Just in case this thread is making you feel like you're the only mom in the world not getting your 60 minutes in....I wanted to post and say that I work while homeschooling and although my daughter is a voracious reader we don't get 30 minutes or an hour every day where I read to her. I understand it's ideal but it just doesn't happen and probably isn't going to any time in the near future. I try to schedule it but it's a lower priority for me than some other things. That doesn't mean it's not important, it just means it can't get done every day. I have her read out loud to me in the car, we read lesson stuff outloud together (like WWE for example, we discuss what she's been reading, we do narrations but we just don't sit down and read for 30 minutes (or even 3 twenty minute sessions). I don't think your child's overall education will be a failure if for a few years when you have all the little's she doesn't get 30 minutes of mommy reading time daily. Keep encouraging your children to read, read to them even if it's below their level because you have the little one's there too, keep lots of books around and they'll be fine.

Have you considered asking your older child to read to the younger daily? Audiobooks are another option. Also, I would think based on the other thread where you said she's not reading chapter books yet that you probably just need to give it some time. If your first child was a little accelerated it may be that your expectations are a little too high. I don't think it's unusual for a 2nd grader not to know what manure means. I pile of hay was probably a good "in context" guess. I mention expecations because I've found myself getting frustrated when I teach kids in Sunday School several years older than my daughter who don't seem to have the same reading ability and comprehension as she does. I've realized that my expectations were just a bit off because dd is ahead of where most kids are at her age.

My dd was an advanced reader so I'm going to answer based on the stage of reading you're talking about rather than a specific age/grade because I don't have much experience outside of our family. When dd was capable of reading chapter books/novels but preferred picture books I still let her read a lot of picture books but tried to introduce longer books (Alice in Wonderland, Little House, etc.. What finally pushed her over the edge in thinking that chapter books weren't too bad was the Magic Treehouse series. We were in the bookstore and I told her I was going to buy her a chapter book to try. She of course said she wasn't interested but started reading it in the car and finished it the same day. We went back the next day and bought 3 more which she promtly finished. After that we decided the library copies would work fine so mom and dad wouldn't go broke! After a few weeks reading the Magic Treehouse books she started picking up the books she wasn't interested in previously like Alice in Wonderland and started reading them. I don't know if it was a confidence issue or what specifically changed her mind but she just started reading more difficult material. I think as long as you keep trying it will eventually click. DD still reads picture books regularly in between things like The Hobbit and The Girl Who Could Fly.

:iagree: I fly several times a year with dd6 and we never have a problem. We're almost always on Soutwest which doesn't have assigned seating but they let families board between the A & B group if you don't have an A boarding pass. As dd gets older and we're not allowed in family boarding I'll just make sure to check in right at the 24 hour mark before my flight to get an A boarding pass. A lot of people complain about Southwest not having assigned seats but I actually find it works better for us than flying on other airlines. I also can't imagine someone not giving up a seat when necessary for a parent and child to sit together.

We watched the video and dd worked a problem or two like that but I think it was mostly to help children who were having trouble with the concept of place value. DD understands place value just find and didn't like the upside down multiplication so I didn't force it. When he teaches things on the DVD more than one way I generally have dd do a few problems each way and then pick which way she prefers to work the rest of the problems.

I started the history cycle when dd was barely 4 but we took more than a year to do year one. History was immediately her favorite subject and she loved reading all the library books about Egypt, Greece & Rome. IMHO it doesn't hurt to start early because young children love stories about mummies, mythology, etc. We started science at dd's request when she was about 5 1/2. I will say it is what gets skipped most often if we don't have time to complete every subject. I'm not concerned about it because I don't think formal science is necessarily a must until later elementary age.

I used exclusively mus until we got to the Delta level. I have some Singapore books that I bought before we decided on mus and dd does problems in them occasionally and has problem translating what she learns in mus to another curriculum. I only started supplementing because dd loves to read and after seeing threads about living math books I decided to add life of Fred and other library books just to make things more fun.

I use Apologia but not in a coop setting. The books are designed to use for a wide age range. Younger students might have trouble reading the text on their own. If I were planning to use it in a coop I would probably have the reading done outside of coop and then do experiments and notebook pages for the coop assignments. It would be a lot of reading to try to do in a group setting. You could also do supplemental library books and/or dvd's. The notebooks have suggestions for each chapter.

I'll be watching this thread because this is my plan too. We're only 4 weeks in to wwe3 right now. Halcyon - did you see significant improvement from the beginning of the curriculum to where you are now with your son? Did you do WWE 1 & 2? I skipped level two at dd's request because she wanted the lessons to be more independent so I'm wondering how much progression in skill you saw over the course of a year.

Yep, that's why I mentioned the Math Bingo. In Rocket Math dd seems to be more focused on building her rockets than doing math. In Math Bingo she has to get problems right to earn some sort of bingo bugs to sling around. She finds it quite entertaining but ends up doing a lot of math. You can also have him practice basic division in the app.

for some reason the first time I typed geomaster in the search just now it didn't show up. I searched for geography and found it on the 3rd or 4th page of geography apps. Then I searched again wondering why it didn't find it and it showed up under geomaster. No idea why that happened:glare:. I did find out in the process they have a free app called GeoMaster US States. I hadn't seen that before. It's definately formatted for the ipad. Visuamobile is the developer.

We have GeoMaster Plus for geography. It's challenging but so far dd likes it. I don't think it was free. I tried to look up how much the app costs but it doesn't show me because I already downloaded it. We also have stack the countries. DD plays it but not as much as stack the states. I think mostly because she knows the state information better.

My dd6 likes Rocket Math but prefers Math Bingo. Rocket Math works on a lot of different math skills. Math Bingo is nice because you can set it to just multiplication or just division for practice. It was either free or close to it because I don't spend much on apps.

I would lean towards the ipad to share. I think the idea of one cool gift to share vs. 2 out of the 3 getting something is more workable. Have you checked out the apple store for refurbished ipads? If you don't think they need a camera you can get a refurbished first generation ipad for $399. I'm not sure if where you're located but you might also check craigslist. There are several for sale in my area at a $50 or $100 discount that still have warranties. Most of them are people who decided to buy more memory or upgrade from an ipad to an ipad2.

I just searched for Archimedes in iTunes and it returned several free podcasts & iTunes university classes and a nice looking audiobook. This made me wonder if others are using any of these resources or I'd maybe I could find a list somewhere of stuff people have already used that was good. Right now I'm just searching for random stuff but it doesn't seem like the most efficient approach.

I had never heard the term until I saw it here so I posted asking for a definition and suggestions. :tongue_smilie: So far the Sir Cumference series and Marilyn Burns books have been hits. There are others I found through links provided by other people here. The site I started with is this: http://www.livingmath.net/ReadersbyConcept/tabid/268/Default.aspx There were other sites mentioned on recent threads. You could probably search for living math books and find several options.

Yep, and on weeks where a hectic schedule and surprise visits from relatives mean you've done very little actual schoolwork. Several times in the last two weeks we've done math & I basically let her read the rest of the day. :tongue_smilie:

I think possibly people were more upset about the dogs because it was a major theme in that book. I don't have the books in front of me but I read it and if I recall the character that died was the one who was supposed to take care of the bell tower but chose to watch tv and drink sluice and eat junk food instead. There was no graphic description of the indicent. When I asked my 6 year old if she remembered what happene she said there were 4 brothers and that after Ned didn't fix it when he was supposed to the book said now there were 2 brothers. I personally wasn't outraged about the dogs or the bell tower falling. It didn't upset my daughter either.

This is probably a shameless brag but better to do it here than on Facebook right? Dh husband was meeting with a client today. The wife is a ps school teacher & the husband is retired and is a very good artists. He brought in some work for dh to look at. Dh called dd in the office to look at it and she said, "wow, these are great. I didn't know you were an artist and that you worked in pointillism style". The wife said, "wow, you can tell you're homeschooled!" This is even more amusing when you understand I can't even draw a stick figure but thanks to discovering the wtm method we've been reading art books and visiting museums. It also made me feel better about the fact that we were doing schoolwork at 6pm tonight when they came in.

We are working through island alongside fll3. I plan to to finish sentence island an practice island around the time we finish FLL and the go through building Language and music of the hemispheres during the summer. I can't envision using it as a stand alone. My original plan was to skip FLL 4 and go to the new book peace hill cancelled. Now I'm considering going with the next mct level as the stand alone. We'll just have to see.

I haven't seen many really negative reviews other than the one in iPad only newspaper "The Daily". I was amused to see the review on their apps/tech page. It was on the front page. It was long and detailed but can be summed up by saying they like the ipad better.

I use both programs. I say just start the next book but keep in mind that book 4 is the toughest book. Some children have problems with sylllables which are covered in book 4. We are currently on book 8. Dd found book 4 challenging but not 5-7. FLL and etc cover different skills. I didn't see any value in slowing down phonics instruction so we just worked one book after another including summertime. We don't all subjects year round but we do etc & math?

If you're daughter is a good reader and accelerated in math I would probably plan for her to do a large chunk or all of the book on Fridays. Dd didn't take very long to do the whole book. I know for her having to wait to find out what happened next would have been torture. I have been doing a lot of living math books lately. The idea never occurred to me before reading some threads but dd told me yesterday math is much more fun now.

I'm not sure about when you'll be finished. I always love when dh gives me answers like that. Usually he can tell from my confused look it didn't make sense so he'll say "why don't you check on that online homeschool board thing". I think you should capitalize on the interest as long as it doesn't interfere with other subjects. By interfere I just mean as long as you have time to get the basics done. We started with Latin 2 years ago. DD wanted to add Greek but I waited until this year. We use the Classical Academic Press materials and she saw the Greek advertisement in her Latin book. She's picking it up so quickly that I realize we could probably have started sooner. I realized her little brain is a lot better at remembering things than mine so I shouldn't hold her back just because I can't always keep up. I have no shame during Greek time saying "what's this letter again:tongue_smilie:". I think she gets a kick out of knowing the answer when I don't. I'm working on my own to learn the Greek to get ahead of her but I'm not sure it will happen. She's expressed an interest in Spanish so I'm planning to let her add that after she get's her own ipad. I'm going to download the app someone mentioned her yesterday iStart Spanish and let it be a fun supplement for her. I think with the Romance languages especially it is fine to tackle more than one at a time as long as they seem to be progressing well. I think dd wanted to learn something totally different, like Chinese or Japanese, I might wait a few years to get more of the Greek and Latin & English grammar down but other than that I say go for it. I think if you wait until Middle School or High School they might lose their enthusiasm for the idea.

I wouldn't correct him as he writes. When he's done I would offer to edit or type it up together to make it look like a real book. You could discuss the actual editing/publication process and make it an educational experience. I wouldn't push if he wasn't interested.