Thanks Denise for the link to the diagramming info. It does appear to get a bit difficult at the more complex stages.. lol. Lewelma.. I appreciate you posting his response. I am going to spend the time clicking on all the links this week. Are you using the 6th grade levels right now? Obviously it has been going well if you are sticking with it, but have their been any snags along the way? It seems relatively straight forward if you just steer clear of the website and download the workbooks. ;-)

I agree that the 2nd edition is much better. I also bought and resold the first. - S

I can see how this method would integrate easily with MCT, but since I don't know much beyond MCTs grammar, R&S4 that we did last year, and the few weeks of ALL I am unsure of which method to choose. It seems clear that he doesn't do traditional diagramming, but by the time you completethe levels, the student would be well versed in any sentence they wanted to understand better, so I am not sure where diagramming would come into play at that point. Perhaps others might be able to clarify that for me? I am just trying to figure out why this method appeals to some vs. a more traditional route. I need to dig around a bit more, but if I am missing something obvious about it I would love for someone to reply. I do like the examples he uses, and the fact that he takes so much of his material from literature. My kids would definitely like that aspect of it. I noticed with Level 1 6th grade he is having you identify PN and PA and that would be new to us. Do you all feel like KISS is a very indepth grammar curriculum? Would it have you more than ready to take on any higher level of R&S or Hake or some of the others out there once you were done with it?

I am not sure if anyone has mentioned the Reception year of MEP but I liked the looks of it and have considered using it and the first level before we start with MM. I have two older students currently using MM3 and MM5 and we are enjoying it.

We are using Sadlier Oxford Vocabulary Building books this year and they are fantastic. We are also doing MCT Town, and studying with Lively Latin so I think we are getting a lot of vocabulary work in. I will probably continue with Sadlier Oxford.

With the printable KISS Grammar Books, I would probably just download the entire document and then put it on their laptops to use instead of printing it. Then they could work the solutions on lined paper. Would that work, or is there a lot of the time that printing would be better? I suppose it will have them writing out a lot of sentences if I do it off the laptop.. so perhaps we could do it orally if I find that I like the program enough. The main question I have is the printable workbooks are only for 2nd or 6th grade right now. I guess the 6th grade one could last a while, but what if you want to move beyond? Is that what everything else on the website is about? I can figure out if there are all grades available somewhere or just 2nd and 6th?

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=311229&highlight=SWB+vocab&page=2 Is the above link what you are talking about?

My dc completed a year of Lively Latin last year and we moved over to Visual Latin this year. They just finished weeks 1 − 10 of the DVD course and we like it a lot. I can't say if you could jump into lesson 11, but I know that there were only a few things that we had even touched on in a year of Lively Latin. The instructor had us understanding the cases relatively quickly as we learned that the nominative case is the subject of the sentence and the accusative case is the direct object. We just had not made those connections before. Also the translations each week have been great. By the end of week 10 they are taking an entire paragraph of Latin from Genesis and translating it. Anyway, we start with week 11 next week.

Thanks everyone!

Yes, as I stated in another post I am very intrigued by it, but I can't figure out how to use it exactly. I would love to have KISS users explain where to start and what a typical day would look like?

I have tried several times to make heads or tails of this website. I am intrigued, but how in the world do you use it???

There are A LOT of changes going on with a girl in middle school.. hormones being first on the list. They may abate as she gets older. My mom always felt horrible as my hives were so bad I would take nightly oatmeal baths. ugh. I remember calamine lotion spread everywhere too. It was not fun. I would consider an ND and perhaps looking into diet, but stress and new changes (location, move, etc.) mixed with hormonal changes can definitely put a body over the top for a bit. Good luck!

When my dd was 4 she insisted I teach her how to read. I went to Costco and at the time they had a complete set of Hooked on Phonics (Levels 1 − 5). What I loved about it was the little sticker chart and the fact that within a week or so she was able to go and grab her first book and read it. This was back before I had any plans of homeschooling my kids, and I had the two eldest reading by the time they were 4. I literally spent about 15 minutes a day with them in the evenings before bed. My dd was reading chapter books by the time she entered kindergarten, so I know they worked well. Before that time, they watched all the Leap Frog videos.. the letter factory, etc. so that they knew their letter sounds and what they looked like.

I grew up in a family of women where everyone had their 'parts' removed by the time they were in their late 20s. So far I am 38 and still have mine (fingers crossed). Initially as a teen and in my twenties I had to contend with very heavy cycles, migraine headaches, moodiness and bad cramps. When I was diagnosed as a celiac 9 years ago, I was working with an ND that also looked into my hormones. Turns out I wasn't very good at detoxing hormones and therefore the second half of my cycles were horrible. She started me on Indole 3 Carbinole (an enzyme taken from the cruciferous vegetable family - broccoli, etc) and after taking it for a full cycle I didn't even feel my cycles coming on.. certainly not to the extent that I had in the past. I have been taking Indole for years now.. one tablet twice a day.. and my cycles are fairly short, very regular and don't instill in my body a need to come completely undone every two weeks. How indole works is that it gives your liver what it needs to detox estrogen and change its form from a 'bad' kind into a good kind that would be able to be excreted out of the body. If you personally don't create enough of these enzymes on your own then you end up with a clogged pipe and those bad versions of estrogen get stored in your tissues. Anyway, it's worked for me.. It's by Thorne Research and called Indole 3 carbinole.

I grew up with hives almost nightly when I was in 4-6th grades. I got them when I was stressed, or anything like that. Back when I was a kid though, all we had was benedryl and I was 'drugged' up from it. Not good. ;-) Many years later I was diagnosed as a celiac. I would suggest looking into a food allergy first of all. Typically something else has your body on alert already, and then if ANYTHING like stress, common allergens, or just some random thing comes along it takes a body that is already full up and has it overreacting to odd things that otherwise might not bother them. You might consider something to lower the histamine levels naturally, like Quercetin/Nettle and a good fish oil for essential fatty acids daily. After that I would consider cutting out foods like wheat (gluten perhaps??), milk (generally people can handle cheese and yogurts though), along with any food dyes or additives. Try eating as close to nature as you can for a bit and see how it goes. You should know within a month or so if it is helpful. I can't say that those two foods would be the only or THE culprit, so if you are interested in reading more consider getting Eat Right for Your Type and Eat Right for your GenoType. Also, there are many allergy books out that connect food intolerance to asthma, hives, etc. It's not much of a stretch, and it's at least a direction to move in so that you are feeling like perhaps you are actually fixing the issue rather than trying to treat every symptom. In WA State NDs (Naturopathic Physicians) are paid for and considered family physicians same as MDs. NDs are a bit different though as they will work with your diet, lifestyle and can do different types of tests to get to the root of it. Try and find a board certified one that is licensed by the state you are in if you can and consider making an appointment.

Listening in.. thanks!

Congratulations Aubrey!

Well... I will take a stab at this. ha. I am using CC Fable right now along with WWS. I can see ahead with the progym. in either CC or CW, but I can't say with WWS since we only have the first level. I think with CC Fable the figures of description help create more descriptive sentences within a structured narration that WWS is teaching. I often times will ask my dc to include certain figures of description within their summaries, or narrations. I do also like the copia exercises in CC, but WWS will concentrate on this a bit later in the year. They are both good programs. WWS is not a full on progym. program, but then it also gets you writing scientific and historical papers a bit earlier than either of the classical writing programs do. um.... yep... that's about all I can say right now. ;-) Hopefully others will chime in as well. They are both great programs.

No kidding about the great selections. It is truly a gift to have a curriculum that excites a young reader enough to want get a copy of the book as soon as they are done with the excerpt. That has been the best gift of this curriculum so far, and it started way back in WWE. ;-) Just the other day the excerpt from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer had them fighting over the book to read it again. For my ds it was his first time, so he got first crack at chapters 1 - 10 before we discussed how vividly Twain described the graveyard scene, and how spooked Tom was before he had even left his room earlier that night! That's what great writing can do to you. I love this curriculum for that reason, and a host of others.. but mainly for all the new reading we are doing. It led them to buy a used copy of The Book of Dragons and other Edith Nesbit books. The only other things that I have done to tweak it a bit (and I am way off of the OPs original question here.. ha) are that I try to play act sometimes with them. Take for example the Kepler story. I really wanted them to think about some of his direct quotes, and how maddening it must have been to stare up at the planets for that many years! I sort of get into it, but it seems to help THEM get into it too. ;-) Then it becomes more exciting to retell his story. With Titanic we talked about how cold people must have been and reluctant to get on the lifeboats, not believing it would ever actually SINK! Which is why they were almost empty in the beginning. They read accounts of the survivors as well. I also bring in the Figures of Description that we are learning within Classical Composition Fable. With the Kepler story we used astrothesia as well as a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head. So.. I am somewhat combining things, but we are enjoying it!

Just listening in and wanted to say I am thoroughly enjoying it! ;-)

I would like to add that today I was pre-planning for tomorrow's assignment on Ivan the Terrible and St. Basil's Cathedral.... Week 11, Day 4. I have found it very helpful to grab short videos from Discovery or The History Channel on the subject that SWB outlined. Since we haven't reached this in history yet, it helps my dc to become more engaged in what they want to write about. I did the same thing when we wrote about the Titanic by finding video clips of the ship, and one of the SOS recordings for us to listen to. Anyway, I noted that the assignment has us writing a description of St. Basil's Cathedral along with our Ivan composition. The IG provides help with suggested adjectives and nouns, as well as how to guide the student in finding appropriate similes and other descriptive elements. SWB also gives us paragraph descriptions from two travelogues for inspiration, or to show your student afterwards. None of that is available in the student book. I think it's a matter of depth within each assignment, as I would miss my target by a wide margin without the IG. ;-)

oh good Ruth.. I just emailed you the link as well before I saw you had edited your post. ;-)

We are currently doing MM 5A and they are also fairly independent with it. It does take a bit of getting used to if you are just moving over. I remember starting with 4A last year and it taking a few months for dd to really get how it worked.

Wow.. the sample chapters online are quite impressive. Are you using the online student and teacher resources by chance? What has been your favorite thing about this particular history book so far?

Stewart English doesn't have a huge sample on RR though and the first book's TC seemed fairly straight forward. You mentioned though that Book 1 moves out of basic 8 parts of speech fairly quickly? Can you be more specific about what else it covers in Book 1? Thanks