Update: I opted for a streaming BluRay player, and so far, it's great. Very easy to use Netflix on it, as well as amazon. What tipped us over the edge was that we realized we could stop buying actual DVDs (which get scratched) and buy digital copies of the movies we wanted, so they can be watched via the streaming BluRay player, the amazon app on the iPad, or the desktop machine in our schoolroom. And of course, it plays BluRay discs nicely too. Thanks for bringing this to my attention -- I had no idea it was even possible! I downloaded the TV SideView app but am still trying to figure it out.

You could spend a week in Williamsburg, or Gettysburg, or Philadelphia, or several of those places and not see everything. Antietam is not far from Gettysburg, if you're interested in battlefields (though I have not been there myself). Depending on when you are looking at coming, you might want to skip Gettysburg. Gettysburg is an adorable, lovely little town. DH told me recently that they're predicting 4 million people in Gettysburg this summer because it's the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg is not set up for 4 million people; I don't even want to imagine how bad the traffic will be. I love Gettysburg and would highly recommend it (and will be happy to suggest things to see; I've written other posts on the subject on this forum before, so you can search those), but not this summer. There's also Fort McHenry (War of 1812, writing of the Star Spangled Banner) in Baltimore, which is not far from DC; you could easily hit DC, Baltimore, and Gettysburg without much trouble, and Gettysburg's only about four hours from Williamsburg, so not an unpleasant drive, especially if you hit DC and Baltimore in between. Oh, and it might be tricky to do, but there's also St. Mary's City in southern MD. If you opt not to do chronological order, you could easily head across eastern PA (and if you come in spring or fall, it will be stunningly gorgeous) from Gettysburg through Lancaster County to Philadelphia, hitting the Landis Valley Museum on your way. That will showcase 18th century Pennsylvania life and is particularly interesting to kids, as it's a living farm/village. There's also Old Bedford Village, but that's out west a bit more and not as big as Landis Valley. And Boston! Boston's just such a neat city! Plimoth Plantation is about the one place up and down the east coast that we haven't been able to take the kids yet.

Remember that I live very close to you -- I would be more than happy to recommend the person we see. Shoot me a PM if you'd like his name. I haven't had extensive experience with him, but he's seen me and my three older kids for checkups, and we really like him.

Our DD is finishing Saxon 7/6 up this year as a fifth grader. She's good at math but doesn't love it, but I do not feel that she needs both 8/7 AND Algebra 1/2. At the same time, I don't feel that she needs to do Algebra 1/2 entirely in sixth grade and then Algebra 1 in seventh. So, I am going to have her start Algebra 1/2 as a sixth grader, but we're going to do it over two years (and then she'll do Algebra 1 in eighth grade). We're also going to supplement with lots of word problems and the like during sixth and seventh grades, because she can also use the practice in that sort of application, and I don't feel that they are Saxon's strong point anyway. I found many word problems at fi.edu, but if you google "pre-algebra word problems," other sites will come up as well. LoF would be a good choice, and I keep hearing people mention Art of Problem Solving as well. DD personally did not care for LoF, as she doesn't care for silliness, but ymmv.

Check out Singapore's scope and sequence as to when topics are introduced; some levels are pretty similar, and others are different. It could be that you come across something that is introduced earlier in Standards but later in US, so you might have to catch your child up a bit on something. But I'm thinking for elementary math, it's probably not going to be that difficult to do that.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. For things that require more than just "do the next lesson," it sounds like I'll want to have those on paper separately, which is what I do anyway. I downloaded the app and am anxious to give it a try!

Thank you! It does sound really good, and for $5, I think it's worth a shot. :)

This is where I draw the line: food on the table trumps everything. If you can afford to put the cheapest food on the table and still have room in your budget, then take the next step: real food. If you can afford to put real food on the table and still have room in your budget, then start looking for the next step. For me, that's pastured/grassfed/free-range meat, eggs, and dairy. I don't necessarily buy organic meat or eggs from the grocery store; if I can buy local and clean, that's better, IMO, even if it's not strictly organic. If I can buy hormone-free dairy products, I'll do that. I prioritize pastured/clean butter over other things, because toxins are stored in fat, and we eat butter every day. If you can afford that, then organic on the produce. Sometimes I swap those last two; sometimes organic produce is only a slight increase over conventional, but pastured meat is astronomical and therefore out of the budget. I do what I can. But if your choice is organic, but less food overall, and hungry tummies vs. no organic but plenty of food (especially if you're already doing a lot of unprocessed real foods), I'd go for the latter.

Hey, I was looking at this app, and one of the reviews said they wished it had the ability to do lesson plans. Kinda not really sure what that's about -- can't you plan lessons on it? That seems like the point of it. If you do put in your lesson plans, then do you just check off that you actually did them, or something? I did see that it lets you bump lessons, so I'm assuming that if, say, you do Lesson 22 of Math but have planned to do Chapter 17 of SOTW on Monday, but you don't get to SOTW, you can tell it that you did the math, while bumping SOTW? But whatever you do, you have some sort of record about what you actually did and can print that if necessary?

We did Miquon last year in first grade and added Singapore to it this year; they're a good combination, and my son loves them both. He likes patterns and mental math and little tricks, so they fit for him; my daughter is not so much a fan of any of that, so she found Miquon kind of annoying (even though the hands-on with the c-rods should have, in theory, appealed to her), and we never tried Singapore with her (I think it would annoy her). I just went looking for Singapore books for next year and found that Rainbow Resource had them for the same prices as the Singapore website. The best price I found was at a convention last spring, because some big discount homeschool store had all of the stuff there, no shipping, plus special discounts. I've found some of the textbooks on classifieds, here or at homeschoolclassifieds.com, too, though finding the workbooks there would be a huge bonus.

What's also hard is when you agree with a publisher's religious views but feel they take it too far. I generally agree with a particular company's religious views and like them in general, but then I read one book by them and was appalled at how far to one political (and that includes religious too) side they are; even though I would consider myself to be on the same side (and was, quite frankly, glad to see a book that supported that side, I was really disappointed in the "our side good, the other side so bad they can do no good at all ever" mentality that pervaded the book. I would have liked to see a little more of a middle ground -- acceptance for "our side's" beliefs but without so much negativity toward the "other side." (At the same time, I believe in calling sin "sin," so I do think it's a fine line. The book was cheap and had come with free shipping, and it did have some useful points, so I did end up just keeping it and using parts of it, even though I edited a bit.) I'm not likely to buy something that is very anti my religious views or pushing very strong religious views with which I do not agree. I think it's possible to talk up your views without necessarily putting down other people's. (And really, Christians feeling the need to call certain denominations non-Christian? Why is that necessary? Don't we face enough persecution as it is? Why do we pick on our own? Can't we just teach what we believe and leave it up to God to know people's hearts?) I have felt that SWB has done a very good job of talking respectfully about multiple religious beliefs in SOTW; I think that sort of tone should be a goal, especially for young children. Maybe slightly different if you're writing for older students, and/or if you're writing about religious-oriented subject. I guess I think: Be proud, be evangelical. Don't be rude.

That's okay, because I've seen so many things that you do, and I often wish I was more like you! Even I'm not the me that I am online or in my nicely organized plans; I'm some shadow of the me I want to be. It's all good. :)

I can't remember exactly. I don't think there was a specific grammar section, but I do think that's easier to pick up. Reading comp, I think he'll do fine on, as again, he's heard and discussed a lot. Thanks for the suggestions for spelling, though!!

As you know, my household is still tipped "in favor" of the littles and will be for some time. I try to keep my vision as "shoot for the moon, because even if you don't make it, you'll land among the stars," so that it's inspiring, and I remember that we're still doing wonderfully. Sometimes it's easier to look at it in terms of what didn't happen, and that can be discouraging. I think we need a balance in our vision -- great enough that we aim high, but realistic enough that we don't feel that we've failed when we don't achieve everything on our list.

So what *would* you suggest, specifically to get a child to grade level for the tests? My son does tend to be a late bloomer, and while I don't really care about the test scores, because I really don't think they're an accurate reflection of his progress and abilities, if they're below grade level, then I have the school district on my back, and I'd rather avoid that. My plan is to have him continue to read, of course; he reads at about a fourth grade level and is progressing well, so I'm hoping he'll have sufficient quantity of exposure in a year. I'm also intending to do WWE3 with him, and copywork for cursive practice, but also purposely choosing passages that utilize various forms of punctuation, capital letters, etc. Then around Novemberish, I'd like to have him do some practice tests, or just pay for the actual test then, and then I'll have four or five months where we can do some focused work before taking or retaking the actual test, if he's below grade level. If you have suggestions for ways to increase grade level, I'm open to them. I don't love workbooky stuff, but sometimes I'm just not sure that we're able to hit all areas in an organic way, so the workbooky stuff does seem to hit holes.

Hunter, I wish you lived next door to me; you have such good, common sense advice. I agree with Hunter. The only thing I might add is that if you have to do standardized testing in any grades, you may want to concentrate a little bit on punctuation and spelling if your child doesn't naturally pick them up from reading (I am slightly concerned about this for my rising third grader; he's been exposed to a lot of good literature because it's been read to him, but he's only been reading on his own for about a year, so I'm not sure he's had enough print exposure to be confident in those areas; we may do a bit of focused work on those areas next year before he takes the third grade tests.) LA in our home has looked like this: lots of reading aloud, even after the child is reading on his/her own. Phonics instruction if needed, general reading support/assistance when needed, and encouragement of reading fiction and non-fiction. Informal discussion of what we/they have read. Library, dictionary, thesaurus, newspaper skills as needed. Some poetry study, memorization of some poems/speeches/Bible verses. Copywork at some point, with cursive following. Minimal writing in early years, gradually building up. Depending on the child, asking for an original sentence or two, building up to a paragraph or two, about a field trip, science video, etc. We've used Writing With Ease to teach summary, narration, and dictation and will continue to use it, although it'll be Writing With Style for our sixth grader. Encouragement for original composition, including via word processor, or as dictation to Mom. I have used BrainQuest and Comprehensive Curriculum workbooks to cover any possible missed points wrt grammar, spelling, punctuation, though next year, we're going to take a break from those. Spelling and punctuation in the context of their writing/WWE. Study of Latin to reinforce grammar points, discussion of Latin and Greek roots. Letter-writing instruction as needed -- thank-you notes for gifts, or DD's request to Lego to make a specific type of set. In short, I'm only moderately formal about LA instruction; much of it comes on as-needed, naturally-occurring basis.

I do as much as possible with my iPad and rarely touch my desktop anymore. Do you have a keyboard for the iPad? If not, you might want to invest in one; it really makes the iPad function like a small laptop and, for me, makes it just that much more useful. I do have an app that mimics Office, so it can do word processing and spreadsheets; it's called QuickOffice HD. Most often, though, I use the Notability app, and I love that. I'm finishing up my planning for next year, and I made notes with the keyboard and Notability. I also called up a calendar in PDF form and used a stylus, and the various pretty color inks in Notability, to note holidays/vacations/birthdays, weekends, and probable school days. Super easy! I also love that I can annotate any PDF with Notability; this comes in handy for making lesson plans too.

Low grade fever can also be caused by your milk coming in, and a headache can just be hormone rebalancing.

All three of my big kids learned Carl Sandburg's "Fog." It is very short, but they really enjoyed it. It's not poetry, but last year, the older two learned large portions of the Gettysburg Address, and the year before that, the Preamble to the Constitution. Mostly we use Bible verses for memory work, though.

I agree with the PPs who said they'd let the grade stand, but comfort the child, congratulate him/her on the ones he/she did get right, and hope it's a learning experience. I have one child who is very prone to skipping problems or making careless mistakes, and as we've pointed out, it doesn't matter how good Daddy is at math; a skipped portion of an estimate, or a careless math error can mean a lot of money lost for his company, which means lost paychecks for a lot of people, including himself. I think there is definitely room for grace, but I think it has to do with habits, too -- is this a one-off thing (in which case, the child will probably learn from it and be even more careful in the future), or is it a common mistake? In the latter case, I'd be working hard on teaching the child strategies to combat such things, because the reality is that a child is always going to have to learn to compensate for his/her weaknesses. I'd still be gentle about it, but I'd brainstorm with the child (and with the teacher, if need be) ways to make sure the child finishes all of the problems. (And at the second grade level, I'd think the teacher would need to do more than one reminder about all three pages -- maybe 15 minutes before the time was up, the teacher could say, "You have 15 minutes left; please be sure you've filled in all three pages, including the back of the first page." Or something like that.)

I like HWOT cursive, and it seems to have worked for both of my kids who have used it/started it. It's set up so that the left-hand side of the book is the instructions on the letter, and the right-hand side is more practice on that letter. I have my kids do it so that they do two pages a day -- the right-hand side practice from one letter, and the instructions on the next letter. So each day they are practicing something they learned previously as well as learning something new. If her handwriting isn't great, you might start HWOT cursive anyway. It's very systematic and easy to follow in its directions, and it might actually improve her printing. (It did so for DD, whose printing wasn't great.) The only drawback to HWOT is that it's trickier to find copywork for it. As for narration and dictation, I'd go with Writing With Ease, either level 3 or 4. (Level 2 has copywork some days, so you might look at that too, but it might be on the young side.)

Two of our favorites were "Good Masters, Sweet Ladies" and "Castle Diary: The Journal of Tobias Burgess." Also, David Macaulay's "Castle" and "Cathedral."

No way! I'm so glad I clicked back on this thread; I've been hoping for a GSWFrench for a long time -- so glad to see it's going to happen!

Setting them up as fractions is the easiest way for me to show unit conversions as well, like Penguin said. Units cancel, and you're left with just one.

My 4yo can tell you about his day, or about what happened in his co-op class, but as a PP said, that's his thing. However, he recognizes only a few letters and can only write one (his initial), and he can't draw a person yet.