I think the first year homeschooling is the hardest. Especially if everyone around you is enrolling their kids into Kindergarten. The majority of the criticism we've received was during my oldest dd's kindergarten and 1st grade year. Everyone was sure we were going to mess her up for life if she wasn't in school. My mom is a PS teacher. She's taught over 40 years with 26 of those years in 1st grade so she is constantly "testing" my kids. My oldest really struggled to learn to read and my mom said she was lazy because she wasn't in a classroom all day. The kid has dyslexia, tracking issues, and visual/motor integration issues but my mom blamed it all on homeschooling. My dd's vision issues were actually caught my another homeschool mom when I was explaining all of dd's troubles, not my mom who had probably taught thousands of kids to read at that point. My sister is going to school to be a music teacher and my brother is a social studies teacher (laid off 4 years ago and waiting tables but still searching for a teaching position) so there are lots of teachers in the family. The way we usually deal with it is by just not talking about it. Since we aren't going to agree it's just better to talk about something else. We still get some flack though. Since Maryland does so well on state assessments my mil is always sending us links on how great the schools are in Maryland. :glare: I just hit delete and don't respond so now she sends it to dh who does the same. So far I've been very unimpressed with our local middle school. I will not send any other children there it is so bad.

My 7th grader has done some of the literary techniques but that's about it. They spend pretty much all their time in LA class practicing for state assessment testing. :glare:

I have my twins work separately with AAS. I did buy 2 sets of tiles but I'm really only using the one because I work with them separately. My son always feels like he needs to be ahead of dd and it just doesn't work that well when they work together. Dd is ahead of ds as well so that makes it easier to separately.

Not all 5 gallon buckets will fit the gamma lids. I found out the hard way by buying buckets locally and ordering the gamma lids. I have buckets of flour and oatmeal in my kitchen and have for probably 7-8 years. They work great. We had a moth problem a couple years ago and none got in either bucket.

I'd do K but get the 1st grade book at the same time. The books are fairly short and they don't take my kids long to work through them.

I've got the $139 one and while I do like it I have had constant trouble with it locking up and restarting. I was using it this afternoon for about 2 hours and it froze 4-5 times and restarted probably a dozen times. When that happens it loses it's page which is annoying. I've only had it a month but I haven't heard of others having as much trouble with theirs.

I couldn't tell from the 3 week sample if it would for me either. I wound up buying Units 1 and 2 from Year 1 so I could look them over. I went with just print so I could resell them later if I decided not to use them. It's really helped me get a better feel for it and so far I really like it. I wouldn't be using it until next fall which gives me plenty of time to lesson plan. I wish TOG would come to a nearby convention. Lampstand Press lists a MD address only about 45 minutes from where I live and the closest convention they are going to is in Richmond. :confused:

That isn't TERC. Our district uses TERC for K-5 but I've heard rumors they are going to discontinue it next year. I'm not sure what they are planning to switch to. There is a petition with over 1000 parent signatures asking that they switch programs so lots of parents are unhappy with it.

If it's making you sick then I'd rip it out. We've put up with just sub floor twice after we've had to rip out flooring for various reasons. We've not done it in a main living area but I think it would be doable. We had to rip out linoleum in our bathroom due to water damage and it was sub floor for months until we had money to fix everything. Right now we have one bedroom with no carpet because my 4 yo peed on it so many times that it made the whole upstairs smell and none of us were feeling very good. I spent hours cleaning it but we found when we ripped it out so much of the smell was in the padding. My dad bought a house with brand new cheap carpet in the house and couldn't figure out why it was making him sick. He ripped it out and discovered the padding was probably original to the house (30 years old) and the previous owners were smokers. I always assumed the pad got replaced with new carpet but I guess some people reuse it to save a few bucks.

ES Intro uses the book More Mudpies to Magnets for a lot of the experiments. Most all of the experiments so far we've already had everything on hand already. It is a lot of basic household items.

I think the books for CTG look very challenging. My 10 yo really wants to do Ancient History next year and I was thinking of maybe doing CTG but the books just look like way too much for my 7 year old twins. I really think it needs a younger kid supplement but I haven't bought it so maybe they have suggestions on stuff to do with younger kids in there. We own some of the books from CTG and there is no way they are at the level for 7 year olds. I think it would be more of a situation where younger kids might be nearby for some of the readings and learn a little bit that way but I can't imagine doing the full program with them. I know with Exp-1850 they would never sit through. I find it plenty challenging for a 10 yo. At least Exp-1850 does have a younger kid supplement. We are considering CC for fall as well. I found out they are doing American after I had been planning to do Ancients (and spent $$ on curricula). I'm not sure what we will do. Plus we haven't done CC before I'm not even sure how well it would work out for our family. I probably shouldn't try to schedule everything around that.

If you get a sympathetic judge you can get off for all sorts of things. My sister got called when we were visiting her last summer and she told the judge her nieces and nephews she rarely got to see were visiting and he excused her for that. I've only been called once. It was 3 weeks after we moved and the notice was forwarded to our new residence. I called and explained that I'd just moved out of state and got dismissed that way. It would be very hard to manage if I got called now. My husband is a lab manager and can't really work from home. We have no local family either.

My 7th grader only has 2 textbooks- math and history. They both stay at home because there are books for the classroom as well. Dd has barely cracked either one though. The history class has no homework and the math class mainly uses worksheets.

We just did it for 3 months. The first month we did 3 of the experiments and I thought they were okay then I kind of forgot about it during the holidays. I didn't do anything the other 2 months we paid for it which was a waste of money. I thought they would have more student pages and that kind of thing. I had signed up because I was teaching an engineering class at our co-op and they had a unit on bristle bots. I was kind of disappointed that most of their info I had already found elsewhere on the web for free. If we needed a science fair project though I might use the site again. Several of the experiments are quite involved and tracking down the supplies turned me off to some of them. The online videos are quite good though and have very good step by step directions. If it wasn't so expensive I'd probably keep it but when I consider I paid $111 for basically 3 experiments I don't think we'll do it again. They did just call me and offered me 2 months for the price of 1.

My oldest went to 2 years of preschool. I had never even considered homeschooling until I met a homeschool family at LLL. The mom was a former elementary teacher and said from what she saw when she was teaching she would never send her kids to school. Her oldest son at the time was around 7 and I was just the nicest kid and talked all about science and other things they were doing for school. It really peaked my interest so I started reading about it. We were also in a crappy school district at the time. My neighbors 6 yo dd had been punched on the bus more than once and I knew I could not let dd ride the bus. We only had one car that dh took to work so transporting her would have been difficult so I just decided to keep her home that year and we haven't looked back. This year is the first year we've used the ps at all. We live in another state in a different district from when we started and the schools are better than where we lived before. My oldest has had such a hard year I'm really hoping to have her at home next year. Plus they practice for the state mandated testing every day I don't know how much dd is learning. I always felt like I probably wasn't doing enough as a homeschooler but I'm finding that I was really probably doing okay. I'd like to have my dd back. She is always complaining about having headaches or being tired since she started school. She claims she doesn't like homeschooling either though. It's hard to know what to do sometimes.

My ds completed about 40 pages of 1A in one sitting. He's always after me to do more pages and he really seems to be getting it. Maybe I'll go ahead and let him do unlimited pages on it. 1B definitely looks harder so I think we'll have to slow down when we get to that one. I didn't know about the challenging word problems book but we did get the intensive practice. I'll have to see about getting the word problems book.

My boy/girl twins are not at the same level either. At 4.5 my dd was way ahead with most things. Had we been sending them to school it would have been a very hard decision for K. They have a summer birthday and were born 2 months premature so they would have barely been 5 when school started. Dd would have been totally fine but ds would have really struggled especially since in our area there is only full day kindergarten. It would have been difficult to put them in different grades. I think ds would have felt badly about being "behind". We likely won't put them in school until at least high school and at that point I think they would easily go into the same grade. At 6.5 I don't notice as big a difference in their skill level. My dd is ahead in reading and her handwriting is quite nice. Ds still struggles with CVC words but it is slowly clicking for him and his handwriting is quite sloppy. He does have quite a talent for math though and is definitely ahead of dd in that area. If we were to do public school now I'm not sure what grade I'd pick for ds. He'd likely be placed in K because he's behind in reading by ps standards but he's doing math that is 1st/2nd grade level.

I don't use MFW Science at all. I haven't used Adventures but we have skipped the Science with both of the MFW programs we are using this year without any problem. We are using Elemental Science which I just like better.

Core 5 does look challenging but I don't know if it is high school level. I haven't done Core 5 but I bought it a year and a half ago used from a friend. I was doing lesson planning to use it with my 10 year old this school and realized it was going to be way to much for her. It looks like such a great program I hope we get to it in a couple years if dd doesn't go to school. The friend I bought it from used it with a 12 yo and 9 yo. She said it was just perfect for the older kid but she skipped a lot of parts with her son. She gave me her son's used Explorer sheets and they are mostly blank except at the beginning so she must have abandoned using them altogether with him after a few weeks.

I don't think that is high either. On my low weeks I spend around $200 a week on that kind of thing for a household of 8 people. Some weeks I spend closer to $300. If I'm really watching it I can get it to $150/wk but I really have to shop sale flyers and match coupons.

That is way too little. I pay my sitter (age 15.5) at least $10 an hour. She was here 10 hours last weekend and got $120. That was a little more than I'd planned to give her but my kids like her and we are rarely gone that long. I pay her extra for anything over 8 hours. She was watching 4 kids which is partly why I paid so much (6,6,4,3). My 13 year old does a little babysitting for her siblings. It's never been more than 2 hours and usually it's just 1-2 of the kids. I do pay her around $2/hr but I've told her that is because I pay for so much of her other stuff. She is going on a girl scout weekend that is costing almost $200 and I told dd she is helping pay that with babysitting. For an outside sitter I'd pay at least $5/hr for one child.

If you do get it I'd recommend getting the CD. I only got the book and we have used it very sporadically I think my follow through would be better if we had the CD. IEW doesn't seem to sell the CD separately either. Their customer service seems pretty good though I should probably call and see if they'd sell just the CD.

I'm using Trail Guide to US Geography with my 5th grader this year. I'm only having her do the mapping exercises because she is doing MFW already. US Geography seems to tie in nicely with the history she is studying. The Geography through Art looks like it is scheduled in the manual. I don't see any mention of the Eat Your Way... in the manual. I haven't used either of those books so I can't comment beyond that. Overall I don't particularly care for it. Dd does like it though. It is one of the first things she reaches for. It is very repetitious. We do 2 states a week usually. The numerous typos we've found in it is probably my main annoyance with it. Asking for things to be mapped that are in different states and that kind of thing. Dd uses the lowest level which is really too easy for her but we are just using it for her to learn basic mapping skills.

About a month ago I bought their intro pack that was around $8. It came with several info CDs including the sample CD. Both Y1 and Y2 are on the sample CD. I don't see the intro pack on their website anymore. If you contact them I wonder if they'd send you the sample CD.

I don't use MFW recs for grammar, spelling, or writing either. You can easily use whatever you want. The writing hasn't been that great so far (mainly narrations for history readings). Most of the student pages are for the 50 states study which we haven't gotten to quite yet. SOTW isn't scheduled everyday and they occasionally skip a chapter. I haven't used MOH so I'm not sure if you could sub it easily or not. We don't spend a lot of time with the SOTW readings but it does seem to help tie stuff together.