Choirs that use the Kodaly method, and are geared for K-3 anyway, should be a good fit for your dd. However, you may want to see what the performance schedule is (too many performances is not a good thing) and how long each class session is. I would think that an hour would be too long, unless activities are varied. At this age, they really should be having something more like a music class, rather than a true choir, which is what Orff/Kodaly teachers do, so you might just want to confirm this. I'm a former music teacher and children's choir director, by the way. :)

I was wondering if your grammar studies have lined up nicely so that you've already studied verbals by the time you get to Homer B. If not, how have you handled it? With my first ds, we were finishing R&S 5 at the time, and so I took off a couple of months, finished 5, and skipped to 7 (because R&S6 didn't seem to cover verbals, at least per the Table of Contents). Then I began Homer B after he had learned about verbals. My problem is that my next ds, who is in 6th grade, is only halfway through R&S5. We've fnished Homer A, and have one more week of Poetry A before starting Homer B. I'm wondering if I should just take a long break from CW, and use my CW timeslot to do grammar so that we'll finish sooner, or if I should just explain what's necessary to know about verbals in order to do the CW lesson. What have you done? Thanks,

(And we live in Georgia, not that that really has anything to do with it, of course.) :D I also prefer drawings to photos, because the artist tends to know what to emphasize and what to minimize, whereas photos capture everything, including whatever distortions the sunlight may create, and I have a harder time identifying things with photos.

Yes, yes, yes. Ditto to Beth's post.

I have both volumes of Streams for sale on the swap board, if you need them.

Jumping in here -- yes, you'll read the "how to stuff" and then jump to the chapter on the genre you want. I think "the novel" is the first genre discussed. Don't worry about the whole "read it three times" thing, especially with something like Don Quixote. Taking little notes here and there in a notebook, or on post-its, it a good idea. Then once you read the book through, you can go back to your notes/questions re: specific passages, and re-read those sections. My book club has been reading the novels suggested in TWEM, but I've had to drop out because of the Omnibus reading, etc. that I'm having to do. I have read all of the books up to The Return of the Native, so if you want to discuss anything, I'd love to join.

You're very welcome, Cyrena! I can't believe someone hasn't thought of selling plastic ones! (Small black ones for dorm room refrigerators would be great too, don't you think?) :) Blessings,

If you want a set of templates already formatted in Word, just email me and I'll send them to you. julieshields@comcast.net :)

I'm just putting this doc right into the body of a post, because it's too big to attach, and it seems easier than downloading it from savefile.com. So, here are the directions: How to Make Greek Refrigerator Magnets Materials: Polymer clay, about ½ ounce per letter, in various colors, plus some transparent clay, or clay the same color as your fridge. Templates for tracing Set of magnets (Magnetic tape will not be strong enough.) We used Ace Hardware #26301 (magnet assortment pack – thin enough to cut with scissors) Cutting board and exact-o-knife To make the templates: 1. Open a Word document and set the font to Arial Black, size 175. 2. Use the “insert symbol†feature to insert capital Greek letters into the document. 3. Format the font to “outline.†4. Print out, cut out, and glue to cardstock or 3X5 cards. (Or just print them out on cardstock.) Cut them out again, cutting the curves carefully. To Make the Letters 1. Press out some clay to a thickness of ¼ inch. Use a letter template to trace around and cut the shape out of the clay. Smooth your edges with a knife, spatula, or clean fingers. Place on a cookie sheet. 2. For theta (Θ), we let the middle section connect to the sides (more like the small-case theta), so that it would be easier to make. 3. For ksi (Ξ), we made the three bars first and baked them. Then we took some transparent clay and made a base to press the bars into, and baked it again. 4. Bake the letters at 265 degrees, for half an hour, or as your clay instructions indicates. 5. When cool, use super glue to attach magnets. Test a couple of letters on your fridge to be sure they’re strong before continuing to glue on the magnets.

Thanks for the help. Here's the file: http://www.savefile.com/files/1368313

I'm not sure how to post a link to a word document that's not on the internet. Help, someone!

I'm not familiar with Living Books curriculum, but could you just skip ancients (or use the Bible for a year) and then pick it back up at middle ages?

You may want to wait a couple of years for Treasure Island; Moby Dick would definitely be over his head. SWB herself confesses to only getting through the first half. :eek: Some other suggestions (recently read by 8yo ds) are: books by Clyde R Bulla (Three Dollar Mule, etc.) Redwall series, definitely. My ds can't put them down (just turned 9). Encyclopedia Brown series The Sword in the Tree (ds loved it) Robin Hood by Bob Blaisdell (Dover Children's Thrift Classics The Sign of the Beaver (We watched the so-so movied version, which got him interested enough to read the book. :)

Jacobs Algebra

Yes -- for systematic grammar we use R&S, but don't do every single thing in the book. We don't do all of the written exercises, for example. For contextual grammar, we're using CW. I really love having both approaches;they really reinforce each other. We only do R&S once per week, and take about 1.5 years to do a book.

just let me know the title. It's a long shot, of course. If I were looking, I would try all the sites. I'm not sure bn.com has been mentioned -- they also sell out of print stuff, like Amazon.

You can also make your own with colored paper: big red squares for 100's, blue strips for tens, and little green squares for the ones. I don't bother with 2's, 3's, etc. (at least not yet).

Around 6th or 7th grade, you can ditch spelling, and do vocabulary studies instead. I don't use a vocab curriculum; my ds gets his vocab work from two sources: Classical Writing (weekly vocab analysis), and Latin (weekly vocab list with a study of derivatives). Of course, if your dc are struggling with spelling, you can extend spelling studies, or continue to focus on spelling with your vocab studies. Does this help?

I haven't used Spielvogel, but seeing as Veritas Press has given it a 5-star rating, I don't think it would be too objectionable to Christians. :) (Re: evolution -- I don't think it's even addressed, because a history text wouldn't necessarily deal with pre-history.)

n

And before I get into it, I thought you'd want to know that the online program for Omnibus is 3 hours per week, in addition to the reading & writing assignments. That averages out to about an hour (or a bit more) per day. My 13yo ds is currently using Omnibus II, and will do Omnibus III via the Online Scholars program next year. Omnibus breaks the assignments down into a basic daily pattern of: activity/writing assignment + reading assignment. (So each day, you're doing work related to what you read the previous day, and then reading ahead to be ready for the next day's work.) We like to switch it, and begin with a reading assignment, followed by its related activity in the same day. The reading can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes, followed by questions that can take 15-30 minutes to answer and discuss. It averages out to 45 min to 1 hour per day for my son (who is a fast reader). Questions are usually given in 3 categories: text analysis, cultural analysis, and Biblical analysis. We often skip the cultural analysis, or just look at it briefly. Questions like "how does the world view X?" annoy me, because any answer would be a guess at best (just my opinion). Still, I know what they're getting at, so we talk about these occasionally, basing our answers on what we read in news magazines, or see on TV or in movies. Oops - got off track. Okay, so in addition to the regular routine of the three kinds of questions, every few days there will be a "recitation." This is basically a comprehension quiz, which can be done orally, or in writing. There are also several optional activities and essay assignments. We've been skipping these, because he's doing CW as well, but will begin to "ramp up" this spring, in order to be ready for the online course. One more thing (if you make it this far -- sorry for the length of this post). Don't feel like you have to do every book. If you want to skip a book, it's fine. If it makes things easier, concentrate on the primary resources, and assign some of the secondary resources as "fun" reading (w/ no assignments connected to them). HTH,

I haven't used this, and probably won't because I like reading out of books. Also, I type pretty quickly, so it's almost easier for me to type a paragraph than it is to cut & paste. In addition, you can get online books for the same prices (or cheaper) than the Amazon upgrade from various online book sellers. If the prices were lower (like just a dollar or two), I think I'd be more tempted to do it.

Me too. I would cross over to a third party candidate, possibly someone in the Constitution Party (I think that's what it's called), but still need to do my homework.

that books you find on "great book" lists (i.e. that qualify as literature) are good ones to read aloud, because you are modeling excellent language usage and beautifully crafted prose to your children. Lighter books can be fun once in a while, but they won't do what to great ones can in terms of exposing your children to the good stuff. Oops - my ds needs me. Gotta run.

As Kathie stated, (but in different words), you will always use "lower level" skills when doing higher ones. So although you'll never return to addition as a learning topic in a mastery program, you will be using it again many times to do problems with subtraction, multiplication, fractions, etc. And in many mastery-based programs, you will also have review problems from previous units added on to the end of the exercises.