I was having a hard time finding a good fit for my DD when she was in 4th. I think the first two books worked okay for her at that time, but I didn't like the series enough (or felt like it was going in the right direction for DD) to continue it. She did Treasured Conversations in 5th and is doing WWS1 this year. So far so good on WWS...she feels well prepared for it and I feel like overall thrust of the program is exactly where I want DD working. Right now I am not expecting to return to it with my boys...but you never know. I suppose it could be "the right thing at the right time" for one of the boys at some point. I can't imagine doing the whole series though!

Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away Lake - Also by Elizabeth Enright (same author as the Melendy books).

Here are a few lists I have bookmarked: http://www.carolhurst.com/subjects/uslit.html http://blog.wrappedinfoil.com/wrapped-in-foil-website/ http://growingbookbybook.com/sample-page/ I think these are mostly picture books. When looking for books about particular states or areas, I have had more luck with googling things like "childrens's books set in California". - rather than relying on lists with one book from each state. I also have browsed books on goodreads with particular tags. So I found one book tagged "California" and then browsed through more.

At what point does WWS1 get harder/longer to complete? (Sorry to slightly hijack, OP) DD11 did the first two weeks easily, and she felt well prepared from having finished Treasured Conversations last year. I'm just wondering how far in other people felt the lessons started taking more than a week to complete, especially for a young student.

Dd likes those books too! She liked Story Thieves by James Riley (I think it is the first published in a new series), then today we are going to pick up from the library Half Upon a Time, also by Riley (which I think is the first of maybe a Trilogy?).

I voted 6th grade. My DD might have been able to understand it a year or two ago, but she is a great reader. She said the only word she didn't know was "incur". And she thought the collection agency might be collecting the lost books, not money. ;-). She completely understood the "point" of the text that you have to take care of your books, and you will pay money if you don't take care of them or lose them.

Last year my fifth grade DD was probably doing 3-4 hrs of schoolwork, plus chores, bible reading, and maybe 20-30 minutes of guitar practice. I wish the guitar practice was longer, but that seems to be all she can do in one day w/o getting really crabby about it. Hoping she can have the stamina for a bit longer schoolwork and guitar this year (we haven't started our full workload yet this fall). She is very independent and spent a lot of time working upstairs in her bedroom or my bedroom...so she could often plug away and get a ton of work done in a short period of time (even less than three hours on a good day). The downside of this is that if she got distracted or sidetracked, she got very distracted/sidetracked and I didn't know what was going on because she was upstairs and we were all on the main level.

I don't have any book suggestions off the top of my head, but Schoolhouse Rock has a great series of short videos with songs that go over concepts of civics and economics. I think a lot of them are on YouTube, or we were able to get the complete collection of the videos on DVD pretty inexpensively (maybe $10 or so).

I'm not currently using BFSU directly, but I try to keep the foundational concepts in mind, especially with my 1st grader, and try and ask him questions or lead him down a line of thinking that will help me cover some of the foundational topics with him informally. Having taught volume 1 a few times at home and co-op, I find I can sort of have a "BFSU lifestyle" without directly using the demos/lessons. So, I would lean toward literature and just look for opportunities to discuss the BFSU topics along the way. That is sort of what I am doing with my 1st grader this year. He will tag along on some longer books that are targeted more at my advanced third grader as well.

Even though I live in the city, not the suburbs, I have managed to avoid parallel parking my minivan quite a bit over the years. Sometimes we have walked further to get a spot...or of course I can let DH do it. ;-). It was on the driving test in MN when I was a teen, and it was a big factor in me failing the test the first time I tried it. Then I learned a "trick" for lining up the flags/cones used for the test. :-) Since then I have learned to parallel park small cars pretty well (but I am almost never driving a small car these days!). I can always parallel park my van in a large spot. And recently DH installed a backup camera in our minivan...and now I am MUCH better at parking the van. So I voted visibility or large spot...because the camera is part of "visibility" in my mind. :-)

Did anyone recommend Chestry Oak by Kate Seredy yet? I big-puffy-heart that one and it was reprinted this year (I have s whole other thread that was recently bumped up on this board about that book!). :-)

I sometimes make comments to DD11 like, "a lot of people don't think wearing two different kinds of stripes is a very good combination" - or something like that. I try to leave it really up to her to make the final decision, and save it for really egregious combinations. ;-)

My daughter brought it as one of her book club suggestions this past week (the girls each bring three books and everyone votes to pick one book from each girls' suggestions). She couldn't talk them into it though - Mr. Lemoncello's Library was more their speed. I think those girls don't know what they are missing! ;-). I am really eager for my boys to get just a bit older so I can share it with them. :-)

I found one in the Files section of the Mystery of History 3 yahoo group. Let me know if you need a link to the group. I'm on my iPad and it isn't being cooperative about linking right now.

Some math programs like RightStart never use a number line as a tool for doing adding and subtracting. I don't think my DD ever saw this method until we switched to CLE in 4th grade and they used it for negative numbers (I think toward the end of the 400s somewhere). It didn't diminish her math understanding at all I don't think to not use it until later.

I think in the "end" (say maybe end of 8th, since you might do different subjects in high school for your history/social science credits), all the kids should have about the same knowledge. But it may not be exactly the same knowledge! For example, the kid that does Ancient history in 1st and 5th may actually by the end of 8th remember less ancient history than a sibling who had it in 3rd and 7th? My DD (oldest kid) actually remembered very little ancient history last year from when she was in 1st. I don't regret doing ancients in 1st because she had a lot of fun at the time and liked the picture books ,activities etc...but she could have just started in Ancients in 5th and not really been "behind" because she didn't really start out remembering much of anything!

I'm most worried about how the 3.5 year old DS will cause havoc. ;-). He has developed an annoying habit this summer of just asking over and over again "What can I do? What can I do?" - any time his brothers aren't directly playing with him. And he never likes my suggestions in answer to the question, since it is really code words for "I want to play with someone". Since there will certainly be at least some times where no one is available to play with him (or DS6 doesn't always WANT to play with him), he will need to do better at playing on his own, but my fear is that we are going to be doing a lot of school work with that in the background, at least at first....lol

I don't have too much trouble putting down my insurance info, but if I did have a problem doing it, I would be temped to just put in a bunch of "xxxx" or "12345". And if someone has a problem with it, then they could call you and discuss it personally.

We also skip the quizes but usually do the tests. My DD isn't very speedy at math and doesn't have the stamina to work for a long time, so we actually take two days to do a test, and she isn't doing all the review problems every day. I want to help her increase her math stamina this year, but we probably still won't do the quizes because they feel like overkill to me.

Answers in red

We got a sonicare model a few months ago as well on Amazon and we've been really happy with it.

I don't do Walmart (and not sure I've seen Ulta here?), but when I looked at Target I only found small ones. Not nearly big enough for the family. Or they had like backpacks and suitcases and the like. Maybe there was something I missed...I almost always have to take the kids with me when I shop and that isn't always the best for actual finding things...LoL.

They actually do have their own toiletries bags for small trips like that. But on the big trips we prefer everyone to share for the shareable types of supplies. DH insists that the toiletries need to be in a separate bag from clothes, so even if we use zip locks, they would still need to go inside some kind of dedicated bag.

With 2 adults and 4 kids, when we are traveling for several days or more, we usually just take all our full size toiletries with us in one bag (kid shampoo and body soap, adult shampoo, conditioner, body wash, a couple kinds of toothpaste, hair products, contact lens solutions, sunscreen, bug spray, etc...). For a week or two vacation it would just be too much hassle to have lots and lots of travel size bottles! (And we are often camping or staying in other accommodations that don't provide free shampoo, etc). We currently have a bag we use but it wasn't meant for that purpose, and it always feels like digging through a black hole to find what we need. Does anyone have a bag they like and recommend for this purpose? Or another good solution? I'm not convinced that the $50+ bags I am seeing in my first round of Googling would really provide enough improvement to be worth that price.