Thank you!!!!! I don't know how I missed this! The K level is perfect right now...it teaches math through stories, songs, and manipulatives, and it includes lesson plans. I shouldn't need lesson plans anymore (he is my third kid, after all), but if I do not have a daily lesson laid out for me it won't get done. I have had grand plans to use all sorts of math manipulatives with my older children for years, but since they have never fit into the lesson plans, they have never been used. I am a bit ashamed to say that I have geoboards, tangrams, counting bears, pattern blocks, and the entire Math Made Meaningful kit with cuisenaire rods...all of which have never been touched by my older children. :blushing: This program actually incorporates all of them! :hurray: Thank you to everyone else who responded, as well. My son does get a lot of exposure to a variety of topics since he often listens in on his older sisters' science and history lessons, and we do make an effort to go on lots of field trips, so I needed the reminder that a lot of what I am doing with him is actually educational for him. Not to mention all the interest-led stuff...I am off now to find out how to tell time in Spanish. He asked me how just a few minutes ago, and since I don't speak Spanish, I haven't the foggiest idea how to tell time in Spanish! Oh, and I really appreciate this board...I have no one in real life that I can ask these sorts of questions...none of my friends have remotely advanced kids, and I am not going to pipe up with questions about teaching my four-year old child who reads better than their second and third graders. It is nice to meet people who can relate to my situation and don't think I am forcing academics on an unprepared preschooler, but rather trying desperately to feed a child's hunger for knowledge (a hunger that will spiral quickly into a huge tantrum if it is not met).

My youngest child has me at a loss, and I am hoping that you all can give me some advice. He is 4.5 years old. Until his fourth birthday he did not show any signs of being advanced or gifted or anything. In fact, he was a little behind on most things (normal for a preemie). But several days after his birthday he began to ask me the sounds that letters make, and insisted that I teach him how to read. Since then I have been teaching him, using first 100EZ and then Phonics Pathways. He is also in the middle of ETC 1 (which is way too easy, but he thinks it is fun). He only needs to hear a phonics rule once for it to stick, so lessons are pretty easy. I never taught him consonant blends, he has picked them up just from exposure. I am not sure what his reading level is. This is my question...academically, he is ready for first grade material. The problem is, his handwriting skills are typical of a four-year old. I used R&S with my older children, but there is no way he could do the writing that is required with that curriculum! I think I have phonics covered...Phonics Pathways looks very complete...but what about math? What else does one teach an advanced four-year old? He loves to learn and is curious about everything! BTW I am not trying to force anything on him...he *wants* to do school with me every day, has asked to do every single reading lesson that we have ever done, and is constantly asking for more things to learn (he learned to tell time to the hour the other day after a 10 second explanation, quicker than either of my older kids did when they were in first grade). So...if you have any advice on how to present first grade level material to a four-year old (in other words, without requiring any writing from the student), please tell me. Six weeks ago I had pre-k level work set up for him, then I switched to more K level, now I need 1st grade level stuff...help!

Not yet, we are doing CLE Reading the first semester and MCT Lit second semester. I'll get back to ya next spring :001_smile:

None. I only require one hour of schoolwork per grade, so my 1st graders only had one hour of seatwork. Even my ADHD one could sit for one hour without needing anything more than a potty break. Now if I wanted that hour to be a pleasant one, I needed to make sure she ran laps around the house or something before we sat down! I still don't give breaks for them now, and they are in 2nd and 4th grade...the only exception is lunch. Other than that, they buckle down and do their work. Trying to drag them back once they are occupied playing is fruitless, so I don't let them wander off during school time. I am not trying to imitate public school, so I don't see the point of dragging formal schooling out all day long. My children have learned to appreciate their chance to do their daily lessons and then move on to explore their own interests for the rest of the day.

It is only free for the first year; after that is is offered for purchase at half price for the following three years. Definitely a steal! :D And they don't even ask if you are still in college....

I guess the term "poor" must be relative. I lived by the U.S.'s standard of poor for many years. After traveling to one of the world's poorest countries, I can honestly say that I have never truly been poor. A truly poor person will not worry about whether or not to pay the car insurance bill because they do not have a car! A truly poor person will not have an ipod because that would mean they not only have a computer, but they have electricity to power both of those items!!! A truly poor person does not worry about paying the AC/heating bill because again, that would mean that they had electricity, and that they lived in an enclosed house! A truly poor person does not have a refrigerator because there is nowhere to plug it in, and nothing to put in it...it is a struggle to find enough food to eat each day! Many people in the U.S. live below the poverty line, but many of them are not truly poor. They may struggle to maintain a relatively high standard of living, but compared to millions of people they are not poor. If you live in a house that is relatively airtight (i.e. drywall, glass windows, a door that closes and latches, and a real roof), if you have electricity, if you have clean water, if you have a real toilet, if you wear eyeglasses, if you can afford to purchase even one bra...you are not poor. All of those things are considered unattainable luxuries by the truly poor. is poor...and not even that poor (notice the single electrical line going into the house...more than likely it leads to a single light bulb). I am not saying that there aren't many truly poor people in the U.S., because there are. But after seeing what poor really is, my definition changed. What I thought of as "poor" was really just struggling to pay for luxuries. And by the government's standards, we have been very poor...my kids have always qualified for state funded medical care, and until this year we have qualified for food stamps. But at our poorest, the shed in our back yard where we kept our lawn mower was better than the house that the family in the video lived in.

I recently got Let's Go Outside! and I can't wait to start using it! It is full of games and projects that my kids will love...we just have to wait until it is below 100 degrees outside.

I have never used it, but Developing Better Reading by R&S is a short, 30 lesson review of phonics for older readers.

I hadn't really thought about it before this, but I am 100% happy with what we are using, and I haven't switched things each year to find what works for me. I have developed myself as a teacher (and learned to adapt the presentation of the lesson to the individual child), but my core curriculum of R&S plus Apologia science and SOTW for history has pretty much stayed the same from the beginning. The two times I tried changing something (R&S science instead of Apologia and CW instead of the writing in R&S English) I went back to my original plan. My 2nd grader is using the same things that my oldest did in that grade, and until there are drastic differences in ability, the plan is to continue in the same manner. My youngest is going to mess everything up, though...he learned to read 2 years earlier than my older two and is more than ready for a 1st grade phonics program, so I may have to give him something different so my 2nd grader doesn't feel bad that he is using the same things that she used last year (they are 3 years apart in age). But that is another story for another board :D

I do not formally teach handwriting until 1st grade...none of my children (so far) have had the fine motor skills for it that young. What I did do was make sure they understood how to form the letters before starting 1st grade. They used sidewalk chalk, markers on a whiteboard, playdough, etc. There were no lessons involved, it was all just in the course of play during the day. But I never had them put pencil to paper before 1st grade and so far it hasn't hindered their handwriting...my older two have better handwriting than I do!

Just an FYI, the majority of the writing assignments are in Unit 5 of R&S 3. There are a few at the end of units 3 & 4, but most of them are near the end of the book. I didn't want to wait until the spring to really cover writing so when I reached Unit 4 I started doing one lesson from Unit 4 and one lesson from Unit 5 each day. You don't have to double them up like I did, you can alternate days, too, but the lessons were short enough that I just doubled them up. You probably already knew this, and I am the only idiot that started wondering where the writing lessons were halfway through the year before looking ahead in the book and realizing they were all packed at the end. :lol:

I wrote about my experience with CW Aesop in this thread. I am sure I am not going to start my 4th grader on the Killgallon book right away (she won't be 9 for a couple more months, she is a young 4th grader), and if she gets frustrated I will hold off longer...it won't bother me if we have to wait a year to do it.

I'm not Coffeegal, but I can tell you how we have done it. For example, my daughter's science lesson included reading the reasons why Pluto is or isn't a planet, choosing a side and writing it in the center of her paper, and writing the reasons that support her side around it. After she had completed it, I told her to put it in paragraph form with complete sentences...and there you have it, a persuasive paragraph! For history, I would tell her to pick the most interesting thing out of the SOTW reading and write everything she remembered about it in paragraph form (which she knows means a minimum of 3 sentences). That is not all we have done, those are just examples of how we use the lessons in R&S to write across the curriculum.

I am adding WWE for the dictation/narration, not for specific writing instruction. I agree that R&S English has excellent writing instruction. My plan for this year includes more dictation than the weekly sentences in Spelling, and WWE provides that for me. My 4th grader also needs to work on summarizing better, and WWE is supposed to help with that, as well. And the Killgallon book is more playing around with sentences than writing instruction...and playing is good. :001_smile:

My oldest will be in 4th grade this year and I plan on adding WWE3 to R&S English 4 as well as Killgallon Sentence Composing (when she is ready). I looked at Winning With Writing, but it seemed to be a duplicate of the writing lessons in R&S...which means to me that the writing lessons in R&S are good! I probably should have used WWE this past year, but I tried another curriculum (CW Aesop) which was a failure and I didn't move on to another writing curriculum after that, I just stuck with the writing lessons in R&S.

My older daughter did the Astronomy book w/notebook last year. For the pages with the empty boxes and lines I just told her to draw pictures of what she found interesting in that day's reading and write a short sentence or two about it (so I would know what the picture was, lol...her artistic rendering of a comet's coma looks like half of the stuff in outer space!). I didn't give her direction or correct anything, it was strictly so she could look back at it and see the things that she had found interesting at the time. Plus it cemented some of what she had just read :001_smile:

This is what I have on my wall for each child. I write the subjects they have on the blank side of the cards, not the side with the clocks since I let them choose the order in which they do their subjects. Every day I open up Homeschool Tracker and see which subjects they are doing that day and put cards with those subjects (i.e. math, history, etc.) in the pockets. When they finish a subject they flip the card over so I can see that they are done with it. This way I can glance at the wall any time during the day and see how each child is progressing, and my kids know from the beginning of the day exactly how much work they have. They are kind of expensive (I only paid $4/apiece for them during Mardel's education sale), but they hold up really well...they were used every day of this last school year and they still look brand new.

Grade 1 Reading has a short Bible story that the student will read and then a two-page workbook lesson. The workbook lesson will go over the new words that were in the story (match them with their meaning, put them in alphabetical order, etc.), have some sort of comprehension questions about the story (yes or no, short answer, circle the correct answer, full sentence answer), and beginning grammar skills are introduced (identify sentences and phrases, put capital letters and ending marks on the ones that are sentences, copy the title with correct capitalization). The skills progress through the year so that the child can correctly answer a question with a complete sentence written in the correct format by the end of the year. Sometimes we did an exercise orally, but most of the time the lesson was short enough that my children would do it written without complaint. Grade 2 Reading has a Bible story followed by several pages of work in the workbook. There is a pre-reading section which is meant to be done after the oral class time (where the new words are discussed) and a section to be done after the reading. It is way, way, way too long for a 2nd grader to do the entire lesson. I would do the oral discussion with my child and then do a couple of whatever the pre-reading exercise was in the book and then after we read and discussed the story my child would do select exercises from the second section in the workbook lesson. I would do that each day until Unit 4 when she had reached a point that she could do each lesson completely without a problem (and without it taking an excessive amount of time). I don't know what the publishers were thinking, but there is more work in the 2nd grade workbook per lesson than there is in the 3rd or 4th grade workbooks, so I didn't feel bad at all about cutting about half of it out. I just made sure she worked on the skills that she needed to work on and ignored the rest. It did cover a lot of good skills, though, so I am using it again this coming fall with my second child. The sight words are really words for which the phonics rules will eventually be taught that are introduced prior to the phonics rule being formally presented. Having taught through phonics a couple of times now I don't treat them as sight words, I just state the phonics rule when they read the word for the first time. The phonics lessons are awesome. The new rule is introduced (or a rule is reviewed), there are two pages of exercises where the rule is used, there is a column of words on the side of the second page which the child has to read (really read, there is no context in which to guess the word, and the rules from previous lessons are mixed in), and on the bottom of the second page is a short spelling lesson. Common words are taught and reviewed there. After my child completed the lesson we would flip to the previous day's lesson and see how many words she could read from that column in one minute...it vastly improved her reading speed, and by the end of the year she could read all twenty-something words in less than a minute. Units 4 & 5 also have two sentences for dictation that include a word or two that follow the phonics rule for the day. I have used the phonics after teaching both of my older children to read using 100EZ Lessons. I like 100EZ because it teaches blending really well and gets them started on reading, and R&S Phonics because it covers all the phonics rules that are not expressly taught in 100EZ. R&S Phonics and Reading go hand-in-hand together...words for which my child had just learned the rule for in phonics would appear in her story several days later.

Kindergarten for my children consists of one twenty-minute lesson in 100EZ Lessons each day. That is it. No spelling, no handwriting, no real phonics, no math, no history, no science...nothing. So far it has not hindered them from progressing at a normal pace once they begin 1st grade. So your son is light-years ahead of where my home schooled children are after their kindergarten year :001_smile:. If you are asking for permission to stop the formal lessons for the summer and just spend a short time every day on reading (or whatever you feel is most important), then you have it. It won't hurt him one bit; in fact, it might even help by giving him some more time to mature before he is faced with 1st grade subjects. You can work on his fine motor skills (which is what is hindering his progress in handwriting, and is completely normal for a K'er, especially a boy) by doing arts and crafts...cutting, tracing, coloring...whatever interests him. Other than that, I would not worry about the rest of the subjects...he still has twelve full years to learn everything, no need to teach it all at the beginning :D.

The sentence in bold above leaves me :confused::confused::confused:. I just sat down and reread the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade spelling TM's and there is NO reference to Catholics whatsoever. None, zip, zilch, nada. One of the lessons in the 4th grade book even includes the word "heathen" in the spelling list, and they only defined it as "a person who does not believe in God". They include some Mennonite doctrine (such as wearing a head covering, kneeling to pray, having a minister preach at church), but it is not preachy nor intended to denigrate other denominations...it is simply fill in the blank questions such as "Mother wears a ________ on her head" or "So-and-so _______ in front of the bench to pray" that a child of the Mennonite faith would easily answer. In fact, the majority of the religious references are more along the lines of "God made each pretty cloud", lol! Can you be more clear exactly where you saw the references to Catholics?

R&S has copywork, narration, and dictation, just not in the English textbook. The copywork is in the penmanship book, dictation is in the phonics/spelling TM (except for 2nd grade), and my children give narrations after they read their story in Reading. R&S really is a thorough LA curriculum when all the parts are used together.

Progressive Phonics is free and includes readers (where the child reads the words that are following the phonics rule being taught and the parent reads the other words) and activity sheets. If you just want to practice vowel digraphs they are covered in the intermediate level. I used this for a while last fall when my 1st grader was stuck on the silent "e".

My children have thoroughly enjoyed the Poetry for Young People series (this is one of the books in the series). Each book has a short bit about the author and a collection of poems (some are just excerpts). I don't use them to teach, but simply to ignite my children's interest in poetry and to help them find it enjoyable.

If I were you (and I'm not, so ymmv :D) I would figure out what my goals are...if they are to dive into all the curriculum and go through each and every one of them, then have at it! If my goal was to learn certain things (like parts of speech or how to write a persuasive paragraph) then I would narrow it down to the curriculum that would help me accomplish those goals and just use those. For example, if your goal is to use 4 different grammar programs, then use them...if your goal is for your daughter to know the different parts of speech, punctuation, diagramming, etc. then pick one...they all include the same parts of speech and same punctuation rules. That is what I would do. :001_smile:

Nope, I have never seen or used either of those, but I can recommend this one, this one, and this one, if it is of any help to you. Otherwise, here is a :lurk5: for you so maybe the daytime crowd will respond. :001_smile: