Mr. Printables has some and a lot of other great printables. I'm not sure if they have a black and white option though. Also watch for Scholastic Dollar Deals sales as they frequently have file folder games and books for $1.00 only.

That is very sad news. :( Prayers are being sent up for her family.

I hope it goes well for you. We are doing Core H this year. We are in our 5th week since we started on July 23. My dd is most likely dyslexic (though never formally diagnosed) and has always disliked reading. We actually switched the reader and read aloud in SL. There are some readers that I will have her read, but I read aloud The King's Fifth and The Iron Peacock. She's been reading the read alouds alone...A Murder for Her Majesty and Out of Many Waters. The read aloud schedule is less reading and I also find the read aloud books a tad easier....the readers seem to have advanced vocabulary, quotes from people in different dialects, unfamiliar place names, etc. My dd reads on grade level or slightly above but was having trouble with The King's Fifth. SL IS a lot of reading. But we are really enjoying Core H so far with these minor adjustments. :) We are not doing the writing though, we use IEW for that. We also don't use their Bible, except for the actual Bible reading schedule. I hope you end up enjoying it as much as we are and that you have a great year.

It's strange because at first I thought that PR wasn't so great for teaching reading when I was in the thick of it with my now 7 year old. However, after going through PR 1, and seeing how much my dd has progressed in her reading without using any other "reading" program, I see now how PR served us well in that regard. In fact, I recently bought AAR 1 (we used the Pre-level which is just learning the letters, and some phonemic awareness) for my 6 year old. I thought I needed a real "learning to read" program instead of using PR for her. It turns out that I really dislike the way AAR teaches reading and much prefer how it is all presented in PR. So we have dropped AAR and gone straight into PR 1. We will use the AAR games as a fun supplement and for review. I love the way that PR teaches spelling to learn to read. I have seen how it reinforces those phonograms over and over again and passes on over into their reading.

I currently have 2 children in MUS. One in Primer and one finishing the last few lessons of Zeta and then moving on to Pre-Algebra. The older child always watches the dvd and I watch them with her. The younger one does much better if I watch the video alone and then teach her. So we do it differently depending on the child.

In the past we used SL Science B and C, then like you, I heard that it was not a good science program. I went looking around for other things. I am not a science person, which basically meant we floundered on science for a couple of years. Then I went back to SL Science F this year and we really like it. I was just telling a good friend the other day that I wish I would have just stuck with SL and quit worrying about what other people said. It gets done, we enjoy the topics, the books, and the Dvd with the experiments. As long as it's working, don't change it. :)

Thank you Ellie, I'm glad to know that. :) Thank you for clarifying. I only have AAS 1 and 2 and I admit I haven't looked closely at any other AAS levels. Yes, the Teacher's Manual has the instructions for the games. Since I'll have several children using the AAR games and a large portion of the workbook is non-consumable fluency pages, I decided to take the whole workbook, color things in and laminate everything so that I could re-use it all. I even laminated those word flippers, and spiral-bound them with my proclick. Then I made another booklet of all the Fluency pages. So nothing will be consumable. I won't need to buy extra workbooks for each student. I'm eager to see AAR 2. If the workbook has a lot of fun type games like AAR 1, I'll most likely purchase it as a supplement too.

Oh and another thing, AAR is supposed to be 8 levels. Some of those levels might not be ready when you need them. So I believe Spalding is probably more complete, it's finished right now. Also doesn't Spalding include grammar, handwriting, and latin roots? PR does, I don't know enough about Spalding to know. AAR/AAS doesn't include those things.

I think you should stick with Spalding. I used Phonics Road with my older dd (accelerated through some of the levels) and also use PR with my 7 year old. I believe that PR is similar to Spalding. With my 6 year old, who really struggled learning letter names and such, I decided to give AAR a try. I also own levels 1 and 2 of AAS. To me, PR is so much easier to get done. AAS/AAR is so scripted that the Teacher's manual is cumbersome to me. We covered the pre-level in AAR and started AAR level 1. But I do not really like the way that AAR has the child reading words right off the bat when they have taught them only a couple of phonograms. They have the child practice reading the word cards over and over, and I'm sorry but that seems like having them memorize words to me instead of actually having to think. Yes they show you how to read the word by segmenting, but I found my dd doing a lot of guessing, adding letters that were not there, etc. I know some of that is completely normal with a beginning reader. I know that reading is eventually memorizing words, but I just like the PR method so much better of learning ALL the phonograms first then start SPELLING to learn to read and write. Spelling really makes them think hard about what letter is making that sound. In my opinion that is much better than memorizing a word. But that is just my opinion and I'm sure people feel differently. AAR also teaches some sight words, and I don't really care for that either. Maybe I'm just used to PR, since I have more experience with it. But I really feel that it is a much better fit for us over AAR/AAS and it moves at a much faster pace. I felt like my dd needed more reading practice than PR provided, but truly I think I just got impatient and jumped the gun. I now see the fruits of the labor so to speak and I see that PR will get them exactly where they need to be. I've decided to drop AAR for my 6 year old and put her straight in PR. I love the games and readers in AAR, but I think that they will serve us so much better once we have mastered all the phonograms. We will use them as fun review and to help build fluency.

That is adorable, yay for box day. What fun!! :)

I can sympathize with you on the high shipping costs!! I need to purchase a Primer student book, but I have been holding off because right now I only need the workbook and don't want to pay such high shipping for one book. I wish other places like Rainbow Resource would carry MUS then I could get free shipping along with the rest of my homeschool order. MUS sells the Student Workbook and Test booklet together. I don't think you can order the workbook alone, but maybe if you call them they will let you do that. I like having the tests, but I suppose you could get by without them and just use a workbook if you can find one used (but not written in). Hope that helps.

You're welcome. Glad you found it helpful. :)

Well there's a few here at Mr. Printables. Also check Scholastic and watch for the dollar deals they do. Often when they have the Dollar sales they have file folder games, even whole ebooks of file folder games, so you can get some super cheap that way.

I have considered buying the Montessori House albums for a while now, but haven't taken the plunge. I love the idea of Montessori, I have some of the Montessori Materials and try to incorporate some into our school. I do find it difficult to do true Montessori at home though. The problem for me has been storage of everything and I don't have enough space to set out a prepared environment with shelves and trays. I do have the Montessori at Home ebook and I think it's great. It's very practical for those trying to do Montessori at home.

I also wanted to add that I'm actually looking forward to trying this program again next year with my dd (currently in 2nd grade). After looking over it again, I think it will be a good fit for her. From reading my responses above it may seem that I have a negative opinion about this program. I did find things that I thought were weak- Science and Language Arts. However, there is still very much to like about TGTL. It is very comprehensive in the history department. I love how they have you reading a book about the topic and also your child reading a different book about the topic. Reading two different books on the same topic like that gives ample opportunity for discussion, comparing and contrasting, etc. For example, when we were reading the Columbus books, one would have more information than the other on a certain event, or one would be a slightly different account of the same event. That gave us plenty to talk about, pointing out that history can be biased depending on who's telling the story, and showing that sometimes we may never really have the full picture of what happened in the past, etc. I loved the Geography portion of this program. A lot of literature based history programs have geography tied in, but with the ones I tried, I always felt like it was tacked on. This one has a much different feel. I've used/tried many different programs in the past--- SL, WP, VP, MFW, and Bob Jones history. I found this program to have the best retention out of all of those we tried in the past. I had to really think what set this one apart and I came to the conclusion that it was the pace of the program. At first, I really disliked the pace of spending 6 weeks on one topic. I was frequently frustrated by the slow reading schedule, and I tried to speed this up quite a few times. I suppose it was because I was used to a much faster pace with programs like SL and WP. However, I really feel that the slower reading pace gives time for the information to simmer and sink in. There are many activities in that guide that tie all this information together and you can tell it is a well thought out and planned curriculum. When I tried to speed it up, I always found that the retention wasn't nearly as high as when we just worked through the program as is. I already have a Language arts program I really like, so I will be using that. We might also do some of the LA activities in TGTL too. I really like what they do with the vocabulary words in POS, for example. I just do not like the Science. It feels much too disjointed and all over the place. I want a more natural progression of Science topics instead it being so heavily tied in with the history. So it's very likely, that I will skip the science in TGTL altogether. I think the majority of my issues with the program was the fact that I was trying to do this with an older child. I feel like the recommended age ranges are best, with the mid to lower level being the preferred age range. We even tried adding in the Middle School Supplement. While I felt like that added in terms of quantity of work, I didn't feel like it was adding to the quality of work. Anyway, I just didn't want you to think that I hated this program. I have often said that I have a love/hate relationship with TGTL and I think that's pretty much how I feel. I think it's a great program, but I feel it needs supplementation in a few areas. I'm a tweaker, I don't think I could ever do a program completely as is anyway.