I agree with Rivka. Level 2 does come with new tiles. So if you use the tiles for your lessons, I would definitely get the student pack.I am currently using level 2 with my 6yo, I think I would have been lost without the student packet. The syllable division tiles alone IMO make the packet worth purchasing, but that said we use the tiles for almost every lesson. HTH

You can go to this page http://notebookingpa...om/memberships/ and scroll down to the green section (about 1/2 the way down the page). It has a list of notebooking page topics with a link next to most of to see samples. Just curious for those of you considering purchasing the membership, are you most likely going to do Option 1 (lifetime membership with lifetime access to the notebooking publisher) or option 2 (lifetime membership with 1 year access to notebooking publisher)? I can't decide if the extra $30 would be worth the lifetime access to the notebooking publisher?!

Thankfully my Dh will be cooking ours this week ;) ! I will be in charge of the eaiser stuff like mashed potatoes and green bean casserole.

I agree. I think you either homeschool for 9-12 or go to public school, or private. It is not easy to switch between the two. Ask me I know;). I started full time at public highschool in 11th grade (my own choice). I had only taken a few classes in 9th and 10th at the public school. I was determined to get a high school diploma from the same public high school as my parents had attended, sentimental reasons I guess :tongue_smilie: (they also had a great art program). It took A LOT of work to make up those credits, they did (surprisingly) count some of my home school credits. It is possible to switch, just not easy. And I personally don't recommend switching. I think consistency is best!

A great article I found today written by a 16yo homeschooler (and very well written IMHO). I remember having some of the same thoughts in highschool when I was deciding between homeschooling and going to public school. It is always nice as homeschool parent to hear high school aged students explain why they like homeschooling. Articles like this always make me feel better about my decision to homeschool my kids. Thought I would share in case anyone else is interested in reading it.

Great advice! I have always wondered what would be better, teaching at the level of the oldest, in between, or the youngest. It is nice to hear an opinion from someone who has BTDT. Thank you for sharing. I will keep this in mind as my kids get older. ETA: I love your scripture journal idea. I may have to incorporate that into our school days! :)

:lol: Love this! That is so cute! We are planning on reading through the illustrated scripture stories NT, OT, and BoM along with our history this year (We are studying ancient history). Other than that I plan on reading through the friend as well as memorizing the Articles of Faith (I plan on doing 1 a month and will hopefully continue that cycle K-12). I may add in additional scriptures memory but first I want to see how we do with the AoF. We are also planning on learning 1 or 2 primary songs a month. If that all works than I plan on learning one prophet a month and also focusing on one new story a week from the gospel art kit. I know with my personality I tend to fall in the trap of "All or Nothing" so I don't want to make it too complicated or it will never get done.

Thank you for sharing! We are doing ancient history this year so we won't use them quite yet, but I bookmarked for next year. Thanks!

Math: We are finishing up Right Start B. I am planning on using Singapore Math and MEP after that. Grammar: FLL Writing: WWE, and we may continue with Zanor Bloser (or we may just do handwriting practice on our own) Reading: We are using Sonlight Readers. I am also having my daughter quickly go through the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Reading just for review and to make sure we haven't missed anything. Phonics/Spelling: We are using All About Spelling. We also review all of the letter sounds, vowel teams, consonant teams, etc. that she has learned thus far. We use the cards from Phonics Road (but the ones from AAS or homemade ones would be great for this as well). Science: Real Science Odyssey along with lots of living books History: A combo of TOG and SOTW

:bigear: We are just starting TOG Yr. 1. My "plans" are to take the time each week to read through the notes myself. I would love to improve my own knowledge of history. But I have a feeling I will not have time most weeks. We are a couple of weeks in and I have yet to find the time to sit down and read through the notes.:tongue_smilie:

Thank you so much for sharing that great blog post. My Dh and I have been trying to work on the whining thing for a while now. But our approach has obviously not been effective:tongue_smilie:. I am so glad to hear that I am not the only one with a 6yo who still whines. But she is not the only culprit, all of my girls have had an issue with this lately. The whining has really accelerated since we started school. I feel like every single day is a battle. My Dd6 will say "I don't like school" and "I just want to be playing.":glare: I understand that it is hard to sit and do school while your siblings are off playing, but she has to do it. I am getting extremely tired of fighting it every day. The other day it took us about 30 to 45 minutes just to start because she was sitting at the table telling me how much she didn't like doing school.:confused: I know it is not the approach or level of difficulty of her actual school work, because she does just fine once she gets going. It is definitely an attitude problem. It doesn't help that I have felt like I have zero energy lately as well as being morning sick (probably the biggest factor in all of this:glare:). I know that it will get better once we get back into more of a routine. I am comforted to know that I am not the only one struggling with this. I have really been wanting to work on fixing whining and attitudes (both the girls and mine). Thank you for all of the great ideas! Now I feel like I have more of a game plan to go about doing that. Thank you!

I haven't read through all of the posts. OP I will do my best to try and answer your question. (As a note, so I don't get hate mail:lol:, this is what I personally believe, in no way am I saying this is what all Christians believe. These are just my personal thoughts on the topic.) In Genesis were it talks about the creation of the earth it only says day 1, day 2, etc. No where that I can find does it mention that the days lasted 24 hr. When you study Physics you learn that time is completely relative. So here is the big question. Was it one day in God's time or earth's time, are they the same thing?! The length of a day for him could be a lot longer than 24 hrs. I don't know how long the creation took, and I don't know how long a "day" lasted. I am just pointing that out (again that is just a personal opinion/observation). Another note is that we don't know exactly how long Adam and Eve were in the garden. It could have been days it could have been years. That being said I guess I would probably qualify as someone who is YE (even though I am still not completely positive I understand the difference between YE and OE). I believe that the fall of Adam happened around 4000 b.c. so I believe that would qualify me as YE. I don't know exactly who made the cave paintings or when exactly they were made. Scientists have taken their best guess at when they were made, but it is just that a guess. They really don't know exactly when they were painted. In fact their guesses usually sound something like "between 20,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C." Of course that is a completely made up example. But the point is there is a gap of thousands of years between those two estimated dates. We have to remember at one point "scientists" also thought that the sun revolved around the earth. They are guessing. And they are often proven wrong (or at least have to alter their guess) years down the road because new technology and knowledge comes to light. I am not bashing scientists, as my husband would probably qualify as one or at least he works in the field of science. That is just my long winded way of saying I agree with some of the other posters in the fact that I don't put much stock in their guesses, I take them for what they are, guesses or theories, not fact. It reminds me of a star trek voyager. One of the crew members, the doctor, wakes up from a hibernation that lasted thousands of years to find out that his crew members and ship voyager have been destroyed. The ship was pieced back together in a museum. That civilizations scientists and historians did their best to understand the history and nature of Voyager and its crew. They interpreted them to be warlike, when in reality they were exactly the opposite. The Doctor was horrified to see his friends portrayed as these vicious animals, he had to move heavenand earth to change their mind about they thought was their true history. Awesome Episode. I wonder how many details in history and science we have interpreted wrong because we only have a few pieces to work with and we can't see the rest of the puzzle. Just a random thought I had.:tongue_smilie: I love that you brought up the cave paintings I have been thinking about those a lot lately (I love art history!) I would love to know who painted them and when they were really painted. A lot of scientists give credit to "cave men" for painting them. When I say cave men I mean the hunched over hairy men you often see in museums, not people who just happened to live in caves. Here is something that many people don't consider, how do we know that they weren't normal looking enlightened men who, like many other artists throughout time, figured out a way to express their creativity. We don't know?! I personally believe that men were created by an intelligent creator, and as such were also intelligent beings (not hunched over hairy men ;)). But I also believe that throughout time there were some (like Cain) who became wicked and lost that light and knowledge they had. So I have always wondered what group of people painted those cave paintings, those who were righteous or those who were wicked. But just because they were drawn like stick figures doesn't mean they weren't created by intelligent beings (art tends to take on certain styles at different periods of time whether pleasing to look at or not). Anyways, now that I have written a book. OP the way I teach my kids is something like this... Some people believe that this and this happened at such and such time (Like cave paintings thousands and thousands of years ago). But they are just guessing. No one really knows when they happened. and I may add something like ....We know that God created the earth. There are some questions we will never know because it is not necessary for us to know at this time. But some day we can ask our Heavenly Father all of these things. And yes I would just place those things on the timeline as question marks, because in reality they really are question marks, NO ONE really knows when all of those things happened. I hope that helped a little, probably not but I tried.:lol:

:lurk5:

:lurk5:

I love this book. It is less expensive at amazon, here is the link.

James and the Giant Peach and Charlottes Web.

OP, you sound like you are in a very similar situation as me. I took piano lessons for about 11 to 12 years. I have been playing since I was about 6yo. I also taught piano for a couple of years, but I stopped after my Dd4 was born. I am now teaching my Dd6 and will be adding my Dd4 soon. I think you would be just fine to go ahead and start teaching your oldest piano. I would maybe just start with your oldest and see how it goes. If it is working well than you could add your younger one. I looked through every piano book/method I could get my hands on. I am extremely picky with this. I HATE when piano methods teach notes with finger numbers, or if the songs have a bunch of finger numbers by the notes. I am okay with that once it is necessary for fingering. Otherwise kids tend to look at the finger numbers rather than learning the notes. Unfortunately there are very few books available that met this requirment for me. The ones we use have a few finger markings (maybe one or two per song), but they were the best I could find. This is what has worked for us thus far... I started my oldest when she was about 4 1/2 with The Music Tree: Time to Begin. I love how gently this program introduces the idea of reading notes. It was the perfect level for a Pre-K student. The Theory book is set up more like a Pre-K workbook than most theory books I have seen. Every song has duet part for the teacher, my Dd6 absolutely loved playing her song with mom (yours may or may not like that). After the Time to Begin level I switched to a combination of Step by Step: Book One by Edna Mae Burnam and Bastien Piano Basics for the younger beginner. I like how large the print is in Bastien books, this makes it a lot easier to read the notes for little ones. I also like that it has colorful pictures because what kid doesn't love colorful pictures. In fact I remember when I was little being really excited to get to a certian song just because of the picture. The one thing I personally Do Not like about Bastien is the way they introduce the notes. They introduce about 3 notes at a time. I want my kids to learn one note at a time so they can really learn them well. I do not want them trying to guess which note is which, and struggle with note reading. This is were Step by Step comes in. Step by Step introduces one note at a time. The print in these books is smaller than Bastien, but not unreadable. The pictures are also black and white line drawings, but at least they still have pictures. What I did is in a Word Doc. I made a table and entered in the lessons in the order I would wanted them to go. I wanted Step by Step to be my spine, in other words I wanted most of the introduction of notes and theory concepts to come from step by step. After all of the necessary concepts were covered needed to play a Bastien song I would then assign the appropraite Bastien songs as "fun" songs. So for example I assigned pages 5-23 in step by step (that covers learning RH Middle C,D,E and LH Middle C, B, A). I would then assign Bastien pages 28-37 as "fun" colorful review songs. This gave my daughter plenty of Review time and opportunity to really get down those 6 notes. (Just as a note I skip over all of the songs that use the black keys in Bastiens book for younger beginner, that means I skipped pages 8-27) I am probably way over complicating things for myself, I tend to do that. If I had to just pick one of those books it would probably be Step by Step book one and two and then I would probably after those two books move just to Bastien. For theory I am using the Bastien Theory book. One of the most important things I remember contributing to my personal love of playing the piano was my teacher allowed me to pick ANY song (in addition to my other books) when I got to the appropraite skill level. So if I wanted to learn the Harry Potter theme she would have let me do that. Big Note Piano songs are great for this once they learn how to read notes well. Doing this also motivated me to push my skill level up a notch because it was necessary in order to learn the new song. I also plan on adding in better exercise books like Hanon-Schaum for Piano when they get to that level, but that is years down the road. In addition to all of that I am also adding a bit of Suzuki piano as well. The one thing I would suggest is to make sure that you are teaching them proper form and posture. Those will be the hardest habits to break if they get into a bad habit. I had already learned all of the "proper" ways to play the piano but a nice refresher course for me was in a this great book. Suzuki method highly stresses proper form and posture. You don't have to get that particular book, there are probably other helpful resources out there I just haven't looked. Sorry my post was complicated and long. But hopefully I was able to help a little.

I know this topic has probably been discussed a lot. After searching through some old threads I couldn't find one that answered my questions. If anyone knows of one feel free to link it. I have been debating back and forth between the advantages of each of these methods, Spalding (particularly teaching spelling) and AAS (I am sure there are others like AAS as well). I did the same thing this time last year as well. I feel like I am going in circles. I am not a spalding expert, I only basically understand the idea of Spalding from the PR dvds I have watched. But I am drawn to the approach. But I am also drawn to AAS as well. The thing I like about AAS is that it gives the student plenty of opportunity to practice and focus on a single rule at one time. But at what point does the student stop thinking about what he/she is doing and start just "plugging and chugging" if you will. I like the fact that PR (or the Spalding Method) makes the student think about each word they are writing and it becomes a problem solving exercise. However, they usually don't have more than one word in a single lesson that follows a single spelling rule. Therefore they only get to practice it once that day. As a kid I remember doing best when I had at least more than one opportunity to practice a new rule/skill. I guess when I compare these two methods to math curricula, PR (Spalding Method) would be like a mental math program that is spiral. AAS would be more of a plug and chug method that is mastery. Of course that is just an exaggerated comparison. I guess my problem is I want a program that has mental-math and at the same time uses a mastery approach:lol:. I can't decide which approach is "better" (I know that there is no one "best" program for everyone). What I am getting at is which one will my child have the best chance of remembering the spelling rules?! I like the idea of having the opportunity to practice a spelling rule until you have it down pat, at the same time I don't want them to just go through the motions because they know all the words look alike. I want them to have the opportunity to problem solve and think about the words they are spelling. Ahhhh!:willy_nilly:I am going in circles again. I think I really like the Spalding method, I am just worried that my kids will not retain the words they learn because they will not get enough practice with each rule. And I am worried that because similar words with similar rules are not introduced at the same time they will have a harder time keeping them in their heads. I don't know if any of that made any sense. :001_huh:If you have read this far thank you. I would love to know others thoughts on this. I have no one else to think out loud with, my Dh wasn't that interested in talking about methods and programs, he was just glad that I was trying to decide between two programs that I have already purchased:lol:. What have your experiences been with each approach? Has your child retained spelling rules better with one or the other? Why do you prefer one method over another? Any thoughts would be very much appreciated? I know there have been lots of threads comparing PR to AAS. That is not what I am trying to do. I am trying to compare the two different methodologies (when and how they present the new spelling words, even if that means talking about experience with a similar program that uses the same type of method). Thank you for any help that you may have! I would also love to hear your opinnion on why you think that your chosen program or method is best for your family. I am really just trying to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each approach to teaching spelling. ETA: I wanted to add that I started last year using PR with my Dd6. My goal was to combine the two, somehow. I ended up just using AAS by the end of the year. I absolutely Love both programs. I have however, decided that I need to just pick ONE method and mainly stick with that. So as I explained I have fears about each one not being adequate. ANY wisdom, thoughts, or opinnions would be very much appreciated.

:bigear: I would love to know this as well!

I really wish I could of had a classical education. TOG and SOTW- I think I would of actually retained history this way, and at the same time enjoyed it. Science- more living books. I would have also loved keeping a nature journal. Math- RS, Singapore, Miquon, any of these. I would have "understood" math, not just know how to plug and chug. The first math course I finally began to "understand" math was my college algebra class. Spelling- Either AAS or PR. I would have loved to actually learn the phonetic rules of spelling, not just memorize lists. Grammar- Something, anything, so I could I have learned grammar while in elementary. The most I remember learning in PS Elementary were nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. That's it. I wish I would have learned to diagram sentences while in elementary. I had to fix this lack of knowledge in Jr. High and Highschool (when I was homeschooled) and I still struggled with it. Writing- I really wish I would of had the opportunity to use any one of the great programs available. Apparently I HATED writing while in school, my mom says that I used to think all the assignments were pointless busywork. I was probably right:lol:. Something like WWE, IEW, Bravewriter, CW, CC, would have done wonders for me. Reading- I really, really wish that I would have been encourage to read all the great literature available. Instead I grew up hating reading. I used to always comment that if I had time outside of "school work" I would probably enjoy reading. My mom did a great job of reading to me A LOT when I was little, but I just didn't ever catch that reading bug once I got into school. Notebooking and Lapbooking- I would have LOVED creating notebooks and lapbooks. Can I just go back and redo my own education.:lol: I really feel as if I have learned more teaching my daughter Kindergarten than I did my whole elementary career! I can't wait for first grade;)!

They are not free, but Hands of A Child has a lot of science lapbooks. I have always waited until they are on sale, not sure when their next one will be. You might be able to find some free ones on homeschoolshare.com as well.

I have enjoyed reading through this thread. I am glad to hear I am not the only one who suddenly realizes that my kids haven't just naturally picked up some of these "common knowledge" things. Raising hands was a pretty foriegn concept until my kids were old enough to be in the children's class at church. They seemed to pick it up pretty quickly. Another concept that was difficult for my kids was the fact that because they were in a larger group, they wouldn't always get a turn. At home everyone usually gets a turn because there are only 4 kids. I don't think my kids would know what criss cross applesauce means. My Dh and I both grew up calling it "indian style." At about age 2 we were trying to teach my daughter how to sit like that (we were trying to discourage her W sitting, thats when you sit with both legs to either side of you). We had no idea what to call it because we knew that what we had both grown up calling it was politically incorrect. So we just made up our own name, Spider Sit. Silly but it was something my Dd could relate to. I guess we should probably teach our kids the current proper name.:tongue_smilie:

:bigear: I have been trying to figure out how best to use these as well. I am thinking about having my Dd create a timeline made of index cards and some how add the review cards to it as well. Not sure yet. I would love to hear how others use them.

Never mind, I figured it out:D! If anyone else was confused, the code can be used at B&N. And yes you do have to use your visa for the code to work.

The programs I remember learning off the top of my head when I took a basic computer class in high school were.... Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, as well as learning typing skills. I also learned how to correctly write letters, resumes, etc. We may have even learned basic internet skills as well.