I love right start for wiggly ones. my 9 y.o. is reviewing with RS and doing R&S 4 at the same time. It is going great. Math is not her strong point either. but RS is really helping her think.

i bought all of the books they recommended - the red list to the purple list. seriously. i found that most were not what i was looking for (I needed/wanted books for youngers and these were for much older kids) and i didn't love them. i have loved reading them myself, but my girls were maybe 6 and 9 or 5 and 8 and i would have preferred waiting on most of the chapter books and reading more of the revised ones suggested on this forum instead. we are doing egypt again this year using the library and the SOTW recommendations and loving it. i do have my 13 y.o. reading Tirzah right now and I myself loved it. The Golden Goblet was great too but I don't want to read it to my kids yet. I think I'll wait till we go through the rotation next time. My 9 y.o. said the typeface was too small in Tirzah and she really struggled reading it. That is the first time she has ever complained about that for any book. I liked Childs History of the World. All of that said, I'd check your library first to see what they have from the VP list before buying much. Oh - all of the ones that are easy readers were great. one other note-my oldest dd can't handle reading much that is very graphic with violence. she struggles with fear issues. many of the chapter books were too graphic for her. even the golden goblet is beyond what i would want her to read with her issues. i personally enjoyed it though. i just think you could read all of the chapter books from your library and decide if you think they'd work this year for your kids. i've reread each this year to decide for mine and have still waited on most even though it is our 2nd rotation through history. we are loving the other books we are reading and all of the shorter VP recommendations though.

my kids watch zero tv shows. we don't have a tv in our living area and don't get cable. but we want educational dvd's that can teach better or faster than i can. we enjoy many, like moody science videos, magic school bus (although we own and love to read the books too)... i taught 3 of my kids to read before hearing about leap frog videos from a friend. i borrowed her dvd and I kid you not, my youngest ds knew his letter sounds from a to z after watching that dvd 2 times. 2. i could not believe it. amazing. i only wish they had one to teach multiplication :tongue_smilie:

I don't think anyone has mentioned Rightstart Math to you. I have a dd with Fragile X - some similarities. and i have a ds 6.5. He loves RS math and I have all of my kids do it with him as it is helping them all gain a better grasp of seeing math in their head and not just learning facts. I tried Miquon and it wasn't my cup of tea, but many love it. My kids all ask to play RS math games. Even if you don't use the curriculum, you can buy the games kit separately. Sounds like you are headed in the right direction. Asking for input is such a smart thing. Enjoy the road before you!

Yes! I needed something. Thanks so much for taking the time to tell us!

We just switched to RS recently. I don't know if this will help, but it helped me feel better about how we were handling review. I use sticky notes to mark all new concepts and things she refers to again. So my RS A book pg 2 sticky says 1,2, buckle. Page 10 says Next #/comes after, as well as another sticky that says Days of the Week. Pg 14 says Parallel. Pg 16 has 2: 1 says Writing # Poem. One says Put Cards in Order. Pg 18 says Perpendicular. Pg 20 says Quadrilateral and Square. Pg 22 says How Many w/ Cards and Build a # w/ Abacus/tally sticks... I could go on and on. Anyway, everyday we would start at the front, quickly flip through and review these concepts. He got them! Yippee! It helped so much and I felt better too :) Now he can point to parallel lines in the room or perpendicular, knows his shapes, etc. I felt like I needed to review like these or the time to introduce these concepts seemed wasted. I know it helps just to put the concepts in their memory bank, but still I'd rather spend a bit more time and have them stick better. Then, around lesson 30 I realized (as someone pointed out in this thread) that RS B is a repeat for the first half and I decided to start him on RS B plus continue in RS A bc/ my son is 6-1/2 and should have been in 1st grade now. We got a slow start with some major life changes/moving... and were behind. Now we do both each day and he is doing fine. We love it and all of my kids ask to please play the games each day. Their skills in mental addition are really improving. I am happy! HTH

http://www.science-groove.org/MASSIVE/ science and math songs http://gardenofpraise.com/mugram.htm grammar, Bible and other learning songs http://www.acme.com/jef/singing_science/

For my first 3, we used Sing, Spell, Read and Write. Crazy but they all loved it. I switched to OPG for #4 bc/ I am a bit tired of SSRW myself and thought it would be fun to try OPG, but the kids all begged to play a SSRW game today. How funny is that? Even the 9 yr old and 13 yr old played. And the 6 yr old begged to do SSRW today. I had given it a break and just been using the I Can Read It stories from Sonlight that another person already told you about. For all of mine, we've used those for extra practice, as well as the R&S and Pathway Readers and enjoyed the mix of all of these. BTW, having used SSRW to teach my older ones, they are speed readers with wonderful comprehension. Don't know if that is nature or nurture, but it sure is the case.

Beautiful Feet has a guide called Teaching Character through Literature. I loved the books suggested even if you don't get the guide. you can see a list here http://www.bfbooks.com/s.nl/it.A/id.288/.f

just a thought - you may try buying Sentence Family (search on this forum for more info and comments on it but we love it and my kids ask me to read it) and having him read it. also, we do shurley grammar and even with that, i make my kids their own flash cards of definitions and have them review them daily.

i bought it recently from them and don't prefer it at all! it makes the child read it off the screen basically. not what i expected at all.

I'm combining my kids and we are doing a step a day of level A. It is going great. We've used SRW and Sequential in the past, and last year they did BJU DVDs. AAS is my favorite so far. SRW was just too intensive for me. It got shelved pretty quickly. I think resale on AAS is good, so I wasn't worried about the initial cost outlay.

Today, my kids ASKED if they could play the RS games for fun with the neighbor kids AFTER SCHOOL. Enough said.

Anything free :) Do you know about this site? http://www.neok12.com/

Just this week I asked at Wild bird unlimited why they sell meal worms. He told me that if you set out about 5 in the morning and at night, you will start training your blue birds to come eat at morning and night at your house. I'd love to do this cheaply, but sure wasn't going to buy worms week after week. So I am excited that I can grow them. Where is the cheapest place to buy them first? Thanks! (We've been working on drawing birds to our yard all summer. Today we had hummingbirds all day long - success!)

i don't know - can someone tell us?

they are free online Magic School Bus videos online http://www.veoh.com/collection/Magic...Episodes/watch# by the speaker there is a square hit that and it makes it full screen Don't let your kids look around this site on there own. I just went to the educational/how to video section and some of the videos there are defiantly not kid friendly. Bill Nye videos are on youtube.

We've used both MUS and RS. We are using A&B of RS right now. I know lots of people love MUS, but for whatever reason, my kids still can't see math after using it for 2 years. They can memorize facts (which we did using R&S and BJU), but not do word problems. They still mix up addition and multiplication answers and don't quite "get" what they are doing when they multiply. We tried and tried with MUS. (Honestly, I am sure they are not math-types, but I was a little surprised they still couldn't get it.) We've only started RS about 50 lessons ago, but I think it is a better/perfect fit for us. I love the way they see that 5 and 5 is 10 on the abacus and then easily see that 6 and 4 is still 10, 7 and 3 is still 10... without having to mess with blocks. Just one abacus and they can see so much. They all really understand odds and evens now and skip counting and so much that they never really got before, and we've really just started. I was shocked that we've done R&S 1-3, MUS 2 levels, and BJU 3 but when I opened RS level C I was certain I had better backtrack and move through B first! (Holy cow, they should be moving into BJU 4 but instead are going through RS B!) There were so many concepts in there that I thought they didn't know and really understand! I've come to the place where I really don't care what "grade" they are in, but that they have a super foundation and understand what they are doing. I think that will get them much farther in life. So we are backtracking and using RS. We actually do levels A and B every day simultaneously. It is super fast. I bought the cd and am so glad bc/ I can print copies for everyone of the workbook pages. If you'll have more than one child use it, I recommend that instead of buying workbooks. We slide a laminating sheet over the pages each day so we can reuse them too, and use a wipe off marker. I wanted to be able to include these with the TM when I sell it. I think the kids think it is fun. The card games are exceptional. They ask to please do them. For the first time ever, my kids talk about math later in the day. My 6 year old son tells us math facts as he thinks of them and sees them in his head. He is happy and having fun. My girls thought the videos from MUS were great. (They often watched them with me.) They didn't want to switch. But they weren't learning to think and so we switched. I love RS. And I think they do too!

:iagree: use this year to stick to what she seems to like. have you seen this? http://homeschoolinthewoods.com/HTTA/AP/Composers.htm she has great american history stuff too!

I just wanted to add that I too own several MUS levels and switched to RS. I love, love, love it. I can't imagine anything else now. It is so much mental math and my kids are enjoying figuring it out! All of my kids do it now and all beg to play the games. I have my 4 yr old listen and answer and play games with us and we help him along. But the other 3 all do it. It is much faster for us so far than any other math methods we've tried (MUS, BJU 3 last year, R&S 1-3). But we haven't gotten into C yet. BTW, I started my then 5 y.o. in A and realized that he could probably do B after we hit about lesson 30. So now we all listen in and fly through A and then all do B. I was afraid we'd have gaps if we didn't all run through it all. This is working for us and everyone is happy. I've been shocked at how much my older ones didn't know after doing R&S 3 and then BJU 3 and now flying through RS B for a quick recap!!! They really didn't know how to think, just to memorize, even though they both did MUS for their first 2 years too. If you switch, I'd recommend getting the Transition book first and then moving into C. I think you'll find it a great fit. But I haven't used LofF. To me, the games in RS wouldn't be quite as helpful without pairing them with the curriculum. I'm glad we made the total switch. it just makes it easy to have the curriculum tell me which game to play today that reinforces what we've just thought through with the abacus. Then we also play ones we've learned previously. hth!

fwiw-the references change a bit from year to year. Even some of the jingles get additional info added. We only have through year 4 so far, but I was surprised when I realized that jingles had changed a bit! I love the idea of creating a notebook out of it. The flipping back and forth drives me crazy! We label each section in our workbook with those post-it flags that are sort of plastic, not just the paper ones, and label the front and back of each flag with a single letter, like R for reference... It works ok. I am thinking I might laminate the references though. I've also noticed that it helps if I look ahead to the test. I can draw items from the matching section of it to put on index cards with the term on the front and the definition on the back. We review these daily and talk about them as needed. It has helped us a lot to learn to apply and understand and not just do rote work. I'm getting better now at knowing when I need to do the same from new material introduced in the scripted portions of the TM. hth!

we've really enjoyed the I Can Read It series that Sonlight publishes. Great stories, building in complexity of words and length of sentences. http://www.sonlight.com/1R16.html

:iagree: You can do it in less than 3 months. We started a week ago and have done a step a day. there are only 24 steps I think. Today I should have done less or skipped some words since my dd's both knew all of it anyway. Instead I foolishly tried to do it all and they got a bit fried. Once I realized and started skipping some words, it was too late and they'd had it! Now I think I should pay attention and skip words if they really know what is going on and aren't missing a beat.

Just wondering what ones are the best of the best. We have a few. But what ones should we be sure not to miss? Or did you just use the library and try to get some of the ones listed in the AG each week? I'd buy any that people love, love, love. Thx!

i think it is also scheduled in veritas press' cycle. if it is, you'd have to buy their timeline cards to get the schedule i think.