Thank you! Kids Stuff Spanish sounds great! I totally agree about finding things he enjoys and are easy. I suddenly remembered "Super campeones", a soccer cartoon that was super famous during my childhood. It's available on YouTube and I went through the first episode and bookmarked snippets with particular phrases and printed them out. I think we'll start from there and see how far we can get, he does loves soccer. The other students will have had three years of immersion by the time he joins the classroom. That's my main concern.

My child has a chance to join a Spanish immersion school next year for fourth grade. We homeschooled for a full year two years ago, and also some shorter periods in the past, using both languages (Spanish is my mother tongue), but I kept falling back to English as soon as there was any resistance, and as a result we've lost most of the progress he had made. He's been in an English-only school for the past year. I owe it to him to do better and prepare him for this opportunity throughout this summer. At the same time, he already feels disheartened because in his mind he's already bilingual, but he's actually nowhere near fluent. He does well with structured learning and measurable outcomes plus fun one-on-one time. We've had great success homeschooling in other areas, and I've been able to break down interesting material to where he's not too frustrated yet feels challenged. I have no idea how to do this with Spanish in a way that'll be conducive to making him feel confident in his Spanish skills yet also get him to the level where he can thrive in immersion classes in three months. I'd appreciate any help/pointers/resources! Thanks!

Thanks for all the replies. We are back from our immersion time and I can see changes in his Spanish (his accent is now beautiful and he absorbed a lot of native interjections, which I think is adorable), but I am just not sure if we're still on track towards bilingualism with what we're doing so far. At the same time, when I was his age I probably knew less English than he does Spanish, and I ended up fluent in a handful of languages, so it is not a lost cause at all. It is just a very different path than the original plan I had, in which I would be able to create a space where he would simply absorb all three languages (English, Spanish and my husband's) as he grew up, and he would actually enjoy learning them. I think letting go of that idea is the hardest part! I need to adjust to his actual needs and wants, and I know that at this point it probably looks more like finding the right workbooks for him to feel confident than talking to him exclusively in Spanish.

Thank you! I gave Life of Fred another chance, got Kidneys instead of trying to start from Apples, and DS is enthralled! He's responding really well to the format of the book now, and I think it might be enough of a platform to open up interesting math discussions before bedtime without having to change the rest of the curriculum.

Thanks for the replies. I can definitely identify with the posters who brought up the relationship vs. language aspect. Another hindrance is that my husband and I only have English as our common language. Yet another issue is that I'm only homeschooling him this year. He'll be back to school in September. So while I can see the usefulness of focusing only on Spanish in our homeschooling, in reality there are so many other things I want to learn with him this year, that they supersede Spanish as the main focus. I can see how that can seem to be a deal-breaker, but that's exactly the challenge. I believe that we should be able to find a balance between the two. I feel that this issue is mirroring closely his path into reading. He seemed to acquire reading at a very slow pace when considering the amount of work he was putting into it both at home and in school. In the end, the pivotal elements were things that increased his perceived competence quickly, like more sight words instead of so much phonics work. I keep wondering what could have a similar effect on his Spanish. After all, people --like myself-- manage to become fluent in other languages in less than ideal circumstances all the time.

Yes, I forgot the "real" part!

I apologize if this post is too old to reply to, I am new around here and different forums have different ways. Anyway, I learned a very calligraphic form of cursive in my home country. It looks somewhat like this: We had calligraphy classes with ink pots and whatnot all the way until the end of high school. Still, it was gradual. We started with print in K, and then in first grade we did a hybrid with print capitals and cursive lowercase letters. Slowly we made our letters fancier until fourth grade and developed our personal handwriting. Later on, we'd learn four or five specific calligraphy fonts that required more precise strokes. I plan to do the same with DS. We'll start with the plainer US cursive, if only just because I want to continue the Handwriting Without Tears books, and then we'll have time to change things up once he's mastered that. Also, I've had to change some of my print and a few numbers to avoid confusing DS, and it hasn't been a big deal so far.

We are using Science-4-kids Chemistry with my 6 year old and he's really enjoying the whole molecule-atom-periodic table thing. We've also done the Chemistry experiments in the Science Wiz kit and the Candy Experiment book and some Polymer kit and he has loved all of them. He's always welcome to make his own experiments with the leftovers after we do the ones in the book. I plan to get him some plastic atoms to play with and a good microscope a little later on.

DS spoke only Spanish until he started preschool at 3. Then he switched completely to English. I'm a native Spanish speaker and I've tried practically everything to get him to be bilingual, but he seems to be really daunted or scared by the whole thing. Now he's doing well with Rosetta Stone, but he seems to freeze when he encounters any Spanish in the real world. I just brought him to a Spanish-speaking country for three months for immersion and while his accent improved greatly, and he can read aloud in Spanish, he can't say more than "si, no, gracias" and he understands very little. He watched videos of himself talking when he was 2 or 3 and doesn't know what he was saying. He's embarrassed if I talk to him in Spanish in public. I'm homeschooling him this year, but in English because he can't understand the concepts in Spanish and our books are in English. He was also a reluctant reader until recently (in English) but has become fluent very recently. It took a lot of very targeted work to get him here with reading, and I don't know how to do the same thing with Spanish. I'm again starting 100% in Spanish with DD who is 1, and I am hoping that he can relearn alongside her, but I'd really like to avoid making the same mistakes with DD. We are moving to an area with a large Spanish-speaking population, and I'm hoping that will make things easier as well. Any advice on how to make DS feel more confident about what he knows and get him back on his way towards fluency?

The tablet version is identical to the computer version; it's not even an app, just the same website but now it works without Flash, so it can be used from a tablet. This is what it looks like, is it the same than yours looked like five years ago? It requires typing, but DS doesn't seem to have issues with it. Actually, since the typing is just copying the word on the screen, he prefers the typing bits to the ones where he needs to spell the whole word on his own by dragging letters down. There is a free sample/demo of the online program here: https://www.explodethecode.com/02_how/student_demo/ DS really thrives with the whole color-coded coin thing (green is 100% accuracy and above average speed, blue and yellow are over 80% accuracy and above/below average speed, and red is below 80% accuracy), knowing that the system is adaptive and then if he gets better color coins he will go through the material much faster (and that if he goofs off and gets a red bee he will have to redo the last 3 exercises), and printing the completion certificates after each level. Spelling was by far his least favorite subject, so I am very excited about the whole thing. But again, I've never used the books, so I can't say how they compare.

I am homeschooling DS (6.5), and I'm having a hard time finding his sweet spot in math. We are using Singapore math 2A and spending some time memorizing multiplication and division facts and making sure he doesn't forget how to do addition and subtraction and word problems. Still, he wants to talk about functions and limits and continuity and other things and I can't seem to find a way to tie it in and help him organize his insights with what we are learning. I thought Life of Fred might give him the free-reign math he needs, but he absolutely hated Apples (he found the stories boring and lacking actual math). I remember, growing up, set theory was in vogue for primary schools and I loved it as an introduction that took me away from the busy work of arithmetic and into actual ideas. Our book started with open and closed sets (drawn as animal pens), then into relationships and functions and from there to equations. I can't seem to find anything like that for DS. Any ideas of a set theory intro for kids, or any other paths into math good for his age? Thanks!

FWIW, my DS (6) is thriving with it! We were doing Spelling Workout A and it was like pulling teeth every single day. I switched to ETC online and he finished the first four books in as many weeks. I do recommend doing it on a tablet, though, or with a mouse; the constant drag and drop is hard to do with a trackpad and the time tracking is very tight. The tablet version is pretty new and kind of glitchy, though, I find myself having to reload it about 5x when it gets stuck. But DS (a very reluctant reader/speller) started reading anything and seeing himself as a reader after two units with this program, so I'm beyond thrilled. I also love all the data and graphs about how he's doing. We never tried the books, though.

Thank you! I had totally missed the link when I checked out the website.

I searched the forums and saw this link mentioned several times: http://smithsonianbooks.com/usersection/Default.aspx?tab=joy&content=Aristotle&fvalue=Aristotle but it is dead now. Does anyone know where I can get a sample chapter of the first (Aristotle) book? I need to check if it'd work for us. Thanks!