropped back 30 or 40 lessons and started over. It took a lot of frustration for me to get to the point of doing these things but they worked for us. (Maybe you can avoid some of the frustration part). Another thing that helped was to mix in other early readers from the library once in a while that covered words we had already done (any words they hadn't done I just pointed to and read). One of mine in particular liked the accomplishment of finishing a book. Around lesson 85 that one refused to use the 100 EZ book at all and we switched to some hand-me-down "I See Sam" books. Again we were reviewing a lot up front, but the transition to new material was smooth. hth

I printed my favorites from this website, where you can buy software to make your own worksheets, and showed them to my husband. Turned out he didn't care a hoot so I went with my choice which was Barchowsky Fluent Hand (not even on the website). Anyway, maybe it will help you come up with a compromise. HTH Susan

My friend says our little ones can remember things easily because they aren't busy trying to remember all the other stuff (where did I park the car? did she just give me the right change? are they going to need a bathroom stop? do I still have an "emergency snack" in here somewhere?) :001_smile: I suppose you could extrapolate this down, too. My older two are remembering more stuff - like the origin and ownership of every toy in the house, if they leave the door open they will be sent back to shut it, am I going to be brow-beaten if I ask for a snack this soon after lunch.... :tongue_smilie:

I'm glad to hear the later books are better. FLL1 is so much about nouns!!! My kids had the definition down after the first week. But, ok, I have them tell me the definition once in a while and we zip through the rest of the lesson. I am very pleased at how the memorization is presented because a year ago learning a poem by heart was intimidating for all of us. My dc don't even blink when I tell them that today we are learning a new poem. We read it three times and then after that they basically have it. I have found that they enjoy correcting me when I try to remember it and that seems to cement it for them. We do three lessons a week. It wouldn't be hard to do more (or double up some of the noun work), but I have them write out the poems as copy work and writing is still a laborious process so this pace has been working.

Perhaps you need to decide what is most important to you - instilling the beautiful loopiness of the traditional scripts, or maximizing speed and legibility. I went with Barchowsky Fluent Hand (similar to Getty-Dubay I think) in part because my own handwriting was poor and I wanted something I could use along with my dc. I also wanted to minimize the differences between the print letter formations and the running-hand forms. FWIW.

I'm in the process of planning also, which is a bit intimidating, but I'm finding relief in some of the things I *don't* need to plan. For instance, we do math every week day (we take an occasional holiday, or spend an extra day on lessons as needed). So I know what we are doing, I plan to keep moving ahead as long as it is working, so it isn't something that I need to plan. Reading is currently working in a similar manner. Since these aren't things with year-end goals (except improvement) I don't feel any need to plan them. The "need to plan" category has history and science at the top of the heap. For SOTW I've written out all the chapter subsections and the map/extra activities. That way I know how many "teaching days" I need. I didn't actually assign days, just left blanks to fill in the date we do them. That way I can check that we are about half-way at the mid-point - not too fast (add more supplementary material!) and not too slow (double up some sections of reading). Plus I'm not sure what weekly schedule we will be happiest with. I'll work on science next, list the experiments in the order (roughly) that I want to do them along with needed materials to give me the best chance at actually having them on hand. Everything else falls lower in priority and also requires less planning. As we go along I will try to look ahead every four weeks, or so and see what other details I can add - library materials, internet projects, things like that. I guess I'm middle-of-the-road, I don't have the patience to plan it all out and if I haven't done some planning I start to stress out.

I switched from HWT (for the same reason) to Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting after reading a hand writing review article from the Wall Street Journal. I was more pleased with the look of all the letters, and the cd lets me print out my own copy work for them to do which has been useful. For first grade I'm going to explore using it in Word - the fonts are there from when I loaded the software, I've just not tried it. That would let me fit more copywork on a page - but I suspect my kids still need the reference lines, so I'll have to see what I can do. Forgive me now while I try to figure out how to make my first "hotlink"... Barchowsky (Yay!)