We've done both Jump In and Writing Strands. My son did them independently.

Over the years I've found mine at children's consignment stores, and Craigslist. :)

What works for me is scheduling our year ahead of time. I make a copy of a calendar for the year, then stare at it & brainstorm until I decide exactly where I want to stick our 36 weeks of school. I use a highlighter to highlight the vacation weeks. HERE is a link to a picture of our simple calendar that hangs on our bulletin board. Don't ask me why this is just a 2011 calendar instead of a Sept 2010 through Aug 2011 calendar as it should be. It's complicated. Anyway you get the idea. :tongue_smilie: I schedule around family events. Like, I gave us 4 whole weeks off at the end of Sept for when our baby is due. And a week off during my son's birthday. And two weeks off during the time my son's dad will be moving out of state & my son will be helping him. That sort of thing. I do all my lesson planning during the breaks for the upcoming chunk of school weeks. That's how it works for me. :D

I used to feel major burnout at the end of every school year. Some years moreso than others. We followed the PS schedule for 9 yrs. By April I was so burnt out that some years I'd barely teach a thing for the last 2 months of school. What a waste! Then I finally tried year round schooling and that's what's solved the problem for me. We school for several weeks (usually 3-6), then have vacations of 1-3 weeks. It feels like we're either having vacation or have one coming right on the horizon all the time, which is great for all of us. :001_smile: My burn out seems to have disappeared. No more lonnnnnng school years.

:iagree: That's been my experience as well. *I* love cutting, pasting & coloring so I'm always drawn to those sorts of products. My 13 yo son however, does not. I forced him through most of one History Pocket (that we used with History Odyssey) before admitting that I was just torturing the kid. :tongue_smilie:

I am not helpful at all but I wanted to mention that my plan is to do LL8 followed by LLfLOTR beginning next year for my voracious reader, who will be an 8th grader. :001_smile: Although I also have Figuratively Speaking on my shelf, too... Do you think doing Figuratively Speaking and LL8 at the same time would be overkill? I am not in a big hurry to get to LLfLOTR because my husband is reading it aloud to our family every evening right now. I'd like to finish that up before my son dives back in again to analyze it.

I didn't discover TWTM until the logic stage. But we don't follow the suggestions exactly like the book (in the logic stage) because I think it would be too time intensive for me. My son would be reading and then writing all sorts of outlines, summaries, definitions and adding to his timeline. I think that he would need a lot of my help to dig out the information he should be writing his outlines & summaries on, but more than that, there would be no answer key. I'd imagine that I'd have to spend a huge amount of time rereading everything he just read and then reading his whole notebook all the time to see if what he was writing is correct. I think that would take me way more time than I have in a day! I do prefer to use curricula that lay all the lessons out for him, with questions and tests, and answer keys. :D I just don't function well without answer keys. :tongue_smilie: But I do lovelovelove TWTM book anyway. I just don't happen to follow this part exactly. Also, I have several other kids. I don't feel I have the time to be keeping up with a bunch of notebooks that they put together & add to themselves. Perhaps if I had just one child and I knew a whole lot about history.... (We use K12's Human Odyssey for history, and are starting Apologia for science)

We love all of Edward Zaccaro's math books. :001_smile:

Love love love the AGs here. SOTW is one of my favorite curricula to teach from, period. Which includes the AG. :D

Well, I created a timeline in a notebook that I thought was a really cool idea at the time, even though it didn't end up working for us. We used this for 5th & 6th grade. What I did was take a 3 inch binder. Then I took a roll of butcher paper & cut out six foot long strips, just tall enough to fit nicely in the binder. I chose 6 feet because that is how long our dining room table is. That way my son could easily open it & write anywhere on each strip on our table. I used a Sharpie to make lines every 6 inches & wrote dates at the top. Each six inches was a thousand years until more recent times when each century got 6 inches. I folded the 6 foot strips up accordian style & tucked them in the notebook. That way they were well protected from all my littles, in a handy notebook that you could just open up & unfold whatever strip (timeframe) we needed. Then, accordian fold it right back up again. It worked great, the pages stayed tidy (away from toddlers), and my son was able to add dates to it easily. What didn't work for us was that it was hidden! LOL My son would add dates & info to it, then stick in back in the binder in shelf. Out of sight, out of mind. He wasn't grasping historical event timing and how they related to each other. He just didn't see the darn thing all unfolded nearly enough. So this year, for 7th grade, I tossed the idea & stapled a giant line of white poster board across our dining room wall. :001_smile: He does all his schoolwork in there, plus we all have meals there. We all see the timeline constantly, and he's connecting dates & events much better now. That's what's worked for us. :D

You may want to post this in another forum on the board as this one is the testing forum. Folks only come in here if they want to post a "test" post to see if it works, or to practice posting pictures or the like. I suggest you repost on the K-8 Curriculum Forum.

We school year round, so, I do all my lesson planning during the breaks. I never schedule more than 7 weeks, or fewer than 3 weeks of school at a time. So I'll just lesson plan for those exact 3 - 7 weeks during each break in between. If I were just starting out as you are, I would definitely only plan out 1-2 weeks at a time until everybody got into a good groove.

Well, I can tell/show you how I happen to lesson plan for my 7th grader. I just recently posted about it in my blog: HERE. :001_smile:

It's funny, the curriculum I was most excited about at the beginning of the year ended up being the ones that were awful! Hakim's Story of Science with teacher guide & student workbook for my 7th grader. After 11 yrs homeschooling, this has officially been my biggest, most expensive (!) mistake. The whole thing is written for a classroom & doesn't work for homeschooling. The workbook seems dumbed down in many places to me, and is just dry & boring. I love Hakim's stuff so much, I was sure I'd love this. But it was awful in every way! History Odyssey. After so much research, I thought I'd found the perfect history for us this year. Somehow, in all my research, I completely missed that the curriculum has no answer key! Since I am not a brilliant historian that has all of history memorized, I was totally unable to answer his questions, correct, discuss, or listen to narration of his work. What a waste! And, Apologia's Jump In. This one *I* still think seems pretty cool, but my son found it to be torturously boring. Instead, Writing Strands is right up his alley. Who da' guessed?

These have been awesome discoveries this year for my 7th grader: Fallacy Detective Evolution: The Grand Experiment. Love 'em!