At age 7, my DD was very handwriting-allergic, so I kept it to a minimum and did a lot orally. At 11, she's much more comfortable writing by hand, although I still don't make her write if it's not necessary, so time may help your boys too. Will they draw, or color a sheet that's applicable? (You could write at the top something like, "We read 'Really Cool Jaguars' by Jim Smith" and the date and have an easy record.) There's also nothing wrong with them dictating a few sentences to you about what they read, while you write them down; whenever we did that, I just wrote "DD dictated this to Mom" and added the date. Elizabeth Foss has a list of different narration ideas, some of which might appeal to your boys. It's on this page, but scroll down a ways: http://www.elizabethfoss.com/reallearning/2012/02/could-it-be-a-storybook-year.html My other question to you would be: do you need an official portfolio for them? If not, I'd just stick to keeping a list of some of the books you read/they read (for your own records and as a keepsake for them). And just enjoy the books and don't worry about it. If you do have to have one, have them dictate or draw or color. I think that not only is reading some library books better than nothing, it's actually excellent. Feeding their minds, introducing ideas and concepts and topics, letting them explore and discover and get excited -- this is all so so so good for elementary schoolers. (And I'm saying this to you as much as to myself, LOL, because I get worried about what we didn't do, and the reality is that my younger kids get plenty of science on an informal basis.) Is there a nature center or state park near you? Take them for talks or hikes; take some photographs and maybe have them tell you a couple of sentences about what they liked the best. Follow up with some books on whatever the main topic was, if they want to know more. Feed their curiosity about the natural world and how things work -- the formal understanding can come later. And consider getting your husband involved -- mine likes sciencey stuff a lot more than I do, so he takes the kids hiking (it's a win all around -- they get science and Daddy time, and I get a break) or builds stuff with them or plays with SnapCircuits with them (which is another good option for your boys, maybe around 8; they can be done without a lot of adult supervision too).

We have many of them, and I think I have several of them in Kindle form; DD went through a phase where she was completely obsessed with the Oz books. I haven't read them myself, so I didn't think of them for the 4yo; I might have to try them and see what he thinks. Great suggestions in this thread -- thanks everyone!

That's what we do as well. After reading as a family, the 4 and 8yo boys are in bed between 8 and 8:15, and they usually fall asleep pretty quickly. Sometimes the 8yo reads for a few minutes. DD goes to her room when the boys go to theirs, and she usually stays up until 9:30 or 10 before I make her turn off her light. :) I'm with you on needing the time alone in the evening.

I'm sorry; do we have the same daughter? LOL! She does all of that stuff as part of her winding down at night, including crafts and the cat cuddling. To some degree, no matter how tired she is, that sort of stuff oddly enough does wind her brain down and is necessary for her, but I do usually have to tell her at some point to turn off the lights and put on some quiet music. She's like me, a natural night owl and not really a morning person, but the entire household functions better when we're all up and moving in the mornings.

For that age, I'd just get a stack of library books and/or DVDs (nature DVDs, Bill Nye, etc.) and call it good. Maybe get a simple book on experiments or projects to do every so often, especially if they like to see reactions. If you need stuff for a portfolio, I'd print out a couple of worksheets and have them fill in parts of the insect, or the cell, or whatever. Or do some simple notebooks of insects or mammals or something -- things like size, diet, habitat, a drawing of the creature and/or its tracks, something like that. Maybe try raising ladybugs or butterflies and keeping a calendar with pictures of their development; my kids loved that! Nature study with some inexpensive field guides (we like the Petersen First Guides) might be good too. You could try the Outdoor Hour Challenges from handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com too. But I would totally not stress about science at that age.

Honestly, our mornings are more pleasant and relaxed when they're *not* relaxed. No screen time in the morning. My kids get up, get dressed, and do their set list of morning chores. Then we have breakfast (with some poetry/Bible/hymn reading at/after breakfast), and then they start their independent schoolwork while I tidy the kitchen and switch the laundry. It's not an option for them not to. It takes some time to build the routine but is so worth it.

I love this thread!

We have two 2001s and a 2004. They all have just under 200,000 miles on them; the 2004 is a small car, and it just got a new-to-us engine.

It doesn't seem like the right thing for my family, but the people I know who have used it have really loved it for the discussions their older kids are able to have. I think it fits certain kids very well, others not so much, like anything.

Anything by Sally Clarkson!

I hear you on the SOTW maps and all -- I will be saving all of those. (Otherwise, I just save a handful of samples for each subject for each year.) I keep them in the small notebook things, the kind that Staples often has on sale for a penny each in the summer; they're a folder but have the 3 prongs in the middle. They don't take up as much room as a full binder. I use duct tape to make an edge on them that I can then 3-hole-punch so I can put them in our portfolio binders (like here: http://littlehomeschoolonthehill.com/2008/03/19/new-use-for-duct-tape/). It's still going to be a lot of space by the time I've homeschooled five kids through high school, but that's okay.

I roughly alternate the two -- a few pages (around 4, but maybe 2 or maybe 6, depending on how complicated the concept is) of Miquon one day, a few pages of Singapore the next. I didn't do Singapore Level 1, so in first grade, DS1 just did the first two Miquon books and not every day. This year (second grade), he did the Green and Blue Miquon books and is finishing up Singapore 2B. He decided he wanted to wait to do the last two Miquon books until next school year, but he may finish up 2B before his older sister finishes her math book, so I may start him on 3A in the next couple of weeks (we have about 4-5 weeks left of the school year). I haven't worried too much about matching up topics or anything like that. I figure the creators of each program have a reason for the orders they've chosen, and overall, I like the spiral approach, because I think it's good for kids to come back to concepts in different ways/levels as their brains mature.

I keep the majority of the art supplies in a cabinet (one of those wooden jelly cabinets), and I keep books that we're not currently using in an upstairs room. My dad built me some pretty painted crates that hold our current books and files. I use workboxes for the various subjects, so the kids can easily tote them to wherever they need -- the living room, their bedrooms, the kitchen table if I'm in there. . . For the often-needed supplies (pencils/crayons, pens, scissors, gluestick, erasers), each child has a plastic box that can be toted around easily, so it's less stuff left around (and I know whose it is if it is left out as well, and it's easy to pack the stuff up for co-op or days when we're schooling out of the house). We technically have a schoolroom, but that's mainly just to hold the art cabinet and my computer desk full o'books and papers; having a designated center for all the stuff keeps it from getting lost. I did make that room my baby/toddler-safe room (ie it's a no Lego zone, and we try to keep shoes out of it too), and my rocking chair is in there too, so we *can* do schoolwork in there and have room for the littles to play, but especially these days, we don't end up using it a lot. (Now, when DS3 was a newborn and then a playing/crawling baby, we did use the schoolroom a lot more, and we were all together; I'm sure that will happen again when the new baby gets here, with older kids taking off for quiet spaces when they need to.) Could you put some pretty curtains over some shelves or something, just to give a more uniform look to your dining room storage space?

Two things really helped with careless mistakes in math for my DD. One, letting her do the work on the iPad instead of paper. It's more fun that way, and it's an incentive to do good work the first time. Two, we use Saxon, so there are 30 problems every day. It is very rare that she makes a mistake because she didn't understand something; it's almost always careless mistakes. So if she gets 90% right the first time around (I make her correct anything that's wrong) on the tests, she only has to do 15 problems on the next several sets (there are five sets between tests). This incentive really helped, and her test scores didn't go down as a result of only doing 15 problems. (I hand-pick them each day, so that she gets a variety of problems.) With only 15 problems a day, she gets a higher percentage correct.

I've only seen TT once, so I can't comment on that, but I can tell you why we like what we're using for our kids. DD, age 11 (finishing fifth grade) -- easily distractible, doesn't like colorful or cute or silly, very linguistically oriented, not so much math oriented, needs to "chew" on concepts for a few days. She didn't like Miquon very much; she didn't want to play with the rods and find patterns and such. She also didn't like the Calvert math book we had sitting around; its mastery approach meant that she'd have a whole chapter on a concept, do a lot of problems on it, and then move on, and that just wasn't the right approach for her. She still doesn't love math, but she is thriving in Saxon (high grades, and her standardized test scores were excellent). Its explanations are clear and step-oriented, no distracting colors/graphics/jokes, and in every practice set, there are guaranteed to be ones she can do easily, so it's a confidence booster for her. It works really well for her that it has her review concepts over and over, and I see her ask questions a lot when something is new, and gradually ask fewer questions as her brain gets used to the concept. She's finishing 7/6 right now and will move on to Algebra 1/2 next year; we'll spread it over two years and do some supplemental word problems and such (not Saxon's strong point) in between Saxon days. DS1, age 8 (finishing second grade) -- very math-oriented, loves patterns, adds the mile marker numbers in his head as we drive up the road, gets math concepts really quickly. We use Miquon and Singapore for him, and he loves them both. Something about Singapore's mental math way of doing things really speaks to him; it would drive DD nuts, but DS1 naturally thinks like Singapore does. When I asked the question, "if money was no object, what would you get for a mathy kid?," on this forum, the majority of the people said "Miquon plus Singapore." DS2, age 4.5 (pre-K/K next year) -- not reading yet or counting much yet but is very curious about everything. What he needs most isn't academics, exactly, but time with me, doing activities and exploring beyond what he can do on his own. I have a book called "Making Math Meaningful" from the Cornerstone Curriculum Company that I picked up for free last year, and I want to give that, or something similar, a shot with him next year.

I was a very good math student, and I still appreciate the way Saxon explains things sometimes. I learned how to divide fractions in school but never learned WHY the "flip the second fraction upside down and multiply" worked. It was pretty cool to learn that. :)

DH and I worked our way through the entire nine-year series of X-Files a year ago. I'm working through Parenthood right now, and I went through Modern Family a few months ago. DH and I are also watching the 2010 version of Sherlock and liking it a lot.

My husband thinks the Fort Collins, CO area sounds really great. He hasn't been there, though, but "on paper" it looks interesting to him. Seems like a lot of great stuff to do there. Baltimore isn't bad; it's pretty nice in the mid-Atlantic. COL isn't terrible (especially if you're not *right* in the cities), and the weather is fairly mild -- some snow but not like New England, occasional tornado warnings but not like the south, warm in the summer but not like the south, etc. I'd have said that for Baltimore, you could live up in the York, PA area, where COL is even lower, but then you'd be more than 30 minutes from BWI (which isn't actually in Baltimore; it's more like Annapolis, but you might find some reasonably priced suburbs somewhere).

We do various read-alouds at breakfast -- some rotating selection of Bible, hymns, poetry, science or nature books, history books, chapter from literature. It varies. After breakfast, while I'm cleaning up and getting the babies ready for the day, the older kids start their reading. If it's a math test day, I have DD do that first. When they finish reading, they can move on to something else that's independent -- cursive practice, copywork, random worksheets for the portfolio, math if they don't need me for it. . . Whenever I have a chance, I will sit down and do one-on-one subjects with them, no set order but whomever it's convenient to work with at the time, and I'll do group subjects like history or science when I have a chance, usually after the one-on-one subjects.

We have that one, and my kids really like it. They've learned a lot from it as well.

I need some more suggestions for read-alouds that my 4.5 yo son would particularly enjoy. He's listened to a lot of stuff that DH or I've read to the big kids (like Percy Jackson, Treasure Island, The Hobbit), but I'd like to read some things that are more specifically for him. We've read the Pooh books (he loves them), and we've read all of the Henry Huggins and Ralph S. Mouse books. (I'm not really a big Ramona fan; he can read those when he's able to read if he wants to.) We've read The Cricket in Times Square and Carolyn Haywood's Penny and Peter (I want to leave the Betsy books and the Eddie books for him to read on his own too). We've read a couple of the Little Britches books, and he liked them, but I just feel like they're a little on the old side for him. Same with Narnia -- I want to wait a couple more years before reading them again. I do have Mr. Popper's Penguins and Rebecca Caudill's Fairchild Family series that I'm putting on our list. We've read some Paddington; he'd probably enjoy more of those too. Oh, and I have the James Herriot children's treasury upstairs; I forgot about that one. We read Farmer Boy fairly recently, and we'll be starting the first several books in that series (again) in the fall, when we start the Prairie Primer. Maybe he'd like the first one or two of the All of a Kind Family books, but again, maybe a little old for him. So, I guess I want books that are more than picture books, appealing to a 4-5yo (not just "tag along for the ride"), and not things that he'll be able to read on his own in a year or so. Also, not too academic; this is for evening read-aloud time, so I want it to be easy and pleasant. Maybe I should try Redwall again? (We tried the audio version, and the kids weren't really into it.)

Mr. Q has a day of reading (with some follow-up worksheets), then two days of experiments. At least that's how the chemistry one is set up. It's all done for you, down to the list of "gather this" for each day (and it looks to be pretty common household stuff too). The curriculum is all written out for you. All I will have to do each week is make sure we have the stuff for the experiments; otherwise, it's open the file and go. (It is large; between the teacher book and the student book, it's about 900 pages, so if you have a tablet or e-reader, that will help a lot.) I am actually really excited about it and think science will actually get done next year. :) Re: the SnapCircuits. I think they are supposed to teach a ton about electricity to teens, even, so you might see if you have the big 750-project set (the one another poster linked). I think the Handbook of Nature Study is available free online.

We're winding down our year and only have a few subjects left to complete, so there's not a lot of drudgery "have to do this" stuff left. We've been having a great week, and I'm enjoying it. It's gorgeous outside, so the kids have been highly motivated to finish their work quickly, so they can head outside. Second grader is rocking fractions and cursive, and I actually had to pull him away from his book yesterday to finish his math. (Math is his favorite subject, and while he likes reading, he's still fairly new to it and doesn't have a lot of stamina for it yet, so for a book to be so interesting that he keeps reading it instead of jumping to math is pretty cool.) Fifth grader did well on her math test today and has been teaching herself to play various songs on the keyboard. I asked her for a paragraph about a recent talk she (and DH and the boys) attended about amphibians; she muttered about not wanting to do it and then wrote me two lovely paragraphs. I'll take it! Toddler asks for books all the time, and the 4yo attempted to clear out the library's sections on turtles, elephants, and owls (I limited it to 4-5 of each). Definitely can't complain about the past couple of school days. :)

We really like the format of the online CAT, because it's easy to follow -- one question at a time, and it's only clicking a bubble, no having to transfer the answer to the scan sheet.

I might look into SnapCircuits for your kids, especially the older one; I would get the more expensive set that has the teaching guides along with it. For an engineering sort, it seems like it would provide a ton of teaching material. Could your 9yo work through the animal sections of the Handbook of Nature Study? I am very non-sciencey myself. History any day, please! This year, science was a lot of natural exploration -- learning about how an ultrasound works, attending talks about frogs (and writing about those experiences), hiking in the woods, raising ladybugs. We did a few experiments. I do feel like my 11yo (and maybe my 8yo) needs a bit more, though, so we're going to try Mr. Q next year. It's all laid out for me, and I think they will like it.