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morosophe

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Everything posted by morosophe

  1. ScoutTN said: If you're talking about God's Great Covenant, it absolutely has Jesus in the Old Testament books. Every chapter (that I remember, at least) has a box with "Jesus in the OT," tying in to that week's lesson, in fact. And whatever curriculum you use, remember you can work on memorizing the catechism, as well, whether that's children's for the young-un's or Shorter for the older. (Just in case it somehow slipped your mind...)
  2. I second the Fleischman, particularly McBroom and By the Great Horn Spoon! I have also enjoyed Margaret Mahy (Try The Great Piratical Rumbustification or Blood and Thunder on Hurricane Mountain). Joan Aiken's Arabel series is pretty funny, as well. (So, apparently, anything illustrated by Quentin Blake gets on my "funny" list. Although I certainly would not deny McCloskey, either. And actually, I don't find Dahl funny or even worth reading. Oh, well.) Sorry, I can't seem to figure out italicizing today.
  3. Last year, I didn't use a timeline package, and it was a lot of work. But what I did was search Google images for black and white images of whatever I wanted to add to the timeline, and printed them off. The Guesthollow site here recommends a similar approach. Several of its external links are defunct, though. If you're interested in them: The University of Texas' "Portrait Gallery of Historical Figures" Bill Ball's "Images of American Political History" Both of these look like excellent sources for timeline photos.
  4. The All About Learning Press website has a page with links to the scope and sequence for each level. They're in PDF format, but that should be fine, right? Whoops, I missed the part where you were looking for All About READING, not Spelling. Sorry! Since you say you have Level One, you can look at the PDF for Level Two (which I got from this page): Scope and Sequence are on pgs. 293-294 (pgs. 47-48 of the sample). And that's as far as the program goes, so far.
  5. I assume you mean Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons? (I thought it was abbreviated 100EZ!) I have made notecards with the letters that I'm having my son trace when prompted by the lesson. I usually show him where to start and correct him if he traces really wrong, but it doesn't require the fine motor skills of actually writing. That's worked pretty well for us!
  6. Sam Samurai could work. It's number 10 in the Time Warp Trio series, but my son read it when we were studying Japan last year without any knowledge of the larger series and did just fine. For Norse mythology, I'd recommend seeing what your local library has to compare them in person. For the rest of these, these are recommendations from various places, none of which I've read myself: William the Conqueror/Battle of Hastings: The Striped Ships by Eloise McGraw. This one seems hard to find, though. Wulf the Saxon, by G. A. Henty. Twelve Bright Trumpets, by Margaret Leighton, includes a story set during this time. William Wallace In Freedom's Cause, by G. A. Henty. The Battle for Duncragglin, by Andrew H. Vanderwal.
  7. Here's the general strategy I use: Pick a topic (such as a person) you are interested in having your child color. Search for it, along with the term "coloring page," on Google Images. Hover over the images that look good to you, making sure they are large enough. (Otherwise, you'll get a lot of thumbnail versions of coloring pages where the full versions are not free.) It's worked for me, anyhow.
  8. I must admit, I learned these as a chant, and they stuck in my head pretty well that way, too. (I! You! He, She, It! We! You! They! Me! You! Him, Her, It! Us! You! Them!). We always finished up with the possessives, as well, voice climbing up to the last one in the singular and in the plural. (My, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, its! Our, ours, your, yours, their, theirs!) It's really hard to explain a chant in writing. But I tried!
  9. Christine Miller's All Through the Ages recommends loads of excellent books for covering any particular period in history or place geographically for any school-aged child, so you can see which ones your library has. See the samples on the page linked for a better understanding of the program. And the e-book is only $20.00! Is that the kind of thing you were asking for?
  10. I use Homeschool Skedtrack and honestly, it seems like exactly what you're asking for here. It runs on a "do the next thing"-type schedule, not a "do this on this date" one.
  11. Have you checked out Biblioplan? They have a schedule for integrating those two spines for Year One, as well as others and readers to go with them, called their Family Guide. (We're doing Year Three of Biblioplan at the moment, and own neither MOH nor SOTW, so I can't speak to your specific issue.) It all depends on how much work you want done for you, and how much you're willing to do yourself.
  12. You could also supplement with the phonogram flashcards you got for All About Spelling. I doubt they're that different. (You probably just got the first level, not the complete set of AAS, right? But that includes all the single-letter phonograms, at least.) Here are AAS's phonograms; here are Logic of English's; here's the list of what LoE adds to the "base 70" of Orton-Gillingham, while AAS seems to add nk and our.
  13. You could also try R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey, over at Pandia Press. For Level One (~1st through 5th grade), they stay away from the topics of evolution and creation altogether, although the upper levels are evolutionary (which is why I couldn't go with that program at all, sadly). You can get a "sneak peak" of quite a few weeks' worth of lessons at the website with their "Try Before You Buy" program. So far, only Life Science, Earth and Space, and Chemistry are available, all for Level One, but since you're looking for something for children aged 6 and 8, that should be about perfect. This would definitely cover the "workbook" side of things, and they've got a substantial list of "Recommended Reading" that would give you tips on what to acquire for the "reading" portion of your program. I just wanted to give you another option!
  14. To Lori's lovely list, I would like to add Gerald Morris' Arthurian books. His Squire's Tale series is meant for middle and high school, but I can't think of much that is objectionable in it for younger, advanced readers. (And hey, I enjoyed it immensely as an adult!) Some of the books in the middle of the series get a little preachy and dull, such as The Princess, The Crone, and the Dung-Cart Knight, but for the most part, the books are an exciting yet funny take on Arthurian legend. His Knights' Tales series is about perfect for a third-grade reading level, as far as I can tell. It consists of: The Adventures of Sir Lancelot the Great The Adventures of Sir Givret the Short The Adventures of Sir Gawain the True The Adventures of Sir Balin the Ill-Fated I would highly recommend these.
  15. Assuming you're talking about the O. Henry, I was actually thinking about your middle schooler when I put that in. I meant to put that in my post, but real-life events intruded, so I just posted the books themselves.
  16. Hey, just consider this a confirmation of momPhD's post, since she managed to answer it a lot faster than I did, and with exactly the same answers. If this were a thread on something legal, I would begin this post with "IANAL." Instead, I'll have to settle for "IANAG" (I Am Not A Grammarian); I don't know the technical terms for everything, and I'm sure I've misidentified something below. Hopefully, someone will come along to correct my identification. However, I do think I've answered the question correctly. The comma is allowed here, but not necessary (depending on which style manual you follow). The introductory phrase is a prepositional one, and when less than four words long, you can omit the comma without trouble. If the prepositional phrase were longer, the comma would be mandatory: See the beginning of this post, above, for an example starting with "If." Here, the comma is NOT allowed. You've reversed the "normal" order of the sentence, which is fine, but consider it in traditional subject/predicate order: "The deer came closer and closer." Would you put a comma between "came" and the phrase "closer and closer" there? Grammatically, "closer" is acting as an adverb modifying "came" (by answering the question "Where?"), with the second "closer" acting as an intensifier. Would you put a comma in "Quickly, came the deer"?
  17. The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. (Ugh, I hate that book.) It certainly fits the theme. The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry. (It's probably his best-known work.) This one is apparently available in several picture book versions.
  18. For your four-year-old: How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, by Marjorie Priceman On the Same Day in March, by Marilyn Singer and Franc Lessac If you're interested in paying for a resource, All Through the Ages has a fairly large section organized geographically. You can see a sample containing the complete "China" section in .pdf format here. I also own (but have never, ever used) Geographical Literacy through Children's Literature.
  19. We did (and enjoyed) Sonlight Cores B and C, both of which use Villyer's A Child's History of the World for the narrative history, which is a lot simpler text than Story of the World. Sonlight usually had us interspersing a chapter or three of Hillyer a week with other resources, particularly from Usborne, (although the Time Traveler books usually took several weeks apiece,) and it worked really well for my son in first and second grade. Unfortunately, while Hillyer covers the ancient history very well, it only covers the middle ages pretty well, and it pretty much skims through most of modern history. Still, it's a possible alternative "spine" for your medieval studies, around which you could schedule other books that look appealing.
  20. Absolutely use Decimal Street. Don't forget the "tornado game"--my son loved that.
  21. My son was like this in first and second. He just hated writing, although he enjoyed artwork. Last summer, though, a switch got flipped somewhere; he started writing whole stories on his own, and now has absolutely no problem with writing, to the point where he'd rather write than narrate some things. (Or, well, he seems eager to do the written exercises for his grammar classes, at least.) So it might just be one of those developmental milestones. Encourage your daughter to write every day, but don't worry too much, is what my (extremely limited) experience seems to teach me.
  22. The #1 resource I would suggest for new homeschoolers is Cathy Duffy's 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum. See if it's available at your local library, and look particularly at the first few chapters. She really helped me focus on what kind of homeschooling works best for me. She has come out with a newer version of the book, but it's so new (came out in June, I think?) that I doubt your local library will carry it. Still, if you decide to purchase the resource, that's the version you'll want. You can purchase that at her site, but joining the Homeschool Buyers' Coop will allow you to buy any of the electronic versions (.pdf, epub, Kindle) for a lot cheaper. Sorry that I'm not really answering any of your questions. I just found that book to be the most useful when I was starting out. (I did find it at my local library, and ended up buying the Kindle version when I realized I was checking the book out every year for more specific curriculum recommendations.)
  23. Well, it's not on this board, but there's a pretty good list over at Home's Cool! (Nicola Mansfield) linked to from Paula's Archives (redshift.com)...
  24. I think I agree with what others have said here, for the most part. That said, I've learned from my mistakes and am not using all the same things for my second that I did on my first. One example that springs to mind is Explode the Code. I'm not rebuying those things--they were expensive, ugly, and not all that helpful, although my son worked through them all successfully. Now I'll just do AAS from the start. Much nicer! However, I have switched curricula in view of the fact that I'll be teaching multiple children. I'm using Biblioplan, where we can study the same history content as a group but split off into age-appropriate readings, writing responses, etc., for individual work.
  25. Just because nobody has brought it up, I thought I'd mention Teaching the Classics, here. Its basic approach seems pretty sound, and it seems pretty in line with what you're already doing. That said, I've not actually purchased the curriculum myself. <rant>It's one of those really annoying videotaped seminars with workbooks (like IEW), so so far I've refused to buy it on principle. Why can't they just make BOOKS? It's obvious that these programs are meant for people who are literate!</rant> On the other hand, it's cheaper than IEW at $90.00 for the DVD/syllabus set.
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