Actually, AAS does take a phonics approach to spelling, so it's a very good way to work on phonics skills without frustrating your child by suggesting that he or she needs help with reading. It also gives actual *spelling* helps--check out their free sample to see how it suggests whether to start a particular unknown word with "c" or "k." (That, of course, is also a phonics rule on the pronunciation of "c" at the beginning of a word turned around for spelling, but it's far more important in spelling than in reading, where a child can easily figure out which pronunciation to give the c by trying both with the rest of the word.) That's why I, who have gone the "100EZ" and "ETC" route so deprecated by another poster on another thread (for viable reasons, obviously), am trying to shore up my children's phonics with All About Spelling.

You're in almost my exact situation, except for the being over budget part. (To be honest, my husband and I are really bad at making budgets. On the other hand, we're both such skinflints that we've managed to do pretty well without a budget so far.) My husband points out that a sixty-dollar curriculum is two full tanks of gas, at current gas prices. There's a different way to look at it! I have two sons, one seven, who's about to start the program, and one three, who's going to be moving into prereading skills soon. I've already let them both "play" with the phonogram CD, and I plan to have younger brother around as much as possible to listen to the practice with the phonogram cards. Hey, it worked for catechism questions. And you don't necessarily know how long it will take for your oldest son to get through Level One. You could put off getting Level Two, which is available with free shipping from Sonlight, until you need it. (Of course, since that free shipping is media mail, it will take a while to get to you.) You could even just get the Basic Interactive package, and have fun with the phonogram CD and the letter tiles. In fact, the first three "lessons" in Level One can be summed up as playing with the alphabet phonograms and letter tiles (talking about the color coding, for instance), along with working on segmentation: this site has a similar approach when it talks about Elkonin boxes. Once you think your child has mastered segmentation, all the phonograms for each letter, and knows his alphabet and his vowels, you move on to the actual spelling. If you'd rather play around with those things and save up for Level One, that's something you could try. I will say that there are many, many attractive prereading programs out there, some of them even free. I've found links to quite a few even just on these boards. And I didn't even bother with a prereading program for my oldest son at all. (I did send him to preschool three mornings a week. It cost $60.00 a month, which was less than minimum wage for the teachers but still added up to almost $600.00 for me over the year.) Check out here and here, for instance. And don't forget about Starfall! I'd say, knock that part off the price tag, and maybe it'll seem a little more doable.

Some of these review "games" sound a lot like solitaire games where you have to get pairs of cards to add up to thirteen (the King, being the thirteen, is a freebie). Some examples would be Tripeaks (or the similar Pyramid) or Monte Carlo Thirteen. You could try a variation on this by removing the "royal family" (Kings, Queens, and Jokers) and playing to ten instead of thirteen. Or, you could more simply play "Tens"/"Take Ten" or "Block Ten," which are variations on the same game, which already are set up to add up to ten. (You do matching with the face cards.) This looks like a much less messy game than either of the above. My son loves to watch me play computer games, particularly ones he can "help" with. If your daughter's like this, "let" her watch you find cards that add up to ten on Block Ten (which seems to be the more popular version for computer playing--my Ubuntu has it natively, and I found at least one place that offered it free online). Soon, the fate of every solitaire player whose game is being watched will befall you--she'll start to offer advice on your next move. Since Block Ten is purely a "luck" game, you can even let her play it on the computer without having to work through any strategy beyond "find all the tens you can." (That is, of course, assuming she has point/click down and you're there to make sure she isn't downloading stuff she shouldn't. And, inevitably, to offer your own advice.)

Hey, I can recommend a couple of great books as supplements, particularly for your younger child: On the Same Day in March: A Tour of the World's Weather and DePaola's The Cloud Book. (I've had those on my wish list at Amazon for ages, because I liked the copies we checked out from the library so much. Now I see that they're both part of the 4-for-3 promotion!) Whoops, and now I see that The Cloud Book was recommended by the previous poster, too. How did I miss that?

Well, I've really only done the one unit study. Five in a Row was a lot of fun to do with my oldest son in kindergarten, and I look forward to doing it with his younger brother when he reaches that level!

Well, I still stand by my post in the other thread. The Usborne is definitely not sixties style! (I think the artwork is gorgeous.)

Wow, I hadn't heard that about MUS and word problems. I thought it was fairly strong on word problems, actually. Could you do some of those "daily life/unschooling" things that sound so simple in theory, but I never manage to remember in practice? "When we started this trip, the odometer read 159 miles. Now it reads 176 miles. How far have we gone?" (This would probably work better as an actual example if you happen to have writing materials in your car. :p) My son is still in Beta, too. He's really enjoying the Flashmaster, especially in the car, where I don't happen to keep handy writing materials. (Link is to a review on a homeschooler's blog.) I'm hoping the "fun" drill he gets with that will keep his adding and subtracting skills strong over the break he'll take.

I figured it was something like that. ;) The problem is that Rainbow Resources has "buried" the interactive kit--it isn't referenced in the All About Spelling category, and it is not findable using their native search engine. You have to do a google search of site:rainbowresource.com to find it. Ouch! I had an even harder time finding a The Littles book a month ago, even though I had gotten the RR inventory code for it a few weeks before my big order. Eventually, I found a different one in the series through Google, put in a subfolder of Russian language instruction or something, and managed to figure out how to change its code to make it my Littles book. Then, it messed up my shopping cart, so I had to do a new shopping cart with that as my first purchase. RR can be buggy, sometimes, is all I'm saying.

If you like having the planning done for you, have you considered Biblioplan? It doesn't do as much planning as Sonlight, and it doesn't offer the books for purchase, but it does schedule on a weekly basis. It has schedules for both Mystery of History and Story of the World (and some other resources...), where you can decide which one you want to read for that particular lesson, and offers suggestions for read-alouds and readers for different aged kids, to boot! The Guide, which is the scheduling portion of their program, is $30-$40 (depending upon whether you buy the digital version or the paper copy). Either way, I believe they offer free (presumably digital!) updates for as long as you request them and can show that you purchased the item from them and haven't resold it. They also sell all sorts of supplements, with map work, questions to be answered, etc. (They won't have crafts available for the medieval period until sometime next year, sadly.) Just something else to consider! Edited to say: Wow, for some reason I thought you had more than one child to deal with. Well, Biblioplan is less useful for those who don't have to coordinate different kids, I guess. Still, it's worth considering, if only as a point of inspiration!

Yeah, because that's the first way you read them. So, the y would be read as a consonant first, then as short, long, other. (For instance, you'd work on "yam" before "hymn" before "try" before "funny.") I don't know what I was on the other night. :001_huh:

My son really, really loved the Usborne Greek Myths for Young Children recommended by Sonlight for Core 1/B. It was the first book he decided to read for himself without it being one of his "readers" (or being a picture book he'd had read to him loads of times). I love the illustrations, and, as far as I remember, the order of the myths made loads of sense. It's not as complete as D'Aulaire's, but my son was bored stiff when I tried to get that for more Greek Myth reading! The link I gave is the one for the "mini" version, which is the same one Sonlight uses; it's plenty big enough for readability, and much easier for your child to handle himself.

Well, my husband likes to pick up cheap framed large art at Goodwill just for the plastic "glass" covering the artwork. It's actually acrylic. He uses it with his games--he can put it on the tiny little cardboard counters and they'll stay put for next time. Plus, this is the same stuff that is used for dry-erase boards, so he can easily write what was going on and then return to his game later. I have no idea how much this stuff would slip, but I can easily see having fun making a new frame for the right size acrylic that could accomodate your workbook. Sounds a little better than a vinyl tablecloth to me, for some reason.

What a great idea! One of those that you know is brilliant because, in retrospect, it seems obvious. Here's the link to the Reading Rainbow version, by the way. They cost $1.75, but look pretty durable. (Now I wish I hadn't already made my RR purchase for the year. Oh, well, I have plenty of cheap page protectors I can massacre!) For the slippage problem--have you tried paper clips or the mini binder clips? Is there just not enough there to "grab"?

I had a hunch, so I checked it out--you are the creator of that beautiful Rod & Staff Grammar 2 schedule, complete with advice for using the term "declarative sentence" the first time through, that I downloaded for next year. I think it's awesome! Thank you so much. (By the way: For some inexplicable reason, "Botany" is misspelled "Botony" on your science page.)

EDIT: Just ignore this, the link is below. (I have no idea why it was so hard to find. Wow.) Yeah, they claim it's been discontinued. You can get it for the same price with free shipping from Sonlight, though! (That won't help you reach your dollar requirement to get free shipping from Rainbow Resources, but at least you'll get it! At Media Mail speeds, admittedly.) That's what I did, anyhow.

Yeah, the '95 version really irked me. I think it was the weird mysticism aspect and the funky special effects, although the fact that things were played much more for comedic effect was a little frustrating, too. I mean, this is a book of dramatic reversals written for little kids--it's all about the gasps, not the giggles. But I can't really remember, because it's been so long since I've seen it and I hated it--I'm not going to watch it again! Now I want to check out this BBC/Wonderworks version. It sounds cool!

Well, if he's going into second grade, and you want an alternative for First Language Lessons, consider Rod & Staff grammar. (Their second grade grammar book, which is the first year of grammar they provide, is Preparing to Build.) That's what I'm going to start my son on next year. He's very visual, so the oral nature of First Language Lessons would be a total flop for him. (That's part of why we needed Writing with Ease, actually, to work on his comprehension of information gained aurally. He actually doesn't do badly at comprehending the stuff he's read, despite my little foray into decoding versus comprehension above.)

I'm still teaching first grade, so take what I say with a big grain of salt. (On the other hand, I was an English major, for whatever that's worth. And for a couple of years, I thought I would be a high school English teacher--until I realized I really, really didn't want to teach. Funny how life works out. :p) You DON'T want a program that teaches everything all at once--no student or teacher can keep track of everything all at once, particularly when you're dealing with a beginning writer who's going to get everything wrong. That seems like an obvious point, so the real point here is, in what order should writing skills be taught? Go with organization first, then refining the actual word choice. This is how you should edit work, anyhow--if a sentence doesn't add anything to an argument, then it doesn't matter how well it's written, it needs to go. Plus, it actually fits the creative process better--the thesis statement and arguments for it are where you should start your work anyhow. Or, if you're writing fiction, getting the main plot points in order first will make for a much easier time fleshing the story out. Then move on to all the things that "refine" the sentence, such as changing the sentence types, eliminating as many "being" verbs as you can, replacing adjectives with stronger nouns, whatever. This kind of work really depends on your child figuring out what kind of writer he or she wants to be anyhow, as well as what kind of writing they're doing. An excellently written technical manual will not share many characteristics with an excellently written novel, and even in the world of novels, Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Faulkner made very different stylistic choices, and yet they're all required reading at many high schools. (I decided to add Shakespeare in there, because I'm a little sick of the Hemingway/Faulkner comparison, and because I thought poetry should be represented as well.) Plus, if there's a particular area your child has proven to be weak in, stylistically, you can pinpoint it with a particular curriculum that's strong in that area. Of course, grammatical problems can make a paper unreadable before you ever figure out its organizational structure... but then again, that's why grammar is a separate subject, right? :p If you find any particularly egregious grammatical errors, work on them with your student until they're fixed. (You're a homeschooler, you have time to let your kid revise the paper until all those extra commas disappear. Pity the poor public school teacher who is forced to put up with three different varieties of bad grammar because she can't have the whole class "focus" on all three at once!)

I would say NO to Sonlight's Language Arts curriculum. I did purchase it for this last year. I got the one to coordinate with what's now called the second grade reading level readers. What a mistake! The first day of every week, my son did copywork; the second day, he discussed something relating to that topic, whether a grammar concept or a writing technique or trope. Often he would rewrite the copywork sentence to explore a different writing choice or to make a point. (Some examples, just off the top of my head: pronouns, adverbs, similes.) That part of the program worked just fine. However, the third and fourth day of a week were always composition work, and they were way, way too hard for my son. Plus, the actual writing of the story would be down to me, since my child was at the level where a five-word copywork sentence was considered sufficient (at least at the beginning of the year), and that was way too time-intensive. Writing with Ease suited us much better, once I switched halfway through the year. It's still scheduled for four days a week, but the schedule goes: copywork, narration, copywork, narration. The copywork is chosen to go with First Language Lessons, but you could easily just point out what it's intended to teach (such as that the names of cities are always capitalized) as groundwork for a later formal grammar, or alter it to fit whatever grammar you are using. The narration involves reading a short passage to your child and then asking him questions to see what he retains, and then having him tell you "one thing about the passage." That's all it is, in first grade (which, for some reason, is where I'm assuming you are), but that provided plenty for my son to work on.

:iagree: My son is a struggling writer/fairly good reader as well. I switched to Writing with Ease because it seems to highlight exactly the areas my son needed help with: if your son seems to have trouble with general comprehension (as opposed to struggling with decoding what a particular set of letters says), it might be worth looking into for him, as well. For what it's worth, I think the actual physical work of writing is more difficult for boys than for girls at the kindergarten/first grade levels, and it impacts their writing. It also might be true that boys tend to be behind in writing skills for other reasons--I'm not a developmental expert, but in general that seems to be true. I've read a lot of comments praising Writing with Ease specifically because it seems to work well for boys by slowing things down for them.

Um... my kids seem to enjoy Schoolhouse Rock a lot, but he might consider cartoons a little juvenile for sixth grade, I don't know. (Hey, I enjoy it, but I'm not a sixth grader with a reputation to protect, right?) You can get that either on video or CD--my local library has it on CD, in fact--and it's really good for pinning down basic parts of speech, which is what you're working on, it sounds like. We got a used copy of the video for a buck or so at a yard sale a year ago, so I can't imagine it being that hard to get a cheap version. You could check it out on Youtube to see if your pupil likes it, and if he does, it should be a good supplement for whatever else you decide to do.

Wow, this is the first time I've ever heard of that Prufrock Press series. It looks really cool!

Since your last post was one of the "recommended" ones on the bottom of the page, here you go: http://welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36472

But the phonogram card of y (with its four sounds) is taught right away, in the beginning of Level One. Maybe it's a little mneumonic to help remember where a "y" will say a particular sound in a word? Like, if it's in the beginning it will probably say "yuh" (unless, of course, the word is yclept); in the middle, it will probably say "ih" or "eye"; and at the end, it will probably say "ee"? I'm just guessing, here!

I'll say this: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I did splurge on All About Spelling, 'cause it's so purdy! And also because I didn't actually do that much phonics instruction with my son, and I thought it would be a good way to strengthen his reading skills. But it is very expensive, for a spelling program. In my opinion, some people are just natural spellers, and some are not. I don't know that any spelling (or vocabulary!) program since I was in the second grade has really helped me, because I was such a voracious reader and that was all it took to get me familiar with how many words were spelled. Yes, there were still some tricky ones (like separate, for a while, or hors d'oeuvre) that would or still do trip me up, but I know how to use a dictionary when I need to, and I can usually get close enough to the word's actual spelling that that's all I need. (I just looked up hors d'oeuvre, in fact.) My mother, on the other hand, is a rotten speller. She's always had exceptional grammar, but the way a word (as opposed to a sentence) is put together escapes her. Doing All About Spelling might have helped her immensely, with its rules and strategies for getting the correct spelling of a word, but it would have been a waste of money on me. (Although I think I would have appreciated the purdy! even back then.) YMMV. Just, if your daughter is enjoying it, and it seems to be working... Keep with it until you can say why not, right?