My son loves MUS as well! We're just finishing Beta and are moving on to Gamma. I think the manipulatives make MUS more concrete than the math program I used growing up. As far as "real-world applications" go, I think that's enough in the early levels. I have lately been debating supplementing with Life of Fred. I do plan on switching to the Art of Problem-Solving PreAlgebra after we finish Zeta, since the upper levels of MUS are widely held to be very weak. This is probably where the "real-world applications" you're concerned about fit in. (AoPS is only one example of a program that starts only after basic arithmetic operations and concepts like fractions and decimals have been covered; trust me, there are a lot of them, and even the ones that cover everything from kindergarten to twelfth usually have a clear point where switching to their program is possible and/or encouraged.)

Plus, you're replacing "my sister and me." Just like "us," "me" is the objective case. If you had been replacing "my sister and I," (used correctly, of course,) "we" would have been the appropriate term. We had to learn the objective and nominative (though we called them "subject pronouns," I think) and later, possessive cases of pronouns separately, in little chants, in elementary school. I still sometimes repeat them: "I! You! He, She, It! We! You! They!" It's not so much because I need the rhyme to remember, though, so much as a case of self-inflicted "earworms." Oh, well.

Yeah, that describes me, as well. I've read the grammar and part of the logic stage, and don't think I even skimmed the rhetoric stage, really. I'm glad I read it, it had a lot of coherent and interesting arguments about several areas of homeschooling, but I don't know that it would be worth purchasing, for me. It was certainly worth checking out from the library, though!

I am really horrible at doing science, personally. But I did do some of the freebies from Pandia Press's R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey's "Try Before You Buy" program. Check out Life (it's at the bottom of the page) for first grade. All of the activities are fairly simple, and most don't have any fancy materials needed. I'm not crazy about R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey, which is why I didn't end up buying the resource, but it could help you figure out if that is the kind of thing that works for you and your child.

Wow, talk about topical! All About Spelling has posted a new article on solving b/d confusion. I really like their mnemonic! It certainly seems like it would work for my son. (I've taught it to him; now we can see if it sticks.)

Or, you could come up with your own copywork and passages in the style of WWE 2. The teacher's manual could help you a little here, but you probably don't even need that. You could do summarization of passages from what you're reading for history, science, literature, etc.--you don't have to go out of your way to find material. And copywork is even easier to manage, in my opinion.

One random site among many, I'm sure: Have you tried the Bill Nye the Science Guy "Home Demos"? Sure, there's lots of little videos on the site, but the Home Demos don't actually have any. You just have to find one that relates to the subject you're studying.

I think that there are multiple definitions to "classical education." Here are two big ones: 1.) Study of traditional materials, up to and including the language they are written in so that original materials can be accessed more directly. This is the people for whom "classical education" means learning Latin and Greek, and studying Aristotle and Caesar. I'm guessing this is what is meant by "Classical languages and a philological-philosophical textual study of the cannonical works of classical antiquity," although I always spell it "canonical," personally. 2.) Coming mostly from Dorothy Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning," (which was, admittedly, attempting to bring forward a much older tradition,) classical education can refer to the educational method of "teaching the trivium," in what we refer to as the stages of "grammar," "dialectic," (also sometimes referred to as "logic,") and "rhetoric." For more information, see the essay. Now, for people who conflate The Well-Trained Mind with classical education, the term can sometimes take on another meaning: 3.) Teaching history chronologically from beginning to now, usually in a four-year cycle, repeatedly throughout the school years. Other "content" subjects, such as science and art, may be arranged to coordinate with history, which then becomes the central organizing subject. These are three very separate definitions of classical education I have used myself. My father has philosophical objections to the first, so any use of the term "classical education" drives him nuts (and he sees "classical Christian education" as a contradiction in terms. No, it does not help that the papists studied the pagans for centuries, okay?).

My boys love Robin Hood, too. Errol Flynn, the Disney fox one, Wishbone, it doesn't really seem to matter. We even have the silent film, but it's a lot sillier. (Seriously, the "merry men" spend all their time jumping and hopping to show how "merry" they are. We haven't even tried showing that one to the kids.) Have you considered Prince Valiant? I've never seen it, but the reviews for it look pretty good, and point out that the whole process of becoming a knight is better portrayed here than in more recent films. (I do vaguely remember the cartoon version that aired on Family Channel when I was a kid. I didn't much care for the little bits of it that I caught, but it seemed to fit your criteria.)

Huh. My 7 1/2-year-old son has started writing b for d and vice versa lately. When he reads what he has written, he'll see the problem and correct it on his own. (Sometimes he needs to be reminded to check his work, of course! :) ) I'm not really worrying about it, because he's never had any problems reading the two as different letters, and because it's a fairly easy (and common) mistake to make. I figure it's only really showing up now because he is finally writing more than just copy work. (He never had that problem with copy work that I can remember.) Just my two cents' worth. I figure he's a pretty normal boy as far as writing goes, and he's still finding b and d tricky.

Whoops! I obviously shouldn't be posting tonight. I'll just be quiet now. (Why isn't there a gag icon?)

Math-U-See and Teaching Textbooks, and check the abbreviation page (or the abbreviation sticky at the top of the forum, although that's usually updated on the page pretty quickly) when you have questions about an abbreviation. Oops, and that was in response to this: Great, now I've managed to double-post. Sorry!

This was originally a double-post, and this was the same as below. To make myself feel like less of an idiot, if you enjoyed "New Math" above, 's a poke at the British monetary system to the same "tune" that appeared on the Frost Report. (Yes, it's still Tom Lehrer doing it.)

Yeah, this is how I've heard it used, too. I know the example above was unschooling, but you could be doing something similar and just switching curricula every few weeks, and it would not be homeschooling and it would still be confusing for kids. By the way, we tend to live our lives "scattershot," if you will. If you're like me, you're "currently" reading about ten different books, you switch between a few subjects a conversation, and you say randomly out of the blue days after a conversation with your spouse, "Oh, that reminds me..." It's just, when it comes to learning new things, a lot of people work better being given a framework (such as my example of the timeline, above) and going through it fairly slowly. Every time my Civil-War-enthusiast husband starts excitedly babbling some story at me, I have to slow him down and say, "All right, which side was he on, Union or Confederate? And which battle are you talking about? And when during the war was this?" I just don't have the framework to put what he's saying into any sort of context, so usually none of it "sticks." (Admittedly, my brain is like Teflon when it comes to the Civil War: nothing seems to stick. This is really sad considering I was born and raised in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was a very fought-over area.)

And, for a light take on it, check out Tom Lehrer's " ." I guess this is part of the popular lampooning mentioned above, but he's not really mocking it any more than he does the "old math" at the beginning of the piece. (Yes, this is the "old" New Math. And Lehrer's specifically pinpointing the "different bases" part of it. Was that ever actually taught all the way to elementary students?)

That's what I'd do. Of course, you could have her do some placement testing.

Well, I can see some cons to having a "scattershot approach." For instance, in history, imagine you cover a battle during the Civil War Monday, a discussion on the legal system in Rome Tuesday, then jump to King Albert on Wednesday and then decide on Thursday you want to talk a little about the historical significance of salt, and then on Friday cover the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. There would be two problems here: 1.) Nothing gets covered in depth, or, conversely, nothing finishes getting covered in depth. It's true that it often feels like this happens in history anyhow, but getting bored of a topic after one or two days would make this even worse, I think. 2.) Without a coherent organizing framework, children have a hard time remembering anything or figuring out why it was important. It becomes more like the memory exercise where Grandma went to the store and bought..., and it's really hard to remember that two weeks later. Plus, people like narratives, and the whole point to history is often to figure out "What happened next?" or "Why did that happen?" (which I guess you could rephrase "What happened before?") If you're using some other organizing framework than the timeline, you're still providing the important context for your children, but I tried to pick a set of topics that made it clear that wasn't happening, above. Besides, if you're going to go with an organizing framework for history, what's wrong with the timeline, particularly in the early years? So, really, if you're too eclectic, you're giving your children neither breadth nor depth. And this is as true in science as in history, and even more so in math. There are some children who can fare better in these circumstances than others, but switching around too often will confuse or alienate even them.

Try the Writing with Ease Diagnostic Evaluation to see where he should land. (Be warned, this is a .pdf file.) If you could start him at WWE 2 rather than 1, that would probably be better, since it starts him summarizing the passage he's listening to, and may seem a little less "babyish" to him. If you are willing to take the time to pick out passages, make up questions, and find copywork for him, then go ahead and buy Writing with Ease: Strong Fundamentals. (This is what I did last year, because I switched to WWE from another language arts program that gave good copywork halfway through the year.) If you'd rather have all the work done for you, get the manual for whatever year your son tested into. (That's what we're doing now.) When you're using WWE with FLL, they do suggest that you "tone down" some on the copywork with FLL when that's what you're doing that day with WWE. WWE copywork is supposed to line up to FLL grammar lessons anyhow, from what I've heard and read.

Calm down, calm down. Okay, here's the key: when you see the tiny little globe icon on a lesson in the Instructor's Guide, it means that there is map work associated with that day. Then, here's what you do: 1.) Pull out your big outline map and your wet-erase markers. 2.) Turn to the information in the Study Guide on the book you're reading. (Note: like another answer, above, I too separate a few weeks from the big folder and put them in a smaller folder. I also make sure to separate out the book information I'll need in that segment from my History and Read-Aloud Study Guides.) 3.) Find your reading for that day. The map work it contains will be at the end of the section for that day, and look something like this: (little globe icon) Oahu, Hawaii (number 9 in a dark circle) (map 1) Memorize this line, or write it down if you're doing a whole lot of map work. (You can go ahead and scrawl it on your map, somewhere away from the center of action for that day.) 4.) Turn to the associated map, which is usually at the end of the section in the appendix for your book. (In the made-up case above, it would be the first map there, out of who knows how many?) 5.) Transfer the information from the little map in the book to the big map with the wet-erase marker. There are different ways to do this: if the geography covered is an entire country (like, say, Egypt a WHOLE LOT near the beginning of Core B) or other fairly large, already delimited geographical feature (like the Baltic Sea), and you can remember where that country is (whether you need to glance at the map or not), you can just do it on the fly during the lesson, or ask your child if he can find it (if you a.) have a big map on the wall for him to check or b.) have shown him the place on the map before). For cities, I usually would either put a dot in the right place and then fill in the city name when we got to the lesson, ro I would just go ahead and write the city names, so that my son had something more to look at while I read him the lesson. It really all depends upon what book you're doing that day. So, that's map work. The timeline is somewhat similar: it, too, has an icon, the clock, in the instructor's guide. If there is a timeline figure available, a little black man will be standing next to the clock. This also requires you going to that day's reading in your book in the appropriate Study Guide, find the "Timeline and Map Activities" at the end, and go from there. However, since there is a "cheat sheet" to the timeline activities, I often use this instead. Find the sheet with all of the timeline entries you are supposed to make for the year. (I often keep this with my timeline and so have no idea where its original home was, although I think it was near the end of the introductory materials.) Find your book and the page numbers you're doing that day. It's a little simpler (for me, at least) than flipping back and forth in the Instructor's Guide. Either way, cut out your little paper figure(s) for the day, if available, and do the timeline at the appropriate part of the passage. Since my son still hates writing, I usually do the actual writing part, but I definitely require him to find the year! I also try to "do" the timeline and map even when that work is not done in the IG, which means that I try to have my son locate where and when we are working (not that I necessarily write anything down). I think that grounds a lesson a little more and helps reinforce the map and timeline work. This doesn't always make sense, however, as in the opening history unit on cultures around the world, or the one we just finished on Knights and Castles from Time Traveller, where the actual location of the "castle" is almost anywhere in western Europe. (At least we got to do Scandinavia, Iceland, and Greenland in the Viking unit!) Certain books, such as Window on the World, have their own maps which it's often easier to use. Usually, the Story Guide for that book will tell you when this is the case.

Well, Connecting with History looks like a Tapestry of Grace/Biblioplan style history, except that it's Catholic. Otherwise, she could check out the elementary history reviews at the Catholic Homeschool Review (which is at the charming website address "keepingitcatholic.org").

Okay, it sounds kind of like the stuff at Project Based Learning, but for younger grades, which makes it more like what you can find at BIE. They have a book for schools--PBL in the Elementary Grades, of which you can get the introduction for free--and some free articles and worksheets. But for homeschooling, it's a little different, I guess. Well, you could check out Camp Creek Blog--I think I like the "How to Start" post, but all of the "project-based learning" stuff seems to be at the top of the middle column, there. Here's a blog post with links to more homeschoolers' blogging posts on PBL, which in the early educational years is apparently called the Reggio Emelia approach instead, after a city in Italy. And this post has become way, way too stream-of-consciousness, meaning that it's bedtime. I'm sure you can google "Reggio homeschool" just as well as I can, so I'm not actually helping much. Good night!

And my son started with ETC 4 (as part of Sonlight Core 1/B), after giving half a stab at "Get Ready for the Code" and giving up on it at least a year earlier--in part because the writing was just too hard for him. I don't think I even made him do all the writing at the beginning of 4, but by the time he finished with 6 (the last one Sonlight Core 1/B schedules), he was certainly writing everything.

For the inverse of Anne Frank (starts out bad and ends well), you could try North to Freedom (now also known as I Am David), by Anne Holm, which is widely acclaimed and should be more appropriate for an eleven-year-old. (I have never read either The Diary of Anne Frank nor North to Freedom, although it's certainly interesting me now. I did read The Hiding Place and Night in high school, however, and I have to say that Wiesel's philosophy makes the latter less useful for historical information than you might expect. Since I completely disagreed with his philosophy, I didn't get much from the book at all, in fact, which sounds kind of sad but remains the truth. I will agree that that one is definitely a high school book.)

I am loving Sonlight. Of course, we've done Core 1 and are working on 2, so it's a little different. I don't really get Sonlight's pre-K/Kindergarten stuff; I think it's a little too busy and cluttered, and I can understand how the horizontal/vertical thing could drive people crazy. (I went with Five in a Row for kindergarten instead.) I wouldn't really start with the classical model of studying history until first grade anyhow, which is about what Sonlight does... So I guess I'm saying, I held off until first grade for Sonlight, used Core 1 (which is now B, I think), and I'm very glad I did so?

Sadly, all I can think of is All Those Secrets of the World, by Jane Yolen. This takes place during the second world war, though. Here's a good one I found for Memorial Day, though, when that rolls around: The Wall, by Eve Bunting. (Particularly since we live close enough to visit it ourselves.) Ooh, and America's White Table deals with POWs/MIAs... H is for Honor tells about the armed forces and military families... Basically, I'm browsing Amazon now. And I don't need to spend the money, thank you very much!