We also used several levels of AAS with my oldest and it was just not working. Apples and Pears has been a great program for her. I love AAS and will be trying it with my 1st grader next year, but Apples and Pears will be what we'll go to is AAS fails.

If he works for a company I would complain and see if you could work with a different agent. We just bought a house and our realtor never acted like that. He knew our broker and they communicated about the appraisal etc, but financial info went only to the broker. We were able to close in less than 30 days, but I would expect a little longer for VA loan.

We have a full size ipad and 2 ipad minis that we love. I love that they can all share the same apps and icloud. My kids haven't figured out how to get around the guided access yet so I can lock them in a librivox app to listen to audiobooks to fall asleep. Or to read in the car. If you can afford it I highly recommend Apple. All of our ipads were gifts :)

For K I am using Rod and Staff Spanish for the second time right now. It is designed for native speakers. It includes reading, copywork, dictation and some basic grammar. It is very religious if that is a concern. For later grades we switch to Yabisí by Santillana. It is secular which we prefer and is an all in one program that includes reading, grammar, spelling and writing. My dd also reads extra books. Yabisí is used in schools in Puerto Rico. Eta: I teach my children how to read in both languages at the same time. They have rarely mixed things up.

We also skipped checking the marks. I just kept track in my head and we either moved ahead or went back accordingly.

For my oldest Apples and Pears was very helpful. She doesn't have any LDs, vision issues etc. She was just slow and fasttrack really helped her.

I'm looking for sites along the line of Reading Eggs, but for Spanish. I've found pipoclub.com and was wondering if anyone else has any suggestions.

I love MM, but my oldest started to say she hated math even when I tried various things like assigning less problems etc. We switched to Singapore because I wanted that style of math. It is working much better to have fewer problems on each page even though she may do far more than the 2 pages we used to do with MM. We switched this year in 3rd from 3A in MM to 3A in Singapore and that went just fine. I'm not sure about switching in 5. I would look at the table of contents for each program to see if it looks like anything would be missing.

Ooh, I hope this happens as I have wanted to try Onenote too!

I'm using Essentials with my current K'er. I like the cheaper price and the simplicity over Earlybird. All the instructions are right on the page and it is very open and go.

I really love AAS and other OG type programs, but they did not work well for my oldest. Spelling is a struggle for her and Apples and Pears is what is finally working.

I also hate to read aloud. Where is the bag over head smiley?! Our library has a nice collection of audio books that get listened to several times before they get returned. I believe in the power of reading aloud, I just can't take much of it so I let someone else help me out. I have noticed that the well done audiobooks are much more entertaining than I would be reading them out loud. Now reading on my own and having a discussion with dd1 about the book that she has also listened to is right up my alley. :)

I always get hungry too!

I loved how every single character in Heirs had the same phone, lol! And in the plugs for Korean beef in My Girlfriend is a Gumiho. Is A Gentleman's Dignity clean like other kdramas? It was written by the same writer that wrote Secret Garden and Heirs which I really liked. But I see some talk online about it being a male Sex in the City which isn't really my thing.

Yes, with a native speaker tutoring him I think it would work very well! It is designed for native speakers which is why I chose it as opposed to something like Rosetta Stone. I am fluent enough to use it although a native tutor would be better of course. :)

I've become addicted too. :) And I watched enough of them to come across 2 that I turned off during the first episode because of mature content, do I get a prize?! 12 Signs of Love on Netflix and What's Up Fox on dramafever. I was very disappointed in What's Up Fox because I was so looking forward to seeing Go Hyun Jung in a romantic comedy, grrr. I love that for the other shows my kids can watch with me. Even the serious or revenge dramas I watched are very tame. They allowed for so much focus on really good acting and the story instead of being all gory. Anyone want to share favorite lines? Mine from Boys Over Flowers were: "It's ok, you can tell me you like me now!" and "Honey! Sweet and Sour Pork!" Heirs had too many good lines every episode for me to choose. Baby and Me was really cute. It has the main actor from You're Beautiful. And it has funny breast milk jokes. :) I'm watching my second Hong sisters show now, My Girlfriend is a Gumiho. I really like Shin Min Ah, she's so cute. After school today we ate Nutella and watched a behind the scenes filming of Pidam's death scene in Queen Seondeok. It was so calm compared to the final version. Ah the magic of editing! Now we're listening to various soundtracks. I love the song from The Great Doctor/Faith and the picture of Lee Min Ho with the police shield cracks me up every time. I've wondered about subscribing to dramafever too. The app tends to have problems during commercials and it had been very tempting to eliminate them.

We use Beast Academy because we like it so much. In our case we use BA instead of the IP and CWP. We use the textbook, workbook and HIG from the standards edition of Singapore.

All the BSFU books are available as $5 pdfs, http://outskirtspress.com/webpage.php?ISBN=9781432706104. You can't print them, but they are cheap and work well if you have a tablet. We decided to try interest led science with library books for my oldest this year and it is going well so far.

It is not independent here. If my dd were older and had already covered the material then I think it could be. But I read the guide to her and sit near her while she does the problems in the workbook. While she does the workbook I can usually work with dd5 as long as I am available to answer questions.

It is working fine on our Mac. When I downloaded it I just chose the Mac option rather than Windows. Amazon seems to have saved the download for me in my account so I would guess that it could be purchased anytime and downloaded later.

Thank you!!!! We have the cd, but the program stopped working after a few uses. We hadn't been able to fix it despite reinstalling etc.

Has anyone used this? It's $99 for the year, all online. There are 3 options, Primary Math, Math in Focus and Common Core. I was just wondering how it compares to the books.

IEW wasn't a good fit for us either. My oldest is not a reluctant writer and it seemed too slow. I really like many of 8's posts on writing. But I didn't feel confident in teaching writing like that. It all made sense to me when she said that she used parts of Voyages in English with her older kids. I needed teacher training :) We are using ViE and Writing and Rhetoric from CAP. I like the more public school writing approach from ViE, but didn't want to miss out on a more classical approach to writing as well. We didn't like WWE as well after level 2. I like that CAP's program takes a more creative approach to narration and writing.

Awesome! I'm thinking about TOG for next year and would much prefer to use it on the ipad.

I was pregnant with #3 when my oldest was in 1st grade. I had HG so nothing that year went as planned. For awhile nothing got done. Once I had the baby we got back on track and finished the year by the end of June. Now my oldest is in third grade and that lost part of the first grade year does not matter at all. We got back on the horse after the baby and have been able to stay on. :) Others have already posted good advice. We loved SOTW on audio and netflix science and history documentaries. Programs like Reading Eggs have free trials so you could check them out before buying.