Thanks so much! My amazon cart is full!

I noted that it was on the thread lots of times about people's least favorite curriculum or one they dropped fast. So we won't be trying it!

thanks bunches! We needed something extra!

it used to be free to download on their website. dig around for it there. we liked it fine!

Thanks! What about which version of Emma?

Thank you! Can you tell if this one is the same version? http://www.amazon.com/Collection-Sensibility-Persuasion-Mansfield-Northanger/dp/B000244FFU/ref=sr_1_3?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1288723163&sr=1-3

Would love some input on this one! Purchase is gift for daughter for Christmas.

does anyone know if droid has an app for this too? I have a droid and have never added any apps! Edited to say - I am looking into this and found that they do have an app to scan the barcode and then you can run a search for word strings in the book! Crazily amazing! Edited again since you all inspired me to search hard! Found this excellent analysis of droid apps for bookshelfing: http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2010/08/15/what-are-the-best-apps-for-book-inventory-on-the-droid/

I'd love to have an inventory! We have a lot of books and sometimes i accidentally order duplicates. How do you all track the books you own? Thanks!

Rightstart A is by far my favorite. Just take it slowly. Games are fabulous!

We're doing Stick Figuring through the Bible. My kids love to color/draw, so this is great and we do it as a family. I bought the download of OT from Grapevine. In addition, we round robin read through a one year Bible for kids. Perfect for us.

I too bought Trail Guide Pathways of Exploration as well as TruthQuest and have used BF to set our pace, SL books to add gusto for my older ds's, MFW, MOH, VP, WP, Guest Hollow, and other sites to find book choices, and then paperbackswap and bookmooch as my new best friends to order the books. We are having a blast. We, like another poster, do a coloring page every day. I just scan a great pic from one of that day's reading selections and use picasa to edit it, enlarge it, add a caption, and print copies for all of us. My kids beg for coloring as I read. Trail Guide was an expensive recent purchase bc/ I just had to see it and hold it and decide for myself. I really like some elements of it, but would not say it is worth the price of a new copy. The geography method used is a fun one. We were only doing the Geography Songs cd by Kathy Troxel with blank maps and labeled maps to teach us to label the blank ones quickly. So I like the addition of Geography from TG. We don't need the Spelling (use AAS and love it), do enough copywork and dictation already in WWE (although we could drop that next year and switch to this), and already had our reading planned out. So that is a hefty price for mostly just the geography. I think Truthquest is our best purchase of the year in forming our history plan.

Mine is doing SL3 on her own.

Jackie - Can you tell us how you use MM with your ds? What I mean is, we switched to using it plus a page of MEP a day. We were doing MM overkill I fear. It helped a lot. We really like it. But, she has gotten to the place where she once again can do none of it alone. She can't recall things like 2-1/2x2000 is not 4000-1/2. So application of previously learned concepts is missing. I was thinking we'd slow way down and use RS B and games plus do MM at a normal pace. But maybe we should back up and do a previous level of MM until she has mastered it, since really I am spoon feeding her every piece at this point. I could even have her work from MM2 and just use it to check where she is unable to do the work entirely alone, moving along until I see where she has troubles and then hanging out there. Any advice? Should I do a S/O thread or will this help 5LittleMonkeys too?

I'm not sure that it will help you to know exactly what the LD is, if indeed there is a genetic cause for the struggles she is having. My oldest dd has Fragile X Syndrome and, for a female, is significantly impacted. She cannot consistently add and does math at a K-1st grade level. My 10 y.o. dd also has Fragile X Syndrome, but bc/ this syndrome is masked by the "good" x chromosome at different levels in different people, you would never know that she has it and very few people in our lives are aware that she does. Fragile X in girls is very often overlooked but extremely common. It is the #1 cause of genetic mental retardation in boys but usually in girls its effect is only seen in social skills and in math. Usually the girl will have ears that stick out, but not always. Most doctors never catch it in girls and we only knew bc/ my nephew (as are most boys with FRAX) is severely retarded and was found to have Fragile X, so we soon learned that I was a carrier and then that the baby I was carrying was affected and later that our 2nd dd also was affected. All of that to say in way of a long-winded intro, for my dd that does math at a 1st grade level, I think we would have been extremely frustrated in 1st and 2nd grade but by 3rd or so would have headed to testing. However, with dd#2 had we known nothing about Frax, we would have simply thought we had a very non-mathy kid! Yet, because we do know she has Frax, we realize WHY she struggles so in math, but not really how to fix this. My point here is that I am unsure that knowing why your dd struggles will get you anywhere. Ultimately it sounds like she is having some kind of brain/synapse issues where info is really not quickly traveling. But I don't think anyone has found the one true program for these kids. It is so hard to keep them at grade level or to know how far they will get, but we all keep trying! We've tried every math program out there. We've started back with the 1st grade level and had her move through many levels of several programs. Our most recent try is to have her work through R&S 1 through 4. When done, we realized she wasn't getting concepts but was really just memorizing techniques and we moved her to MM and lots of Singapore bar drawing practice. I had her start in MM3 (having completed R&S4) and wish now that we had started in 2. She just is missing things that were covered in 2. She made it through MM3 this summer and finished MM4A yesterday. But the truth is, she really can't do it alone. I am spoon feeding her every bite! I have RS and probably need to get out B and work through it slowly with her. She did B a year ago and games too but I put her back in R&S in an effort to move her forward at grade level. Not so bright of me. Ugh. She really can't decide what operation is required in word problems but can do the mechanics if I draw the bar and walk her through the concepts each time. She has made lots of progress and will probably place at a 3rd grade level still but should be in 5th. She's done more math than anyone I know her age. I am so glad she at least likes MM! All of this to say, testing might not really open up doors for you. It might identify why she struggles, but not how to fix it. Touchmath might help her learn her facts, but the RS suggestion is a good one. My dd learned her facts using the MUS site's drill game. She did a fact set each day until she scored a 20, then moved to the next one once she could repeat the 20. She still uses her fingers though on 2 digit numbers. She can't see to count up in her head. Feel free to pm me, but I don't know that i can help at all! I just wanted to say that a diagnosis doesn't always provide all of the answers. We're still really struggling with how to teach. I took graduate level differential equations while getting my phD, and my son without Frax can whiz through math mentally. I just wish I knew how to teach my dd's! Now to go back and absorb Heather's posts... :grouphug:

I wonder if we should all add to our signatures what didn't work. That might help us all understand other people's posts even more. For me, we ended up buying but not using long-term: Saxon Math Horizons Math Math u See BJU Math Abeka math Miquon math Sequential Spelling Excellence in Spelling Little Hands for His Glory Bigger Hearts for His Glory TOG Shurley Grammar (did 4 levels before finding MCT - what a relief!) Veritas Press history Writing Strands and Reading Strands Play N Talk Phonics Sadly, there have been lots of others. We really love what we are using now at least!

I wish i hadn't done it when mine were that age! They retained so little. What a waste. We could have been playing! reading! math games! nature study! Nature study with water colors has been a new and super fun adventure at our house. I wish we had known then! And the CLP nature readers are a much better use of my time than history and science at that age. There - I said it! Be released!

Worth it for us; and my youngers learned to alphabetize quickly by being handed that magnet board and the pile of tiles daily for a while. Once they got quick enough, we started leaving the tiles on the board. We've tried the IEW spelling program and sequential spelling with no success. This seems to work.

Could you all tell me about buying points on pbs? Is it always the same cost or can you buy them from some people more cheaply than others? thanks!

Liberty's Kids Videos Online FREE! Here is a link to watch 5 episodes online. Does Guesthollow list movies? I am pretty sure she does. Check there.

I just wanted to encourage you to really use that commute as said if you can. That is a lot of time that you could be using a Classical Conversations cd, Linguistic Approach to Poetry Memorization, and all the rest she mentioned. Also, if you have an ipod, downloading books on tape from librivox.org is free and there is a great list of which AmblesideOnline curriculum choices are available on librivox. Also, if you can possibly begin to limit all appointments till after 3pm or something like that, it will help. This is my first year of remaining with my kids throughout their schoolwork. We are getting the most done ever! Before, we schooled in the kitchen and I was constantly hopping up and trying to get laundry/cooking/cleaning done during school. Now I only teach and we all do that after school. WOW! What a huge difference that has made. We filed our year's work and that has helped. We have a schedule that says who I teach while the others do something specific. All of this has made a world of difference. We school 4 in 4 days a week, have a dad a mile away who needs us, and lots of interruptions. But we've finally made it work. I am worn out by the day's end, but we are even doing some nature study! You can do it! Hang in there and keep seeking input. Have a super year!

Gracious! That's an amazing list - thank you! Are you saying your 1st grader read all of those books to themselves? Just checkin'... Thanks for the clarification.

We do and love it, but what age(s) of children would you be targeting and which studies? I think that would affect the answers you get and their helpfulness.

can you do History Pockets from Evan Moor and choose some fun books off the Guest Hollow site to spice it up?

We were in the same boat: own SL cores preK through 6! Never used the schedule except to have an order to read the books in, didn't prefer the LA or the Science as much as we tried year after year. Finally switched to using SOTW last year and really missed the lit from SL being right on the shelf waiting for us. Me and the library don't get along and just SOTW wasn't what we want, which is great lit. So this year we are using BF as our basic schedule/frame/and spine books with SL added to it. We love it! We added in tons of fun books, pulling from book lists from Paths of Exploration, TOG, MFW, and others and I put them on a gutter shelf each week for book basket time. I stuck to mostly authors I recognize whom we enjoyed in SL. It has been our best year ever! I think I need a main curriculum to follow as a guide for our overall schedule, but then prefer to add on fun books with it. Buying the SL cores means we can always grab their great book choices as add-ins. I bought all of the cores we own used, so got super deals on them. And I try to get the extras from Paperbackswap as much as possible. But next year freaked me out bc/ there isn't an equivalent BF for the following year. I bought Paths of Exploration used because I wanted to really check out its TM's carefully in hopes that it will be a better main guide for us next year. I feel so much more confident that we can continue to have great history years after this one! I might end up just using Guesthollow as my guide next year or Truthquest, but somehow their lists offer me too many choices, just like TOG, so POE or POS seems a better choice for my starting place. Anyway, so much rambling! I hope it helps you somehow to see what others have tried after/in addition to SL. Blessings!