We love the game TransAmerica. My 6-year-old has no trouble playing it. GeoPuzzles are fun, too.

I don't actually know how much we have saved for college at the moment. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 for each child. We have 12 years until the oldest goes to college, and 7 years until our house is paid for. My husband works at a decent university that will provide free tuition, but we hope to offer our children more choices.

My husband and daughter go to a German School every Saturday morning during the school year. He's taking beginner German level 2, and she's taking first grade German for native speakers. We do a lot of field trips on the weekends, when Dad is home to join us. He enjoys coming along to the museums and things. We often go to a museum every weekend -- we didn't go this past weekend, and it was sort of odd! Piano lessons with Dad also often happen on the weekend, plus we frequently watch documentaries, have read-alouds, and do some reading. Oh, and board games, we play board games on the weekend. We don't do written work, though. Well, except when the kids want to do random workbooks for fun. But that's not part of our regular curriculum. :tongue_smilie:

I finally wrote up our week. Erika finished Math Mammoth Subtraction 1 this week, which seems like a major milestone. I also had to dust off my extremely rusty knowledge of phonetics to help her with one of her German exercises this week. I still can't figure out why the curriculum authors thought the kids needed to know this. It's kind of like the difference between the voiced and unvoiced "th" in English, but much more so -- it's almost impossible to pronounce the wrong "ch" sound in German when saying a word.

I never had a moment like that. I learned to read gradually, without explicit instruction - my mother thought children shouldn't learn how to read before first grade, so she was not encouraging it. I would describe it as a slow awakening. By the time I was 7, I was reading books like James and the Giant Peach. My daughter has been similar, though I did explicitly teach her, at her request. Had she not asked, I would have waited until Kindergarten. Anyway, her reading has improved slowly and incrementally over the course of the last two years. She now, at 6, reads books like Magic Tree House at about 50 wpm.

Thanks, that's a useful list!

We are getting all of this done: Math Reading Science Social Studies German Art Music appreciation

I'm confused about reading levels, and am hoping someone with more knowledge of how this works can explain it to me. My kid can read books that have a wide range of "levels" associated with them. The main factor in determining whether she can read it isn't the "lexile level" or "grade level equivalent," but the number of words on a page, whether or not there are pictures, and the overall length of the book. Here are some examples of books she's read recently: Young Cam Jansen and the Dinosaur Game (Lexile: 370, AR: 2.5) Little Horse on His Own (AR: 2.9) Jenius: The Amazing Guinea Pig (Lexile: NC860, AR: 4.8) Dinosaurs Before Dark (Lexile: 240, AR: 2.7) African Animals, Ann Squire (AR: 5.1) - This one has the most complicated vocabulary, but is shorter than some of the others; it doesn't conform to my general perception that it's the number of words on the page, pictures, and overall length that determine difficulty for her. I'm pretty sure my daughter's perception of how difficult these books were to read is the order I've listed them in. I don't feel like the difference in reading level between the easiest of these books and the most challenging is 2.5 grade levels -- perhaps half a grade level, the way my daughter evaluates the difficulty of reading material. There are tons of books she would not be able to read that would be rated 4.8-5.1 in the AR system. Is there some other system of evaluating books for elementary school children that would work better with the way my child perceives difficulty? Of course, I can easliy determine whether she'd be able to read a book by looking at it, but it would save me a lot of time if I could look up whether a particular book would be likely to work for her.

I voted that we have "rabbit ears only," but that doesn't really describe what we have at all. We have an indoor antenna that's several steps up from rabbit ears. We have TiVo. We have Netflix streaming. We have AppleTV. We have a ton of DVD's. My kids watch a fair amount of TV, between the German-language children's shows and the English-language documentaries. They watch 15-20 minutes a day of American children's shows that are not specifically selected for their educational content. This would be things like Sid the Science Kid, Dinosaur Train, Wild Kratts, etc. My Kindergartner watches 20-30 minutes a day of some kind of documentary related to our schoolwork. Both of my kids watch German TV shows and podcasts, which we consider to be an important aspect of our language program. After the kids are in bed, I watch shows like "Criminal Minds" and "CSI: NY." My husband watches sports. We sometimes watch things like "Masterpiece Mystery" or a DVD movie together.

It was actually super easy to figure out for first grade. She has tables showing which books in the blue series are for which grade on her website, so then you just look at the section headings in the table of contents for the light blue series, and find the relevant sections in the blue series books. I assume it would be similarly easy for other grades, but I haven't tried it. I originally planned to use MM as a supplement, but it worked so well for my daughter that we have used it as our main program this year.

I have a (very) part-time job. I use the income from this job to pay for homeschool stuff and extracurricular activities. We also allocate $25 a month from our household budget, and pay for the subway fare and food on field trips out of our household budget. Our biggest expenses this school year were a family membership to the public swimming pools ($500), the stuff we needed to do Lego WeDo robotics ($400, because I bought a netbook to use for homeschooling in addition to the Lego stuff), tuition at the Saturday German school ($325 per semester), and books from Germany (reading/writing curriculum, readers, read-alouds; about $400).

One other thing- I don't know how much you're doing with German, but one thing that recently occurred to me was to buy German-language books about things we were studying. I feel dumb for not thinking of it earlier in the year. We are now happily reading a book about Africa in German. I'm wondering if a German book for preschoolers about kids around the world might be a helpful addition to your study. Perhaps Dein buntes Wörterbuch der Kinder der Welt? Shipping is a bit steep from Amazon.de, but I find that if I buy a bunch of things at once, it's not so bad.

There is one homeschooled child in the book, but it is definitely mostly about schooled kids. Some of them walk hours a day to get to and from school, at least one goes to boarding school, etc. I am not dealing with a child who would rather be in school, so I don't have any personal insight. I personally get more of a feeling of "learning is a privilege" out of the book, as opposed to "school is awesome."

Getting back to this -- here's what my basic approach has looked like: * Stand my daughter in front of a wall map and ask her what part of the world she'd like to learn about next. * Obtain relevant library books. * Read section in atlas out loud to her. * Read from Children Just Like Me and A School Like Mine. * Watch a documentary. * Read library books out loud, or have her read them out loud to me. * Have her color in a flag of the country we are studying, while I'm reading aloud. * Have her mark some important features on a black-line map. * When feasible, do an art project related to the area. * Read folk tales aloud. (As someone else mentioned, Around the World in 80 Tales is good for this.) * Visit relevant museum exhibits (we happen to live near the Smithsonian). We skipped eating food from different parts of the world, because my daughter is a very picky eater. It wouldn't have worked out. Documentaries we've enjoyed: Antarctic Wildlife Adventure (features homeschooled kids!) Australia the Beautiful Blue Planet: Coral Seas (went with our Australia study) Arctic Exposure (we watched this when we studied Canada) Wild China National Geographic Africa My daughter is really into animals, so we've heavily emphasized the habitats and animals in different parts of the world. We have not yet studied any part of Europe or South America. I'm leaving Europe for last because I feel we've already got that pretty well integrated into our life/school. She uses the Anki software for memory work, so I've incorporated the flags of countries we've studied (along with other countries of personal importance to us), locator maps, and the locations/names of the continents into that work. We really like the GeoPuzzle brand of puzzles. The ones that focus on specific parts of the world have puzzle pieces shaped like the individual countries, which is really helpful. If you happen to own an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad, I highly recommend the "Stack the Countries" application. One thing that's really worked for me is not to stress about keeping to a schedule. It's Kindergarten. If we wanted to spend six weeks on China, we spent six weeks on China. I did not plan in advance what countries we would study during the year, nor did I have a preconceived notion about how many countries we would study. As long as we're learning something and enjoying it, I feel that it's fine to let things run their natural course. Oh, and we've been doing a temperature graphing project all year. Every week, we've used the Weather Underground site to find out what the high temperature was the previous Monday at the South Pole, in Canberra, and where we live. The South Pole and Canberra happen to be located in the first two continents we studied. It's been interesting to watch the temperatures change over time. My daughter has learned a lot about graphing, about the seasons in the southern hemisphere, and about extreme temperatures! This exercise has also given her a better understanding of negative numbers than I think she would otherwise have had.

I buy lots of stuff on Amazon, but RR has many homeschool-specific things Amazon doesn't carry. I also find their product descriptions helpful. I always use the free shipping on Amazon, so I'm used to waiting around for my order. I've never felt that a RR order took a particularly long time to arrive.

This year we've been doing something like that. Books we have used include: National Geographic World Atlas for Young Explorers Children Just Like Me A School Like Mine We've used lots of library books, many of them about animals in the parts of the world we've studied. I have been particularly impressed with the "True Books" series, which my daughter can read herself at this point in the school year. They have books about animals and about the various continents. We've watched lots of documentaries, mostly from Netflix streaming. We use a big wall map and a globe. I allowed my daughter to decide which countries we would study, but encouraged her to move around the world. I didn't get hung up on specifics -- for example, she wanted to study Africa with a particular emphasis on Cameroon, whereas in Asia we only learned about China. I need to run, but if you have questions about what we've done, I'll be happy to go into it further.

My daughter is somewhere between half a year and a full year ahead of the public school here. She would probably be bored. I am not terribly concerned with what the public school is doing.

I don't know about the current edition, but in the first edition of TWTM, it is suggested that reading lessons be broken up into two sections: phonics at one time of day, and the same amount of time spent reading from an easy reader at some other time of day. This edition of TWTM predates the OPGTR. So if you're not already doing it, how about "supplementing" with reading from real books? Disclaimer: We gave up the OPGTR after lesson 118 because it bored my daughter to tears. I switched to just having her read from real books.

I learned diagramming in school, but did not find it helpful, and have since forgotten how. My husband went to Catholic school, where they diagrammed extensively. He can explain grammar, but he doesn't write very well. I plan to decide whether diagramming sentences is a good use of time once I find out what kind of writers my children are.

This conversation definitely got me thinking as well, and I was able to obtain the entire article, which I have skimmed. The homeschooled students, who were in grades 3-5, were given a specific writing prompt. For third grade, the prompt was to write a letter to a friend. The students did the writing in a classroom-type environment with other study participants, and the writing was untimed. It was evaluated based on the 6+1 Trait method, though they did not use the +1 (presentation). The students typically scored 4 out of a possible 6, so in the "above average" range. The reason why the researcher thought this was slightly behind was based on the demographics of the parents. 35% had graduate degrees, 30% had undergraduate degrees, 10% had high school diplomas, and 25% declined to answer the question. Children of parents with this educational background would apparently be expected to score even higher than "above average." She also determined that 44% of the parents reported spending 15-30 minutes a day teaching writing, and 25% spent 31-46 minutes on writing.

Well, as I said, I didn't discuss it with her in depth. I do know a little bit about the methodology she used. Apparently, she solicited volunteer homeschooling families, and had the actual writing of homeschooled students evaluated. So she wasn't relying on standardized tests or on school results of formerly homeschooled students. Obviously, a pool of volunteer homeschooling families is not as good as using a random sample. I also don't know what the exact qualifications were of the evaluators, what kind of evaluation criteria were used, whether the evaluators knew the students were homeschooled, etc. Now that you've got me thinking about it, I went and found the abstract of the dissertation: http://gradworks.umi.com/33/35/3335412.html We only discussed this in passing -- our conversation had nothing to do with homeschooled students and writing. I can tell you that this person is in no way negative about homeschooling.

The woman who conducted my homeschooling review in January (legal requirement) happened to have done her PhD dissertation on homeschoolers and writing. We didn't discuss it in depth, but her research found that homeschooled students were behind in writing, but not to a worrying degree.

You will not know what to do with some of the lab sheets without the Lab Sheet Annotations. It also has helpful lead-in exercises. I would not try to use Miquon without it.

Writing is not my Kindergarten daughter's favorite thing, but I'd say she writes more than that in her schoolwork. Usually the equivalent of a few sentences in German, one or two sentences of copywork taken from a book we're reading, plus writing numbers in math and some writing for science when we do that (a sentence or two describing observations and results). I also sometimes have her write a letter or a caption for a picture. In an average day, perhaps five or six sentences. Of course, she is a girl. She is also somewhat advanced academically. So I don't know how useful this information is!

My son uses the Brainquest Pre-K workbook when he wants to feel like he's "doing school." I find it heavy on learning to write letters, and light on everything else. It also has a glaring error in it - "xylophone" is given as a word that starts with the same SOUND as "X-ray." I preferred the "Comprehensive Curriculum of Basic Skills" workbook from School Specialty Publishing we had for my daughter when she was that age. It had more fun activities involving cutting and pasting, which also have the benefit of taking up more time. It also had more pages. I remember it had one or two things in it that didn't really make sense, but overall I thought it was more fun and provided more hours of entertainment. My daughter also used the K workbook from the same series when she was a preschooler. I bought all of these workbooks at Costco during back to school time.