All, Thank you so much. Mom was my business partner, but most importantly my best friend. She's lived with us for four year. Her mother, my grandmother Majorie also lived with us and passed away January 30th, so it's been a tough few months. Mom battled cancer for seven years, but for most of that time did fairly well. We even wrote Beyond the Book Report and Eternal Argument during that time! Her legacy is her work as a teacher; she would be so honored by the lovely comments from former students here and on our FB pages. My daily life is going to be quite different, but I'm doing okay. Thank you so much for your love and prayers. Erin

Just stopped back by. In either case, to me, NO and LONGER still modify SERVING. They tell is "how" or "when" (depending on how you look at it) he's serving. Verbals are funny things. A gerund can be modified by both adjectives (modifying it's noun function) or adverbs (modifying it's verb function). Cool discussion! (Oh, and thanks for the love, Cherry Kissies!)

Well, I'm Air Force, so I can speak to that. Go to your local recruiter and ask for a copy of "The Book" put out yearly (I think in January) by Airman Magazine. It's like an encyclopedia of Air Force ... rank, planes, pay, locations, missions, etc. The other services may have something similar. Also go to the Web sites. NOT the recruiting ones (like http://www.airforce.com), but the real ones. The Air Force is http://www.af.mil. Look for the .mil ending. There's a TON of info on there. The DoD has http://www.defense.gov, too.

I'm VERY impressed with Word Build from Dynamic Literacy. I've used the Critical Thinking text as well as English from the Classical Roots. WB is MUCH more thorough and smart. It starts around 2nd grade.

You're welcome to order them and return the if you don't like what you see. You're only out the shipping if you do that. We're happy to refund the purchase of anything not used/written in. Blessings, Erin from AG

The states I listed in my previous post, CA, WA, ID, and AK especially, have a host of programs like this.

I can give you the vendor perspective. We receive purchase orders from school districts in California, Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and Minnesota. (There may be more, but those are what I can remember off the top of my head). Most are from homeschool charter schools (described by a PP above). Our material is secular; that's why public charters can use it. If you know of a secular curriculum you want, it's really not that hard to get it on the approved list. As long as you don't mind a little gov't oversight (the amount varies), the homeschool charter is win-win-win. -The district gets the federal, state, and county impact funds (education money) for your kid. They're pleased with that. -You get SOME of that money toward your curriculum purchases of secular material. It's nice to get at least some of your property taxes back! -Vendors (me) like it since it results in more sales. Some districts also allow homeschool kids to participate in extra-curricular activities like sports and music at their local public school.

Diagraming is a teaching tool. If you want to be able to understand the phrases and clauses (gerunds, participles, infinitives, noun clauses, etc) you're going to have to use diagraming. There are too many "moving parts" to complex sentences to keep track of what's doing what to what without a diagram. It's a means to an end.

Appositives can have their own modifiers. You just diagram them beneath the appositive to show that it modifies that word. That being said, I would also analyze that structure as an adjective with a prepositional phrase modifying the adjective. In the grand scheme it doesn't really matter a whole lot, but I wouldn't use that as an example of an appositive.

My little toot did her first day of homeschool today. She's doing McRuffy Phonics and RightStart Level B. We had a great time and she loved it, yay! It just tickles me that I've been so active in homeschooling (I'm a vendor) for a decade, but this is my first day doing it for my kids. LOL I LOVED IT!

I really like The Homeschool Handbook. It comes out 6 times a year and the mail subscription is $19.95 a year. You can read it for free online, too. http://www.thehomeschoolhandbook.com/

I'm sorry I wasn't clear. I was suggesting that she could watch the DVD lessons with her student so she would feel more confident and have her hand held a little. Two bird with one stone and all that! LOL

If I may, you don't need to buy yourself your own book. As much as I like to sell books ... :tongue_smilie: If you feel you need some support, you might want to order our new companion DVD to help you teach the information. That's cheaper than another book. The DVD is optional, though; you can teach AG without knowing any grammar. Just learn it along with the student. If you have questions you can always call us, we're happy to help!

If there were a way to really master punctuation and usage without learning all the grammar (unless you want to learn a foreign language, then grammar is a must), I would bother studying it. But it's not. There are comma rules and usage issues that simply can't be taught unless the grammar is learned already. For instance. You have to put a comma after an introductory adverb clause. That's the rule. If you don't know what one is, you're faking it. Faking it will get you by about 80% of the time. (I pause, therefore I comma.) The other 20% is when people like me read what you've written and say to themselves, "They don't know their punctuation rules ..." It's not fair, but that's the way it is. That being said, I think it's silly to spend so much time on it. It doesn't take that long to learn grammar; it's a relatively small body of knowledge. Wait until they're ready to really learn all of it and get it over with. Also, constantly repeating the definitions of the parts of speech is really not useful. I could poll 100 3rd graders. They'd all (probably) be able to tell me what a noun is, but only 15 of them would be able to identify all the nouns in a sentence. It's all about function and logical thinking. That's why it's best to wait.

Well, there are many (and I'm one of 'em!) who would say the only one of those listed who even needs grammar instruction at this point is the 10 year old. It's an important body of knowledge, but not a big one. It's all around easier and more effective if you wait until their logical, multi-step, analytical thinking "brain" appears and teach it then.