Great! Thanks!

I just got SoTW 3, both the book and activity guide, used. I didn't realize it when buying them, but they are the 2004 editions. Does anyone know what differences there are in the new editions? If I purchase extra student pages, will the chapter line up the same way or where they rearranged from one edition to the next?

We've been using MUS for a few years now with my oldest, and she really likes it. I had hoped to use it with my younger DD, age 6, but she's complaining that it's boring. I had been thinking about switching over to Teaching Texbooks for both girls, and wondered how it compares to MUS in scope, ease of use, etc. Thanks!

Sorry, the signature line needs to be updated - my daughter is now 8. We didn't use WWE 1, but have done narration with SOTW 1 and 2. She would sometimes get frustrated with that too, but I thought it was mostly because I would just ask her to "tell me what happened" in the chapter. I like how WWE uses questions to draw out the main point - and she answers those just fine, but it's almost like she's afraid of that final question? She's a bit of a perfectionist, so getting the "right" answer is important to her, so important that she has trouble if I ask her to take a guess or say the first thing that comes to mind. How different is WWE 1? I think I did some type of assessment when choosing WWE 2 and then I waited till half through the year to start it, thinking that would help. She's really pretty good at dictation/copywork, but the narration piece is giving us trouble.

We just started using WWE 2 a few weeks ago, and at first it seemed like a great program for my daughter. She's always had troubles with narration when it comes to selecting out important details from a text, she wants to repeat back chunks of a passage verbatim. So the questions to draw out the important points really seemed to help. But after a few weeks of easy, she's going back to falling face down on the floor and writhing around when we get to the last part which asks her to get the main point of the story in one or two sentences. It's painful to watch. I'll have her go back to the questions, which she usually answers without much fuss, then tell her that those answers contain all the details that she needs to make her sentences. Still crying and fussing... So I'm wondering is WWE just too hard for her? Should I look for something else, like IEW or could she have some type of learning disability with regards to writing?

We're doing it this year combined with SoTW. We're taking it slowly, since my DD is only in Kindergarten, so we've only made it about half-way through SoTW and to Unit 7 of CWH/RC history. It's a bit difficult to mesh the two, but I really like that SoTW has a narrative for cultures other than just the Israelites, the story for Israel coming from the OT of course. I also have E.H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World, which I think could be used with CWH to provide a narrative too. I don't know whether there's any anti-Catholic/ anti-Christian bias in it though, since we haven't actually used it yet - I just found it at a thrift store and picked it up. There is a Yahoo group for those using CWH so you can see how other's handle the multi-level four year cycle.

There are a lot of good answers here. I noticed your weight loss ticker though. Sometimes dieting / losing weight can bump you into a low thyroid state and cause moodiness. Especially if in dieting you're not getting enough of certain vitamins. Also, just being overweight can make you tired grumpy and irritable. It can interfere with how much sleep you get or the quality of sleep. Of course you don't want to stop trying to lose weight - just make sure you have the right nutritional balance while doing so. Also exercise is a mood lifter so if you can start your day with exercise that may help. :grouphug:

I'm also combining them. I found someone else had posted (on their blog) a schedule of sorts for how to use them together and I modified that. We're not finishing it all this year either. I really like both programs and I think that they work pretty well in conjunction. I think that SOTW gives you more to do with beginners, especially beginners who aren't reading on their own. The library is a must for all the books, but I've also had luck finding the books at thrift stores or used books sales.