I love planning, but I still don't plan too far ahead. I have a general sense of direction, but what I have found is that over the last 5 years, I have learned and changed a lot, and I tend to trust my gut feelings more and more, adapting to our current mood and continually evolving. So I know if i try to plan too much detail too far ahead, I will be wasting valuable time that could be spent reading ahead the books we will be reading in the near future, which is something I feel the need to do now that my kids are older. I could never have predicted that we would be doing what we are now, nor could I have planned for it, and I prefer to be open to the winds of opportunity, change and growth rather than be rigid about our future.

Oh its good other people responded because my memory is crappy, and I think I have read all the CM companion books when I had our town's homeschooling library, but I cant remember any of them at all. I am sure I got something out of them all. You can also just Google Charlotte Mason and see what comes up. I think all the CM imterpretations are just that- interpretations- and not necessarily how I would interpret CM, either. Once you have been homeschooling for a while, you take what feels right and what works and leave the rest. Sorry I cant be more specific. I read widely and often cant remember the details!

Yes, I will spend up to several hundred $ at a time, usually on school things, but its not secretive. I have my own income which we agree covers my personal stuff, plus everything to do with the kids' schooling. I like it this way, but he has the same privilege- he doesn't ask my permission to buy a new muffler for his Harley, or new speakers for his car :). We definitely discuss more expensive purchases though. I guess I have been a little embarrassed at times about the amount of books I buy, that turn up in the mail box, but Dh has never said anything about it.

My 12 and 14 year olds do ALL dishes, every meal,(we have a dishwasher but pots are handwashed) as well as wiping surfaces, basic kitchen cleaning, on alternate weeks. It doesn't work to do it alternate nights for us because if one leaves something soaking they end up arguing. And if they try and do it together, we have problems too.

I have never taught 1st grade since my kids were in school then, but I have found TWTM to be incredibly valuable for educating me, and ihave used it, but it is "too much" and maybe, from my perspective now, too academic for me. I am gravitating toward Ambleside, except that I relaly loved using SOTW for 4 years, and love the 4 year history cycle. I am not a hands on, crafty type mum, and my kids don't like workbooks, or books with dry information- they respond well to information presented in a literary form. I am a love to cuddle on the couch and read aloud type mum. And Ambleside is good for that, while also being very academically rigorous. But you know, you don't really have to choose or feel you have to only do one forever. Whatever I use, I tweak it. The curriculum is one thing, but the kid is another, how they respond and I also trust being drawn to different things at different times- I have no loyalty to anyone but where I feel drawn, and that changes year to year.

I think having a look at the Ambleside website is a good place to start, too. ambleside.org I am secular. TWTM works for us secular folk! So does Charlotte Mason, with some adaption. There are lots of secular folk here so if you have specific questions, you can find answers here.

but dont have the heart to face the tantrums.... We had recently fallen into the habit of watching TV in the evenings- not TV but Smallville DVDs actually, to which we were severely addicted...then they finished and there was this big emptiness. So, as has happened before, my kids started pulling out movies and watching a movie each night. It happened subtly, just one at a time, and before you know it, it was an expectation. So tonight, as they were getting ready to watch another movie, which I hadn't said they could, but I hadn't said they couldn't, really clearly, either.... I said no, they couldnt. Dd, as usual in such terrible circumstances, shrugged and said ok. Ds, however, as usuall in such terrible circumstances, acted like I had just told him he could never watch TV again. Ever. Or worse. He screamed. he went to his room and cried. He told me I betrayed him and I had promised he could watch this movie tonight. He told me I was living in the past, like, when I was a kid and we didnt have TV, or at least it was only black and white. Ha. I am not that old kiddo. I stood firm. I waited the storm out. I didn't have to put him in his room because he went there to cry. You know what they are doing now? This 12 and 14year old are playing LEGO! They haven't played Lego in years! They are sitting on the floor near me having a fantastic time, happy as anything, building things. Happy to discover pieces they had forgotten about. So, there is hope.

I give myself permission to keep changing and tweaking what we do so that i stay excited about it. I am having the best year ever, but it doesnt look much like last year.

I was going to suggest Flylady too. It helped me. I don't find discipline to be about willpower and forcing myself to do something. Or at least, thats a rare expression of discipline for me. Usually, its a change of mind or heart that makes me want to go in the direction of more order, more efficiency, beauty, peace etc To be more specific, in order to keep my bedroom tidy, I don't "make" myself tidy it. I walk in there, realise it will literally take 5 minutes to make a difference, have a desire to have a clean room, start tidying and putting away, and then have the reward of a tidier more peaceful room at the end of it. There was never any forcing myself. I have to want to- not idealistically, but really, in the moment. Same with exercise. I just went through a period of very little exercise, but I trusted that at some time the inspiration would come back, and it has- just enough to walk every day and do some yoga when I am up early enough. No pushing myself, no hurting myself with expectations- a gentleness and wanting to love myself. I don't use self flaggelation for motivation any more. But it took Flylady for me to realise how much can actually be done in a short amount of time, and that the little bits all count, and for me to stop feeling overhwhelmed with that feeling I had to do everything right now. It's all about babysteps, and lovin' yourself.

I combine my two, ages 12 and 14, into one year, although like Jennifer I adapt to each child, giving the older more, the younger less. I don't print books, I buy them. And if I can get them cheap- as many classics are available cheap around the place- I buy 2 or 3 copies, so that they/we can have one each. Otherwise, I schedule each child to read each book on different days.

Just joining the chorus here! We started in the middle too, my kids were ages 8 and 9 when we started, and we did 4 years of Story of the World. It was fantastic. We will get through the history cycle just twice with the older, and have 2 years left for the younger. Enjoy SOTW, its great, and in a way I am glad we started older, anyway.

Here is a bread recipe I made last week. I have never had much success making bread before and this was just awesome and easy and it worked! It is left overnight so that it starts to ferment and activate enzymes and so becomes more nutritious and easier to digest. My kids helped me with the kneading- it is a relayl fun thing to do together, and we saved some of the dough so they could make some shapes with it (and my kids are 12 and 14- there is something primal about dough!) You have to scroll down the page. http://www.2die4livefoods.com.au/recipes.html

Hi Colleen :) Mom of 7 wrote a fantastic writing post last year some time I think it was (could have been the year before?) about her way of teaching writing. It inspired many of us. I wonder if someone saved it? I think for myself, after 5 years of homeschooling, I just trust myself a lot more, and feel quite confident to use this and that, develop this skill now and wait till later to build another. My biggest inspirations have been TWTM, the Writing Without Fear lecture by SWB, CM methods, the continued use of copywork/dictation/narration especially for my reluctant writer- and to top it all off, Bravewriter. Bravewriter in a way gave me wings to trust myself and allow the creative side of my kids to come out- both my kids are incredibly creative and it makes all the difference if they are writing from their inspiration. So the key for me has been to read widely, try various things, then trust myself to guide my own kids, using various resources. At the moment my dd14 is using home2teach.com and it is perfect for her to really tighten up her grammar, her sentences, her more left brain aspect to her writing, which is otherwise very expressive. So at this point I felt what she needed wasn't more writing experiences or exercises, but feedback and interaction with someone else, to move her forward.

Yes, I know what you are saying Krista, and it is all pretty ikky on some levels. However, I could easily push it all aside and just enjoy some of it if only we had a darned reception for one of our many TVs. We are even in the same time zone for once! The only Olympics I have seen was a swimming race at the dentists.

Meet the Fockers.

We didn't do memory work with Cambridge, but we are doing a moderate amount- similar to what you are thinking of doing, Lana- with LP. My daughter did get bogged down at a certain point with Cambridge because she didn't know the endings well enough- Cambridge has a vast amount of translations and it is very difficult if you have to look everything up! Both kids have picked up a lot of vocabulary with Cambridge though, without muchmemorisation. Now that we are all doing LP, we are going over the charts at the beginning of every lesson. We chant them. But we don't work and work at them till they are solid, we just go over them before every lesson and what goes in, goes in. Time will tell whether it is sufficient- I don't dispute that with Latin, memorisation helps a lot. But my style doesn't easily lend itself to strict and rigid memory work, so we kind of go with the flow about it, a little more relaxed than may be perfect, but so far, it's ok.

My dyslexic son is similar. I have ended up with an Australian program designed for "less academic" kids, or those struggling with maths- the lessons are very clearly presented, and have no "extras" on the page. Page presentation seems important for my son. Each page is a clear separate concept. He needs mastery. But it still is "too much maths" and he works very slowly and gets frustrated and upset easily. I would suggest that you may need to just be available for lots of help and walking her through her maths- I still have to with my 12yo- don't keep changing programs hoping one will click, just pick the one that seemed the best, and work slowly. Don't worry about the maths facts- the woman who tested my son said he may never learn his maths facts, so let him use a calculator. I don't do that, but I do have the multiplication chart on his desk for him to reference. We have taken quite a long break from drilling his facts, and soon I will go back to it for another burst, but I am honestly not sure that every kids is able to learn them perfectly, and that's ok. The way it was explained to me is that dyslexic kids don't visualise- sometimes not at all, sometimes just not very well. When you learn maths facts, somehow the facts get imprinted on a normal person's brain, so that we "see" them when we recall them, but with a dyslexic, they just don't"see" them. They use other pathways to memorise, but they are far less efficient. I was amazed when the tester had my son recite series of numbers back that she told him- he could do far, far less than I could. He just couldn't hold them in his brain. Reciting them backward was impossible for him, yet not for me. We did Singapore for a couple of years. It got literally too difficult for my son. He needed more practice, he didn't get fractions. I wish I had been more patient and spent a lot more time using manipulatives, and taking time to really make sure he understood concepts, before moving on, when my son was younger- your dd's age. I kept thinking he was behind,and trying to keep him moving, and it backfired. He needed cakes and M&Ms and blocks, and I kept thinking he should be beyond that. I was still of this mindset a few months ago, but since getting a diagnosis of dyslexia, I have realised I have got to stop expecting this kid to perform for me, and really meet him where he is at. So he does have a grade level book this year, which makes him feel good, but we will probably take 18 months to go through it. And, if he does understand a concept well, he only has to do odds or evens. I found out that private school maths teachers who use this series of books (which I am not recommending since they are Australian) typically only assign half the sums. I have seen Saxon and Rod and Staff- its just too much sheer work. My son would get very, very frustrated because his brain cant stay switched on for that long. A few well executed sums are better than a pageful of sloppy ones. he might need to do a few sums on the same topic several days in a row, but trying to get him to do too much at once has always backfired because hethen gets stressed and then he really cant think! So, I cant help you on the maths program, but I do think you shouldn't worry too much about the memory work- take the stress off it and just do maths with charts on the desk if necessary. Work with her if that helps her, and move as slowly as you need to. Take the stress off maths altogether, and relax and just take it slow. She has quite a few years left before she has to perform at that much higher level, and the concepts she solidifies now will make it much easier later.

For 4 years the only geography we did was the maps in SOTW, and my kids learned a lot just from that, and so did I! I never had time to add another curriculum, although I do own several :) Here in Australia, geography covers Earth Science as well, so some documentaries have helped, but i sitll havnt added anything formal. They have covered a lot of what is considered geography, in Scouts.

When I was using mostly TWTM, I used the WTM books as my basis, and just added in Ambleside books as we had time. Now it is vice versa- actually, Ambleside is too full to add much to, though.

The way I do it at the moment is to alternate days. So Latin Prep is getting done for 30 minutes Mon and Wed, French Prep Tue and Th. Friday we are out too long to fit in a language. It's not ideal- ideal would be 30-45 minutes a day of each- but we decided it was better to do one language for a solid 30 minutes a day, than try and do two for 15 minutes each. I am working within my own constraints and this is working quite well for us. We are doing most of it orally, so we are getting through quite a lot of work in 30 minutes.

I guess I never really made many long term plans- I have always had a certain sense of direction, but the hows and specifics are very much laid down only a little way ahead. Probably because I just knew I didn't know much and I would learn as I would go, and change things. However, the 4 year history cycle has worked very well here and that has provided a certain structure around which to build everything else. That has stayed stable, as has the use of copywork, dictation and narration, and lots of reading and read alouds.

At that age....I say let him go for it! When older, much older, I limit time spent on that sort of thing to when I am doing read alouds, or their own free time.

Hi Colleen, I wonder if you are overthinking it, because so many people do different things, there is no objectively correct way. I haven't done more than a couple of book reports because I see them as a waste of time, but we do discuss literary elements and discuss books and sometimes write about them. My kids do not really enjoy anything artificial or contrived, but sharing how they feel about a book to a real person might come up at some stage, in a newsletter or something. I don't really subscribe to the idea that if you need to always be something to prepare for something later- for example, I would think it is quite easy for a highschooler to learn to write the publisher's date etc- takes all of one lesson. A lot of things are easily and more quickly learned "later" and the years enforcing them earlier can just be a bit of a waste and rather tedious. Not so with other things of course- many skills need lots of repetition- but I think its important not to make things too dry for younger kids, and all that detail seems a bit over the top for me. But every family and every child is unique, and i don't think the point is really so important- not something i would stress over or cause stress for my kids over.

They're different skills for sure but I think we are moving into a time where more and more poeple are goign to be listening as they commute or whatever,and I think its great! And I dont see how it is inferior at all in terms of absorbing and digesting the material, that being the point, not the actual art of reading, which is more a skill. I wouldn't like to see listening replace reading altogether- because reading is harder work, in some ways, and it is a different "feel"- but it is great that people are getting exposed to more good literature. In fact, I dont tend to do audios much because I find it harder to listen than to read- i am very visual- and my mind wanders all over the place when I listen. I intend to train myself to listen more, though, because I can see it would be useful.

To some extent I assign according to the child's capacity- so my happy writer has always received more and longer writing assignments than my reluctant writer. My kids don't write for every subject every day or even every week. I pick 3 or 4 longer assignments a week for them and I vary the subjects they are related to. We cover a lot orally. Both do short answers etc for some subjects, some copywork, dictation or other shorter assignments daily. My ds12 usually does two pieces of writing a day- 4 days a week- one copywork or dictation, 3 days a week- longer assignments. Dd14 does a similar amount but probably more like 4 longer assignments a week. When younger, my ds12 could only manage a very small amount of writing a day. It has only been this year he could manage a page.