Both of my girls vastly preferred Bernarda Bryson's Gilgamesh to Zeman's trilogy.

We found the teacher's manuals indispensable. They have little scripted things to say when teaching the letters, like (from memory) "up like a helicopter!" and "bump on the bottom line," which I thought were silly and demeaning (for me), but which really, really helped dd7 remember how to form her letters. I just made myself a slave to the teacher's manual and the results were magical. Compared to the agony of trying to teach dd14 to print, anyhow.

Yeah! Twaddle is badly underrated. There's "no author's name because it was ground out by a hack as a Disney tie-in" twaddle, and there's luscious twaddle. I spent much of my time in grad school wallowing in 18th-century fluffy gothic twaddle.:lol:

Mine are 14, 7, and 2, and I'm envying the ability of others in this thread to get rid of curricula. I'm saving everything--who knows what #3's learning style will be? who knows if there will be a #4? what if my grandchildren are homeschooled and my kids find that 1990's LLATL books with crumbly spines are exactly what their children need?:) Like Sebastian, though, I box between-years curriculum items to save room. So much of our "curriculum," though, is just books, and since you can never guess when a child will pull something off the shelf you thought would be too advanced for them (or beneath them...), I keep it all out.

Classical, because I want the option to pursue it at higher levels should my children choose, and because we worship in Latin, so the minor differences are picked up easily.

We don't exactly schedule year-round, but we reverse the year. We take a break from Thanksgiving to New Year's, when dh's academic schedule is crazy (squeeze in those last lectures between Thanksgiving and Christmas! Extend those office hours for the students who haven't paid any attention all semester! Turn in those grades before the break! Fly off to the yearly conference as soon as the gifts are unwrapped! etc.) and I'm basically a single mom doing all the holiday preparation. We work like dogs in the summer when it's 100+ and nobody wants to play outside. We also have a 6-day lesson week, with no work Sundays, feast days, or slacker days.

Thank you both, Faithr and Sophia. Of course you're right; it's silly to think about dissuading her because of the dialect. Besides it's nothing compared to how her Latin prayers sound from her tiny tongue.:) Anyway it was all made pretty moot today when I asked her if she'd like to learn Sir Patrick Spens by heart entirely, and she rattled it off.:tongue_smilie:

Dd7 learns a new poem every week, usually one we select from her Oxford Book of Poetry for Children. Lately she's been reciting bits of Sir Patrick Spens, prompted by recent visits to Aberdour Castle and Dunfermline. I can't bring myself to ask her to learn the whole thing by heart, though, for the probably stupid reason that it's in Scots dialect in her book, and honestly, when dd7 reads "O whaur will I get a skeely skipper/ To sail this ship o' mine?" in her good, honest Texas accent, it makes me cringe. It's available in non-Scots adaptation, but it's the version with all the Scots that she likes. Should I just assign her to memorizing the whole thing, which she will love, and ignore the massive Scots/Texan dissonance? It sounds silly and petty not to, but if you could just hear her saying "'Tis we maun fetch her hame" you would understand my dilemma. Has anyone had similar difficulties with dialect in literature? What did you do?

A man asked me conversationally how many children I had, and when I said three, he said "Wow! That's insane!" I didn't come up with a snappy reply, since the occasion for our conversation was my having just run my minivan into his parked car, and I thought I would just graciously accept his pity for my having a huge family.:tongue_smilie: So I suppose for some, three is a large family.

I teach my kids to do it this way. (This is assuming a sentence that isn't complex.) 1. Find the subject and predicate (usually the first and last parts of the sentence). If the sentence isn't in standard English grammatical order (as in questions, or some poetic phrases), I ask the child to arrange it normally. 2. a. Find the simple subject and simple predicate (usually the last and first parts of the subject and predicate, respectively). 2. b. Determine if subject and/or predicate are compound. Identify connectors. 3. Using the simple predicate, find the object, if any. 4. Bracket off any prepositional phrases. 5. Remaining units should be modifiers of subject, object, or verb. I'm sure others have other methods. This seems to work best for my kids.

Anyone thinking of taking Asta's advice and dipping a toe into real theology might look at Hans Urs von Balthasar's In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic. The Swiss von Balthasar was Pope John Paul II's favorite theologian. Several friends who were considering the Catholic Church found In the Fullness of Faith to be very helpful (some became Catholic, some didn't). It doesn't pit Catholicism against Protestantism, but looks at Catholic faith as a complete tapestry. It's only 130 pages, but very dense reading.

:iagree:Dh and I turned it off during the agonizing "contrite teen does home maintenance" montage and amused ourselves by outlining exactly what would happen in the rest of the movie, then checking our predictions against imdb. We were right in every detail. It's that paint-by-the-numbers.

About $100-200. Like Krystan above, I never worry about getting the order up to free shipping level; parents in our hs support group just team up via e-mail to combine orders. I've never needed to order an item and been unable to find a few hs'ers who'd like to order from RR too. If I weren't spending dh's paycheck at Half Price and the library bookstore every month, I'd think myself frugal.

I like the RSV-CE. I use it for my CCD class instead of the (*shudder*) Good News Bibles they stock the classrooms with. It's readable and comprehensible, and retains, for the most part, the idioms of the Standard Version (KJV) which have become part of the English language. (I use the Golden Press Bible as a children's Bible for the same reason.) Some reviews of different Catholic Bibles.

You have just altered my mental image of you completely. Somehow I'd assumed you were a Gen-X'er, but you're a ... a ...:eek:

Dd14: Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage Dd7: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines Dd2: Days With Frog and Toad (again...)

AWANA ended a friendship of mine. Other Mom invited little dd to come to AWANA, and her son, dd's little friend, really desperately wanted her to come, too, and they promised it was just a few verses of Bible study and then lots of fun 'n' games, so I let her go. When I picked her up from the room, her little friend told me with great excitement about the prize he was getting for having brought an "unsaved" friend. Now, dd went to mass twice a week, prayed daily, and had just made her First Communion, and Other Mom knew that. I had never realized until that moment that we were not Christians in her eyes. (Some gentle probing later confirmed that.) On the way out, a couple of church staff members stopped dd and asked her--not me--if she wouldn't like to come back next time, every time, maybe she could bring her family on Sunday? I told them she wouldn't be returning. Dang I was stupid and naive. Never again.

I just finished Scott's Waverley. I had to keep flipping it over to read the back cover blurb about how it was a sensation when published, one of the world's classics, very readable, sparked a wave of Scottish romanticism ... just to convince myself to keep going. No sign of a plot for the first 200 pages; one-dimensional stereotyped characters speaking over-the-top Scots dialect requiring constant flipping to the appendix for a translation ... and a hero I wanted to kick throughout. I can't believe they named the central Edinburgh train station after this book. It should have been a warning when dh told me he'd read it wasn't as good as Heart of Midlothian. :ack2: Anyone want a used copy of Waverley? I'll leave it in the Edinburgh airport on the way out.

It's hard to combine my 14yo, 7yo, and 2yo for anything other than activities and some read-alouds that have higher levels to them such that big sister enjoys listening in (Tom Sawyer, The Peterkin Papers, The Wind in the Willows, etc.). I did try combining handwriting last year in a desperate last-ditch attempt to provide dd14 with legible writing, and she was game, but today her penmanship is as bad as ever while dd7 has a beautiful cursive. Ah well.

I used Perrine's Sound and Sense with dd14 when she was 12-13yo, adapting as necessary as we went along.

If you don't feel it's inappropriate for DD the Elder's age, I'd say go right for an up-to-date translation of Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend. It's the source for all the medieval saints' stories and iconography. Unlike Butler's, it's quite full of historically unlikely hagiography; it's not in Butler's that you'll learn how St. Martha made it to France and saved the locals from not just a dragon but an onachus, "which lets fly its dung like an arrow at anyone who gives chase and can shoot it up to an acre away, scorching whatever it touches as if it were fire." There's violence, occasional anti-Jewish and -Muslim references, and references to prostitution and other sexual proclivities; I don't read out of it to younger children. (I do let dd14 read it though.)

Oh--I was talking about BFSU. Somehow I hadn't realized "Nebel" meant anything else.

:iagree: Dh has been studying grammar for 23 years since high school ended (1000-page dissertation on anaphora, i.e. pronouns) and is still going strong. Grammar is a common dinner-table subject. That said, the traditional identifications of parts of speech and parts of a sentence we try to finish up by the end of elementary age. So everyone can join in over the soup.

Have, and have used: Miquon Key To ... series Standard Service Arithmetics

Nebel looks overwhelming in part because there's so much explanation. The point is to have the child learn to think scientifically, not (just) to learn scientific facts. Fundamental understandings are established, and then knowledge is built on that. When I first flipped through it, I thought there were many parts we could skip because my rising 2nd-grader had already done the associated experiments and (I thought) therefore understood the principles. But I found she actually had a lot of confused thinking, much of which I had caused by not being systematic. I wish I had my copy with me so I could be more precise. What I did to get the book under control was read through all the introductory material, then paper-clipped that section to get it out of the way. I left free the flow chart diagrams of the necessary order of experiments/discussions, and penciled in the page number for each experiment in the corresponding flow-chart box. Then determine what the first/next few units you want to do will be. Read them carefully, and make sure you understand the concepts. Then get together whatever you need--the materials are very simple and ready-to-hand--and you're good to go. Now we've only done about a dozen units, as we've been slowed down by dd2's issues and a sudden temporary move to the U.K., but dd7 and I greatly look forward to continuing Nebel. She loves it, and I love it (though I kick myself for now having to un-teach her some bad science she picked up from my previously unsystematic approach). Nebel even got a strong endorsement from dd14, who was looking over the page that explained why "potential energy" isn't included in the list of "kinds of energy," and said she had been confused by potential energy when I had taught her about it, wasn't unconfused until she took chemistry years later, and was glad dd7 wasn't being taught wrong things about science. :blushing: