Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper is so good for middle school. The first book is Over Sea, Under Stone. Has connections with King Arthur but is (relatively) modern. Would be especially good with Once and Future King so they catch the references like "the Old Ones" etc. The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge was one of MY favorite read alouds I read to my boys a few years ago. They liked it, but I think it might appeal to girls more. I would look at it first though bc it might be too young. If Princess and the Goblin by G. MacDonald and the Red Fairy books aren't too young, this wouldn't be either. ETA: We loved George MacDonald as well

Wildest Middle East. We were learning about these areas for geography (and then of course they hear about so many of them on the news ) so we really enjoyed seeing the nature side and how beautiful they are. It really helped my kids see that the entire Middle East isn't just one continuous desert or war zone (which unfortunately they kind of thought before).

BJU 6th grade: YE in approach Bright and colorful. Lots of great labs. We did NOT use the videos, so it needed to be taught by me. Took a lot of "mom" time, so if you are not a science person or do not have the time, you would need to choose something else or use the videos. Pricey!! Real Science for Kids by Gravitas Press Focus on Middle School Geology We ONLY used the Geology so keep that in mind. ;) I used this in addition to BJU 6th grade bc of my son's interest in Geology. I thought it was very light. Some of the "labs" seemed more appropriate for 2-3rd grade. I would not recommend it for 7th/8th. It was ok for us bc it made a nice easy introduction to the info in BJU, but all in all we were disappointed. BJU 7th grade YE in approach This was a big step up from 6th grade. I did not use the videos so it is very time intensive for the parent. I consider this an honors program compared to other middle school science I've looked at. Some of the things covered in this course I remember learning in Bio 1. Labs are great but use real lab equipment so it is expensive. We ended up setting this aside for my oldest bc it was too much for him. He moved into Apologia General Science which was considerably easier. Apologia General Science YE in approach, conversational in tone. The texbooks are not as colorful as BJU and are therefore much cheaper. ;) This is similar in level to BJU's 6th grade. The notebook is nice in preparing the student for more writing (lab reports, study questions etc.) Can be done independently by the student (we chose not to do it this way bc it was kind of boring for him). Honestly, a lot of the labs so far are things we've already done in other curriculums so I'm hoping this improves as they move into high school.

I agree with the list and with Lori D. I think the books she mentions omitting are books that you get so much more out of when you are a little older. And if your son likes Little Women, I'd add Little Men to the list. My son read both this last month and really liked Little Men. So much that he wanted me to find him other books by the author. I think books like Call of the Wild etc. really depends on the child. I hated them as a child. My super-sensitive animal loving son LOVES them. My tough-as-nails son can't handle them. Go figure. Lol!

I often use them in place of the exercises in the book because with the worksheet they don't have to copy the whole sentence, for example when doing punctuation. You don't need them however. As far as whether your local Amish store has them, I would check. I know the Amish bookstore that I've been to has their stories, poetry books etc. but they do not carry the actual textbooks. R &S is at the homeschool conventions as well.

Thanks everyone!

This is what we did as well. The memory work FLL had them do (memorizing the state of being verbs and helping verbs, for example) made R&S much easier to use at our house.

Ok. That makes a lot of sense. I think I'll check it out at a convention. I was just going by topics, and he has already done the topics multiple years. Ooh! or I could have him do BOTH! (Ha! KIDDING! He'd hate me forever. ) :laugh:

Here's the deal. I bought BJU Life science (their 7th grade prog.) for this year but was unable to do it bc it really needed to be taught by me rather than done independently. We had multiple crisis going on this fall and so I switched him into Apologia General Science since it can be done independently. The sequence he's done is: 6th grade: BJU 6th-which is a general science and RS4K Geology for Middle School 7th grade: Apologia General Science. So I feel like he's already hit a lot of the physical science and earth science. What he's lacking is life science and he hasn't used a program yet to teach him how to use a microscope (BJU life does this.) BUT if we didn't do an actual physical science, would he be missing out by not doing the 8th gr. physical science math? And if we did Life in 8th and the Bio in 9th that would be kind of redundant. And BJU Life was by far my biggest purchase including IEW dvd's so I really hate just NOT using it..... So I'm deciding between Apologia Physical or BJU Life for 8th, and will move in Apologia Biology for 9th. Ugh. Opinions please if you've taught 8th gr. Physical Science. Thx.

Math: Finish Hands on Equations (if we don't this year) and work through the word problem book. Besides that I'm stumped. He was doing great in MM but didn't want to use it for 5th this year (me either.) So I went with Rod and Staff which I was using for his older brother but hasn't challenged him at. all. I'm actually thinking of moving back to MM for the remainder of the year...but he's not wanting to. Science: BJU grade 6 or possibly BJU Life science if I use that for his brother. History: Either AO year 6 or Sonlight 100 with brother if I go that route with his brother. Geograpy: Memoria Press Geog. 2 with Geo. 1 review--this again, will depend on which history we go with. We used Geo 1 this year with good results. Spelling: He will be moving into AAS 7 in a few weeks, but his brother is only on step 10 of that book, so I think I will look into something else. Older brother would NOT appreciate that. Looking for something that could be Vocab too. Lit: I might pull together our own stuff using TTC. But this has been the year of burn out for me, so pre-packaged is looking better and better. So maybe Lightning Lit 7 or Sonlight if we get that. Writing: Probably IEW SWI continuation level B with brother. It's the one thing I found that my oldest doesn't balk at doing. He thinks Mr. Pudewa is hilarious. Grammar: Continue with Rod and Staff I would love to finally get on the ball with a foreign language and music lessons, esp. for this kid. But since I say that every year, don't hold me to it. We also do a co-op, 4H, soccer, Awana etc.

Thank you so much everyone! And those were some of the ones I wanted to include but couldn't think of! (Lady and the tiger, Raymond's run, to build a fire). :).

I know there was a thread in the past that had a lot of good ones listed but I have been looking everywhere and can't find it. :( I'm thinking of pulling together a lit program next year for my (then) 6th and 8th grade boys using Teaching the Classics and the second half of Figuratively Speaking (we did the first half this year.) I'm trying to come up with some interesting short stories that would be good for this age group. I plan to include The Veldt by Ray Bradbury and Ransom of Red Chief by O Henry. So what are the Hive's favorites? :)

My oldest was in the same spot going into year 4. Check out the free reads for year 4. They are more age appropriate. I had mine read some of those and listen to the lit choices on librovox. Mine are only 1 yr apart in AO years (although 2 grades apart) and so we combined for history and other places where we could. Those books get very hard very quickly.

Thanks so much! U just saved me quite a bit of money. :)

Ok, I'll be honest. I think the only way Spanish is going to happen at our house is with a DVD program of some kind. I'd like my kids to have an intro to it before starting high school. I'll have a 5th grader and a 7th grader in fall. Is La Clase something I should consider, or is it for a much younger crowd? I would skip cutesy crafts etc bc they would not be interested. If this program is geared for littler kids, any suggestions for a solid middle school program that does the teaching for me? It can't cost more than about $100 either or my hubby will have a heart attack. ;)

My kids like the art projects on artprojectsforkids . Org. Not a curriculum but worth checking out since it's free. She has many drawing projects and I love that you can search by grade level or technique.

I think it depends on what kind of reading you prefer. We used Core E this year and while we enjoyed it a lot, we will be back using AO again next year. SL had a lot of historical fiction. And my boys "liked" all of the books. But I tried to squeeze in some the AO free reads and those ended up being the books that they "loved" (secret garden, Anne of green gables, cricket in Times Square were a few). There is also quite a big difference in reading levels-at least for the core we used. I felt like the reading books were too easy for my 6th grader...some were for my 4th grader as well. The history books were good though. I agree that we have found some AO books that are dry or too challenging, but for the most part we have been very happy. One thing to keep in mind with the pacing: it is slower but that allows you to go more in depth and is suppose to help with retention. They are both excellent, so enjoy!

Yep. I've read all the editions and I reread the current one every year, although the last couple of years I haven't read the sections for the youngest kids because I didn't have anyone in that age range. Now as to actually following it... not so much. :leaving:

I found an attendance chart with 180 squares where you fill in the dates and I just fill that in. I don't record any extra days we do. (Our state requires the "average" amount of days that the public schools do, which they say is 180.) We moved recently and our local school did less than the 180. Where we live now does 180. Do we do more days than that? Yes. In fact we usually do math all summer, maybe taking one or two weeks off before school starts for the next year. But honestly, I don't think we need to compare or worry about what ps is doing as long as we meet state requirements. After all, if we wanted to be carbon copies of ps, I'd just send my kids there. We never run out of curriculum before 180 days....I like shopping WAY too much for that to happen!! :laugh:

Memoria Press has a Geography (level 1, I think) that is learning the countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. We will use it this fall (we're also studying ancient history.) It has a small section on what happened in the country in ancient times and its ancient name, then what is happening today (for example: Italy/ Ancient Rome). They do a small amount of mapwork, including memorizing all the countries and capitals. We might flesh this out some by adding current events in those areas, since there is quite a bit happening over there. If your child loves myths, have you seen D'Aulaires book of Greek myths? Rod and Staff grammar 5 is usually where people start coming in new to the program in middle school (from what I've heard). If the writing assignments in R& S seem too easy, you could just drop those since you'd already have a writing program. I used level 5 this year with my 6th grader, and it was a good fit for him.

Well don't feel too bad. My kids have watch every episode of P & F on Netflix and none of us have heard of it. lol!

Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit (slightly easier) or Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb We've used Beautiful Stories from 1st grade-5th and Tales from Shakespeare from about 3 grade on up till they are ready to read the real thing in middle school. We didn't get study guides or anything, just read them. I would explain vocab as we were reading. If the amount of characters/relationships between characters became too complicated, we'd draw it out on the white board or use stuffed animals to help keep it straight (thinking of your younger ones for this.) My kids loved it.

In the past we've combined AO with my boys who are 2 years apart. However, we only did this for history (for science we didn't use AO and for literature they used their own levels). What I did was add in some beautiful feet books for my younger guy when books were too hard-(he was doing his older brothers history ). It worked ok for us, but that was partly bc younger boy is advanced and older brother is not. In fact I have my 4th grader in yr 4 and my 6th grader in yr 5 so there is not a huge gap between them. We also did one year of SCM. I liked the SCM schedule but we didn't care for the books. I'm thinking of splitting them into their own years for next year. There is not much reason to keep them together once they are independent readers unless you are doing a lot of readalouds. fWIW we took a detour from AO this year to use Sonlight and we won't be going back to that. I thought I could combine them easier with a program like Sonlight but after AO it was a major step backwards as far as reading level. In hindsight I should have looked at some of the books instead of just placing them according to where they fell in the history cycle.

Well, thought I knew where I was heading with everything but then I went to a hs convention this weekend and realized I didn't want to use most of what I had planned on. :). So I know for sure: Rod and staff math7 and Hands on equations with little brother (haven't seen HOE so not sure if he needs this or not) R &S English 6. Writing will probably be WWS 1 since I have it and could use it for both Life Science (BJU ) this a maybe. Not really impressed with ANY middle school science. :( Figuratively Speaking. The rest is up in the air. I really wanted to try Further Up and Further In but when I saw it I realized it was not for us. :(

We are using with a 4th and 6th grader this year. It's definitely doable for a strong reader. My 4th grader turned 10 in Feb. and he found the reading fun and easy. We came from using Ambleside and this has been a VERY easy year of reading for my 6th grader compared to AO. Don't get me wrong, the kids LOVED the books and I think they had better retention but I also think younger kids could do the cores than it suggests. (Keep in mind we do NOT use the LA so that might be why they have the ages that they do on the cores, IDK.).