I just wondered if anyone knows what Carrie's plan is with this history wise? She begins with America, then moves onto a World History rotation- is that going to be a four year rotation or what? What after that? Are they repeating or will there be new guides for those again? Sorry, just trying to understand what she is shooting for. If you started a child later on in the age groups would you even make it through history once before high school? Anyone know?

I ended up going the route of Charlotte Mason Help. I adore Linda Fay and how she has set up things. She does the history somewhat differently than AO and has each week set up. My children are behind "grade level" of AO. My older did not go to CM until she was older, so it was too much at that time to push her into grade level. I am still very happy with where she is at. My son has some learning disabilities and so we had a very hard time getting him reading. It took most of 2 years and I focused on that rather than many other things. I still am happy with where he is. His narrations are beautiful and we recently began dictation and so far they have been perfect. I really did not know what to expect there, as we just began using some WWE and up until now he has had no formal writing, spelling, or grammar. Some of the books are more difficult (from any list that is CM oriented) and I have ended up putting them aside for a bit. But I have found after time my son was able to comprehend and narrate these same books with ease. I guess it was a matter of his being ready for them. If you think a book looks too difficult, there are quality substitutions that can be found to be certain. I think it is good to have all quality, but alternate on difficulty. Some books being more difficult to grasp, some books being not so difficult. I understand the frustration of pulling resources from different places. I hope you can figure it out. ~Laurie

I thought this was looking an AWFUL lot like Linda Fay at Higher Up and Further In or now Charlotte Mason Help. Here she references her for picture study. MANY similarities!

I think they are still out there. If it helps I have decided on it for next year and am solid on the decision for all 3 of my children at home. If you went through a logical progression in coming to that decision based on your homeschool vision, goals for your children, how MFW helps you meet those goals, etc. then stay with your decision and don't doubt it. Don't look back, there will always be shiny things to tempt us. :001_smile: Laurie

:iagree: I did TRY to consider what my child's feelings on their name would be. I was hoping they would appreciate any eccentricities after learning the reason why the name was chosen. I found that not to be the case SO FAR, but my children are not grown yet. Maybe in time? It's just something to consider. My eldest has the most original of the names and she self-shortened it finally (although I still call her by her full name) and does not readily tell anyone her full name. I pray that with age it will not bother her so much. I am certain it could be different when you are new to the country though and choose an ethnic name. ~Laurie

We are doing WWE 1 right now also due to my DS's learning disabilities. I have found it makes things tougher as well, so I do not ask the questions. I read the excerpt and ask him for a narration. He gives it back to me "usually" in long detail. Once in a while a story just seems not to click with him, but overall I get better feedback with just asking him to tell me the story or what he remembers from it. We had been doing narration previously, so maybe that is part of it. I think we probably could have went to WWE 2 and I am looking at that, but I also did not want to miss anything. I usually write down for him the highlights of his narration, although sometimes he insists on all of it- which goes onto another page. Laurie

I think she could handle the MM at this point, but just to be safe I think I will get the Singapore for this spring and the summer, then move to MM 1A in the fall if she is doing alright. Her Kindergarten year will "officially" start then, so that should give her lots of wiggle room. Also, I do not want her doing MM 1 while my DS is flying through it. He would be destroyed if she were in the same Math. :confused: Thank you all for your wisdom! Laurie

I was actually considering this anyway, so I think I may go this route. He will love those lessons I am sure!

I have questions about MM for 2 of my children. First of all I was going to supplement the CLE with MM so that my DS can do more mental math. He is a year behind in math from his LD's, so he is in 2nd grade CLE doing simple multiplication. What should I buy? It looks like her second grade full set would work, but will he be missing something from the first grade set since he is jumping in? Also I know I cannot start it with my K-5'er yet. She will "officially" start K this fall. What can I do with her until first? Should I do Singapore or what? She wants to do math pages too, otherwise I would appease her with Math games until then. That has gotten old with her and she can do simple addition and subtraction from the games we have played so far. Thank you for your advice, Laurie

I'm doing K again this next year. I want to add read lots of lovely books to your child. So many out there to choose from! These are some of my favorite memories with the children who have finished K and moved on. Definitely history and science can be relaxing this year. ~Laurie

Can I save a public domain book onto a zip drive and take it to Staples or Office Max and have it printed and bound? Is there an easier way to do this? I have found a few books I would like to have a copy of and they are not being printed by Yesterday's Classics or anywhere like that. I was figuring some of you had done that and would know what to do. I figured I could print it and have it bound, but argh! That would take me all day with my printer. I would rather them do it personally. Thank you! Laurie

I have a mix of friends here I guess. Because of the Armed Forces we have a LOT of homeschoolers here. I don't exactly hang with too many. I know some unschoolers and well their children are woefully behind. I know that cannot be the case with all unschoolers. I guess the ones I know seem to have chosen unschooling to justify their wanting to do nothing with their children. One goes to a co-op once a week and that is school-including her high school aged children. The other has an 18 year old doing Algebra 1. I cringe about both situations. A few others are eclectic, doing a mix, but little or no foreign language and still lots of co-op activities. The rest use an entire boxed curriculum- mostly BJU with few add-ons. I think we are OK. We could certainly stand to add some things. In my defense I LONG to be more rigorous. I would love to add a host of things, but with the learning issues my children have it would be difficult. I hope in the near future to add more. I am envious that many of you are able to accomplish so much with your children, when my son struggles through Math for an hour or more each day and my oldest is in tears as well. I refuse to add so much that we are spending an entire day doing third grade. I still want him to love learning, which somehow he does. ~Laurie

So does TWSS have what you need to instruct the children or do you have to buy something else too? I had a friend who taught my oldest IEW in a group and she used the Bible based plans with it. She has since moved away and is difficult to keep in touch with, so I was not sure what I needed to start with it on my own with the younger children. I did love the way it was laid out and how much sense it made.

I don't have any suggestions to add, but I did want to encourage you to continue anticipating your child's needs in this area. It is awesome what you are realizing. I am a lefty. The only one in my family growing up and now with 4 children- none of them are lefties. It is a lonely world sometimes. :001_smile: Some of the more difficult things I recall are the simplest. I grew up with right-handed people showing me how to do things. It was like trying to learn how to do something looking in a mirror. Very difficult. Hitting a ball, using scissors. So many things like you mentioned notebooks and textbooks are designed for right-handed people. It was frustrating and sometimes still is. I learned long ago how to write with a spiral binding pushing into my arm. I learned how to get lead from the pencil off my left pinkie (or ink) since it was always blackened from being dragged across the page as I wrote. I actually learned how to cut and hit right-handed finally as I just could not get it any other way. I might have been a better hitter had another lefty been there to show me, there just was no one. (I am a dreadful bowler for this reason as well!) Hats off to that teacher you mentioned. That is awesome! And hats off to you for realizing this issue your child has and helping her any way you can. ;) ~Laurie

I agree that you can do both. I handle several things differently than they suggest. Some of the books are not tremendously easy for my younger children to understand and so I made alternate selections. I did include suggestions from charlottemasonhelp.com the last few years. For us, that made a tremendous difference. She has week by week laid out and it has helped me so very much! I have seen MA mentioned in the earlier post and it is also a great help. I have not used AO's suggestions for teaching them to read. I also make my own choices regarding math curriculum. I did rely solely on narration and now some dictation for my DS in grammar. I really was nervous about this decision. To my surprise his dictations have been perfect and his spelling is impeccable. My oldest DD used WTM suggestions, including Spelling Workout and is a terrible speller- in spite of her avid reading. :confused: So at this point I am impressed with the LA suggestions. I believe it is good to still have reference books like Kingfisher history encyclopedia to refer to. We use them as needed. My son likes the pictures. It is a personal choice and you are probably going to find people on both sides of this fence and some in the middle. I know for me CM felt more natural and not forced and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE all the living books. My DS loves to read his books and enjoys the ones I still read aloud. He really gets so much from them that I am amazed. I want to add that the art study, music study, and poetry are such wonderful components of CM and we really enjoy them together!

that she has some sort of LD. Has she been tested? I will say that I have been around many public school children since I have homeschooled. I do not take that opportunity to grill them or try to ascertain their level of knowledge- it does seem to just fall into my lap though. My ps neighbors ask me questions and ask me to help them learn things. At any rate, I have found that with an alarming number of them they are woefully behind. It is scary. My eighth grade neighbor could not spell anything and her reading comprehension was worse. Things like house and church were simply beyond her. All but the simplest of words. Her Math was just as bad. I felt so bad for her, but felt helpless. At that point I had no time to help her and since I knew she had an LD and thanks to "No child left behind" they would pass her every year. All this to say it could be your niece has this little understanding. I guess to me you start where you start. Thank the Lord she is coming home and with loving instruction and consistency she can catch up I firmly believe. It is finding her fit. I believe your niece is truly not alone in this and it is rampant. ~Laurie

Same exact thing here! We have an Emily and she is an Emily through and through. I think of the names we considered and they would never have fit her. I wish her name weren't so popular, but it is so I have moved on. :) Choose the one you like best. Who cares what everyone else does? ~Laurie

We have used the LTR, then LA, Math, and Reading for my son. We have stayed with the Math and the LA for now (we use some PLL lessons also). I find all of the workbooks to have tons of review, which works well for my son. We were disappointed when we finished LTR (Learn to Read) and began the reading. My son did not make the transition well and he faltered. I am interested to hear someone say they liked it later on. For us, it seemed like they were demanding a lot more reading and longer length than they had in the last reader and he was overwhelmed. I have seen the older CLE LA workbooks and they have a lot of diagramming and look as rigorous to me as R&S.

:iagree:This is us also.

In the past we have been part of several different co-ops. I usually end up hating them by year's end. One I loved, but it required me to volunteer (I still paid a fee also) and it was always at some odd time in the day when I either had to stay all day or leave, drive home the 20 minutes, then come back the 20 minutes. At the time I had very young children (and was pregnant with #4) and I was only interested for my oldest DD and did not want my youngers there all day in "daycare". I made it work, but hated it so. The other one was with a group of friends and I did take one of my younger ones. There was also a significant time and teaching commitment for me and after my Mom died suddenly that year I found it to be very burdensome. This year a few SMALL groups of friends with children the same age are meeting once a module to do the science experiments from Apologia. It has been less tiresome. I have helped many days and other days another Mother does. My younger children are here with their Father (he works nights) on the days I must go. My DD was being taught Algebra with a friend who was a Math teacher. She is a homeschooler now and was doing this as a service (and since she was going through it with her son) for a group of kids. The problem was this year more kids joined than in Pre-Algebra and some are honestly academically behind. They have struggled and she slowed the pace for them to a crawl. I began to despair half-way through the year that they would come even close to finishing the book. So, I pulled her out and picked up TT and LOF from where she was. Not my favorite choice, but something I could live with on the fly. Next year, I really plan to just go it all alone. My children have plenty of social time and while I would like some aspects of a co-op, in other ways I find it confining. I like to go at our pace and take field trips, etc. as we want to go. I also am finding that my DD just has had too many lessons and other things going on to get all of her school work done if she also had a co-op at this age. When she was younger it worked, but with guitar, riding, and her volunteer commitment it has been too much this year and we will be going into the summer I am sure. I wish I could have found the perfect fit along the way. I think part of the reason it was difficult for us too was having so many different ages/levels. There was no good place where we all could go. ~Laurie

I would not. You will have to make copies to practice anyway, so I would use one set as masters. They are giant though 11 X 17 just FYI. Really, I am not sure of your goals, but you could get away with map outlines from any number of sources when I think about it. The nice thing about his maps are the latitude and longitude lines- at least for our purposes. I think as long as you have maps of the world where you have the children spend some time mapping each area too- so that they can see each area in relation to the others then you are fine. I hope this helps! Laurie

Nine kittens! Geesh. I love cats, but DH has banned them. I told him if I am ever a widow I WILL have a cat. We have a dog and I cannot even get another of those out of him. Our neighbor fosters dogs and we help some when she has to work late or cannot get home as much as she would like. The endless parade of cute puppies is gut-wrenching for me. I would take them all.

Fire and Rain by James Taylor.........

Oh to be able to hang out with some of you people. I need to laugh more. Why is Russell so pretty? I love him. My DD thinks I am nuts and cannot even wrap her mind around it.

Why? Now I am scared. I had thought Grandchildren would be the bomb. You are worrying me. Is there something I need to know? (No, I am not expecting any, just looked forward to that time.):blink: