I knew two kids in high school who were briilliant, one more so than the other. He's in cryptography now. Almost everyone I know would test in the top 2% of the population on an IQ test, and I know quite a few people who would test in the top .25%, but these two really stood out as being something special.

I should clarify that I was not suggesting that Biblical history is an unimportant subject. I believe that every well-educated person in our culture needs to be familiar with the important Bible stories, including those recounting the origins and history of the Israelites.

The Bible has a number of problems as a source of historical information. Of course, many people believe that the authors of the various books of the Bible were divinely inspired, and that therefore, the information contained within the Bible may have greater historical validity than we would attribute to a similar, but non-divinely-inspired text. I say "may have" because there is a great diversity of views even among those who are believers, so there are many Christians and Jews (I am not as familiar with the beliefs of Muslims) who believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, but nonetheless do not believe that all of the facts contained within it are historically true. As a non-believer, I obviously do not believe that the information contained in the Bible has greater validity than other sources, and therefore would evaluate it based on the same criteria I would use to evaluate other sources. Some of those criteria would include: * How long after the events in question did the author write the work? Did the author personally observe the events? What sources did he or she use? * What corroboration of the events is available from other sources? * What is the author's possible bias or agenda? * Is the document authentic? That is, was it actually written by the person it is attributed to at the time when it purports to have been written? * Is the original manuscript available, or are we relying on a later copy? Is it possible that changes were introduced in the copying process?

Whereas I, as a non-Christian, view SOTW Volume I as having a very heavy Christian bias. There are entire chapters which present stories from the Bible as historical fact. In the process, SWB also devotes an inordinate amount of time to happenings involving the Israelites. While I'm not disputing the historical significance of Christianity, it seems to me that much more space is devoted to it and its origins in SOTW Vol. 1 than would be called for based on the significance of the events during the time period in question. I bring this up to make a point about history. There is no such thing as objectivity in history. We all have our own bias, which we bring to the study of history. Anything that has ever been written about history has a bias. Original source documents have a bias. The decision about which original source documents to read is a source of bias. No matter how hard we try to understand the original context, we are unable to escape our own cultural background in reading history. What seems to me a satisfactory account of the American Civil War may seem to you an unsatisfactory one. Neither one of us is necessarily "wrong" -- we just look at it differently. Which, getting back to the original subject, is why it's so hard to find a good history program. Everyone's definition of "good" is different.

You might think of it this way: You're not starting her "Kindergarten Year" at an odd time -- her "Kindergarten Year" can still begin in August or September. You're just offering her a curriculum appropriate to her ability, which happens to be labelled "Grade K". This is one of the benefits of homeschooling! You can move at her pace, rather than worrying about what everyone else her age is doing. If you sent her to school, wouldn't her ideal school offer a differentiated curriculum that met each child at their actual working level, rather than forcing all of the children to move along at exactly the same pace? My daughter won't be starting her "Kindergarten Year" until August/September. But we work regularly with materials that would typically be thought of as "Kindergarten curriculum." Today, for example, we did our second lesson on telling time using the Math Mammoth Clock worktext, she did Miquon lab sheet A-15, and we did half of lesson 50 in the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading.

Hopefully you will get an answer from someone who's actually used the program, but I didn't want you to go without an answer. I've only read the free sample lesson from Sequential Spelling, but my understanding of the method was that you were to read each word, then read the word in a sentence or two, then read the word again, and have the child do their best to figure out how to spell it. Then I think the idea is to write the correct spelling on the whiteboard, with the core pattern in a different color, and have the child correct their own spelling.

Shen and Zhao's short program almost brought me to tears. It was truly a thing of beauty. I was sad that their long program wasn't really their best skate, but I'm so happy for them that they won the gold medal. I saw them skate in person at the World Championships in 2003, and we were all amazed at their sheer guts -- she was landing on a completely numbed ankle due to a serious injury in training.

Lots of great suggestions so far (Mighty Mind and pattern blocks are real favorites here), but wanted to add a suggestion for the card game "Set". It says it's for ages 6 and up. My daughter started playing it at 4 1/2 and loves it. Even if your daughter can't manage the full game right now, she could probably handle the easy version (you remove all the patterned cards, leaving only the solid ones).

I'm not the right person to respond to the rest of your post, but I think I can speak to this. Relax. You are not going to mess up his education. Yes, you may realize two years from now that it would have been better to use a different math curriculum, or that your son responds better to more/less structure, or whatever. Realizing that you have done things in a less-than-optimal way is not an indication that you are messing up his education -- they are a sign that you are paying attention! Exactly what he learns or doesn't learn in any given year of elementary school is not really that important in the grand scheme of things. If you detect a deficiency in his learning, you will have time to work with him to improve it. When you have doubts about your ability to homeschool, it is easy to latch on to every perceived error or weakness and think of it as a reason homeschooling may not be best for your child. Remember, though, that even in the most ideal possible school environment, there are going to be things that are less than perfect. Can you honestly say that you think there are MORE things wrong with what you are doing at home than there would be with whatever school he would go to?

You might look into MEP. It's available online for free. There are a few parts which require a password for access, but you can e-mail the people in charge of the program and explain that you are homeschooling and they'll send it to you. The mep-homeschoolers yahoo group also has the password. Anyway, the MEP lesson plans I've been working with (UK Year 1 - Kindergarten from a US perspective) do make considerable use of manipulatives. We use Cuisenaire rods instead of the paper number strips called for in the lesson plans. My daughter also prefers to do a lot of exercises on the white board or with the number cards instead of on the worksheet pages.

All of the people I know who are strong believers in Alfie Kohn's ideas are unschoolers. :) To add something a little more meaningful, some ideas I think would be compatible with Kohn's views include: 1) Setting aside certain hours as "school hours," during which activities like TV and recreational computer use would not be permitted. 2) Allowing the child to have input, in an age-appropriate way, into the curriculum. 3) Allowing the child choice about what order the subjects would be done in, or which topics would be addressed on a given day. For example, if you have more than one math curriculum available, they could choose which one to work in on a given day, or which one to do first. 4) Encouraging the child to evaluate their own work, rather than giving grades.

I recommend more bookcases. I have no idea how someone could get by with only three small bookcases. I need three full shelves just for reference books -- a variety of dictionaries in several languages, nature guides, etiquette books, grammar and style references, holy books of major religions, reference books about different religions, atlases, star charts, etc. I also have two shelves of art history books, four shelves of biographies, five shelves of children's books, three shelves of non-English literature, and so on. I think I have 11 bookcases, though it's possible that I might have miscounted. My basic philosophy is that bookcases belong on every wall that's not being used for something else. :) Oh, and I do get rid of books that I don't feel have lasting value in my home. I make excellent use of several different libraries. I don't even buy very many books, they just accumulate over time!

If you haven't already read it, you will probably be interested to hear what Susan Wise Bauer has to say about starting with an older child: http://www.welltrainedmind.com/older-child/ No personal experience, sorry I can't help further!

Hmm, how many colors of paint... Nine or ten. We have quite a few fairly bright colors, though we usually only do one wall in a bright color and have the others off-white. All the colors in our public spaces are warm, except for the recently-renovated bathroom which is blue -- we were going for a water theme there.

In addition to the idea of copying workbook problems to a whiteboard, another thing I do with my daughter is have her complete workbook problems using number and symbol cards instead of writing. I often let her choose her preferred mode for doing math -- so if she wants to use the whiteboard, we use the whiteboard. If she wants to use number cards, we use number cards. If she wants to do workbook pages, we do that. If she wants to use Cuisenaire rods, we do that. Often, we use several different methods in the same math lesson, so if it seems really important that she do a particular kind of thing, I'm able to steer the lesson in that direction. She also enjoys using the "Math Drills" application on the iPod Touch to practice arithmetic in idle moments. (I also enjoy the Math Drills application -- the multiplication and division are a lot of fun for me, too!)

I wouldn't normally answer a thread like this, because I don't think of what we do as homeschooling since my children are so young. However, since my children are slightly older than yours, I figure what I do might actually be relevant. :) I don't prepare. I do need to read ahead a bit in our math curricula, but I find that I'm easily able to accomplish this while we're doing math together. There are times during the math lesson when she spends a few minutes doing some worksheet-type work, and I'm able to review upcoming lesson plans. Reading lessons require no preparation. The other stuff we do -- reading library books aloud, doing art projects, mazes, cooking, etc. either don't require preparation, or can be trivially prepared while the kids are playing. If i have "projects" I want to do, like creating laminated cards for a game, I do that in the evening. That's also when I read books.

Do you mean a dictionary for children, or a dictionary for the whole family? I've always been happy with the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Within the space available (it's no OED), it provides a good amount of information, including information about word origins. Hmm, makes me wonder if I should get a new edition, the one I have is getting pretty ratty...

Julie, what this illustrates most clearly is that these issues are always seen in relation to one's own frame of reference. It would never even have occurred to me that it was possible for someone to have interpreted the original poster's request in this manner. I really appreciate you being so specific, because such an interpretation is so far outside my own frame of reference, I was unable even to conceive of it. The way I read the original post, I imagined that she wanted her children to know the most important stories from Christianity so they would recognize them when they are referred to in art and literature. It wouldn't have occurred to me that anyone would want to teach their children Christian stories for the specific purpose of illustrating that they are silly or wrong. Thanks, I really learned something about your world view today. Incidentally, I have not found all children's Bibles to be essentially equivalent. I agree with the recommendation of the DK Children's Illustrated Bible for this purpose.

I print the pages as needed. So far, that has meant printing five or so workbook pages at a time; I generally keep my laptop handy while we're doing lessons so I can refer to the lesson plans on the computer. I have a laser printer with a low cost-per-page, so it wouldn't save me money to print at a copy shop. I give my daughter only the page with the current exercise.

It's interesting to me that different people had it make sense by reading different parts of the teacher's materials. For me, the First Grade Diary was what really showed me how one would teach with the Miquon materials. Then I use the Lab Sheet Annotations to figure out what to do with the individual sheets and how to introduce specific topics. Good luck, I'm sure you will figure it out!

Smooth, small group set, and either plastic or wood. The colors of the plastic ones are brighter than the colors of the wooden ones, and the finish is smoother on the plastic. They're solid and feel nice, not like a cheap imitation of the wood ones. The wooden ones only have two advantages I can think of over the plastic ones: they're made of a renewable resource, and they have an aesthetic advantage if you prefer natural materials. We have both kinds mixed up in one bin, and my daughter always chooses the wooden ones. However, I think a different child would choose the plastic ones instead, so it's really a toss-up. You can't go wrong either way. In my view, the introductory set does not provide enough rods. For example, there is an exercise early in the orange book that requires 28 white rods and 14 red rods. Of course you can skip it, but why not have enough rods to actually do it? Plus, having a a larger assortment of rods means kids can engage in more open-ended play, something the children in the Miquon school did a lot of.

One thing you could do, if you wanted to continue with RightStart math, would be to do it much less intensively, and combine it with other math activities. You might incorporate pattern completion, Cuisenaire rod games, and/or pattern block puzzles. You could do just a minute or two of the activities that are challenging for her, either in between other activities, or as part of a math lesson that included things drawn from other sources. My daughter has math lessons almost daily, at her request (I would have preferred to wait until she was actually in K next year, but I also wasn't going to turn her down). We're using MEP and Miquon, but we don't follow anyone's lesson plans verbatim. Instead, our math lessons usually go something like this: 1) I ask her what she'd like to do. Typical answers are work on the whiteboard, work with the number line, work with magnets, or do math on paper (this means a workbook activity). 2) I figure out something to do in the mode she requested. For example, today she wanted to do something with the number line, so we started with some oral math involving the number line. This is an activity from MEP, but one she's already pretty proficient at. 3) Once she's gotten to do something of her choice, she's amenable to having me move things in another direction. Today we switched from doing oral math on the number line to doing oral math using number cards, a new activity. We generally repeat these steps until the timer goes off, after 45 minutes. Today we moved from the oral math to doing MEP worksheet problems on the whiteboard. One type of problem we did was another variant of the kind of thing we'd just been doing, while the second type of problem was completely different. We finished up with a Miquon page of her choice; today she picked one that was very easy for her. This method is working well for us right now -- we both have a level of input into what we're doing that makes us happy. It's not always the case that she's the one picking the activities that are easy for her; sometimes I'm the one picking an "easy" activity, and she's the one picking a challenging one. I try to be very flexible and focus on what the lesson is actually trying to teach, rather than on the exact form of the lesson. Earlier on, she resisted the use of the number line, so I shelved it and taught the concepts another way. I re-introduced the number line just a few days ago, and now it's fine.

German kids still use fountain pens in school, and I've never heard of them using anything other than cartridges. There's an entire category of fountain pens known as the "Schulfüller" in Germany, of which the Pelikano is a classic example.

We're using MEP in conjunction with Miquon here. The main advantage of supplementing MEP, in my inexperienced opinion, is that it's better for my daughter if we mix things up. She's a young 5 (not yet K age), and although MEP has a lot of different activities in each lesson plan, it would be too much for her if we just did straight MEP. Supplementing with Miquon allows us to take a break and do something different, or look at something another way. For example, yesterday she was doing oral problems (drawn from MEP) like, "2 + 3 - 1 + 2 - 2." It's too much for her to do those problems entirely in her head at present, so I taught her how to use the (MEP) number line to do it. When she had that down, we switched to using the Cuisenaire rods, which she's familiar with from Miquon, to do the same thing. During this math lesson, she also did a patterning worksheet from Miquon, some inequality problems from a MEP worksheet, and some (MEP) inequality problems on the whiteboard. My main objective for yesterday's lesson was to help her get to the point where she could answer questions in the form, "If Bob has two books, and Bob has one more book than Joe has, how many books does Joe have?" She had trouble answering this type of question previously. I could have attacked it head-on, but the best approach for my daughter was to spend half an hour doing other things first, and then get back to the part she was having trouble with.

In addition to all the other great ideas, how about: Playing memory -- you can play memory with ordinary playing cards, or make your own deck. Looking at art together -- you can talk about the picture (what is going on in the picture, what is going to happen next, what do you like about the picture, etc.) or you can play games with the picture (can you find two white flowers in this picture? what do you see that I should find?