We spend about 30 minutes a day combining Salsa Spanish (with the lesson plans from http://edu.wyoming.gov/searchresults.aspx?SearchQuery=salsa) and Spanish for children. After each lesson we use flash cards for vocab building. Then on Wednesdays we're part of a co-op spanish class that meets once a week that really motivates them to learn the language because they get to see other children speaking it. It seems to be working well, but I'm not aiming for fluency, I'm simply aiming for them to be understood if they travel to a Spanish speaking country. We're also going slowly because I'm learning along with them. I took french and latin in school, so spanish is a stretch for me. I expect that both programs will take us about 2-3 years to complete at our current rate, but we're enjoying ourselves and I think that's the most important thing.

I'd second the suggestion of buy one and see how it goes. I just asked Kit if she liked the Life of Fred Apples and she said: "A little bit, but not really". Maybe it's because we've read so many math books that we've loved more from the local library or maybe it's because she loves her math programs already (she's currently doing MEP and Miquon) and LoF really shines with kids who don't enjoy their main curricula, or maybe it's because she's a left brain learner and LoF works better for right brain learners. I have no idea, but for whatever reason it was a poor fit for us. So only buy one, and if your child loves it, then let him run with it (but beware of Dogs, I understand that he returned the dog because he couldn't care for it but, it left a bad taste in my mouth - there are other ways to teach pet/personal responsibility).

Thanks all! Since no one had any complaints, I've started putting them up. My goal is to get 5-10 up each week... hopefully I'll be all done getting everything up within the next 8 weeks (since I was extraordinarily dedicated today and managed to get 1/9th of them done ;)). If anyone wants to book mark it - the quick links are available here: http://lovelearnplay.wordpress.com/history/#Year 1 Outline

Two thoughts, 45 minutes is a really long time to be working with such a small child. He might be getting stressed or frustrated, which would hamper his ability to remember. The second thought is more of a question - are you ALWAYS using manipulatives when you work with him? I wouldn't worry so much about giving him the answer as simply working with him to discover the answer for a while. He might have a disability or he might simply just not want to do it because counting is pretty darn dull or he might just be trying to initiate play with you. It's hard to tell at this age. I would try this for a week or two and see how he does at the end: Hold up one object, say one, one [object]. Pick up another object that is exactly the same. Say, now I have two [objects]. Hold up the first object, say 1, hold up the second object, say 2. I have two [objects]. Can you count them with me? Say 1 then 2 several times together while moving the objects forward as you count them. You can continue this to three or five, whichever works best for you both. Just don't do it more than 2-3 times each day. I say this gently, please don't spend so much time on this. According to your signature he *just* turned 4 in Jan. It is not surprising that he is unable to count at this age. From Bright Start by Dr. Richard Woolfson: Age 3.5-4yo "Reaches the first state of genuine counting - for example, she counts a row of small blocks up to the second or third block." Age 4.5-5yo "May be able to recite numbers up to 10" (There was nothing specific under learning development between 4-4.5 years old. But these are averages, with several months on both sides of "normal". He is still well within normal.) I would work on counting to two or three for 5 minutes per day and just allow him to play with mathematical manipulatives and block for the rest of "math" time. Once he has up to three down you can get him to 5, and then to 10. But remember - the 4.5-5 year old MAY be able to count to 10, not every child that has just turned 5 will be able to. Good Luck!

For Physics we like the K'nex Sets... although this might be because I really suck at Physics... Intro to Structures - http://www.amazon.com/KNEX-Education-Intro-Structures-Bridges/dp/B000PQJJ42/ Gears - http://www.amazon.com/KNEX-Education-Intro-Simple-Machines/dp/B000O910E2/ Levers & Pulleys - http://www.amazon.com/KNEX-Education-Simple-Machines-Pulleys/dp/B000O94QTI/ Wheels, Axels & Inclined Planes - http://www.amazon.com/KNEX-Education-Simple-Machines-Inclined/dp/B000O94QU2/

Woot! I'm so happy that it works on your phone Rbsmrter! I feel like I'm in the stone age sometimes, I haven't got an ipad or phone that I could check to make sure that it was still readable on :)

I've put together a resource list by SOTW Ancients chapter (inspired by Angela over at Satori Smiles). I've got the first one up and I wanted to make sure that it was useable in it's current format before I take the time to post everything. Most of the chapters don't have as much as the first chapter does but they're not completely berefit of links and books either. I've converted the first week in to a .pdf so that the quick-linking bookmarks would be available on the side-bar. This way someone reading it can quickly click over to books, videos, timeline stuff etc. http://lovelearnplay.../sotw-week-1-2/ So, let me know if the format works, and if there aren't any tweaks I'll just put them all up. I'm sure that some of you will be going to the MCT Conference in Valley Forge too, so if they're not all up by then you can remind me to get my act together in person (since I'm really bad about remembering to get things up on my blog) :D PS - if you're curious about what order we're going to be doing SOTW 1 in starting in Sept I've posted it here http://lovelearnplay...ss.com/history/ along with some background info.

They sound like a wonderful family, and according to the article they make time for the kids to interact with their age group peers as well. It seems like a very reasonable solution to a tricky problem -- what DO you do with a highly accelerated child that has surpassed your knowledge in a subject that they're intensely passionate about? It's nice to see that they outsourced when they felt that their children needed more enrichment / knowledge than they had. I hope that I'm able to make the same unselfish decisions about my own girls if they develop an intense passion for a particular career. It's not like the children in that family can't change jobs in their thirties if they find that their interests change.

We school year round so that I can take lots of mental health days (weeks ;)), but her official line-up will look like this 4 days / week -- Reading: OPGTR (Progressive Phonics to supplement) All About Reading (it's just a better fit for her learning style) Math: Singapore Early Bird B / MEP reception to Year 1 / Bits and pieces of Miquon Orange Science: Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (Nature Study & Gardening to supplement) History: SOTW 1 (we're only doing this because her sister is starting SOTW this year, so I've been mixing things up a bit to have things for a non-reader/writer to do) Spanish: Salsa Spanish w/ Wyoming DoE lesson plans & Spanish for Children (sloooooowly) Play with Friends: we're in a couple of homschooling groups to play, do projects, go on field trips, etc She's also started taking Violin lessons with a good friend for fun, but it would be nice if she continues doing that over the next year too. Edited - I forgot spanish *doh*

I used OPGTR with both girls. For Kit I supplemented with reading eggs, and for Mim I supplement with Progressive Phonics because she enjoys co-reading. Once Kit finished OPGTR we just started buying her chapter books at the book store in her lexile range and I ask her to read outloud to me every day for about 10 minutes to make sure that she's prounouncing things correctly and decoding unknown words well.

We've liked: Raymond M. Smullyan's books http://store.doverpublications.com/0486482006.html http://store.doverpublications.com/0486474356.html They're often more like tricky logic (or illogic) puzzles, but the little stories that he puts in them are fun.

Ouch, but I guess that it could be worse, we've apaprently improved on both scores by several percentage points over the last few years: vs. the world math - 35% reading - 47% vs. the nation (we're almost average o.O I had no idea how bad education must be in this country) Math 44% Reading 48% vs State Math - 37% Reading - 41% vs Finland Math - 28% (singapore 19%) Reading - 32% (singapore 38%) I don't know whether to be horrified or vindicated because I chose to homeschool... neither really make me feel good.

I feel creatively bankrupt. I've been trying to put together Lapbooking ideas for our first pass through SOTW1 next year and I need help coming up with ideas for the different chapters. So far I've done: Civilization Nomads Become Farmers Egyptian Climate The Nile Provided Two Lands of Ancient Egypt Food Eaten by Ancient Peoples Copper Age Trading Game Egyptian Daily Life Egyptian Gods Cards Egyptian Gods Matchup (can you tell that I haven't had any trouble thinking up ideas for egypt?? ;)) Life in the Indus River Valley Uses for Bronze But I've barely gotten through 1/5 of the chapters and I just can't seem to come up with any more. I've seen and bookmarked a lot of the lapbooks that are pre-made around the web, but many of them seem beyond the capabilities of my youngest. Because Mim is only just going to be 5, I can't imagine that she's going to be writing out little notebooks or dictating her thoughts on what we're covering. I'd like for the lapbook to be something that she not only enjoys putting together, but something that's fun to go back through to read and play around in/with so that she walks away with something tangible even if she doesn't remember much of anything from the year itself. I feel like I've got this enormous mental block. Any and all suggestions would be enormously welcome, especially since I love making these lapbooks, I just seem to have completely run out of ideas :( PS - I hope that I've posted this in the right place, I waffled between here and the Elementary board, but I thought that I might find some more moms that have run through the whole sequence a couple of times if I posted it here.

There are a couple of lapbooking /notebooking pages here: http://www.homeschoolshare.com/ancient_egypt.php and http://dynamic2moms.webs.com/ancientgreece.htm If you click around a bit on their sites, I think that they have other topics as well.

She sounds a lot like my youngest. Mim loves meeting new people and talking, but she's also requires an incredible amount of sensory and physical stimuli. Before I realised that she just wasn't getting enough stimuli she was really hard for me to get a handle on. I was terrified that there was something wrong with her because I could tell that she was bright, but I just couldn't reliably reach her. We bought a jumpstart indoor trampoline, it's huge, it's loud, it can't ever be put up because it doesn't fold, and watching Mim on it has given me more gray hairs than anything other than the trees in our backyard, but my youngest sensory-craving daughter loves it. Within a month of getting she started climbing up on the handlebars and jumping off or doing various gymnastics tricks (is standing on the bars and falling to the wall and then handwalking up and down it), recently she's realised that if she tied a thick strap on each bar she could turn the bars into a swing for sitting and standing on. Luckily now that she's approaching 5 she spends more time in imaginative play instead of thinking up new ways to endanger herself. The other two things that helped was getting a lot of children's instruments (plus a full electric piano and my old guitar) and allowing her to smash, bash and combine them in any way she wanted to (except for standing or kneeling on the guitar - but playing with her feet or hair/head/ears was okay) and we started Science! She loves nature study and taking samples or pictures. She adores playing with the mini-indoor/outdoor microscope that I bought for her sister (who is now graduated to a regular elementary microscope) and 'experimenting' out in our backyard pond and the sandbox. Te winter and deep summer months are the hardest, but I try to find a balance between my oldest who can't tolerate too much sensory input and my youngest who requires too much. Luckily they've learned to accomodate eachother to some extent. PS - We also put youtube videos up on the TV (I love the historyteachers, melodysheep's syphony of science channels, any video with Hilary Hahn (she likes that Hilary wears really pretty dresses, although she is very sad that she's not blonde) and any of the instrumental videos of Lindsay Stirling... I put them on Mim can run back and forth endlessly across the living room (or twirl dance herself sick) and Kit can stay or wander off out of hearing range depending on how she's feeling that day.

Another group of BFSU lovers here.

Your daughter is so amazing :) Instead of academic groups (since you both seem like you might like a break from them) have you thought about joining a multi-age park/play day group? The one that I'm in (in SE PA) was started by someone from CA, but I can't imagine that it's unique - there have got to be some elsewhere too. Being able to just hang out with a group of kids of different ages that simply accept Kit as she is (she's very shy and horribly rule oriented) has been incredible for her self-esteem and willingness to reach out to other people and try new things. Plus, I get to enjoy coffee and lunch with an amazing group of diverse women while both girls are off playing, which might just be the best part.

If I were stuck with one curricula for K, I'd do MEP-reception a couple of days a week but I'd also buy and use cuisinaire rods and pattern blocks for the other two-three days a week (since reception is only 60 lessons) for us to play around with (*cough* no, I totally didn't just add Miquon back in there -- no books!! See!! *shifty eyes*).

We tended to do 10-30 minute lessons & experiments about 3-4 times a week for about 3 weeks per topic (although not at the moment since we take the whole spring off of work to do vegetable gardening ;)), but I count reading books about the subject and watching vido clips (from bill nye, 3-2-1 contact & other children's science programming, etc) in that time. For each unit we usually did a brief review at the beginning of each week about things that we'd done during other weeks (often going back to the very beginning because my eldest does best with spiral curricula). It was just a little reminder to keep things fresh in our heads. I have to admit, most of my friends just breeze through the book, and I can see the appeal, but I really liked having the 3 (sometimes 4) weeks per topic. It meant that if I didn't get my act together right away I still had some more time to think up fun experiments or to borrow new books from the library (since I never remember to pre-order them). Also, sometimes the girls grasped the concept really quickly and we just worked on diving deeper and deeper ... and then there were weeks when it seemed like they (or I) couldn't even remember the vocab words :D so it was nice to know that we had tons and tons of time to do science and if it didn't work today, or even yesterday, then it would surely be fine tomorrow.

We did: A/B1- Organizing things into categories; A2 - Solids, Liquids and Gases; A3 – Air is a substance; D1 – Gravity I: Gravity, Horizontal and Vertical (concurrent w/ A3); B2 – Distinguishing Living, Natural Non-living, and Human Made things; C1 – concepts of energy I: Making things go; C3 Concepts of Energy Kinetic and Potential; B3 Distinguishing between Plants and Animals (concurrent w/ C3); D2 – Day and Night and the Earth’s Rotation (concurrent w/ D3); D3 – Read and Draw Maps (w/ D2); D3A – North, East, South, West; B4 Life Cycles; B4A – Identification of Living Things (concurrent w/ B4, B4B, & D4); D4 Landforms and Major Biomes of Earth (w/B4A); B4B – What is a Species (w/ B4&B4A) I'd send you to my blog for how we implemented it, but I never put all of the units up. I keep meaning to update it ... but I should really just take it off of my signature since I never find the time :(

I totally know what you all mean. I waffle between letting myself go, and then 'doing something about it'; because of this, the South Beach Diet has been perfect for me. I've been on (and off) of it for over 7 years now and my weight fluctuates around 10lbs (taking into account two pregnancies), if it goes over 10 (or I start back up on the sugar rollercoaster) I just go back on Phase 1 for 2 weeks and then do phase two for a month or two and then I'm back on maintenance & (trying) to exercize. Happily, maintenance has been lasting longer for me every time but I tend to forget to eat and then eat garbage once I remember... because sticking a pizza in the oven and gorging on Doritos and mochas is easy and cooking three meals & two snacks can be hard (but so unbelieveably tasty). I really like http://www.kalynskitchen.com/ for recipies and ideas. But the reason why I love South Beach, despite the extra time cooking, is because I have sooooo much more energy when I'm paying attention and eating more salads and less carbs. Like the other nice ladies here have said everyone's body responds differently and needs different things :), but for me a low carb (ie 1 carb serving per meal) high fruit and veggie lifestyle is the best choice.

Ah, what a fabulous point!! I was typing it over from the Amazon page. I can't remember who he was supposed to be the most hated by - perhaps he's the most hated by historians writing about him? Or maybe just me. He was a pretty horrific ruler. Interestingly, I just checked (and despite the authoritative Amazon reviewer's comment to the contrary), SWB doesn't actually call him the most hated Emperor. She calls him evil and mentions that he was the worst emperor and that he was hated by the people of Rome, but she doesn't actually say that he was the most hated. I have no idea where that leaves us, but perhaps it will be useful :D PS - I forgot to mention that I'm not a historian, I was just a lowly history major (and lover, because really, who would major in history without loving it?)

History is messy. Every history book that I've ever read is riddled with 'innacuracies' because authors write history through the lense of their own lives and understanding. I only breezed through the comments on Amazon - but here are mine about a few of them. As with anything relating to history - you should take my answers with a large dose of salt ;) Did Alcibiades actually lead the Spartans through a secret tunnel into Athens? No. Did he change sides and incite revolt in Athenian territory during the war between Athens and Sparta? Yes. Does she change the order of historical events and put them into a more easily digestable, if not always strictly correct continuum? Yes. Does this make grasping ancient historical topics easier for children to understand? Yes. So is it bad? Not in my opinion. Most history texts skip around quite a bit. Was Alexander the Great Greek? Well, there's not as clear an answer. In part, it depends on whether you define Greek as decending from Athens or Sparta, or if Greek is a broader term relating to any person born of greek ancestry or if you're born / have lived in Greek occupied territory, or if you believe that you must self-identify as Greek to be Greek. It also depends on whether your primary language is Greek and ... well, I'm sure that if I kept thinking about it I could come up with even more. Whether he was 'Greek' or not today devolves a lot more into whether you believe that Macedonia should exist as a separate state, or whether you feel that there's something inherently inferior about slavs, or whatever personal prejudice that you bring to the table than what people actually thought of Alexander's legitimacy as a Greek at that time. In reality, it was a bit of a non-issue, but at least one history makes it clear that his first language wasn't Greek - but at this point, who knows what that historian's personal bias was. And as for Nero being the most hated Roman Emperor, I'm happy to say that the statement is quite accurate, and not the least bit negative or biased. It's come down to us as one of those few historical subjects that every historian really can agree with ;) Is her short vignette, myth and story based, style any less accurate than Herodotus' or Tacitus' histories? Not really. Is it great for small children? In my opinion, yes. It is essentially as accurate as any other history for children. The point is that these books are for small children, and history does need to be simplified. It is a complex subject filled with contradictions. I don't want my elementary aged children knowing the full story of Cleopatra and Ceasar any more than I want then reading the complete epic of Gilgamesh complete with ancient prostitutes. Anyone offering you a 'true' history has probably got a great bridge in brooklyn to sell you once you're done reading it (at a steep steep discount, of course!). Edited for grammar and punctuation... (and yet they're still awful - hopefully it's a little bit more clear now though)

According to the PA law code, the people involved in 'founded' charges of abuse are listed in a state-wide central register, therefore I don't think that this would be an issue. (PA child abuse code: http://www.pacode.com/secure/data/055/chapter3490/chap3490toc.html)

The issue was caused by this memo: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/Legis/CSM/showMemoPublic.cfm?chamber=S&SPick=20130&cosponId=11867 - which, when you read through it, sounded like it was going to impact every HS family. The actual legislation is actually fairly narrow: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/PN/Public/btCheck.cfm?txtType=PDF&sessYr=2013&sessInd=0&billBody=S&billTyp=B&billNbr=0032&pn=0691 - they can only report in cases where there has already been a charge of abuse within the last 18mos.