I own the original hard copy version of Level 3 (with the Aesop's fables and LLTL title) and I really wanted to love it, but I just don't. I adore the idea of it and I like the book lists, but I don't like being tied to keeping up with reading certain books in order to be able to do our English lesson for the day. Also, I found some of the lessons confusing and accessing the answer key really cumbersome. And the workbook PDF was not as polished as I expected it to be. Ultimately, I think it's just really new and will benefit from more user feedback and editing in order to live up to the potential I think it has. We are trying Rod and Staff next year and I think it will be a better fit for us, for now.

This is something I would skip, so hopefully there aren't too many things like this in there. I guess I'll skim ahead a bit and make notes of anything I want to omit or change. But it doesn't sound like there will be much, so that's good. Thanks, everyone! :)

Thank you for your input! I think I'll go ahead and order it. I'm really hoping it will help me get more science done this year, as it looks fairly easy to implement. :)

Thoughts, anyone?

Anybody else have any experience with the HITW units and know how many can realistically expected to be done in one year?

This is a good point. Maybe I should just do the world history (the two Project Passports) for the first 12 weeks and the US for the rest of the year?

I've got a rising 5th grader, 3rd grader and kindergartener. We've been pretty relaxed with history so far and have only gotten as far as about 1000AD in our chronological studies (didn't start chronological history until my oldest's 3rd grade year). Next year, I want to continue the chronology and also focus more on American history when we get to that time period. I also want to add more crafts/projects for my crafty kids. So here is my plan so far, please tell me if this looks doable: 1st 6 week unit: (Homeschool in the Woods) Project Passport: Middle Ages (select projects, not the whole thing) and the relevant chapters from CHOW (we've already been reading and enjoying it) plus living books 2nd 6 week unit: History Pockets: Native Americans, the relevant chapters of A History of US concise volume 1, and the Childcraft Indian book plus living books 3rd 6 week unit: Time Travelers: New World Explorers and the relevant chapters of A History of US concise volume 1 plus living books 4th 6 week unit: Project Passport: Renaissance and Reformation (select projects) and the relevant chapters form CHOW plus living books 5th 6 week unit: Time Travelers: Colonial Life and the relevant chapters of A History of US concise volume 1 plus living books 6th 6 week unit: Time Travelers: The American Revolution and the relevant chapters of A History of US concise volume 1 plus living books

I really like the looks of Science in the Beginning... it looks doable and interesting for us and I like that it touches on various science topics throughout the year, instead of focusing all year on one topic. My only concern is that I'm afraid it will be too heavy handed on Young Earth Creationism, which I do not agree with. We are Christian and I don't mind stuff that mentions God creating the world, but I do not believe science and faith should necessarily mix, nor do I believe that the Bible should be used like a science text. From what I understand, Science in the Beginning uses the "creation days" to organize science topics, which I can live with, but not if it also preaches that a literal six days is the only reasonable Christian belief. I'm sure that evolution won't be taught in this text (which is fine, we can cover that another year) but I don't want anything that discounts or dismisses evolution, either. So my question is, aside from the structure of the topics and the fact that it mentions God creating, is the rest fairly neutral? Could it be used by someone who believes that God used the process of evolution to bring about his creation without heavy editing?

After looking through both LLTL3 and the CAP samples, I think they will compliment each other nicely. From what I can tell, LLTL3 focuses more on literature and grammar and CAP more on re-writes and original composition. They both cover narration, copywork, dictation, and grammar application and that is where we will pick and choose because I know it would be way too much for him to have to do all the writing in both of these programs. But there are things from both that I think are important to learn and everything is so nicely laid out in each of these programs that I think they will be fairly painless to implement. Plus, neither program has an overwhelming amount of lessons to get through. Lots of people do WWE & FFL together and that is what I would compare these programs to. So far this year, we have been doing ILL, Sentence Family and writing across the curriculum (narrations/dictations/copywork) and it's been OK, but I feel like I'm floundering a bit without a more laid out plan. (SF has been the hit of the year so we will for sure finish that up, though). So we will see how things go when I get my books. :)

Terrible enablers, the lot of you. Thanks to this board, I just bought two levels of LLTL and now I've gone and bought the teacher's manual to both of these books. :svengo: Truthfully I'm really excited, though. No other writing/grammar programs have spoken to me like these two. I'm thinking of using them together for my oldest, doing most of CAPW&R Fable orally/on the whiteboard (using a notebook for the longer assignments) and LLTL3 in the workbook. Does that seem reasonable, or do you think that would overwhelm my reluctant writer?

Yes, I've read the book Wicked and I would definitely not read it to my children. The musical has the same themes as the book, but it's much less "dark" and much more child friendly. I was just wondering how the "Wicked" Oz relates to the world of Oz in the original series by Baum.

I've been researching these and I've read that they are undated so you could start using them any time during the year! I'm very tempted to order... there are a few days left for the 30% off and free pens! lifeon18wheels, have you received your order yet? I would love to hear what you think!

I loved Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. O'Brien when I was growing up.

Thank you! Another sort of related question... does anyone know how the musical Wicked fits in with the original book series? I know the musical story line was drawn from a modern book, but I wonder how much of the world of Oz the author of Wicked drew from. DH and I just saw the musical recently and our whole family has been enjoying listening to the CD and I think the kids will enjoy delving deeper into the land of OZ.

I have just been reading about Language Lessons Through Literature on here and I am loving the looks of it! It's exactly the kind of thing I've been wanting to pull together myself but haven't. :laugh: I'm thinking of starting my 4th grader in Level 3 of LLTL and my 2nd grader in Level 1. I noticed that the Wizard of Oz is read in Level 2 and then every level after that is projected to use each of the subsequent books of this series. I've never read any of these books and am only familiar with the movie version of the WoO, so I was wondering if we could just watch the movie to get the basic gist of the story line before starting The Marvelous Land of Oz from level 3? Then we would read The Wizard of Oz next year when we do level 2 with DD. Or is the story line of the movie really significantly different than the book?

I have no idea if it was a gradual process akin to a growing awareness like going from infancy to childhood, or if it was that we had reached a certain point in our development and were ready to receive his image all at once. I also don't know exactly what it means to be his image bearers... that is a highly debated theological idea. But I think it mainly has to do with us no longer being simply physical beings like other animals, but also spiritual beings. And I don't think that our ability to choose was suddenly switched on, so much as we had reached an "age of accountability" where we no longer acted solely on basic instinct like the animals, but had reached the point where we could reason through the consequences of our actions. I don't know if anyone else is still even reading this thread, but I am loving your questions and this conversation... you are really making me think!

My gateway book was For the Children's Sake. I need to pull it out and read it again since it's been a while, but I remember that book being one of the first times I encountered the idea of teaching with "living books" and I just fell in love with that idea at once.

My thoughts are in bold

I'm on my phone and I can't figure out how to quote, but I wanted to respond to livetoread. I think you are asking good, important and hard questions. I was raised believing in YEC, a literal, inerrant Bible, etc. and I have rejected most of those teachings. I'm still working through what I actually believe about many things, but I did want to take a stab at the question of why God would create a world with suffering. I believe that God set in motion a creation apart from himself using what we now understand as the process of evolution. Perhaps he nudged here and there a bit during the process to ensure that humans would develop as we did. And perhaps when we reached the proper stage in our development, God then "created us in his image" aka breathed his spirit into us. Then we grew in reason and developed the ability to distinguish right from wrong. I believe he created us specifically apart from him because he desires a true relationship with us. In order for us to fully choose to love God and do that which is holy, we must have the freedom to not choose him and to do things that are not holy. If we were created without the freedom of choice, then we would not be relational beings, we would be robots. But when we choose to do things that are not holy (aka sin) we can no longer be in the presence of the One who is holy because that which is not holy cannot survive in God's presence. So because he knew that we would make choices that would separate us from him, he came up with a rescue plan which he wrote into the very fabric of creation. The very existence of the cycle of life-death-life that we see in nature points to Jesus' redemptive act of allowing himself to die and then overcoming death, bringing life. But I think nature was allowed to develop in its own way, for the most part. Over time, perhaps the more vicious mutations were the ones that came out on top through natural selection. After all, Genesis doesn't say that God created the world to be perfectly in line with his will, it says he thought it was "good" (the word in Hebrew means "beautiful"). There is great suffering that has come about through creation's freedom to develop as we will, but there is also great beauty. Lastly, I believe that God redeems even the horrible situations we find ourselves in due to "sin" (which simply means missing the mark of what God desires for us). That can happen through our own wrong choices, the wrong choices of others, or from natural disasters that result from nature doing its own thing. And I believe that God exists outside of time and therefore has a "big picture" perspective that we can even begin to understand. He knows that what has happened, and what will happen within our tiny realm of time is only one small part of a much bigger story. I hope that made sense... it's kinda hard to re-read and edit on my phone

Thanks so much! I will check this out.

It's not just the storage of the worksheets themselves I'm concerned about, but rather having drastically different sized papers to deal with in our end of the year portfolio binders. Maybe it's dumb, but I would rather take a bit of time to just copy the full sized worksheet on the back of the few measurement pages that there are (which are obvious by just a quick glance through the pile) than have to buy all new binders for our portfolios that then don't fit our regular-sized paper. :svengo:

You have all been so helpful! I literally had my cart at RR filled up with a whole new math program, ready to push the button and you all have talked me down. :hurray: I think I have not been putting in the effort required to make the most of MEP and I was looking for the easy way out hoping that a new program would be the answer to all my problems. :001_rolleyes: But it doesn't sound like PM is the miracle cure I was hoping it would be. And since we all genuinely love MEP, I shouldn't change what isn't broken. With a few tweaks, I think it will be just right for us. I'm going to use the weekend to print and bind the next section for DS the way I outlined above and then take the time to read ahead on the lessons with the practice sheets next to me and highlight and make notes and such. Thank you all so much for your ideas and advice! :grouphug: Oh, and one more question... does anyone know if the Elementary Mathematics for Teachers book will help me if I wanted to learn how to apply the bar modeling method from Singapore to our lessons in MEP?

If I use A4 paper then it won't fit nicely into regular binders, though. And that would drive me crazy, too. I just have to be difficult, don't I?

I have tried not shrinking them down and the partial numbers really bother me for some reason. The measuring ones have been few enough so far that I don't think it will be too much of an issue to just print them full sized on the back. I have also tried just looking at the laptop (don't have a tablet) and it just doesn't work well... I'm not sure why. But it always seems to go better when I have everything we need printed ahead of time. Which is why it's been a struggle using MEP... I'll think "oh, no big deal, I'll just read that from the computer when I need to" and then it just doesn't happen. I am using MEP because it is an interesting and quality math program, not because it's free. If I wasn't using it, I would be spending money on a pre-bound, prepared curriculum. So, for me, it makes sense to spend the money to make MEP as legit and easy to use as possible. Spending the time and money to get it pre-printed, bound and organized makes it feel more like a "real" math program and will make me want to stick with it longer. And it will still probably be cheaper than buying Primary Mathematics or any other program I am interested in.

Well, now this is interesting. Maybe what I really have is "greener grass" syndrome. If I am willing to spend $100 on a whole new program, maybe I should just spend some money and time on making MEP (the program we know and love) more useable for me, huh? So here is what I'm thinking: for each printable section (3 in A and 3 in B ) in each of the years, I want to print all the lesson plans (double sided) and answer keys (4 to a sheet) and then have them spiral bound. So I will end up with 3 smaller spiral books that I can then put in a binder labeled "MEP year 4a", for example. That way I can just pull out the spiral book we need instead of handling the whole bulky binder. Then I can print all the worksheet pages and put them in order in our file box, like I already do. The kids actually like having individual sheets to work on instead of a workbook. I suppose I could also take some time to go through the pages and find the few that need the full size printing (the measurement pages) and print them full size on the back of those pages. The copymasters are what I struggle with. A few of them are useful, but I don't end up using most of them. But I know from experience that if they are not printed ahead of time, they will not get done. Maybe I should just print them all (double-sided) and put them in page protectors in each year's binder so I can just pull out the ones I need for each lesson. Then we can use dry erase marker on the sheet protector to work the problems and I can reuse the sheets with the next kid(s). I can also make copies of any that need to be cut up and put those in the page protectors on top of the original. Does anyone have any other ideas about organizing MEP? I do think I will also get The Complete Book of Math, grades 3-4 for DS just for my peace of mind. It looks fun and colorful and includes US money and measurements as well as a more traditional presentation on topics we've already covered (or will be covering this year). Then if we hate it, we are only out 10 bucks. I actually have all of the Miquon books torn apart and organized by topic filed in a big binder. The plan was to pull out select pages and put them into page protectors to use with dry erase markers, but I haven't really done much with them yet. Is there a book I could get that would teach me the Singapore teaching techniques that I could use with MEP? Like I said, I have the Miquon books and I also have the RightStart AL Abacus books and have enjoyed using those teaching techniques with MEP (especially the abacus, we love that!). Maybe just learning the techniques would keep me from wanting to buy the whole Primary Mathematics program?