Thanks!

We are reading A Child's introduction to the world, then adding our own mapping activities. Little Passports is also a nice, lite program for the early ages. My kids loved it.

I would really like to hear your opinions on Moving beyond the page. Pros and cons, etc. Also, how easy or difficult is it to use with kids of different ages. I'm looking at this for next year when my kids will be 9 and 6. And is there anything similar to this that you might recommend instead, maybe. Thanks!

If you have an iPad or something like that, Star Walk is an excellent app. It's not too expensive. My 5 year old is also very interested in space and he loves playing with that. It gives a lot of information about planets, stars, galaxies and satellites. The Usborne Children's Encyclopedia also has some great pages with pictures.

I used Math U See Primer when my son was 4. You can go as fast or as slow as you want and the teacher's guide comes with some great suggestions for extra games to play with the blocks.

I have a 3rd grader and math takes between 45mins to an hour every day. We have had longer days, but those were the times when she spent too much time daydreaming.

My 3rd grader still isn't the best speller on the planet, so I know what you mean. I let her write however she wants to, then afterwards we go over her writing together and look at the misspelled words. I remind her of the spelling rules and we change the words together. At other times, I just spell the words for her, because the writing assignment is more important than getting the spelling right. She has improved greatly over the last year. It's slow going, but I can honestly say it's getting better. We did Phonics Road 1 & 2 and we're using Spelling Workout these days.

That's good to know. My dd starts with VT at the end of February.

Part of websudoku.com is this one http://www.jigsawdoku.com that will probably be better for kids.

I can scan them and e-mail the pages to you. Would that work?

We also dropped Singapore for my dd8 because she didn't like it and it didn't work for her at all. We are using Saxon 3 now and it works. Not everyday is perfect, but she is learning a lot better than she used to. She gets lots of chances to practice her math facts, which has improved tremendously from last year. And it's not as much worksheet writing as you think. The new concept is not introduced with worksheets. You do get the chance to use manipulatives. And the way the worksheets are set up is that you can do half of the problems now and the other half at another time. What also works for my dd is that one worksheets covers a whole host of topics, so no two questions are the same. She didn't cope very well with Singapore's worksheets where you have 2 or 3 pages of the same type of problems. I have no idea what Saxon 5/4 looks like, but I understand it does look a lot different. For now I intend on continuing with Saxon.

Hi, my dd is 8 and in Gr 3. We use BJU English and BJU Reading. I like both of them a lot and it works really well for my daughter. The English program includes grammar and writing. I bought both sets through the Homeschool Buyers Co-op, which made it a lot cheaper than anywhere else.

I have a Kobo Touch. You connect it directly to your computer to upload books and to charge the battery. I picked the Kobo and not the Kindle, because the e-pub books that you can get from the library won't work on the Kindle. I get e-books from the library all the time, and it works great. The file size for a 300 page book is about 500K. I'm reading a book right now with more than 1000 pages and the size is 5M. So, it varies greatly.

So far the fact cards we've used for Gr 3 are +0, +1, +2, doubles & doubles + 1. I know there are multiplication and division cards still waiting for us. I haven't checked all of them. Hope this helps.

That seems fine to me. We're doing Gr 3 this year and we're finished by lunch time. I don't want to spend all day doing school work.