Well, here's another thread on the topic, from a few months ago...

Adjectives have this done to them all the time; I'd agree that it doesn't make them "pronouns." Here are some examples: She got a blue dress and a green one. I like the green better. ("Green" is not a pronoun. Whether "one" is... Well, that's what's up for debate, isn't it?) He argued that the time for finding blame was long past. She countered that it was never too late to do what was right. Neither was a terribly good speaker, but I found the latter more convincing than the former. ("Former" and "latter" are used like this all the time, but they're still clearly adjectives.) "I'd like a tall, please," I told the barista. (Oh, please.) Now, my argument would be: Numbers can clearly be adjectives: three days, Fourth Avenue, 1,256,093,902 people. Numbers can act as nouns, particularly when they're abstract conceptions, as someone already stated above: I added two and two and got eighty-nine. (Clearly, I need a new calculator--or new fingers.) The number "one" has a long history as a pronoun. "One should always wash one's hands before eating. One should speak politely to persons older than oneself." An alternative--and the one that soon became preferred, except, apparently, among Victorian nursemaids and moralists--was to refer to the unknown person either as "you" (particularly when the sentences were as exhortative as those given) or as "he." More recently, "she" has become the catch-all for the politically correct, though I personally prefer "he." (We women are smart enough to figure out they mean us, too.) Clearly, here, "one" is acting as a third person personal pronoun, when the person isn't known or identified. "One" is still used in such indefinite ways so commonly (I've used it several times in this post alone) that it has made it onto the indefinite pronoun list, alongside such stars as "all" "none," and "each." This is otherwise known, around here, as the list of pronouns that I have trouble remembering are pronouns. (For one thing, many lead a secret life as indefinite adjectives, so why can't they be indefinite nouns? Except that the proper definition of indefinite nouns seems so murky and confused already that I don't want to compound it.) So, "one" seems to have earned itself a place as a pronoun. But "two, three, four..." or "first, second, third, fourth..."? No, I'm just not buying them as pronouns instead of outright nouns or adjectives pressed into service.

The Elephant and Piggie series, by Mo Willems! Okay, these aren't, strictly speaking, phonetic--but they're so fun! Even if you're just reading them to her, the few words on the page might motivate her to learn to read more quickly, so she'll be able to read them on her own the sooner! Or you could check out the Barron's Reader's Clubhouse books. At $4-$5 and eligible for Amazon's 4-for-3 promotion, these seem very reasonably priced. I've never used them, though, so I don't know how "fun" they are!

My younger sister? It was a box of aluminum foil when she was nine or so. She was always using bits of tin foil for crafts from my mother's box, so my mother gave her one of her own for Christmas, as a joke. The things she made out of that box of tin foil! Slippers, crowns, and helmets feature largely in my memory, but she also made all sorts of little toys to play with. It was a lot more endurable and enjoyable for her than I would ever have thought!

I third Five in a Row! Particularly supplemented with lapbooks from homeschoolshare.com, if your kid is into crafts. Easy, simple, and FUN!

According to Ruth Beechick in An Early Start in Arithmetic, many children have trouble with moving from concrete (manipulatives) to abstract (manipulation of number symbols) at as early a stage as we'd like them to. You may want to check out this book--it includes some suggestions for gentler math lessons, and might be about the level your son can manage. An Early Start in Arithmetic is available on its own or as part of the compilation The Three R's. (Check your library first--mine has The Three R's.) Like a previous poster, we use MUS, which has a strong focus on only covering one thing at a time. That might help, too--don't worry about subtraction until you get addition down a little better. I love the little houses on " ," which really helps teach place value. I'd recommend you make one of these for yourself, particularly if you already have an alternative to the MUS blocks. (I also love MUS because my son usually just needs to watch the DVDs, which certainly helps with my frustration levels as a teacher. Since you've already gone through a few programs for your son, though, I'm guessing that you don't want to switch AGAIN. Plus, MUS is admittedly expensive, and not necessarily any more right for your son than what you've already used.) Finally, a resource I do not own but find interesting is Dr. Wright's Kitchen Table Math by Chris Wright. If you check out the "Click to LOOK INSIDE" feature for this book, it will not only give you an idea of what the book contains and suggest one way to make manipulatives that could work for "Decimal Street" (pg. 4), but also list further possible resources for exploration (Chapter 17).

Here's my experience: You should never, never stop and think about grammar when you're first writing. Talk about losing the flow! No, thinking about grammar and spelling come in when you're revising your material, just like thinking about all the little writing "extras," such as varying sentence structure and replacing "being" verbs with stronger alternatives. If you're anything like me, in the middle of this process you realize that your entire argument would be strengthened if you moved a couple of sentences to another paragraph, and by the time you're done with that, your paper has grown two pages, which is good because you stopped to revise because you'd hit a snag... And now you've had my personal experience with using grammar. Besides being irritated by poorly-constructed sentences, that is. (Please don't tell me about my poorly-constructed sentences, unless they truly do irk you.)

Something I left out above: If you give Amazon another chance, it may surprise you. Go further down the page than the books you were looking at before, and it will give you "Customers Also Bought Items By," which is a list of other authors instead of other titles. On this page it lists as the big ones (complete with pictures) Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, of Nate the Great fame, and Arnold Lobel. (I guess you just can't get away from Frog and Toad. But why would you want to?) But it also has a whole list of other authors to check out, including Mo Willems, Peggy Parish, and Jane Yolen.

Have you tried your local library? Ask them if they have a readers' advisory librarian. Our local library has a database called NoveList, by EBSCO, that is supposed to do similar work. Unfortunately, they don't have Henry and Mudge listed. To correct this oversight, it looks the readers' advisory librarian at my local library actually wrote an entry in the blog for people who like Henry and Mudge. (I found it checking Google, though. Kind of strange that it was from my local library!) There's nothing terribly new and exciting on it--she recommends Amelia Bedelia and Frog and Toad, for example--but this is the sort of work that librarians working in readers' advisory do. I hope some of this has helped.

I have never diagrammed. The closest I got was in my college class on hermeneutics, (taken to fulfill part of my gen. ed. requirements, lest you wonder about me,) when we would take a long passage and lay it out on a page to try to illuminate its meaning. For instance: For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. It's much more subjective than full-on diagramming, as you can see. (Why did I do it the way I did? Because I felt like it.) It was more a way to look at a passage in little chunks and then build up its meaning as a whole, much like a pastor does during a sermon (assuming the sermon involves Biblical explication). Interesting, and you would definitely use conjunctions to parallel things, but otherwise not necessarily terribly interested in the grammar of a sentence or passage. It was more following logical arguments. In grade school, though, all we ever did was: underline the noun or pronoun subject, put a line between the subject and predicate of a sentence, double underline the verb, put parentheses around the prepositions, and circle the direct object. This kind of "pre-diagramming" is still pretty useful. However, I have no objection to teaching "full-on" diagramming for my son, even though I've never needed it. (Which is a good thing, as I'm using R&S, which is apparently pretty strong on the whole diagramming idea.) I'll probably learn a little more about our language while I'm at it, but since when is that a problem? EDITED TO SAY: Oh, and assume that there's white space at the beginning of some of the lines above. I didn't feel like redoing everything in .html to put in the &nbsp's, and forgot that there's no other way to put it in. Feel free to assign the white space as you feel fit, actually. It was terribly subjective in the first place! (I did have the "nors" that were matched with "neithers" nested underneath them, though.)

To add to this beautiful list, here's the question I have to ask myself before switching curricula: Am I using what I have now at all? If I'm not, is it the fault of the curriculum or a fault of mine? If it's a fault of mine, will the new curriculum have the same problems? I switched composition from Sonlight's LA to WWE last year, because half of Sonlight (the part that was actually composition instead of copywork) I wasn't using at all. The switch definitely helped us get back on track as far as LA went. I switched art programs from Artistic Pursuits to Scott Foresman Art, Grade 1, but it turns out the reason we don't do art is that I just never get around to it. The Draw Write Now materials I got for my son are as close to art instruction as he's actually going to get this year, it looks like. Whoops! (Then again, he gets his piano lesson promptly every week. He's pretty good at piano, too. But it's because someone else is teaching him!)

I followed the advice of someone else on this forum and got Scott Foresman Art, Grade 1 after Artistic Pursuits fizzled out and died on us. It is nicely pitched at the level where I don't have to teach the lesson--my son can just read through on his own. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean we get to the lessons any faster. At least I feel less guilty about it, since the Scott Foresman book cost considerably less (used, of course). Once we finish the Scott Foresman art book, I'll probably go back to Artistic Pursuits, just to try to get my money's worth out of it.

Is there any reason you can't teach "deleting the prepositional phrases" as a technique with any other grammar program? Once your kids learn prepositions, talk about how they function, and encourage her to "cross out" the prepositional phrases all she wants! It's not like it doesn't carry over to another system. It's just that she won't be learning prepositions FIRST. Then again, they don't usually include prepositional phrases in the sentences that need to be analyzed until they get to prepositions in the lesson. (Whoops, I just spelled "analysed" Britishly. Spell-check fixed me right up!) There, that's one item off your list, right?

Well, here's what I'm getting for my son, who is turning four tomorrow. I figure it can help with reading instruction, to help cement the shapes of the letters in his mind without requiring him to write. As for 6 and 7-year-olds--my nieces really love their American Girl dolls, though I doubt they're terribly "instructional." On the other hand, making clothes for them, or any other dolls they may already have, would certainly help build useful skills. Have you considered a little sewing machine, perhaps with a book to go along with it? (Here's one all about sewing doll clothes!) Great, now I'm getting ideas for things to give my nieces... :p

The only thing I didn't order for my son's Sonlight Core 2(C?) this year was Cornstalks: A Bushel of Poems. It's a collection of four books of poetry by James Stevenson. The reviews for it just weren't that good, and my local library had all the books that make it up, so I decided to just check them out, instead. Wouldn't you know, my son loves this guy's poetry. Whoops--guess I should have bought it! And the poems are beautifully illustrated, in such a way that the graphics really are a part of the poetry. (The illustrations are, of course, by the poet.)

Yup, that's exactly what I did. I posted on Saturday, and heard back Monday morning. Wow!

I always start with the Child's Catechism. There are several version floating around out there, but I use my denomination's version. That way, I don't forget what it was they were working on last week--I just ask the questions and they answer to where they remember. Goober 2 is faster than Goober 1 was, because he hears and has heard the catechism recited so much. (Plus, he gets a little reinforcement from Grandma who teaches 2 to 3-year-old Sunday School.) We start catechism EARLY. When Goober 3 (20 months old) is missing, Goober 1 calls out "Who made you?" and waits for the answering "Ah!," which is all Goober 3 can say of "God!" And I haven't even tried to teach it to Goober 3 at all! Of course, we've also done Scripture memory work, which I now use a memory box to review. Before I got the memory box, though, the only thing I could manage to work on consistently was the catechism. Something about those little numbered questions and answers really helped keep me on track. To be honest, I still have trouble doing memory verse work beyond what our curriculum requires, which means that I haven't taught anything to Goober 2 but his catechism. I guess I'll start more persistent memory verse work--probably starting with John 3:16 and Romans 10:9--next year, when he starts Kindergarten. I'll have to add cards to the memory box, though--maybe a different color? EDIT: Oh, and as to how to actually do the memorization? Repeat the memory work three times, starting and ending with a prompt (such as the reference, the catechism question, or "Our address"), then get your child to say it along with you. If your child still seems to have some patience left, have him repeat it along with you three times. See if he can say it on his own. Repeat the next day. Maybe you only have to cover it once or twice, but maybe you have to do it the full three times again. Don't worry, he'll get sick of it pretty quickly, too. Repeat ad nauseam. See if you can move more towards him saying it instead of you, until you're at the point where he only needs the prompt. Then, stick it in a "review periodically" section of your memory box (or whatever you're using) instead of the "currently learning" part. And, of course, when it's a long piece of work (length here varies depending on what the child can handle), break it up into smaller pieces and teach only the first part first, then the first and second parts when the first part is learned, etc. If your child needs help with a word or two when "reviewing," you're still probably okay. (Particularly if he can't remember which Psalm passage is which, and so needs the beginning prompted.) If he's forgotten more than that, it needs to be reviewed more often.

And here's a study talking all about it, for those of you who want the research. Don't worry, this was definitely written for the layman. (The link is to the informational page, which includes a link to the .pdf with the actual report.)

I'm pretty sure you still have to cut out the tiles. I did, at least, and I got my (perforated card) version of the program this summer. A paper cutter would have been nice, but I survived. My advice: Make sure you keep the card box far from grabby little hands. My 20-month-old son will go looking for it when it's out, in order to cause maximum chaos. (He also goes for his brother's memory verse card box when it's out.) If you want to buy a magnetic dry-erase board, check out your Target. Mine was less than $20.00. And once I actually had my husband mount it a couple of weeks ago, the tiles suddenly became interesting to my son again. (Amazing!) Once we got to the word cards, I would dictate them for the lesson (I've never bothered with the extras, since he hasn't had a difficult time yet), and then stick the cards in the "review" section. I didn't actually review them until I had two sets to mix together, and then I shuffled them and did ten. If my son got them all right (which he always has), into the "mastered" section those ten went. So, we're always about ten cards "behind" where we're supposed to be, but he can't be sure what rule is being used. I think it makes it more interesting (and less dreary) for him. Now that we've hit the dictated phrases, I also tend to do half the dictation one day, and the other half the other day of a lesson. (It's about twelve phrases a lesson.) Day 1: Do beginning of lesson as written, except for reviewing word cards. Introduce new spelling words and have him spell them with tiles or on white board, whichever he prefers. (For the blending level, which has a much longer list, I only did part of each list--I think that level took three sessions.) Add cards to the "Word cards -- Review" section of the box, shuffling like crazy. Dictate six phrases, often including them in sentences to make a silly story. Day 2: Have son spell on whiteboard ten words from word cards in the review section and put them in the "mastered" section if they are spelled correctly. Dictate remaining six phrases, once again making a silly story out of sentences using those words. And there's what we do. (Sadly, I only get to these lessons about twice a week, but let me tell you, we've gained some impetus since actually getting the whiteboard put up! So, real piece of advice? Mount a whiteboard or equivalent. The lessons suddenly get so much easier. And if you've lost a tile or two, because, say, your twenty-month-old son did get to the card box that one time... The lovely Molly at AAL is on the ball, and will send them to you pretty promptly!)

I, too, am using Math-U-See. I am planning on switching to The Art of Problem-Solving: Prealgebra when we finish the "elementary" MUS, and seeing how well my son does. However, you might want to check out supplementing whatever you use with Kitchen Table Math; it apparently has several ways of explaining mathematical concepts. You can see what other posters have said about it.

I'll say the same thing: Cathy Duffy. You could also try Homeschool Reviews and The Old Schoolhouse Reviews: Homeschool Curriculum and Related Products. All of these are review sites, but they separate curricula by topic and give you an idea of what's out there. Or, you could go to Rainbow Resource, which has a pretty comprehensive catalog. It doesn't provide some products (such as Math-U-See, which is only available through MUS sellers), but it does have loads that it tries to separate by subject.

Exactly what I was going to suggest!

I've been toying with the idea of doing unit studies during the summer. I figure, as long as I don't require the incremental lessons (like handwriting, spelling, grammar, etc.) and really focus on something that the kids love, it'll be like a break. Plus, I can schedule more easily for the occasional week off here or there for camp or VBS. I haven't tried it yet, but I really want to. There are so many neat things out there! (I'm really looking forward to Further Up and Further In when my boys get old enough. I'm just sad that I don't have any daughters with which to do Anne!)

Well, here's Homeschool Share's lapbook templates. (The bottom has them "listed by divisions," which could be rather useful.)

Don't get Get Ready for the Code, Get Set for the Code, or Go for the Code; from what I remember, those all do have "writing instruction," since they're introducing the alphabet letter by letter. If you stick with the actual Explode the Code books, you should be fine. (I've only actually seen books 4-6, but those didn't have the "writing instruction" bits.)