Thanks for the input!! I needed reassurance that not all the LA needed to get done in an hour. I appreciate all the feedback. The idea of rotating some aspects so that not all the English works gets done every day will help, too.

We are coming from a more laid-back literature-heavy elementary year to a full-throttle middle school year for 6th next year. My dd is looking at going to an IB school for high school, and I want to make sure she is well-prepared. I'd love to just tell her to spend an hour/day on LA, but with the spelling/vocabulary, grammar (her weak point), composition (needs some work) plus doing literature discussions - I see her doing more than an hour/day. Math will take an hour, and the history/science/geography we have picked out looks like to be 5days/week, too. How much time is normal in middle school HSing to spend on LA? I expect some overlap with history/science reports, but is anyone else spending more than an hour on LA? PS. My dd is pretty laid back and s-l-o-w at writing anything, but is a very fast reader. This may also be why I'm nervous about LA next year. :huh: - Rebecca (doing 6th and 2nd next year - both girls)

I just went yesterday to a local homeschool curriculum bookstore to compare 6A standards edition to the US edition. In my mind, there is no way I would use the US edition since it doesn't not cover close to the material in the standards edition. The material does not cover as many topics and the ones they do cover barely scratch the surface with no review work. We switched to standards at 3A and use the HIG frequently. The lack of a HIG for 6A&B really makes me nervous. You can buy an answer key booklet for the TB and WB that covers 4A to 6B standards for $9. But there are no explanations, reinforcement ideas, or teaching strategies. I'm contemplating buying the $50 Teacher Guide just to hold my hand. I would love to hear more from others who want to use 6A&B standards next year.

Our year round schedule starts the Monday after 4th of July. We take two weeks off in the fall, the month of December off, two weeks off in March and the month of June off. That leaves approximately 40 weeks to get in 36 weeks of school. I didn't start out this way; we actually burned out and needed the breaks then. It helps us tremendously to step away and come back refreshed (and the house reorganized). I also organized our subjects into either 12 weeks studies (like history or science) or 6 weeks studies (like geography or nature study) so we can rotate what we are working on. Besides Bible, Memory and Math we are not working on every subject every week, but I have to plan it out or it doesn't get studied. My oldest is going in to 5th and it has taken me this long to really figure out what works for us. So don't feel like you have to figure it all out right now. Plan your work and work your plan, then see what actually works.

We started a Book of Centuries in 3rd gr when we started ancients, and it fell flat. We had no interest in it at all since my dd saw it as busy work (yes, she's hard to motivate). So I dropped it, but this year starting 5th grade, I'm going to do an index card timeline, one card for each event. I'm hoping to have dividers for each century and color-code the cards for wars, inventions, etc. She'll be able to take the cards out to rearrange, classify them, and play games. That's the plan anyway. I'm hoping to spend the next couple of weeks printing clip art and ironing out the details. Store bought just doesn't work well for us.

Thank you for sharing your awesome hard work! We're starting OIS next month and basically going to all living books instead of just a textbook and read alouds. Your Book Notes makes me feel like someone is holding my hand as we switch our learning to a more organic style. Thank you!!

:iagree:This is us, too. I bought MCT Island to supplement because I thought her imagination would enjoy it. It did, but she did not remember any concepts with it. She did not enjoy R&S 2 so I was looking for a change. Maybe I could have waited to do MCT when she was older, but as she's advanced in most subjects I don't think her age is to blame, but how little accountability there is in retaining the concepts. We switched to R&S 3 and now are in 4. She's learning a lot and I'm pleased with the pace. I don't do the writing lessons, but instead do my own writing plans. For a reluctant writer, MCT is too vague to help them write, IMO.

I'm using Abeka's K5 program this summer to help a 8 yr. old boy learn to read. I used it to teach my two how to read and like the method a lot. It's gentle and builds naturally. But, I do not use it as written. Even with my girls where I take a year for K, I go through and mark the lessons so we do the meat out of a whole week in two or three lessons. Since it is one on one, all the busywork and extra review aren't necessary for every situation. I do not like their writing so I only use the phonics materials. In May, a friend gain custody of her nephew that had been neglected and not sent to any school so he didn't know how to count past 10 and couldn't recognize more than 10 letter smuch less know any sounds. I've worked with him 37 days as of today and he can count to 50 and is 3/4 of the way through Abeka's kindergarten phonics program. I'm doing the meat out of 4 to 5 lessons a day to help him get ready to go to a private school next month where they use Abeka. I'm still only working with him 2 to 3 hours a day, but he is reading the readers fine and improving so the method does work. If he had had any prior knowledge before I started with him, I could see using the 1st grade materials. Abeka has so much review that you cannot follow it blindly. The K readers are very gentle and not overwhelming. The 1st grade ones can be more intense unless your student is just plain ready to learn. I do have a good friend who did not use the lesson plans, and just used the Handbook for Reading and Letters and Sounds 1 and taught her children how to read. If you have any specific questions about the materials, please feel free to ask. I like the method, but don't think it's the only way to teach kids how to read. I know it well, so it's easy for me to teach.

I use notebook paper since Excel and online planners were a flop for me. I first schedule how I want our week to work and what subjects should be done on which days. Then I take a piece of paper per subject and write at the top how many weeks and how many days per week to teach it to get how many lessons I need to complete a year's study of that subject. Then, I go down numbering my weeks deciding which weeks out of the month we will do school (mainly for fall since in January I'll nail down which weeks we'll school). On those weeks, I'll list the lesson numbers or concepts we'll cover so I can see if I'm spacing it out correctly. I only print out a month's worth of work since I've found I need to revisit our curriculum monthly to keep on track. If it's already printed out for the year I tend to space out and lose track of where we want to go. It's a fine balance of over planning and under planning. Most years I over plan then really want to give up in February since we're so off the plan.

We just read the book here, too. We used alot of different sources for learning Greek myths when studying ancient Greece and she loved the myths. I finally found D'Aulaire's at a library 45 minutes away (our libraries do not communicate around here:001_huh:) and she inhaled the book. Last month, I found it at a used book sale and couldn't wait to bring it home. For us, using a lit guide would have ruined the joy of reading it. I'm so glad it's on our shelf. Just discussing the book aloud gets most of the intent of using a lit guide, imo.

We just finished 3B Standards, and we do the CWP one semester behind. So next month we'll start 4A, but will have the last half of CWP 3 to do. We do it together on a dry erase board about twice a week. We do not do the IP since it just totally added on a whole bunch more stress to our math day. And with review and math games we do, we are spending enough time in our day in math that adding the IP was just torture for us. If she enjoyed doing math more and needed more challenges, I would definitely use it.

A couple of years I ran across a poem that described the months of the year as they happen south of the equator - cold in July, hot in January, etc. I thought I bookmarked it and now I cannot find it anywhere. Does anyone know where to find this poem? Thanks!

FWIW, we're starting them next month with The Magician's Nephew. We've already read LWW and my dd loves all three movies (yes, I'm upset she watched the movies before we've read the books (so we're definitely reading The Hobbit before Christmas)). If you are introducing the world of Narnia, start with LWW, but if not, it doesn't matter too much.

We were going to start our root study this year for 4th by making cards a la English from the Roots Up for our vocabulary. But I now I'm learning towards doing vocabulary from the Chronicles of Narnia and working on learning from context. What grade do you think benefits the most from English from the Roots Up book?

We do Kindergarten over two years - but we do it every other week. My dd, who is 5 now, was ready to do something, but couldn't handle a whole curriculum, plus she had some speech issues. We took our phonics and work 2 - 3 days a week every other week, and in between that we work on memorizing and reciting nursery rhymes. I printed them out so she can make her own book she can read all by herself (it's memorized, of course) by adding about 2 or 3 a month. She feels like she's doing school, but she's not getting burned out by being pushed to hard to read too soon. It's slow and gentle and fun.