Thanks for posting this - I'll have to put it on my "to buy" list. I have one of their other books, and have enjoyed it.

Another option would be to skip the part that deals with Rome. I can't remember exactly how many weeks that would be (maybe the first 10 or so?). I haven't used Bibioplan Ancients so I'm not sure exactly how thoroughly they cover Rome, but we had a slight overlap with our previous curr. when we started RtR last year but we just did RtR as written. The beauty of MFW for me was how much the Bible and History are integrated and because of that we didn't really worry about the review.

Are you talking about the Rome to Reformation package? If so, I used it last year with my then 3rd grader and 7th graders and a first grader tagging along for parts and we consider it one of our best school years ever. There are specific readings for the older grades, mainly out of Streams of Civilization but you can add more required reading in from the book basket list if you feel it is lacking. I required more frequent/longer narrations from my 7th grader to increase his writing levels. It really is designed to work with the age spans as advertised - second or third graders to eighth.

Full-time student wasn't one of the listed exemptions. The exemptions were very few. When we sent the questionnaire back, I was expecting a response right away if he had been exempted because of the full-time student occupation. A few years ago, I was called to jury duty that was to begin the day my three-year old was due. They responded to my note very quickly to excuse me but no response yet for 18 yods.

Sometimes it just seems like my ds is in no-man land's right now. Yes, he's eighteen and an adult and he did vote in the last election BUT he's still in high school - LOL! Next year as a college freshman I probably wouldn't have even given it a second thought. It just seems weird for him to be worried about missing high school basketball practice for jury duty!

My son turned 18 in October. He is homeschooling and is a Senior this year. He was notified last week of his selection for jury duty. We filled out the survey and I made sure that he noted under occupation that he was a full-time high school student. We haven't heard anything yet and he should call and follow-up or just show up on the day he was called for. Have you ever heard of or had a high school student called for jury duty? I can't imagine that ps students are serving on juries during school time, or are they?

But why does it work?!?! I've heard of this before and always dismissed it as urban legend . . does anyone have any idea of why it seems to work for so many people? Most "cures" have a reasonable explanation but my mind cannot figure out why putting Vick's on my feet would have anything to do with my cough in my throat.

It doesn't bother me anymore and my kids have become used to it. I didn't appreciate it completely until I realized that my kidlet that was doing 8/7 last year was not complaining about the new concepts. I would ask him what his lesson was about and he would tell me and then usually add, "but it's easy because we did (such and such) last week and this is just a little different". I realized then that he had adjusted to the Saxon incremental system and was beginning to connect the dots. All of my kids, older and younger, have since said similiar things when talking about their math lessons. Notice that I said they don't complain about the new concepts - that doesn't mean we don't have any complaining about the problem sets :)

My dd did MUS Algebra and then switched into Saxon Algebra II. I won't say it wasn't difficult, but she has managed and she's not a "math" kid at all. She did hit a wall between lessons 20 and 30 but we just backed up and redid those lessons and she's been flying through them since them. I'm sure it's not ideal but it has worked for her. For what it's worth, my ds did Teaching Textbooks I, then MUS Geometry and then Saxon Algebra II. He said that he learned more in Saxon Algebra II than he did in either one of the previous courses.

SWB used to post reviews about different curriculum but quit doing it some time ago. I seem to remember the reason being that it always generated so much angst and controversy that she decided to stop offering the reviews.

I didn't have trouble with "thank" but we have run across a few words that we definitely pronounce differently than Mrs. Beers. I always allow my kids to mark it the way we say it. It's just too confusing for us anyother way so if I heard the long a when I say "thank" I would mark it that way. It doesn't change the spelling, and it doesn't cause undue confusion. The major point of the marking is to understand how to spell the word so you are going to accomplish that purpose whether you mark it long or not.

I'm doing Saxon 3 right now with my 7 yo. We do it as written with very few modifications. I do omit some of the skip counting because he is so confident with it. He really doesn't need to count by 25's, 10's or 100's anymore but we do it once every week or so. Other than that, we follow the lessons as written. We started it in August and are on Lesson 67. I try to do five days a week with him but sometimes it ends up being only four just because of my time being limited. It probably requires my direct time for about 20-30 minutes depending on the lesson. He works on the meeting strip by himself then we do the oral questions together and then I teach the lesson, followed by the drills. He is pretty independent with the worksheets. When my olders were using Saxon 3 I know the lessons took more of my direct time, but this particular kid is a quick study with math and we are able to skip the repeated examples in the lessons most days.

I am using Saxon 3 with my second grader right now and I do have the meeting book and we do use it but there's really nothing in it that you couldn't recreate. It has all the calendar pages, a few graph pages, and some counting strip pages. I'm using Saxon K also and am not using the meeting book because I had the MFW K calendar pages to use and they are on thicker paper. The Saxon meeting books drive me crazy just because they are on that newsprint thin, ugly paper. I was just trying to decide whether I should order the Saxon 1 Meeting Book or just create my own on nicer paper.

I have PR Levels 1 and 2 and the Rules Tunes list for PR1 is not complete - I'm not sure if PR2 is complete or not. I'm doing The Bridge with an older student and purchased it used and had no rules tunes for it so I'm using the PR2 list and so far haven't run into any that are missing but we're only about have way through. I'm guessing that it's not complete just because the grammar in PR2 isn't as complete as the grammar in The Bridge. As far as your 10yo goes, I'm accelerating my current 10yo through the PR program. We started PR1 in the summer and he is now on Week 5 of PR2. We went through PR1 at a really fast clip only slowing down for the more complicated building codes and did basically a week's worth of work in one day. Now we are doing two days work every day (more or less!). He is a very strong reader but I have an eighth grader that still struggles with spelling and I've just decided that I don't ever want to go through that again if I can help it. I'm planning to finish PR2 with him this year and maybe start PR3. For what it's worth, I'm also accelerating my eighth grader through just the spelling lists so for your 10yo, you could just do the spelling if you think the grammar/composition too simple and use seperate programs for those parts. I do own SWR but find PR much easier to use. I was never confident with SWR but the DVD's with PR are a great help. HTH,

I have six students for the first time this year and I completely understand what you're going through. My days are long - I've given up the idea of a "short" day because with as many dc as I have there is just not enough of me to go around unless we stretch the day out a bit. I have combined all my dc that are in 2nd through eighth grade for history (using MFW) which has really helped. We started this last year and unless something drastically changes, will continue for the foreseeable future. My hs students work very independently so that helps of course. One thing that I've had to let go recently is that I've finally given myself permission not to check every box every day for every kid. I've been doing a "loose" loop kind of schedule with the subjects that require me to be one on one with a kidlet so what doesn't get done one day gets done the next day as a priority and we just keep circling around. That way, one thing doesn't always get set aside at the end of the day when I'm ready to quit. If you have kids close in age I would combine as much as you can. I already mentioned history, but I'm also able to combine my second and fourth graders for science and my K'er usually listens in as much as he wants to for both the olders science and history as I don't really have time to do much more than reading and math with him at this point. We've also at different times been able to combine spelling and grammar but that doesn't usually seem to work out for very long at my house. I usually do panic when trying to think through the day after a long break or summer vacation and the first week back is usually painful - LOL! I tend to find that after about five days though, we tend to settle into some sort of normal routine that usually works.

I was sad to see this, too. I've purchased from CBD but really dislike their internet catalogue - for some reason I find it very difficult to find specific things and to navigate compared to other places. Of course, for other reasons, I was sad when Pennywise took over The Book Peddlar earlier this year, because I always enjoyed their catalogue and website and I "felt" like I knew them because I knew of the owner when we were at the same college.

I'm in the same situation - my 13yods is doing Saxon 1/2 as an eighth grader. I'm planning on just doing the regular Saxon sequence with him in high school. My oldest was doing Algebra II last year as a Jr. and he did decent on the ACT so I've just decided that I'm not going to worry about it. If I feel like it's a problem, we'll probably work through a summer somewhere along the line and move a bit farther ahead in the sequence that way.

I've been doing Motivated Moms for two years now and love it. I'm trying to decide whether to get the app for my itouch or just to the paper version again. I'm leaning toward the paper version as I have my kidlets trained to check it for things that need done and also I use the pages for menu planning and grocery lists. I think I may mess up my system if I switch to the app.

I have two favorite items in our homeschool room (besides bookshelves) that I would never give up. The first is that each kidlet has a clipboard. I originally bought them just to use to hold their weekly schedules that would constantly get lost but we've found them invaluable for holding half-finished papers and all kinds of things that might otherwise get lost. They hang on the side of one of our bookshelves. The other thing is a shoe organizer (the kind that hangs on the back of the door. We have a basement door adjacent to our dining room/school room and we have the shoe organizer hanging on the stairs-side of the door. It holds all the little things we always misplaced. Scissors/glue/labels/erasers/pencils/pens/markers/colored pencils/permanent markers/calculators/staplers. My daughter made a label for each compartment that helps keep it organized.

My dd is doing horticulture right now and is really enjoying it. My ds is doing the accounting and that is going well also.

Just wanted to let you know that there is a way to filter the netflix. We found it through the netflix web site - you can block certain ratings and change it anytime you want to. We went to our account at netflix.com and found it under settings.

My fourth grader is doing 5/4 and I have finally determined that this is what I need to do. I started going through the lesson with him the last five or so days before Christmas break and there was a wonderful difference in his attitude and his work. We had been using the DIVE CD but that wasn't quite enough for him. Now he does the warmups and the drill. I sit down with him and work through the examples in the book and we work on the practice problems together then he goes to work by himself on the problem set.

I don't know which one is more fun - it probably depends on the child and the teacher :) As far as singing the songs, that was the one thing that I thought probably wouldn't work with my boys, but I started doing it and now we all sing them with great gusto. Sometimes when one song has been done a lot in a row (silent final e's comes to mind) we just have a contest to see who can sing them in the funniest voice. Even my teens are now singing along sometimes and even my 13 yods who is speeding through the program sings them (albeit with much eye rolling sometimes). I have found them very helpful to use at other times (narration, for instance) when someone has forgotten how to spell something . . a few notes and words and usually they catch on. I agree with Amy that the writing is always a problem for the youngers. I'm not using PR with my current 5 yods because of that but we are practicing writing and learning to read with another program and then will roll into PR more fully next year. I'm just getting into the grammar and composition portion (it really doesn't start until PR2) but I will say that it really is easy to teach. Mrs. Beers walks you right through it, step by step. I take notes when watching the video's and have no problem re-teaching to my kidlets.

You may want to check out Lamp and Quill Bible Study Materials. It is set up like this and has different levels for each member of the family, including adults. Also, it's not specific to homeschooling, but Word of Life has Bible study materials for different ages that do the same thing, cover the same passages at different levels and with different activities for the ages of kids while the adults and high school read and respond to the same passages.

My two oldest children used BW Highschool (that's the essay course, right?). They did it when one was a freshman and the other a sophmore. They both say it was the most helpful writing course they ever did. In fact, because of their recommendations, I'm going to have my current eighth grader do it starting after Christmas. My oldest two did it really fast because we were using it as a way to get them up to speed on writing essays for another curriculum but they both said that they never understood how to write an essay before they went through the book. I haven't really looked at it in a few years, but as I remember there is a lot of flexibility built into it. I think she has examples of topics but I know that my son spent most of his time writing about sports-related topics and my daughter about literature-related topics so I'm fairly sure that it would work for whatever writing you wanted your child to do.