Well, we started today, too. My husband was actually around to corral the younger boys, which is good, because I kept having slightly longer lessons as I was reading the introductions to the new materials. Still, it went pretty well. Now for the rest of the week, when my husband is off to a convention and my middle son still has a month before he starts his morning preschool classes up again...

Us too! The only problem is that my husband leaves tomorrow morning for Gencon, so it'll be a challenge to keep up with everything without the relief of "second shift" starting in the late afternoon. So far, so good, though!

I agree with boscopup on phonics. I'm going with All About Spelling for my son's spelling, which is definitely phonics-based. I used 100EZ to teach reading, however, so hopefully AAS will give a stronger phonics foundation. OPGTR seems like a very thorough phonics program, actually--how far through it did you get? You may just want to review it occasionally and throw in a new lesson or two every once in a while. Or not. As long as your daughter seems comfortable reading, she's probably fine. My second grade plans (starting today! Yay!) are in my .sig, although I left out that I'm also going to try to do some Spanish (Getting Started with Spanish and Rosetta Stone: Homeschool Edition) and Art (Scott Foresman Art 1). Oh, and I'm also doing How to Report on Books to supplement the literature portion of Sonlight. As for grammar, I'm only now starting formal grammar lessons (with Rod and Staff English 2, Preparing to Build), and I feel that I could probably safely put off grammar even longer (for another year or two), if I wanted to. (Although it's not a very attractive program--literally, the pages are black and white and mostly text-filled instead of having colored cartoons--it is theoretically possible to do the R&S fairly independently, which was one of your criteria. In second grade, it's a little difficult for children to do anything independently, though.) I do have the Schoolhouse Rock video, which teaches about parts of speech, and which my sons really enjoy. Have you considered Schoolhouse Rock for your daughter?

I think it's a sweet book. I remember being rather disappointed in it when I first checked it out of the library, though. I think the illustrations are rather substandard, so if you're more keyed into the illustrations than the story, you're going to be disappointed. But the story is actually very moving but gentle with a whole lot to teach your children. (Of course, I've encountered it in the course of my Five in a Row lessons...) So, I like it, and would be glad to get my own copy someday, as long as I don't have to pay more than a couple of dollars for it.

You could start with the classic: chocolate chip cookies! Baking 911 talks a little about the chemistry behind what makes cookies puffy or flat, and gives recipes for chewy, puffy, and thin chocolate chip cookies. The site also has some other baking science your daughter should be able to sink her teeth into. (What a horrible pun, it wasn't intentional, I'm sorry!) Otherwise, this page of links from Penn State seems like a useful resource to explore.

I don't know any one book that covers all that, but I'll recommend a couple that could be useful. Firstly, Cathy Duffy's 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum rates her top picks for how well they mesh with the four learning styles she describes in the fourth chapter of the book: Wiggly Willy, Perfect Paula, Competent Carl, and Sociable Sue. Sadly, she doesn't include ratings on this at her reviews over at cathyduffyreviews.com. This book has been in print for a while, so your local library may have it. (Mine does.) I ended up buying it for my Kindle anyhow, since I realized I'd been checking it out yearly to make curriculum decisions. Secondly, a book that has been in print for much longer and should be widely available is Cynthia Tobias' The Way They Learn. This is a good primer for several different approaches to learning styles. If, while you're reading this, you think "Wow! That's so my daughter!", then you'll have a good area to research further. Check this one out instead of buying it, if you can: this is a good initial research tool, broad and easy to read but not very deep. Both Duffy and Tobias are Christian. Neither is what I (a fellow Christian who is less charitable than she should be towards bad writing) would call "distractingly" so. For instance, Tobias gives an example of how different thinkers went about an outreach program for a church, while Duffy rates materials for Protestant, Catholic, and Nonsectarian audiences. I hope this helps.

That Dover poem book is good--we got it as part of my son's Sonlight Core last year. But I'm mostly going link crazy for you in this post. I think the best way to approach poetry memorization is to give your children choices of which poems to memorize, or to read poetry to them and see if there are any in particular they seem to enjoy and then make that their memorization project. I'd stick with good poets, instead of going straight to the silly, shallow ones, since the whole point of this is that these poems will (hopefully) stick with them for a long time, or maybe their whole life. Poems for Children has a bunch of good classic poems. I'll second Robert Louis Stevenson--A Child's Garden of Verses is good, and it's free. "Whole Duty of Children" and "Bed in Summer" are particularly good for beginners, I think. Robert Frost has some poetry that's appropriate for children--particularly "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," of course, although I personally have a weakness for "Fireflies in the Garden." "The Road Not Taken" is extraordinarily well-known and appropriate for older students. An overachiever can try "Mending Wall." For light verse, I'll also second Lear (although I personally have never been terribly fond of limericks) and recommend Ogden Nash ("God in His wisdom made the fly / And then forgot to tell us why.") and definitely A. A. Milne: check out "Halfway Down," "Cottleson Pie," and "Knight in Armour". (That last was very hard to find in any reasonable form; trust me, I tried to do better than a random blog entry.) I'm actually ashamed of the Silverstein I memorized as a child, because now I wonder, Why was I filling my head up with garbage? If you're going to make your child memorize something, make sure that it's something worth the effort they'll put into it! (They may, of course, choose to memorize trash all on their own, like I did. I still resent the teacher that made us memorize the pseudo-poem that started "If you open it, close it," and went on in the same stupid vein, though.) As for Kipling, "If" is great for middle schoolers, but "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is also a wonderful poem for when your kids get older. (It's a poem that is, in part, condemnatory of adultery, so I don't think it's necessarily appropriate for younger kids.) I'd also be tempted to pair Edward Rowland Sill's "Opportunity" with "If," since they deal with similar issues and are about the same level of difficulty.

This is what I love about Homeschool Skedtrack. You can schedule things by the calendar, but default is to schedule things by the lesson. Once you finish one, you put in the date you did it, and it gives you the next lesson you've scheduled for the next day. For some reason, this really, really works for me. I feel motivated to do the lessons but not terribly overwhelmed when I get a little behind. Plus, having a sheet printed out for your daughter so she knows what's supposed to get done might help keep both you and her accountable. Some days I make sure my son gets his lessons done; other days, he's the one making sure I get them done. (I'm such a terrible mother, that half the time my first grader is more responsible than I am. Oh, well.)

This is kind of a strange idea, but my little sister used to love playing with tin foil. She'd make hats out of it, and shoes, and goodness knows what else. That's something you could supplement a dress-up box with, I guess. Also, do you have a boy or a girl? Since you're listing capes and hats, it sounds like your child is male, or at least won't appreciate tutus and wedding veils. My boys have loved pirate costumes. I even made my son his own pirate shirt out of cheap muslin using the instructions from this blog.

Welcome! And, just in case you haven't found it yet, here is a page where Debbie has done a lovely job laying out the abbreviations for curriculum and other homeschooling terms that can get so confusing.

I have this book, and so far we have just done the first two lessons. (Those would be 1.) fiction vs. nonfiction and 2.) the level of realism in fiction, by the way.) All I've done are the lessons on the left-hand page, using books they recommend (and that are available from my public library) as models. I've also brought up those lessons when discussing a book he's reading. (For instance, he decided that Grasshopper's Journey by Arnold Lobel is rather unrealistic fiction.) So far so good. As we begin his formal school year next month, I plan to continue the lessons once a week and make him fill out a sheet of his choice for each of his weekly reading assignments. He hates writing, so, depending on the writing level of his week, I may end up doing the actual writing part, but I want to get him thinking a little more about what he's reading.

I, too, taught my son to read with 100EZ, and am now "catching up" his phonics with All About Spelling. I personally don't see anything wrong with doing it this way: 100EZ lets the kids actually start reading a lot sooner than many heavy phonics programs do, and that makes reading fun instead of a boring chore involving a lot of rote memorization. On the other hand, spelling is always going to be a boring chore involving a lot of rote memorization, so doing your phonics there just makes sense to me. And for a boring chore involving a lot of rote memorization, AAS sure tries to keep it fun! Which is why, like SSRW, it's expensive. Wow, I'm really not helping you out much here, am I? (I've never used Abeka--at least not on the teaching side--so I don't know how thorough their phonics are. I also don't know much about All About Reading, and am not terribly interested, either, because of the reading-then-phonics-through-spelling philosophy explained above and the fact that it's PRICEY.)

Not at all. I'm very thankful for the internet at times, let me tell you!

Over at Delicious Ambiguity, Jenn had a linking frenzy post for "busy bags" for toddlers. I've loved many of those ideas. (Note for the script-suspicious: I had to allow "linkytools.com" on my Noscript to get the page to load properly.)

There's always Explode the Code, particularly books 4, 5, and 6. It's phonics, yes, but it ends each week with a spelling test. Don't get the teacher handbook--it's not really necessary. You can just come up with your own version of what they're supposed to be doing if you decide to do the unit tests, and the rest is self-explanatory. I don't know how "high quality" EtC is, but lots of people use it. My son seemed to enjoy it for first grade this last year. And it wasn't that expensive. Of course, that's only one year's worth of spelling, so you'd have to decide what you're doing for the next year after that. (Doing one unit a week, or about two pages a day for four days a week, it takes about a year. That's what Sonlight has for their Language Arts for Grade 2 Readers schedule, actually--you could look at the free samples to see how it charts out.)

To add to kristinannie's list, you could also do Biblioplan. I have a hunch, though, that what you really want to do is have some good reading-out-loud time. Have you read them The Chronicles of Narnia yet? The Wind in the Willows? Heidi? If you really want some curriculum for it, you could always check out DITHOR and get them the workbooks. Then just have a read aloud of the same genre as your oldest two are reading on their own, and talk about its genre, along with the other subjects your reading brings up. Call it literature instead of history, and there you go!

Sequential Spelling doesn't even give rules--it just tries to do everything from word families, and let associations to the families do the job. That seems even more tenuous than AAS, to me. But someone else may have more knowledge about it than I do.

Stop second guessing yourself! There, does that help? As I'm becoming more familiar with teaching, the stuff that Sonlight does for me is becoming less useful. (Note that I'm still going with Core C for next year, though! :p) It doesn't take that much planning to figure out, "Read a chapter of the read-aloud every day... Read one or two chapters from the spine every week, interspersing with the Usborne World History and occasionally throwing in the other (mostly Usborne) resources where appropriate..." The questions and other "resources" about the various books I've learned to mostly ignore, since my son still isn't really far enough along for some of it, and already knows it for other parts. In other words, I am, of course, a better judge of where my son is than the curriculum makers could possibly be. :p I am planning to switch to Biblioplan after next year, mostly so that I can have something to keep me accountable week-to-week on what I'm supposed to be doing, but be able to teach multiple children more easily. Plus, the Biblioplan Guide for each year is a whole lot cheaper than those Instructor's Guides! On the other hand, this makes Sonlight a little more appealing to those who really go for crafts. Just to make you even more frustrated!

Yeah, I'm more with this one. I'm not exactly doing much that requires much planning, since I use Sonlight (and even got the workbook for the second level of Writing With Ease), but this is more my approach, anyhow. I do a variant on it by chopping my semesters into four- and five-week "chunks" and taking a week break between them (for the most part). During this break, I figure out what is left needing to be done, while kicking my sons outside--or downstairs--to play. (My oldest appreciates not being in school enough to be willing to play with his younger brother for a while, while the youngest is still at the stage of frequent naps.) I similarly take a week between semesters (except for the ones that have longer breaks between them already, such as Christmas and summer break). "Chunking" your year into six-week "chunks" broken by week-long breaks to catch your breath, figure out what's working and what's not, and plan your next six weeks was a take on the school year recommended years ago at a conference I attended. I adapted that to something that more closely resembles the usual school calendar to make it a little simpler to use resources tied to that calendar, so that I would have even less planning to do, if possible. Plus, you could always check and see if the curriculum you're using has a schedule planned by someone else... (Thanks again, Christine of Core Foundations!)

Same here. For Bible studies, we used several picture Bibles and the real Bible, but we usually started each week with the story of the week from Lindvall's Read Aloud Bible Stories (By the end of the year, my son was reading them himself.) Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for reading Math-U-See Primer for math Five in a Row (first two books) unit studies and associated picture books for history, social sciences, art, literature, etc.

Well, I didn't "skip" K, but I did do unit studies (Five in a Row) instead of the more challenging chronological study of history we used in first grade for content areas of skill. I also started reading longer books to my son in first grade. For skill areas (learning to read and mathematics), you're going to have to start at the beginning (or "a" beginning), no matter which grade level you're starting with. For instance, I did do Math-U-See's Primer in K, because the assumption is that your child will not really have to retain it, and I thought my son would enjoy it. But you could easily skip that and just start Alpha in 1st grade, if you decided to go with MUS. Really, though, I'm having trouble thinking of a program that you'd have to start in kindergarten, and couldn't just pick up in the first grade level, unless it is a skills-based program, such as phonics or math, in which case you could just start at the beginning and probably move pretty quickly through the first parts, since you believe your child is ready to learn at the higher level. (I can't quite tell if you skipped kindergarten but your child is old enough for first, or if you just have a precocious child that you think is ready for first ahead of the usual time.) I don't really see it as being a big problem.

I'm going to give you the same advice I gave someone else a few days ago: see if your local library has Cathy Duffy's 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum. In the first few chapters, Duffy really does help explain the various aspects of making a homeschooling decision--do you want "traditional" (textbook-based, like A Beka) curriculum, Charlotte Mason, unit studies, classical homeschooling, or a mixture (like My Father's World)? How do your students tend to learn best? What is most important for you to emphasize in your teaching? Then Duffy goes through her reviews, starting with a chart that lines the various programs up with how they fit into the framework from her first few chapters and also gives additional information, such as about how much time you can expect them to take per day. It's really, really useful, and a great starting-off point for homeschooling, much more so than any other book I've read. If your local library has it, it's at least worth checking out.

You can just buy the Instructor's Guide. It's pretty hefty, and you don't get the "Core Membership," but that's what I did this year anyhow. (I did get the Core last year, so I ordered this year while I still got the 10% off that gave me.) You may also want to consider the timeline figures (and timeline book, unless there's another one you'd prefer--they all seem to cost about the same, although you could also, of course, print out your own version, whether booklike or the kind to hang on the wall) and CD with "extras." Also, I really like the fold-out laminated map they use for mapwork, although, as others have pointed out, it does have its disadvantages.

Honestly, if I hadn't wimped out and just bought the Sonlight ones, I might go hunting through Google Images with a keyword phrase for the person or event I was putting on the timeline. You can do "line drawing"-restricted searches, for instance, in "black and white" (to save on ink), and then just scroll through until you find something you like. For instance, I just clicked on a link given from a search for "Caesar" and found this. A little further investigation revealed that the site this came from is the ClipArt ETC, an online service of Florida's Educational Technology Clearinghouse, which has 3,981 illustrations of "Famous People" in its database of "65,281 pieces of free clipart." There's a pretty cool resource I never knew about before! Even if you do purchase a pre-made package, doing this can help you supplement it if you feel that's necessary.

My son really loved Leading Little Ones to God. It's a systematic theology, rather than a Bible story book or strict Bible study. It is, however, very Bible-based, using Bible stories or passages for all of its lessons, and recommending Scripture to read as well as to memorize at the end of each lesson. It's a very general, gentle introduction to the Christian gospel, sticking with basic Bible truths agreed upon by most Protestant denominations, at least that I'm familiar with. (I'm not too familiar with Roman Catholic or Orthodox doctrine at all.) I just think that sometimes it's just a little easier to figure things out in various parts of Scripture once you have a general overview of the message of the whole thing. (Sort of a whole-to-parts instruction, I guess, although I'm really shaky on deduction vs. induction and whole-to-parts vs. parts-to-whole instruction in general.) Plus, it's been in print for ages and is fairly cheap to purchase. That never hurts, right? A Bible story book for your youngest that I haven't seen recommended here is The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes, by Kenneth N. Taylor. This, too, has been in print for decades, and is fairly easy to get used.