Another vote for Harold Jacobs. My daughter LOVED the humor in it!

I wonder if Disneyland could be considered a National Park. Just kidding! :lol: We've been there too many times to possibly count. :D All kidding aside...If you haven't been up to Oregon, you should go see Fort Stevens and Fort Clatsop. There are a lot of historic sites up there around the Oregon Trail.

No clue, but have you looked into Math-U-See? I know that those who struggle with the conventional math type decide to try this curriculum. You might want to call Math-U-See and ask them if they have received this question before. Hope that helps... :001_huh: :D Blessings, Lori

Thank you, Trina. Good to know.

Thank you, ladies! This is all great info. :grouphug:

:iagree: We spanked our kids when they were young. Most don't understand a good explanation of why not to do something when they have no reasoning skills yet. There are exceptions of those kids that will melt when they get a stern look of disapproval from mom or dad, but I wouldn't say that is the norm. We always followed our spankings with praying with them and them asking for forgiveness.

Thanks ditto! I was wondering how to keep those. :001_smile:

It really depends on your daughter, but I think with having had some grammar already, that she would probably do fine. There is review in the beginning...it just goes more quickly than the previous grades. I think the younger grades may be too slow for her, being that she is in 10th grade. Not being an English major, my humble opinion is that I think it is a superb curriculum. It has jingles to help remember English terms and definitions and a question and answer method for classifying the parts of the sentence (similar to diagramming). There is also a writing component that you can use or not that I believe prepares them well for different types of writing. ;) I don't know much about Rod & Staff except for that it is very thorough. Hope this helps. :D Blessings, Lori

Silly - I would make up crazy movements to jingles for the kinesthetic learning. :lol: Quirky - I now love reading every little placard at museums and such. It drives my kids crazy, but I love learning everything I was not taught in public school or just don't remember because it wasn't interesting. :001_cool:

How about Learning Wrap-ups? They have them for +, -, X, ÷ ($7.25) as well as states and capitals, etc. Also, the Mr. Pipes ($8.75) books are great read alouds! :) If you are 50¢ short or so, you could get the President/State bookmarks and a book for $3.50... Hope that helps. :D Blessings, Lori

Have you looked into Horizons Math? We have done Horizons Math completely through K-6. I taught math in HS and I have not regretted using Horizons once. It has a short lesson and definitely has spiral review but not too much. It is colorful and my kids have done very well. The workbooks are consumable and they have now come out with pre-algebra which my son has started. I used Saxon 8/7 with my daughter and we both hated it. I know there are a lot of people who love Saxon, but it just wasn't for us. While I thought it was thorough, it was very jumbled and I never knew what I was teaching. It just skipped around in its concepts too much and didn't have enough practice on the concept that was just introduced. With Horizons, you definitely need to need to use the daily lessons in the teacher's manual, especially in the younger grades because they will instruct you regarding which math facts/flashcards to be working on. Ask any questions you still might have. Again, we have LOVED using this curriculum. :thumbup1:

Grand Canyon - We watched the sunrise and the sunset over the canyon, hiked part way down (and found I really enjoy hiking!), and saw mule deer in our campsite. What an amazing work of God! Zion - We loved Zion. It was so beautiful and we saw so much wildlife. We loved the Emerald Falls and Weeping Rock (water coming out of porous rock all over the place.) I wish we could have hiked up the Narrows but the water level was too high...we saw amazing pictures online! We also stood in some wagon ruts in Oregon not too far from Mt. Hood. There were a few sites there along the Oregon Trail. We actually saw Barlow Road where they had to lower the wagons down with rope. Redwoods - Amazing gigantic, beautiful trees that smells sooo good. We drove through a redwood tree too! We went to the End of the Oregon Trail site, as well as the end of the Lewis & Clark trail at Seaside and saw Fort Clatsop. I could go on and on. We saw so many historic sites last summer. Homeschooling is so cool! :hurray: I would love to go back east and see all that we have studied!

I sure appreciate all your input. :hurray: I really think doing the class over the 12 week time frame in a co-op sounds like the best way if we go ahead with it. You get a discount on the program $50 vs $100 if you have 10 kids or more. Books for everyone and 1 set of DVD's. She expresses that it is important to do many practice SAT tests. It just seems like it might be a good motivator to start with the DVD's then study from there. Anyone else have more input? :bigear:

This is all great information, ladies! Thank you! Anyone else have any thoughts?

Would love to hear about it! I considered doing it as a co-op as well but our schedule seemed kind of full. My daughter watched the informational dvd about it and wanted me to get it. :)