LOL! I'm going to take that as a compliment to my curriculum instead of an insult to my personality. :biggrinjester:

It looks like the thread is dying down, so I'm going to attempt to extricate myself from the forums. :-) Thanks for letting me participate! And please feel free to PM or email me if you have any additional questions.

I love children's literature, too, which is not the same as children's fiction. As for libraries, not all of us have a choice. We live in a very small town, which happens to be the largest "city" in our county. There are no other libraries within easy driving distance. We check out history sometimes, lots of science books, and some picture books and early readers. My children bring me fiction books that we've checked out and explain that they're not worth reading. I've kept the twaddle to a minimum over the years, and they recognize the lower quality when they see it. And they see a lot of it at our library.

Probably 2, since you've been doing Spalding. My phonograms are closer to those of LoE than Spalding, though, so there would be a slight adjustment.

I believe it's okay to toss parts of a program that you feel are causing problems. Just based on what you said right there: I don' t believe in quizzing my younger children with spelling. Their focus is writing the words from dictation, and reading them. The only REQUIRED writing my younger children do is dictated spelling words and copywork. IMO, mistakes lead to confusion and more mistakes, so we just avoid the mistakes altogether. When we have mistakes in dictation, rare but it happens, I have them correct immediately, and I tell them what and where. Again, my opinion here, but I believe that the time and the place for children to proofread is after they've learned how to read and write, not while they're learning. My oldest child had a "proofreading" exercise in a spelling book when he was in second grade. It took weeks to undo the harm from that one exercise, so I have serious issues with that now. :001_rolleyes:

Sometimes we do the dictation the same day, sometimes we do the dictation the next day. It's really up to you. The program is set up for three days per week, but you could divide those three lessons per week up any way you wanted to.

I printed out the exercises, but not the copywork, for my 4th grade son. He does the copywork into a primary comp book straight from my Kindle Fire screen. It just depends on whether or not your child is ready for that. For levels 5 and up, which won't have workbooks, I'm going to recommend that children diagram the sentence, and then write the part of speech of each word right there on the diagram. That will keep them from having to write the sentence twice. And yeah, that would be an issue around here. LOL Depending on your child's age, this could work. Other exercises could be done orally. Though if you'd rather buy the workbook, I won't complain. :D

Ah. It is gentle, and while I have no experience with CAPD, I can only suggest that you gentle it up even more where necessary. ((hugs)) I know it's frustrating to mom as well as to the child when dealing with programs that are developmentally inappropriate in some way.

I hope it works for y'all! The resistance I've heard about from others concerns either the reading or the copywork. If he resists the extra reading, I recommend the audio books from Librivox. If he resists the copywork, I recommend working up to it slowly if necessary. For example, he could start off only copying one sentence of the copywork. After a few weeks of this, bump it up to two sentences. Repeat this process until he's doing all of it, always waiting until he's grown comfortable with the new amount before increasing it again.

Yep, I have the notebook covers, planning pages, and some reading lists that have been around for years. :-) I don't like hearing that about CreateSpace. I hadn't heard anything negative about their printing. I only have a printed copy of one of my books from them, 50 States, and I love it. It's still fairly new, but it's not showing any quality problems that make me feel like it's likely to fall apart quickly. Tomorrow, I will try to make sure that there's a print option for all of my books at Lulu. That way, if anyone is concerned about the quality, Lulu is also an option. I have a number of books from Lulu which I've had for years, and I've been very pleased with the quality. ETA: I found two threads online with authors talking about CreateSpace quality. Overall, they seem happy. Only an occasional problem is mentioned. http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=198525 http://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=163511.0

You don't have to use RLTL to use LLTL, but you certainly can. If you want to use both, you don't have to finish RLTL before starting LLTL 1. I did wait until Eli could sound out the words he would be using for copywork, though. I helped him (and sometimes, still do) to mark words on the copywork page to make them easier for him, and I would draw a line between syllables. So he could not read fluently when we started, but he was at least sounding words out without TOO much difficulty.

Level 1 and Level 2 are both available as stand alone books now on Amazon, but the combined edition is still available.

I designed the cover for three before I was completely sure I would write it. :lol: I'm glad y'all like them. And y'all have one cool librarian. Our library has very strict rules, despite the fact that it's small and we've only seen other people in the children's section on one occasion.

It looks great, but it's not public domain. I decided to steer clear of anything that would require me to ask permission. Plus, I like keeping the program inexpensive to use. You begin to see my problem now, huh? Some of the publishers require some sort of proof that you have a real publisher just to consider a request for using their copyrighted material. The lion on the cover of Level 3 was supposed to be Aslan. *shrug* I liked the cover, so I decided he was the lion from Dolittle. But thanks! It looks like a fun read aloud.

Yes, it's version 3. That just means that there are three different readings of the book on Librivox. The first one, I think, has many different readers. Versions 2 and 3 each have a single reader from beginning to end. My husband used to use Librivox a lot when he was traveling, and he says the quality there is a really mixed bag.

Does anyone feel like this is not realistic? Level 4 will be recommended for 4th or 5th grade. Joshua can handle this now, in 4th grade, but Joshua is... well, "special" in a number of ways, not all of them good. :-D

I will be putting some of my oldest son's papers up on my blog for people to read. Obviously, he did not learn to write using my program. But it should also be obvious that I'm adding to my program the same types of activities that made him a good writer. I'm not comfortable posting the link here for a number of reasons. See my Facebook page, link in my sig, or PM me if you're interested. I posted my reasoning for doing this on FB, so I'll copy and paste it here: "I'm considering posting some of Jared's (17yos, 11th grade) papers on my blog, with his permission. My reason for considering this is to demonstrate the power of narration and imitation in teaching writing. Jared is a 'natural,' in that writing has come easily to him. However, he did have to learn, and he's learned completely through imitation. I'm pretty sure he's never had a single lesson on writing paragraphs, and he certainly NEVER learned the 5 paragraph essay. I did explain to him that he needed an intro and a conclusion, and what transition sentences are." He started writing essays for me a year or two ago. Before that, it was all imitation, and lots of reading.

We've done it after having already read the books. When I wrote Level 2, I used some books that we'd already read that year, so we didn't feel like rereading them so soon. It worked fine. The only problem with doing the lessons without having ever read the books is the possibility of, as River Song would say, "Spoilers!" ;-) We wouldn't choose to do it that way, and I think doing it that way would take away what I see as one of the benefits, the integration of the reading, the examples, and the exercises. However, that's a personal decision. The examples and the exercises are still real sentences from classic literature. In my opinion, that's still preferable to using manufactured sentences.

The exercises require very little writing. Most of the writing is in the copywork; you could do the dictation like we do--on the computer--if he types already. If not, I also recommend getting him started on typing. :-) With the copywork, you could let him work up to the full amount. For example, he could start off only copying one sentence of the copywork. After a few weeks of this, bump it up to two sentences. Repeat this process until he's doing all of it, always waiting until he's grown comfortable with the new amount before increasing it again. As for the grammar terms, whatever program you use, just practice saying the definitions. I recommend repeating memory work three times a day until it's memorized, then reviewing it periodically. We stopped reviewing last year, so now Joshua is relearning the definitions. LLTL has a list in the back to make it easy to review the terms and lists mentioned in the book. In Level 3, my original idea was that children are transitioning from having to have an exact model to copy to being able to correctly form the letters no matter the source material. With that in mind, I only provided one workbook, in italic. However, there have been some concerns about this. I've already created a cursive italic font workbook, and I'm going to create a regular cursive font workbook, too. So, soon there will be three choices for workbooks for Level 3. For Level 4, the workbook will be in a standard font like Times, and Levels 5 and up will not have workbooks at all. Hope this helps!

Here are the planned literature selections for Levels 4, 5, and 6. I'm going to get them posted on my site (eventually), but at least one person has indicated that she'd like to see them here. These are subject to change! But this is the current plan. And yes, there's an Oz book in every level except Level 1. Oz is where I started this journey, so it just seemed right. Plus, I like them, and so do the boys. I liked the idea of covering more fairy tale type books (Oz and The Princess and the Goblin kind of books), ones that were "outside" of history studies, but I couldn't actually seem to make it work that way. I am open to suggestions if you can think of books of that sort (ETA: in the public domain), but I make no guarantees of changing my mind. :-) Level 4 Black Beauty The Book of Dragons Heidi Ozma of Oz Tanglewood Tales The Reluctant Dragon Level 5 Tom Sawyer Around the World in 80 Days The Emerald City of Oz Little Women Two short stories by O. Henry The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde Level 6 At the Back of the North Wind Call of the Wild The Patchwork Girl of Oz A Christmas Carol Sherlock Holmes stories Other short stories

Karen Savage is one Librivox reader we like, and she has a lot of books. We downloaded her version of The Story of Doctor Dolittle.

I've gotten better about read alouds over the years, but I would still have trouble using multiple levels with younger children without audio books. I have audio versions of various books from both Audible and Librivox. Because these are childhood classics, there are some really good readers who do the Librivox versions! I regretted wasting my Audible credits on a few. :-)

70% dark, either Lindt or Green & Black's. In case you're ever considering a bribe. :-D

Levels 1 and 2 are now separated. Level 2 is available now through CreateSpace. Level 1 should be available through CreateSpace tomorrow; there was a problem with the cover file that needed correction. Both levels should be available through Amazon within a week. Amazon will discount them and they'll be eligible for free shipping offers For the time being, I'm leaving the single book that includes both Levels 1 & 2 up as well, for anyone who prefers it.

This one is simply the standard dictionary way to break that word into syllables. It's following the rule to divide syllables between two consonants. FWIW, I've disagreed with the dictionary re: dividing syllables multiple times. :-)