Love love love RightStart. It is giving my K-er such a fantastic foundation for future mathematics, I am truly thrilled with it.

We do the majority of "school" in the afternoon after lunch -- I swear we are twice as fast when we wait to start! Finding the opportune time for *your* kids to be focused and really engaged is so important.

We're doing the Warriors books as read-alouds, and my DD is quite pleased about how both male and female cats are warriors, the Thunderclan leader is a warrior, etc. We also like the Redwall books (still read-aloud at this point) for having some (not enough, but some) pretty strong female characters.

OK, so to follow-up, do most people drill and memorize these facts in isolation? I mean, the times tables I get, and I think up to 12 x 12 should be absolutely down cold. But, while I have personally "memorized" addition facts, I can't remember them ever being consciously memorized. I feel like I just added 5+2 enough times that eventually I just knew it was 7. I mean, just from using RightStart, with its emphasis on not counting, my DD knows everything up to 5+5 without having to think about it. It seems to me the rest of them will come the same way, just practicing enough times so it's second nature. Am I naive? Or is that just another way to drill?

I keep seeing posts about helping children memorize their "math facts" and I have no idea what you're talking about. It seems to go beyond times tables. What are these mysterious facts? It is just knowing things like 6+2=8 down cold so you don't have to do the calculation?

I am documenting our cooking and gardening as part of our health "curriculum" as well as using the Food Pyramid stuff from the USDA website: http://teamnutrition.usda.gov/resources/mypyramidclassroom.html

We're in a similar boat. My DD does a lot of free writing, because it's fun for her and she does a lot of story writing with creative spelling on her own time, etc. But we are also methodically going through HWT, even though she certainly thinks she can already write, for many of these same reasons. She even starts her S's from the bottom! And she had this bizarre way of making lower case e's that I thought would be a total pain to correct, but after reviewing lower case e in HWT and my reminding her a few times when I saw her doing it her funky way, she now writes them correctly without prompting. So, I'd think it would be worth it to work through the K level HWT book and really get proper letter formation down.

Logic, Engineering, but also math, and science (physics). We use LEGO all the time for math.

A friend of mine has her son chew gum and play with silly putty while she reads, and all of a sudden he is retaining the information. Something that works in my house when my K'er gets glassy-eyed is to stop every few sentences and check in with her, see what she's retaining as we go. It's annoying for *me* to interrupt the flow of the reading, but *she* can sometimes find it very helpful.

Here's mine from a few months ago when we were first getting started. It's still pretty much the same! http://www.chickencounting.com/2010/07/day-in-life-of-our-homeschool.html

We use AAS as our phonics program, along with the McGuffey primers. It has been working really well, and I love how she is learning decoding and encoding at the same time and not as separate skills.

I am glad I decided to start it this year for K, because some of it would be way too easy/boring for a 1st grader. But there are other parts that I think will challenge her -- I'm just planning to speed up the pieces she already knows and linger on the stuff that's new.

:bigear: We just started and I'm thinking we may be moving pretty quickly through the first lessons, but then it does seem to get a big meatier. Or maybe it's just a matter of finding my DD's level.

We don't have cable, and the only broadcast channel that comes in consistently is PBS (yay!). But I don't like to be limited to what's currently playing, so when my kids get to watch TV (usually 30 min per day), we select something available on Netflix streaming. In addition to all the great PBS shows already listed, my 2 and 5 y.o. really like Arthur -- it's not as explicitly educational, because mostly it focuses on emotions and family relationships and ethical dilemmas, but they absolutely love it and it's prompted excellent discussions.

Thanks for the links! I feel like we do so much, but the need to document everything just exhausts me. "As we made oat bran muffins, we talked about the importance of eating healthful food to keep our bodies strong." Can I just take a bunch of pictures of DD's organic vegetable garden she's been working on all year?? Documentation is going to be the death of me. ;)