Can you share more about Keepers of the night? I've never heard of it and wouldn't have guessed from Amazon that it would be something for nature study, at least not the one I just looked at. And TC? We have POE and haven't really begun adding it to what we were already doing with American History using BF and TQ. Thanks!

For little ones, we also love the Hide 'Em in Your Heart cd's and videos by Stever Green. You can hear them for free here http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/search/songs/?query=hide%20em%20in%20your%20heart%20steve%20green And the Susan Hunt ABC Verses book is fun too!

Our church provides our list each year by week, so I use it. But I wanted to say 4 things - 1) my friend's church does theirs as this really cool Sword Drill where there are set questions with answers from scripture. Do the caller calls a question. The kids have to find the standard reference they were given for the answer, flip to it, review, step back, close Bibles. Then the caller calls on one and they recite the scripture by memory. it was an awesome thing to see! I want to begin this. 2) Memorizing whole books or chapters is awesome and I think even more helpful. Check out John Piper reciting some here - You’ve gotta let your kids watch it. not only a fabulous example of hiding the word in our hearts, but also a good example of how to orate! 3) Use a review system like Mnemosyne or Simply Charlotte Mason's to help them stick for life. 4) be accountable to someone and you'll learn more faster. HTH!

This is what we do. We all meet at a set time, which we just made a little earlier when daylight savings started. We each have identical One Year Bibles and rotate reading a paragraph each till we finish that day's passage. Then we each have a notebook of memory work to practice and the notebooks are all identical. Each memory piece is inserted into a sheet protector since we use them so much. Right now it includes our Shurley Jingles, some sizzle bops bc/ I just learned about those on this forum so added one and will add more as we learn each, the Preamble, a blank map of the US inserted into a plastic sheet protector which we label daily with states and capitals as we listen to Kathy Troxel's cd, a blank map of the continents (ditto), the Pledge, the Lord's Prayer, Apostles Creed, and our poetry for the year, and I can't remember the rest. Oh yes, it has art prints in it too. And scripture memory. After we review, we all do handwriting and listen to our hymn of the month at the same time. We add a verse a week. We have cd's of them, but a really fun thing we began is to find them on Grooveshark too and put them in our Grooveshark playlist. That has been very fun bc/ we now listen to Ray Charles singing America the Beautiful whereas before it was this cheesy version from a kid cd. Oh - we also found out that 2 of our Christina Rossetti poems were put to music as hymns. So now we listen to them too! One has a Jars of Clay version and we found a hysterical video for it on youtube. It is "Love Came Down at Christmas". All of this has made our year so "successful" in terms of memory work. Now all of us know most of this 100%. We are soon to add in the Presidents using the genevieve foster song, and the Declaration. We do a lot of work together now. Even the 5 y.o. is in for most of it and yells out, "direct object," as we classify sentences on the white board for MCT. Totally fun! Edited to say - we do our Latin review during Latin time. We just listen to the cd as we color the pictures off of the headventure website and then do 1 new page in the workbook. I guess we could add flashcard style review for this and AAS at the beginning of the day. Hmmm...

:iagree: WWE4 is challenging for my dd10, turning 11 in one month. She struggles with comprehending the passages as well as remembering the dictations. If WWE3 would work, I'd say it would be fine. But WWE4 would be for sure.

one thing that you all might enjoy that certainly builds audio memory is to memorize some poetry. Andrew Pudewa's Linguistic Approach is a great way to start. K'ers are so ripe for memorizing. It is also a fun time to hang a map on a wall and use geography songs cd to memorize the states, the continents, etc. Once you start, learn one well then move on, practicing the other sometimes. Plus, this impresses the family :) Youtube has really fun examples of 2-5 y.o.'s who know the world's countries and obviously have a blast of it with their parents. Ditto on holding off on SOTW, imho. Jim Trelease's Read-aloud Handbook is a super way to get a fabulous reading list but is also a great read! nature study is so fun with a k'er - learn your evergreens over winter together, start a sketch book to keep for life... have fun!!!

We are doing a blend as well. I am really glad I purchased the TQ guide, even though it isn't my spine, bc/ I use it to get any books I can off of Paperbackswap and Bookmooch. We've managed to get quite a lot! And I like it for the movie and extras choices. My friend loves using it to get the plan for using Light and Glory as her spine. We use BF as ours. We also own SL3 and follow its IG for my older 2 but they do all of that independently. We only discuss what we read-aloud from BF. We did just begin a History Pocket for fun. And we have some Time Traveler cd's from Homeschool through the Woods. It has been a fun year, our best yet, and our first to hodge-podge it like this.

Could you make it a time-based class each day so that some days you finish more than "a day's work"? We are doing 4 pp a day and so will catch up, but I am very prepared to slow down if needed. Each time though that i have thought it was that time, we got to something we had already covered in our previous math curriculum and so things got much better suddenly. Every now and then we hit a read tough spot. DD10 is just starting 4B. We did 3A and 3B this summer and 4A this year starting in August I think. We did 5 pages a day for a while and it was hard work! I wouldn't recommend it! Now she thinks 4 pp a day is a breeze!

My ds7 is doing MCT Grammar Island w/ his older sibs and loving it. It is written for gifted students supposedly, but only my ds would qualify and all are gleaning so much. We do most sentences on a white board and make a game of it. The books have fun stories to teach the points and we all love it.

We are having a super time doing nature study in our co-op. We picked trees recently on the property and are studying 2 per time together, tracing their leaves in our nature journals, water coloring their leaves, bark rubbing, researching them in tree guides to ascertain exactly which kind they are, etc. We are excited at the thought of following them all year long! We also are memorizing poetry and every week the kids all stand and one by one recite that week's poem. So everyone is getting better at presenting. And we do composer study, so we did Carnival of the Animals and made masks for every animal. With 14 parts to it, this could last a long time. It has several well known songs integrated into it, like the Can-can, so is fun to study!

Us too! I'm so glad you said this about doing school all day but fun. I keep reading posts about folks doing an hour of school per grade level and then I feel guilty! My kids school all day altogether, but we love what we are doing. Yet, if they had their druthers, they'd be 2 houses down playing with cousins. School could never be fun enough to surpass cousin-time! Sometimes the cousins do ask to join in our water coloring, sentence family, nature study, and other stuff though! Anyway, thanks for saying that. It helps me feel better about the path we've chosen this year! The scary thing is that I'd add in even more if it were up to me alone. But I think at that point I'd burn our kids!

Ohhh- great idea! I didn't think of a purposeful supplement of MM with MM for further review and application. So if we bought the full set of Light Blue, should we still buy the topic-focused or is it easy to figure out how to add in extra review from the extra practice?

We don't line up topics at all b/w the 2nd curr and the 1st.

My dd10 bombed on the test too. I ended up starting her in MM3 anyway and later wished I'd start her at an earlier level and had her go a certain amount of time a day until she is caught up. We do MEP 1 page per day and about 5 pages of MM a day. We are finally at MM4B and just relaxed to 4 pages a day. What I've found is that it really has helped to give her much better reasoning and thinking skills than she had. I am glad she did it. We took some time off to go through an 8 step model drawing book by Char Forstren and that is the best pay-off I've seen yet. My dd still struggles but we just keep plugging away. R&S is very fact oriented and repetitive. Perhaps it would work as a 2ndary curriculum to work through slowly as you do MM. I wouldn't give up on MM. I'd just start at MM1 and work through it as you do something else like MEP at whatever grade level she can do MEP. There are things taught in MM1 that my dd never caught onto in any other program. I am realizing now as my ds7 works through MM2 (just finished MM1 last year) that I really should have started dd10 in MM1 as well, for her sake to fill in the gaps. .02...

We've been homeschooling for about 10 years. I've learned the very most in the last 3 or so years, since I found this forum. My advice is to read it a lot! :tongue_smilie: Truly, I read and read and glean and glean. And my kids would say they love school now more than ever. The folks that say to stick with curriculum whether or not your kids love it aren't giving advice I'd heed. I sort the threads and read the ones with the most replies, taking copious notes in a document of my school notes. I recently read on here about Evernote and now use it for these school notes and all of my life notes! So, my 2nd advice after reading the forum often is to find curriculum you love and your child loves too. As you listen to her and observe, you can learn so much about her style of learning and tailor to it. One book that I enjoyed bc/ of this forum is Liping Ma's book, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics. You'll enjoy it. Find a good used copy or use the library. Perhaps you can listen to audiobooks at breakfast and lunch, as well as audio - poetry. Librivox.org is something we discovered a year ago and we have audio something playing all of the time here. I've gleaned a lot from the ambleside website about what is available on librivox in way of classics. We listen in the car always. The Truthquest guide (while we don't use it as a history spine) has also been a great resource bc/ it lists movies and audio to go along with our history studies. So today we listened to Focus on the Family's rendition of Squanto while making a quick errand. And after reading a thread last week about History Pockets, I ordered one used to coincide with our current history study and added it to our week. The kids were thrilled! Enjoy memorizing poetry. The Andrew Pudewa book is a great one and we love having the cd companion. It gave us the impetus we needed to branch out on our own this year. It has been a blast! We also study composers and found in our study of Carnival of the Animals that there are poems about the animals. We weren't afraid to then memorize those poems too! And as we studied poems by Christina Rosetti we found that 2 are now favorite Christmas hymns so we added them to our grooveshark playlist and listened to them all this week during our handwriting time. The kids are loving this! Seriously, we are having so much more fun now that we are using curriculum tailored to our family. I found the curriculum mainly by reading this forum, searching with advanced search for "love ----" in the title filling in the dashes with science or math or whatever. I read all of the posts about switching after just weeks or rather quickly and noted in my evernotes that people tend to switch away from ----- and so I skip those choices. And I was able to glean that many people love ----- so we switched to those. Has it been worth switching? Absolutely! My kids thank me for it! The RS games have been so much fun that my son asks to play them. Enough for now. Have fun. Everyday at home with our kids is a blessing!

I have a note to try this one after bbc. http://www.typingweb.com/

I recently asked a question about testing, so just wanted to let you know in case it helps (even though it doesn't address your exact question), that you can give her old tests that are available online from several states. Here are links to some. When you look, you'll see that they are really just about identical from state to state too: Texas TAKS tests are published free online TAKS TAKS–M grade 4 math http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/resources/release/tests2009/taks_g04_math.pdf answer key http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/resources/release/expect/2009/taks_key_g04_math.pdf FCAT released tests free online NC released tests http://www.ncpublicschools.org/accountability/testing/eog/sampleitems/math

We bought this book http://www.amazon.com/8-Step-Model-Drawing-Singapores-Problem-Solving/dp/1884548954/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1288904688&sr=1-1 First they write the answer with a fill in the blank: Mom bought ___ boxes of cereal. Then when they are done, they fill in the blank, make sure that is what they determined properly and that it makes sense. This book has helped tremendously with my dd10 and word problems. It hasn't been the end-all cure, but it sure has made her grow in leaps and bounds! I recommend it highly.

I ordered it. I have more credits at swapaDVD. What do you suggest now? Favorites and classics... We have Sound of Music and we have Emma.

Has anyone seen all of the 3 suggestions who could tell me the best of these 3? thanks!

http://www.sovgrace.org/5PTS.html http://www.reformedonline.com/view/reformedonline/fivepts.htm

thanks!

Truthquest and Guest Hollow are both great, inexpensive options.

I think MCT gets to writing and people love it. We are on Island level and so not writing yet.

I'm fairly certain that SSRW had us reread every story 3 times. At least, that is the way we did it and I think we got the idea from the manual. It helped so, so much! My kids didn't memorize, and did become fluent and expressive more readily than I think they would have otherwise.