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purduemeche

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Posts posted by purduemeche

  1. We are a Tapestry of Grace family and are really enjoying the literature for our 6th, 7th and 8th grade boys!  For Year 3 units 3-4: Jungle Book, Just So Stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Invisible Man, She, King Solomon's Mines, An Age of Extremes (Joy Hakim).

     

    We don't use much else on the list of TOG options outside of the maps and Accountability/Thinking questions for Dialectic students.  We started with grand plans of doing it all, but then life happened.  And 11 kids.

  2. Based on time we don't do any targeted reading programs after our children complete "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Steps."  The only exception is if a problem arises in reading at grade level.  In this case we will assign a load of reading slightly below grade level to improve confidence and use a spelling program as "backwards phonics." 

     

    Outside of this, we rely on the Tapestry of Grace reading lists every week to make sure they are constantly reading. :)

  3. I would highly recommend Latin. It is not "useful" in the utilitarian sense (not like Spanish or Mandarin), but as a starting point for learning all the Romance languages it can't be beat. I was a fluent Spanish speaker in a prior life, and now teaching Latin, I see the roots of Spanish everywhere.

     

    In addition, Latin is the base of >50% of English words, is very useful to learn English grammar as an inflected language, and is simply the best way to help our children connect to the cultural heritage of the Christian West.

     

     

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  4. Our favorite history audiobooks for this age are the unabridged recordings of the Little House books by LI Wilder, the GA Henry abridged recordings by Jim Weiss, and the Roman Mysteries by Caroline Lawrence.

     

     

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  5. Another option, instead of explicitly teaching about savings, is to expose her to literature about people who do save and live frugally. Benjamin Franklin comes to mind, as does the Little House series. Literature tends to leave a more indelible mark on the heart when teaching virtues.

     

     

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  6. If you are pressed for time, you should only consider chemistry if it is totally independent. Until 7th or 8th grade, a strong focus on nature study/journaling/exploring is all you really need in science.

     

     

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  7. Lots of effective curricula are out there. We use Memoria Press, but those mentioned above I am sure are good.

     

    My advice goes down a different path. I recommend you either learn the language yourself and then teach your kids (have to stay 1-2 lessons ahead, at least), hire a tutor, or enroll them in live online classes. Learning a language from a book or DVD set with no live instruction is very difficult.

     

     

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  8. The complete Beatrix Potter is available on Audible

     

    The abridged Roal Dahl series was done by Blackstone Audio, and many of them contain animals.

     

    Jim Weiss at Greathall Productions is one of our favorites.  We picked up his recording of Jungle Book (abridged) at the Cincinnati homeschool convention and are enjoying it.

     

    Another idea...if you shop for any of these titles at Audible, the site will track your searches and suggest many similar works.  It's a handy feature.

    • Like 1
  9. We are jumping into the writing programs of Classical Academic Press next year.  IEW simply takes too much effort on our part, and since neither of us enjoy writing, we decided to outsource.  It seems the CAP program teaches many different types of writing over the years.

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