Oh have mercy, do not even get me started on Study Island.

While I am ranting, my 3rd grader has always loved to do school. 2 weeks into the virtual school and she doesn't like it. She says it is boring. I'm going to have to do some tweaking.

It's funny because I had no trouble teaching 5th grade math to my older 2 kids. I mean, I know 5th grade math! This is just not going to cut it. The 3rd grade level so far seems okay. I'm thinking of getting Teaching Textbooks for my 5th grader. Although I do have Math Mammoth here. I hate "new" math!

Okay, I broke down and enrolled my 2 younger kids in the Virtual School. We use K12 and the math is totally different than it was the last time I used it with my older kids. My son is in 5th grade and his first unit on rounding. Perfect, no problem. We can round up and down on any number, front end estimation, all of it no problem. Then they come up with this thing called "friendly numbers". :confused: I get that it is like the nearest 25 or 100 or whatever but seriously why? I have had all the math geeks in my house look at it and everyone of us finds it a waste of time. Anyone out there encounter this?

Nobody has seen this? Hmm, I wonder how long they have had this program. We've been using CLE Learning to Read for the past month and I have to say we are seeing the best results ever. I don't know if it is the program or the fact that it is finally sinking in after years of phonics lessons but my son is finally reading! I hope the transition to Mark12 will go smoothly.

I signed my 2 younger kids up for the k12 virtual school here and they both got waitlisted. Well, over the past week the have both been offered spots and I accepted. My dd is being put at grade level which is good because that is where her abilities are, she has no special needs. However, my ds is being placed in 5th grade because that is his age group but he is my kid that we are still working to find out what his ld's are. I was concerned about putting him in because I know how rigorous k12 is and I was afraid he wouldn't be able to keep up but I talked to the special ed coordinator and she is putting him in their MARK12 remedial reading program in place of his language arts. Anybody heard of this before? Apparently it is k12 proprietary material and you can only get it through a virtual school.

http://www.diyplanner.com/diyp_official/diyp3cl/diyp3_core_a5.pdf I can never find exactly what I am looking for in planners. I use this page for now and just write in each day what I want them to do. 2 of my kids are box checkers so this seems to be working for them so far.

I am feeling like such a bad mom right now. I have 4 kids and have been homeschooling the 2 oldest for 10 years and the 2 youngest have been homeschooled since birth. My oldest is heading off to college this fall with a nice academic scholarship that was based on her ACT score. I am mentioning this simply because I want it known that we have been actively schooling. While my kids probably do play way too many video games, they have school work to do too. My oldest son attended the first 9 weeks of Kindergarten before I pulled him out. This kid has always been a perfectionist and he just about drove me to drink because I would work with him and knew what his abilities were but if anyone else asked him to read something to them (why do people think an encounter with a homeschooled kid means it's an opportunity to play Quiz Bowl?) he would tell them he could not read. But he could read!! I saw him do it every day! But he couldn't read the big chapter books like his big sister so he didn't think reading the easier books counted. Finally, one day he admitted he could read and he began reading for pleasure and all the family members who don't like the fact that we homeschool unclenched. I mention this little bit of history here to hopefully provide a back drop for how I managed to completely fail my younger son. So younger son comes along and we do the phonics and the practicing handwriting and I found out I had a lefty. So, we had challenges right off the bat because I didn't know how to teach him to hold his pencil, learning to tie shoes took longer than my other kids, it was all so different with him than it was with my other 2. Shortly before my youngest son's 5th birthday my father was killed. He owned a business and I inherited it. I could not run this business and did not want to so I shut it down but it took me a little over a year to get everything finalized. Needless to say, we became major unschoolers at this time. By the time we got back to our regular homeschooling ds was 7 and my youngest daughter was 5. I decided to just combine the 2 youngest kids and go from there. Youngest son was doing the same thing his older brother had done, saying he could not read but there would be times I would catch him reading a word or so here and there so I figured he would eventually do like his brother and all would be well. Then my younger daughter started reading. She loves to read and was so excited to be big enough for chapter books. Meanwhile, I couldn't (and still can't) get my son to read a simple phonics reader without slowly sounding out every single word every time. I have used just about every phonics program on the market. But the thing is, he knows the sounds backwards and forwards. He is 11 now and he still gets b and d mixed up but he can easily tell you what sound it makes if you tell him which letter it is. He writes his 3's backwards, sometimes does so with 5's too. But he is good with math. He is very smart actually in every subject, he has great retention, he just can't read it himself. So, I've been reading here and there and saw people recommending vision therapy. I pooh poohed the idea. He has always had regular eye exams and he has great sight. But, as I'm coming to learn, great sight does not mean good vision. We had an initial evaluation by a Developmental Optometrist on Friday and he goes in for more testing this week. I am hopeful that this will help him but part of me wonders if he needs something more. What if he is dyslexic? Where do we go to get help with that? I am just feeling so bad that all this time I thought he would eventually "get it" and I should have had him checked out before now.

I need a new printer. The one I have works fine but it drinks ink and I am just doing way too much printing for this. I have a great scanner so I don't need an all-in-one although it would be nice to have. Mainly though, I want a printer that does double sided printing and something like the eprint or airprint that I'm seeing advertised. I want to be able to print in color and I don't mind a high upfront cost, I just don't want to have to constantly be buying new ink cartridges. I don't know if I should get laser or inkjet. Anybody got something to recommend for me?

Both me and my 18 year old daughter have read this book. We both really enjoyed it. For me, there were a lot of parallels between her childhood and my own. I found it to be well written.

My daughter is going to college this fall and she got an academic scholarship based solely on her ACT score. Her scholarship covers about 50%. Combined with our state's lottery scholarship, about 75% of total costs are paid for. Having said that, we followed TWTM for the most part for her. She is very self-motivated and the program isn't working as well with my son. We are going to be switching things up next year. I agree that you have to KNOW your student. One of the beauties of homeschooling is being able to tailor our studies to fit each individual student instead of one size fits most.

I am looking heavily at planners right now. Thank you for the link, I'll check it out!

Hello all! I am new here but not to homeschooling. I've been doing this for 10 years now, seems so unbelievable to realize it's been that long! Anyway, my oldest is off to college this fall and I will only have 3 students in my homeschool now. I am in love with curricula and just from glancing around here, it seems I am in good company. I'm not completely sure what we are using this next year, I've bought several programs to try out and am just trying to figure out where to go from here. I pretty much followed WTM with my oldest but it's not really working for my sons. I bought SL Core F for my oldest son and Core D for my 2 youngest. I also have MBTP, WP AS 1, SOTW and TOG. We have all done SOTW 1 and 2 and my oldest son has gone through all of the Hakim History of US books. Tomorrow I have Homeschool Convention and I'm pretty stoked about that but the last thing I probably need is more choices!