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.

I'm using MUS with my 5 year old. He loves it. I agree with a previous poster about taking it slow and going over the place value again and again, until it makes sense. Place value is pretty important, and if the child gets it, it makes other math a lot easier. Play some games that will help. Use the decimal street idea a lot. You can even change it up and make it cages with animals in, for example. There is a book called "Sir Cumference and all the king's tens" that you can read with them. It's a story that uses the place value concept.

I go through the lesson the previous evening, just to check what the new material is going to be mostly. I prep the meeting strip and gather all the materials needed, and I pull out the necessary test and/or worksheets. It takes about 10 minutes, if that much. We're on Saxon 3.

We do Saxon Math, but for extra math I have started to get mathy books from the library. They are stories that incorporate math and after reading it together, you can discuss the math and maybe practice it using some of your own examples. Books like: Sir Cumference (there's a whole bunch of them) Spaghetti and meatballs for all How much is a million? The grapes of math Books by Greg Tang and Trudy Harris And there are hundreds of books like that. I did a search in Amazon and my local library. I like doing it this way, because it doesn't cost me an arm and a leg, it's not a second full math curriculum and it shows my kids that math have a practical application in real life. It's not just numbers in a book. We also play math games from RightStart math. Hope that helps!

We use Saxon for my 3rd grader - it's scripted, spiral, includes lots of review and my kid loves the timed tests. We also use MUS for my K-er - the DVD's explain the concepts really well, includes lots of exercises and review before moving on to the next topic, you can easily move faster or slower as you need. I think it makes for a very good base.

You can let him practice drawing basic shapes first - circles, triangles, rectangles, curvy lines, etc. Then you use those basic shapes to construct a picture. I've used "How to teach art to children" by Evan Moor before and it works really great. There's also learn to draw books by Ed Emberley. He uses those basic shapes to draw bigger pictures. Might be worth a try.

My ds 7 is like that, she has a hard time remembering the basic facts. We practice them every day. I have her count in 5's, 10's, 100's, 2's, up and down. We recently started counting in 3's as well. Then we play the RightStart math card games. Those have really helped to cement some of the facts for her. It took some time for it to start working, but it's working now. We switched to Saxon precisely for that reason as well. We did Singapore for Gr 2 and it's a great math program, but I found that she really needed to practice the same math every day, otherwise she forgets it. We've just started with Saxon 3 and the repetitive exercises everyday really helps to make it all so much easier for her.

Sounds good to me. You can maybe add a little olive oil to your marinade. We always do that and it works great.

I started Math U See Primer when my ds was about 4 and a half. I like that we can go as fast or as slow as required. Some days he did a lot of the problems, other days only 2 or 3. I sometimes do the writing for him. The blocks are great to work with. We also did HOP K and he flew through that. And we use Handwriting without Tears K. All of this we do if he feels like it. If he doesn't seem interested, then I put it away and I give him some puzzles to build or games to play.

I can see where you're coming from. I don't like it either when other people tell me what to do, especially if I had already thought of doing that exact same thing by myself. And if you then continue with the card/letter or whatever, it feels as if you're just doing what the other person told you to do; and not anymore because it was something you wanted to do. Hope that makes sense. It's not so much the gesture or action that is in question , but the way the whole thing makes you feel as a worthy and capable person.

I would suggest to not necessarily overlook the curricula that can be considered religious. With some of them, the religious content is very little or only a couple of books would be religious and the others not and it's fairly easy to either skip the religious parts, or replace the books with something similar. In some instances I have found that it's just in sentences in worksheets and you can always just replace those with your own.