Thank you both for the feedback. This board is so helpful! When you only have one student it's hard to know if you are on track. Bonniebeth4 she would like to give me every detail and usually will start with that and I have to give her some parameters. She has really improved over the last month since we started wwe3. We were doing wwe1 and when we finished she asked if we could change to something she reads herself instead of me reading to her so we skipped level 2. The more detailed instructions seem to be helping her. "Tell me something you remember" was too general for her. When we started this level and I told her to summarize the story in three sentences she said, "you've got to be kidding me, there's no way I can do it that short" but she seems to be getting the hang of it. After we're done with each lesson we read the suggestions in the teacher book to give her exposure to good examples. Thanks the encouragement on the creativity. I was not very creative as a child and language arts was never my strong suit son I tend to be a little too focused on the rules instead of the creativity. I was a tomboy who loved math and I've always said God has a sense of humor because he gave me a dd who wants to be a princess, loves to write stories & hates math even though she's good at it. She told me this week pirate's are more fun than princesses so there may be hope on that front:)

Thank you for your insight....we definately don't need any extra exposure to sassy or snotty attitudes. We avoid the Disney channel and most cartoons for the same reason.

Thank you so much for the information. the attitudes and emotions sound way too mature for her. We are pretty conservative and probably would have to have way too many conversations we don't want to have yet if she read them. We're studying mythology and discussing various religions and how they differ from what we believe so that content wouldn't bother me so much but the adultery and adolescent behavior would.

I would appreciate any feedback from someone who has read the series about whether these books are appropriate for an advanced 6 year old. She has read everything she can find on Greek & Roman mythology and the Mary Pope Osbourne series. She's also read the Chronicles of Narnia series in it's entirety. I am specifically interested in whether there's inappropriate romantic content. We are a pretty conservative Christian family and since there's no way for me to read everything before she does I could use some insight from some other parents.

Etc books are cheap and require no printing. That's pretty much all I used for pre-k. I discovered mus primer after we were past that age but if I were doing pre-k again I would use that along with their blocks. Hwot pre-k or k workbooks are also inexpensive and don't require printing or prep I tried some other curriculums first and I'm just not crafty & they seemed to require a lot of prep work which felt unnecessary for pre-k. I see all these blogs and posts about pre-k activities and lap books and crafts and workboxes and all this super-cute stuff that people do and i'm impressed but I realized early on that just wasn't my strong suit. We just read & do academics and then she plays and does crafts on her own.

We bought one two weeks ago and plan to buy another one for dh beforenthe end of the year. We'll both use it for business but we agreed I would get the first one to use for business & school since he has a newer laptop & I travel more. Right now dd and I are sharing. I can foresee us getting a third at some point because she would use it constantly. Before I bought the iPad I would have considered getting her a laptop in a year or so but now I can't see a reason for it. I might take the suggestion from a previous poster & check in to a iPad instead of ipad2 for her to save some money.

Can anyone tell me the difference between the iPad app access for $6.99 per month & the website subscription. Do you get more with the website?

Wow, Julie! Thank you so much for this information. I am going to review this and then discuss it with her. This board is such a valuable resource!

Critter fix thanks for the suggestion. I tried to get her to explain why it was upsetting that night but she couldn't articulate exactly what upset her. She just kept saying it was going to give her nightmares because she couldn't get it out of her head and the book started referring to Tip as "she". After, hearing your explanation about it being an unnecessary twist it makes a little more sense. She likes things to make sense and be in order so it might have been that she just didn't think it was a logical outcome. I'm going to revisit it with her in a few days and see if she can explain it to me better when she's not as emotional.

Just realized ther's a typo in my title. I think my iPad autocorrected me! Was trying to say 6 year old daughter not 6th.

One of the things I think works well with the mus curriculum which could be applied to whatever curriculum you use is to learn the facts one at a time. I think when we started gamma which is the multiplication book the order we learned the facts was: X 0 X 1 X 2 (we already knew how to skip count so this was easy) X 10 X 5 Those were the first 5 of 30 lessons and we finished those in about 2 weeks. Because of the skip counting foundation and learning them one at a time it was relatively painless. X 9 with tips listed by previous poster covering the pattern & skip counting X 3 utilizing skip counting and patterns X 6 same as above...and pointing out that there is a pattern X 4 skip counting We went throughout all of the above relatively quickly but didn't move to the next fact until we mastered one. That left x6, x7 & x8 which were the ones that took the most work I think sometimes when people read the descriptions on mus and discuss. mastery Curriculums they envision moving really slowly but the concept is move at your child's pace. Memorizing them one set at a time builds confidence. Taking the time to learn a table before moving on saves a lot of finger counting time down the road.

I just discovered this part of the board and could use some feedback on dd's narration. She would like to give me every detail and gets offended when I try to shorten or change her words. Here's what she came up with for the Homer Price excerpt: The boys were driving home when they saw the Super-Duper sitting with his head in his hands near his car which was stuck in a ditch. Freddy thought he would lift the car up with one hand but instead he got caught in a barbed-wire fence. Then the boys realized that the Super-Duper wasn't a super-duper hero at all! He was just an ordinary man! She is quite specific about her words and where to put exclamation points, etc. It still seems pretty long to me but I'm struggling with the balance between teaching her good technique and encouraging her love for language and creativity. Please share your thoughts. Tia

We pretty much school year round and just take breaks for vacations, holidays, etc. We normally work 5 days a week but we take frequent breaks for fun and/or travel. On short/break days or weeks we'll just do essentials like math and one language arts instead of several. So far this is working for us. I've been forced to take a month break before & it was torture getting her back in the routine of studying daily. I don't like to take more than a week off at a time...if we're traveling for longer than that we do some sort of lessons or learning while we're gone. Sometimes it's curriculum stuff but other times we'll write letters or do some reading and narration about the area we're visiting.

I wouldn't discourage the sight reading but I would go ahead and start teaching phonics & get some phonics apps too. There are several gentle approaches you can use. I used explode the code as soon as dd knew her letters which was way before I initially planned to teach her. We only did 5 or 10 minutes a day when we started but it gave her a solid phonics foundation for when she started reading on a higher level.

You could always buy an ipad2...after reading the recent iPad thread the money saved for something else had to be "redirected" to iPad budget.:lol:

Dd6 " Mommy, did you know I have an acute sense of taste? I can taste horrible olives on my pizza even after you pick them off"

She watched the movie and the first book was fine but she was just really freaked out by the tin man changing to a girl. Your husband may be right because she specifically mentioned that it was weird that it changed from saying "he" about the tin man to saying "she". She said that was what made her stomach hurt...every time she read "she". I guess she was invested in the character as a he. She said she doesn't think she wants to read book three now so we'll give it some time and see if she changes her mind.

Dd6 read the wizard of oz and loved it so we downloaded other books in the series for her to read. Last night she got to the end of the second book and was very upset. She said it made her stomach hurt & might give her nightmares. I asked her specifically what was upsetting & she said something about the The tin man really being a girl. Has anyone on here read this book. If so, I would love some insight on what happens at the end of the book. Dd reads non-stop and this is the first time she's told me she was upset by something she's read.

I just downloaded Marilyn Rockett's book "Homeschooling at the Speed of Life" bok to my iPad to read because I'm struggling with these issues too. I saw her speak at a conference in May and really enjoyed it but I'm just now getting around to buying her book. So farbit's a goof read with some good tips.

There was a blog this week on the mathusee website about teaching multiple children at the same time. http://www.mathusee.com/2011/10/is-teaching-multiple-children-at-the-same-time-a-good-idea-math-u-see-newsletter-vol-30/

I haven't tried it but I'm pretty sure audiobooks would work. I downloaded mp3 files which iTunes converted & they work. There are plenty of apps I've downloaded that aren't for education. I've downloaded apps for tracking calories, recipes, taking notes, accessing my home computer remotely while I'm away from home, and tracking the financial markets. I will probably download apps for saving web articles to read later and many other things when I have time tondo a little more research. There are an unbelievable amount of apps in the app store to go through. Most of them have nothing to do with homeschool. I wasn't sure what to look for either at first and just kind of searched and googled to get ideas and I'm finding new stuff daily. There is a "genius" tool you can turn on which suggests apps based on one's you have already downloaded.

I know several people who have one and on one has run out of space with the 16gb. You can transfer files back & forth to your computer and/or use the cloud options from amazon or apple when it comes out. I use the iPad for business & school stuff and have been downloading one app after another and haven't even put a dent in the storage space.

I can't find the link either.