Would have been interested in doing this but it looks like they already sold out of the deal. :(

If you are in the southeast our AHG troop has had great success with the Belk Charity sale.

Thanks!

For those of you who went from Singapore Elementary to DM did you do level 6 or jump from 5B into DM? Trying to decide what to do with my son who had no problems with Level 4 and will most likely complete Level 5 by early spring next year. I've heard some people say to skip 6 and move straight into pre algebra if they aren't having trouble after completeing 5B but most were going into other pre algebra programs.

I was going to say the USS Alabama as well. If you go and have an Iphone there is an app that gives additional details about the rooms of the ship etc as you tour. We've lived in Alabama for 8 years and I've never been down to the coast so I don't have any other ideas beside that one ;)

We tend to go with more of the medium sized sets. My son wanted knights so rather than buying the largest castle we went with the medium sized one. He still loved it even though it wasn't the biggest. Another year my son loved the farms and my daughter liked the houses, so we ended up buying the take along house and take along farm. Again they were happy. The only large set we've purchased was the Egyptian pyramid from another homeschooling family that had outgrown it. Smaller sets ($5-10) end up showing up at birthdays, Easter and as random gifts. We had about 3 years of being Playmobil obsessed. They haven't played with it recently so it's about to go into storage for about 6 months while our youngest is hitting the crawling and putting everything in her mouth stage. By the time it comes back out everyone will be ready to be obsessed for a few more years.

We trimmed out our wall of 5 Billy cases. It really helped. I can add pictures if you'd like tomorrow. You can also check out Ikea Hackers for ideas of how to make different cases look more built in.

I liked Primarily Logic since it has a variety of activities in it. We've used Lollipop Logic, Primarily Logic, Logic Safari, and Logic Links during 1st-3rd.

Easy to do with just the teacher manual. I did use the CD since it has been a long time since I took Latin in highschool and wanted to make sure I had the correct pronunciations. We did most of it orally or written on a white board, made our own flash cards, and I had him copy the prayers and vocab words into his own notebook.

I've had that happen at our library as well. I finally stopped calling to ask them to find the books because they never actually looked for them. I complained to the children's librarian and she said that there had been a number of complaints by people who checked out large numbers of books. What we finally found out was that the people responsible for checking in books were not watching the computer closely as they scanned in the kids books. Our library has radio tags in the books so they just place them on pad and it checks them in/out. With the kids books they were stacking up too many and not counting or comparing them to what the computer checked back in. The next couple of times I stood there while they checked them in. It took a couple of months but repeated reminders and complaints to the children's librarian and they finally got better about checking the number of books.

Planning ahead is what will get you through. Alot of our meals were easy to convert to lower carb by just leaving out part of the meal. I didn't really miss it once I got through the first couple of weeks. Alos having a fridge/freezer stocked with low carb foods that you can eat when what the family wants isn't low carb. I keep a lot of salad fixings and seasoned chicken in the fridge. That way if we happen to be out late and grab pizza on our way home I can quickly throw together a big salad with some chicken for my dinner. Like others said I just stop buying/making the things I can't resist. My husband knows that I can't resist cookies, so if he feels like he has to have them then he buys a package and keeps them at work. I only buy the kids snacks that I don't like etc. I did find that last time I went low carb after a couple of months I was fine eating a higher carb meal every once in awhile and enjoying some old favorites with my family. Generally while I loved eating our favorite pasta with them, the way I felt like crap the next day was a good deterrent from doing it too often.

Thanks to both of you. I've been meaning to listen to SWB's lecture about writing but just haven't found the time yet. Will put that at the top of my to do list before picking books for next year. Just the mention of working on it would bring tears and have him trying to crawl under the table. He has a lot of problems with things not coming easy and not being perfect. So writing and spelling have been a huge problem since grammar, phonics, math, science etc have come so easy for him.

My 9 year old is having a horrible time with spelling. We've used AAS for several years but he has just now gotten about half way through level 3. In 1st grade he breezed through level 1. In second grade we started level 2, stopped for a few months because it was causing tears, and then started over again. By the beginning of 3rd grade he had finished level 2 and started 3. Again this year it caused tears, so we put it aside for awhile working on copy work and reviewing dictation sentences from level 2. In the past few months we have started up again on level 3 and he is about 1/2 way through the book. While doing the lessons he has no problem spelling the words, he can spell them orally, written or with tiles. Has no problem writing the dictation sentences. Our big problem is that it doesn't carry over to any other writing! Writing a 3 sentence email to his grandma he will stop to ask how to spell words that he had just spelled the day before in AAS. It's like his brain can't function to compose a sentence and spell words correctly at the same time. He also had trouble with the spelling section on the DORA test and only tested at a high 1st grade level even though the rest of his scores were well above 3rd grade level. He also has a lot of difficulty with any writing other than copywork. He has beautiful handwriting and loves to write cursive, but putting an original thought down (even if I'm writing for him) is awful. We are going to put a lot of focus onto writing this summer and coming school year, but I'm not sure if I should continue to move forward with spelling or let it wait until writing is less of a struggle for him. Any suggestions on if we should continue with AAS, wait for writing to improve, another program, or suggestions on how to help original writing to be less of a struggle?

My youngest was like that as well. He loved marble runs (he built unsupervised, but then got marbles while we were with him.) He also like stacking pegs with foam pieces to build levels, large cardboard bricks. Now at 3.5 he still LOVES puzzles, but also likes legos, jr knex, and lincoln logs.

There isn't any must buy items for me there. Although they do have great buy one get one sales every week. In my area if it isn't on sale at Publix it's going to be way more expensive there than at Kroger. It's a nice store, but I wouldn't use it to do weekly shopping.