Thank you so much, those are fabulous suggestions. I'm going to print it out and start gathering materials. Can I just say I can't WAIT for school to get out? I asked the kids if they wanted to "deschool' for a while, have a summer vacation and start homeschool in the fall, and my 8 yr old DS said, "Nah, let's get started right away, I'm excited to see what it will be like." Yay!

Wow, CNED for children who don't speak French yet... that'd be amazing. I'll go dig around on their website...

New here (just posted my intro) but one quick thing came to mind. This is for older children, not your kids' age, but when they are older, there is a truly classic book written in the late 19th Century called "Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants." It is a very sappy, ultra-patriotic, sentimentalist book, written and used in French schools at the end of the 19th century to teach patriotism and French geography. It was written after the 1870 war in which France lost Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans until WWI. The plot is basically that two children, after their father dies, set off on a walk around France, learning about the different regions as they go. It's very old-fashioned, but I LOVE it. Again, that's not for now, but I'd keep it in mind for later.

Hi, I'm Jennifer, and I'll be homsechooling starting next year. I have DD (10), DS (8), DS(5), and DS (2.5), and expecting another BOY in July. French is not my native language, but I speak it without an accent. It is very comfortable for me, but not as comfortable as English. I majored in French, spent my Junior year in Paris, worked in Paris as a translator, did a double degree law school program between the U.S. and France, took the bar exam in France, and worked in a law firm in France for 3 years. My DD lived there from the age of 6 months to 3 1/2, and my first DS was born there and lived there till the age of 18 months. Unfortunately, although I made a new resolution with each kid, I never ended up speaking French to them, and now I deeply regret it. Although it's not quite as relaxing for me as speaking English, I could speak entirely in French with them and they would be hearing unaccented, almost completely error-free French. (I would be missing some of the "baby" word euphemisms I never learned, but that's probably not a big deal.) So why didn't I do this???? DH speaks some French and can read pretty fluently, but does NOT speak well, in terms of either accent or grammar. So.. now I have my (I think) last baby coming, and I'm bringing everyone home to homeschool at the end of the year (only 9 more weeks, yay!) (I am not working as a lawyer now, but I teach one section of eighth grade French at the school my kids currently attend.) I'm really determined to speak French to the new baby, and to get the rest of the kids up to speed, but I'm not sure what the right way is to go about it. They know very little French at this point. I thought for the sake of simplicity and cost-savings that for my two oldest I should just use the curriculum the school uses for 8th grade French. I could xerox all the extra resources at school and have access to a complete program, free of charge, for my kids. (The school uses "Allez, viens!", which I don't adore but which will suffice.) How do I work in the two younger kids? Should I just switch to French and let everyone flounder for a while until they catch on? I don't want to make them hate it. We sing a lot of French children's songs, which they enjoy but don't understand at all! When I try to read French children's books to them, they want me to translate and then they end up demanding that I JUST translate, skipping the French altogether. I tried having a "French hour" between bath and bed, and that fell apart. So now the kids know some terms I use during bath, (sit down, stand up, give me your arm, give me your foot...) but that's it. I would REALLY love to get them caught up in French enough to do CNED for French (I saw at least one person does this?) but that seems like a really distant possibility. We may be able to do a sabbatical year in France at some point, but not for a while. Any suggestions? Thanks so much for reading if you got this far!!