:iagree: I like Rex Barks a lot. My oldest is using AG, but I considered throwing in Rex Barks when he finishes. It's a very winsome approach to what could be a tedious subject.

If I might suggest your last question is an excellent idea even if he was already dating. Manners and restaurant skills are useful for job interviews and working as well. I can remember reading about what to order at a job interview based on what others ordered. Those kinds of skills are good to know and rare is the friend who will tell you that.

I may be misunderstanding what she is saying: I agree with what you suggest here (in fact you have more nicely stated my original point which she disputed), but her argument was with my original point that diagramming must continue so I assumed (maybe incorrectly) that her quote above indicates an early discontinuation of diagramming. You, I believe, are repeating my original point that you must use it or lose it, and I absolutely agree with you that children must build up to more complex sentences as they themselves develop the ability to work with more complex ideas. And they must be taught explicitly to apply it to their own writing. But perhaps I am misreading. It's been know to happen.

Quite true, but I suspect that it may have been the glue that held the classical system of education together for as long as it did. When the glue disappeared the system slowly crumbled. By the time you and I were in school the glue was long gone and only components of the overall system still existed and those mostly in individuals not whole schools.

I disagree with this and the analogy to math. I learned to diagram and multiply in grade school. Multiplication I kept doing because it was very directly in my math each day in school, but when my school stopped teaching diagramming, I stopped using it. While I picked it up quicker when I worked through Rex Barks, I did not use it like SWB suggests in her approach to writing. And it wasn't required of me in the same way multiplication was required of me in my daily math. So I think both some occasional grammar and diagramming should be incorporated into an overall writing program. Analytic Grammar keeps this to less than 15 minutes every two weeks, but much depends on the student and their skills and interests, some students might need more frequent doses. And I think it would be wise in late middle school to teach the writing usage. That was never taught to me, and I did not make the connection.

I suspect any school at the time of the reformation and probably for centuries after would by its very nature and time period be "classical." It wasn't until the 19th century that schools began to give up serious study of Latin (and at later ages Greek),by beginning Latin in very young ages and reading works in it. This was also the point when scholars began to write in their own languages and not Latin.

Did you read the sample chapter? That will give you the why would diagramming in particular help a writer. And SWB says it much better than I do.

I agree with the idea of making them. I've found that if the student makes their cards, they will actually learn as part of that process not just using the cards. However, there are also now, lot's of free sites and apps for making electronic flash cards. Some keep track of whether you are getting a card right and bring it back to you more or less often depending on how you are doing.

SWB gives one very strong answer by showing how being able to diagram a sentence can help improve writing: http://www.welltrainedmind.com/store/media/downloads/pdfsamples/wwesample.pdf Here's the thing, if in whatever grade a child is a whiz kid of diagramming how long will they remember that skill to be able to use it naturally and easily later while writing? There's an old saying that if you don't use it you lose it, I think that is very true of skills like diagramming and other grammar related knowledge.

Read the Bible out loud together! The National Survey of Youth and Religion found that reading the Bible themselves was one of very few things that correlated with ongoing church attendance after a child passed 18 and left home. Devotions, special study classes, world view classes, etc. did not correlate. Don't just read the stories any more, read the whole thing or at least big chunks of other books.

I agree that it is not a glorified reading list. It is well worth it the price for just the 7th grader. Yes, the older child would work on their own although if you wish to do projects I'd try to do something all of them could work on. I suggest using SWB's A Plan for Teaching Writing instead of Writer's Aids which I did not find very helpful way to nebulous and it doesn't really teach a child how to write. Instead it delineates various writing projects. SWB's audio talks are $4 and are extremely helpful in teaching the path to writing. The 3 week sample is very accurate and if anything later years than Year One are better so the longer you stay with TOG the better it will get. (And if you are looking ahead, I would wait and get the revised Year One they are currently working on).

I used SL from PreK to Eastern Hemisphere and it was Eastern Hemisphere that proved to be my moment of disaffection because it so lacked any effort to get the child to think critically at all. I ended up developing my own questions for the readers. So personally, I'd look at the books they use and I'd carefully pull out the ones that seem like you and yours would find them interesting and plug them into Tapestry where appropriate. Tapestry does cover most of the non Western areas in their four year rotation they just stay more history focused rather than cultural focused. But you could read the read alouds out to your kids at the right moment or just over the course of the year.

My guess is they have seen parent transcripts but haven't detected them. Personally, I say out them and find another school to go to.

You may also wish to read this blog post on exporting quotes and notes from Kindle: http://technosavvy.org/2010/09/12/exporting-kindle-notes-and-highlights/

We've done a few. The ones in elementary ages on plants were good, the one on electricity was also good, we struggled with magnets (although I'm not sure exactly why as it has been years). More recently I used the analysis and animal survival with good success those were with older children (middle school). In our case we did our studies with other books on similar topics for the most part. The animal survival book we did at the beginning of a year long study on ocean life and it was done while we read a Rachel Carson book called Under the Sea Wind. It was not a direct tie into this book, but just served to give a hands on view of animal survival and camouflage. I think the results in terms of learning were good.

Asimov wrote a series about "Lucky Starr" or "David Starr" that is for young readers. Please be very cautious about a young reader and sf. Many of the older (historically) short stories and novels will be acceptable, but current sf often carries a heavy does of adult relations and violence sometimes mixed together and it can spring up totally unexpectedly.

The Other Wes Moore (this is a fairly new nonficiton book but it is purely narrative.

I also tend to think we miss when we categorize this as Puritan. Everything I've ever read about this particular bent in English literature says this is a Victorian artifact. (I have read that we refer to chicken parts as light and dark because the Victorians couldn't bring themselves to use breast and leg. I've also read they put skirts on curvy table legs for modesty.) As to whether it is religious in nature, you must ask were the previous time periods less or more religious than the Victorian age? Also, I don't think the heroine in Anna Karenina quite follows the pattern that you are saying Tolstoy heroines follow. Similarly I think the role of Helen in the Iliad is very small and in the Iliad itself we don't see her husband take her back with open arms as Troy does not fall until the Odyssey ends. If you wish to assess Greek culture and women and men, I'd suggest you need to get a bigger picture than the Iliad. You could certainly start with the companion Odyssey. C.S. Lewis says in The Allegory of Love that romantic love in ancient literature "seldom rises above the levels of merry s*nsuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated as tragic madness." As I run the list of ancient literature in my head, I find this pretty accurate. In the Odyssey we have domestic comfort and Penelope contrasted to Calysto and Circe's merry s*nsuality. In later pieces I come to Medea who certainly runs to tragic madness as does Carthage's queen (who's name, I'm afraid, escapes my memory).

I'm trying to follow the plan she lays out in A Plan for Teaching. If you had not listened to that she provides other resources for after The Rulebook for Arguments in later years (assuming you start in 9th). I will also use The Lively Art of Writing this year when we finish Rulebook. It is also fairly slim and easy to use.

I'm kind of mean. So my poor ds will continue to advance forward into college math if at all possible. With my eldest math is not his first love, but he's good at it. So we finished NEM 4A this fall and then switched to DM Additional Maths. We won't worry about NEM 4B since that is review (might do it in prep before PSAT/SAT in 11th grade, we'll see). He's in 9th grade which leaves a lot of time to fill. Our state allows 16 year olds to take cc classes for free but only STEM classes. They also require state unis to accept those as credits. Personally I'd rather deal with math and get 4 or 5 days of foreign language instruction, but that's another thread. The soonest he could take a cc class would be next winter. My plans are somewhat murky as my first goal is to talk one of two nearby LACs to allow him to take foreign language at them next fall. If I can get them to do that, then we'll add math when it seems right. In the meantime, if we finish DM Additional Math, I'll pick up the text(s) for pre-calculus and maybe calculus that those schools use. I'd rather him get ahead and be bored in a college class than feel like the class is moving too fast. Although, I will be careful not to get semesters of work ahead, just a few chapters in is my goal. AND of course, he'll also be taking that foreign language. If I go nowhere with the foreign language component, then I'll do the same with math with the local cc. Is that all clear? Or just plain murky?

It's a pretty straight drive. Most of it is now four lanes. If you are okay with staying about 20 minutes or so away, you could stay in Blowing Rock, wonderful tourist town just down the road (one of the best little town Fourth of July parades around).

When I was in college I enjoyed symbolic logic, I have nothing to offer you on texts to use though.

I think if you can find Spanish magazines you could get one of those and just let them have conversation about it. Since you have girls maybe a fashion magazine, but travel would be good, too. Really anything to get a group conversation going would work: movies, books, etc. Although some depends on their level of vocab.

Compare copying costs. You may be able to find the workbooks for less than copying cost. I also make sure I am Timberdoodle's email list for their ding sale and one thing they always seem to have slightly damaged versions of is Easy Grammar.

This helps, but I suspect you're going to end up having to do this yourself. I like to organize lists of books and plans, too (I even used the color sorting that Excel can now do as part of this process). I'm not totally sure there is a fixed AP list, but as you'll see below I've kind of walked away from AP in this area. The two challenges, beyond organizing, are do you want to make sure you do all or most of the AP lit books to the exclusion of other things along the way and how will a student do who has studied some works further ago than "last fall" on an AP test. I have also considered this dilemma, but at some point let go of the AP concept because I wasn't willing to sacrifice integrating history, lit, religion, philosophy, and art to AP. I also find it hard to believe a student would do well if some works were studied two or more years back. It would leave a boat load of AP tests for spring of the senior year (presuming you'd like to add on some matching history APs) and I know I've read that you can't take some AP tests in the same year because the timing of when tests are offered (but maybe I've misheard).