I would advise looking at the online samples of TOG. If your friend has the classic version of TOG, it is very different from the re-designed. I love TOG, but I don't know if I would have been sucessful with it when I had my 5th child. MFW has a seperate K program, so I would check into sample of that as well. When I was expecting #4 we did MFW, and it was not a sucess in our house. I would advise a different approach which you may dismiss as completely unacceptable. But, as a Mom who has btdt, I would choose something easy to do for history, literature, and science. For me set schedules written by someone else were not helpful when I had a newborn, toddlers and older children to keep up with. I would pick read alouds that you want to cover, for lit, history and science and make your own schedule on how you want to cover them. I would read lots of bible stories and pick great memory work to do. If you like hands on, I would pick some things to do ahead of time for history and science. I would get all of the supplies you need together now and put them in really big ziplock bags so that you can just pull one out and do it. I put together some file folders for my youngest children to keep them busy check out Confessions of a Homeschooler's website. Put your focus on the 3 R's, focus on skills and don't worry so much about content. I found once I start following a curriculum, I start to stress on how we are falling "behind"... not a good place for a sleep-deprived Mama who is juggling a newborn etc. If you are interested, I would listen to some of the Circe talks and Society for Classical learning. I found them very helpful in keeping my focus on why we are home educating . I now try to remember to keep our focus on our faith, knowing that education is more than filling the mind with facts. I hope that some of this is helpful to you.

I think that you have a lot of great ideas here. Before you start spening all of your money on these things, as a mother with children in elementary,middle, and highschool, I would suggest you think about what you feel is lacking in your own education. What are your weaknesses? I would then find ways to study those things now, purchase with an eye toward the future. If you are not confident in a subject, now is the time to prepare. For me, TOG has been the best curriculum for my educational growth in history, philosophy, and literature but WTM and WEM have great plans for study as well. I wish I had taken the time to study logic and rhetoric before I had students to teach. I also should have studied chemistry and physics or even had some Latin under my belt. I spent a lot of time trying to find the right curriculum - hours researching, time I could have spent reading some the great books or learning some of the above. I would pick technology carefully, make sure you have a good printer with lots of paper and ink, get some great hands on things, build a great library, and purchase as much non-consumable curriculum as you can. The My Book House books or some other set of classic books would be a great choice as they start with fairy tales and go all the way through high school level books. Check out what Homeschool Buyer's Co-op has to offer so that you can stretch your money (Math Mammoth is often available on cd at a great price). Btw I think your math plan is a very good one! ETA- I would also stock up on science kits and books.

Most weekends are filled with trying to catch up on housework and laundry, planning school, kid activities and church. This weekend I attended at Tea to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Predjudice. It was at my friend's house, with her daughters' help they prepared a lovely tea with all the bells and whistles from scratch. I was able to meet new people and talk about all kinds of things unrelated to homeschooling. I think I need more Sundays like that!

We have used TC as supplements to our TOG studies in history and literature. I am using the Chemistry course along with Conceptual Chemistry. Dd was very worried about chem, and those first few lectures helped her to confidently begin her studies. I also think it would be very easy to use TC as a jumPing off point for any class.

Such sad news. Praying for Tripp and the children!

I completely forgot about the bar code registration thanks for the reminder!

Dd and I will be attending our first college fair. Help me out dear hive so that we can be effective wih our time.

Yes! I have also seen a large family walking and thought how big their family was, only to find that our family is the exact same size.

I guess my question for you was , are using the literature from TOG or anything else beside the history? I just never thought that I could do LlfLoTR unless I dropped TOG. I picked it up used and never really looked at it - it was soooo big- before I sold it. Of course now it regret selling as it was the first edition.

I see you have TOG 4 in your siggy, are you doing TOG and LL fLoTR? If so, how?

I suppose the question is , "In which direction would you prefer to tweak?" If SL is not enough of what you want and TOG is too much, would you prefer to cut or add to your choice? I understand your struggle with TOG, I have it I use it and Year 2 was killer for dd. We skimmed through year 3 and now are happily doing Y4. Why are we happy now? I have made changes, I am steering this ship, not TOG. I allow dd to choose what she would like to read for lit, we don't do all the TOG analysis. This year we will do a mix of LToW and WTM, and sometimes we will do a little of TOG...and some days we will just read and enjoy. We will cut, trim, skip. Right now dd loves the history books, when she gets tired of them I will pick something else to do, maybe we'll just watch some movies, look at our timeline book, and read the literature. I have changed my focus I no longer care so much about gaps, missing content, my focus is on truth, beauty and virtue. I want to see the light in my dc's eyes because they connect with what they are learning in some way. I let curriculum suck the life out of our school day, it was not the curriculum's fault, the fault was mine. Life got busy, very busy and I let the plans of others determine what my children's learning looked like. When things didn't work I felt guilty and had trouble determining what was wrong. It has taken many years to feel this confident, and I spent the summer really looking at my options, funny thing is that the books I wanted to use with all 5 of my dc were in fact in TOG already scheduled. Even the FIAR books I wanted to use with my youngest! I knew that I could now use TOG fully with all of my children and not get bogged down. I treat TOG the same way I do my library, there are lots of books I cannot take them all home I pick and choose what I like. I take those books home, some get read, and some do not. I don't let it bother me that some books don't get read, and I don't fret that I left lots of books untouched on the library shelves. TOG narrows down my public library, and gives me a starting point for each week. If this is not for you, then add to SL or MFW or whatever else you fancy..bottom line is that you must determine what works for you as the teacher, and then you can work out how to present the material to your student.

Why oh why did I read this thread? I stayed up late last night watching instead reading my plans for our first day of school today. Look at my face, and I bovvered?

Congratulations! Thank you for sharing the process, I learned a lot!

Sorry no help here. We use TOG also.

Not a country girl, but I'm pretty sure a back 40 is short for the back 40 acres... Your back yard.

SOTW is scheduled as an alt resource in TOG Re-design.

I just wrote a very long reply that has disappeared into the vapor! Now I have to put littles to bed so I will try to answer briefly. You can do a TOG/WTM mix, you must not let either dictate what is best for your children. Pick the gems and leave the rest behind. Do narrations and read alouds with your little ones, read and discuss with your older one or just read aloud and discuss. Have him write something, sometimes you can use the SAP's sometimes use the WTM logic stage questions. Don't jump into D level too soon, don't overwhelm your children by doing too much. Don't make yourself crazy worrying that you're "not doing it right"! Use TOG like you do the library. When you go to the library you browse, you pick the things that will work for your children. You never try to bring the whole library home with you. The books will be there the next time you visit, just so TOG will be there for your next round of history and you will pick up the threads you dropped this time. I am making a concerted effort to follow my own advice :lol::lol:. The DVD's are great, so are SWB's talks, I use them often to keep me on track. If you really want to try TOG, I say take the plunge! I have put off buying things I really wanted and just drove myself crazy until I tried it.

My oldest ds has been using Visual Latin at his own pace for the last year and he loves it. This is the first latin program that has stuck in this house. I don't have to push ds to do his latin. He does about one lesson a week, and uses Quizlet to work on the vocabluary. As he has gotten further along in the program, the vocabulary has increased and he works toward mastery in the vocabulary. I was as Spanish major and I have to say, I don't know how you could study any foreign language and not study the vocabuary consistently. If you don't really know the vocabuary, you will most certainly get to a point where the student cannot progress.

I will keep this in mind. I find I try to do too much and then don't accomplish much at all.

I see that you are using IEW with your 9th grader, did you do LToW with him as well?

The Lost Tools of Writing by Circe Institute http://circeinstitute.org/the-lost-tools-of-writing/

Could you give me an idea of how your week was structured? Did you use the SAP's? Did have discussions ala TOG using he discussion outlines? We have never used TOG's writing either I am happy to see that I don't need to start. We will be doing Y4, I am excited to see that was what you did last year! I like the example you gave about WWI. This is so helpful. I have been overwhelmed trying to learn how to teach LTOW and plan for 5 children (my youngest starts 1st grade this year).

There are not a lot of literature assignments in T OG there is a lot of literary analysis. Your post has helped me think about how I can take some of the questions in the lit section and use them with LToW. I think I am just going to have to start to teach this to see how it's really going to play out in our home. It has been hard work trying to see things in a different way but I think our studies will benefit from it. Thank you for your help and I welcome any more advise!

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I have been thinking of changing the focus of our TOG studies by putting more emphasis on Literature. I have been toying with the idea of using LToW for years, once I read the Circe thread I knew it was time to take the plunge. So now I have LToW and TOG sitting here and I have having trouble deciding how to marry the two. If you use TOG along with LToW, how do you structure your studies? Do you use the Lit questions in the SAP? Do you use the Frameworks and Poetics? Do you just work through LTW and just cover the basics of who the author is, and what the historical setting is and then just do the ANI? If you don't use TOG, what do your literature studies look like?