My son started just before his 3rd birthday and has been doing it pretty much continuously for almost 2 years. I keep trying to get him to take a break and try something else...he is all about trying something else TOO, but he refuses to stop his gymnastics class. He loves it. I just started my 2 year old in the mommy and me class. I think gymnastics has been great for my kids. They learn to follow multiple directions, they learn left, right, up down, front, back, side, etc. The gym we go to even incorporated colors and numbers, etc into the young kids lessons. They are all about fun and not at all about serious competition or skills until much older (7ish I think).

I just found these anthologies. They also have leveled readers. The website sucks as far as giving you any information. I was lucky enough to be able to look at some things in person because my father-in-law buys curriculum for a school district in California and he had a bunch of stuff that he let me brows through. I am going to try them out this school year and see how it goes, but I like how they look. The anthologies are basically a story, some comprehension activites and a writting activity.

Anyone have a link to a website with info about Hagamos Caminamos? I would love to check it out. Thanks!

This is SO my son! He will talk to anyone, anywhere, and of any age. I think it is great that he is so comfortable, but sometimes he can talk people's ears off.

My friend just gave me this and I have to say I am not at all impressed. It is just a video really, and not a great one at that. I have not looked very much into Spanish programs (my husband and I are bilingual, English/Spanish, so we just talk to them as a means of teaching them Spanish for now), so I don't know what else to suggest. But for what this costs, I would expect something much better. Just my opinion.

I have started reviewing a lot. My son was fine until we got to the end of the section on blends. Then he just started getting lost with all the different rules. Before that I didn't feel he needed it. I always start by having him read something "easy" so that he gets his confidence up and wants to continue the lesson. Then I have him review a couple of words or a sentence from a lesson he struggled with. Then we do the new lesson. At the end of that we play a game (which is really review as well). This is his "reward for getting through the harder/more boring parts of the lesson. I use games mostly from "Games for Reading" by Peggy Kay.

We totally school around dh's schedule. If he is working, we are doing some kind of school thing. That way when he is off we can play. He works Mon-Thurs, four 10 hour days.

I know how you feel. I live in Hawaii and shipping here is horrible. I can never do media mail because it takes months to get here (literally 2-3 months) and is so unreliable, sometimes things never come. So I do priority mail, always, and the cost basically defeats the benefits of buyinmg used. I usually go for things that I can get with free supersaver shipping on Amazon. Or, I wait until I have a huge order for rainbow resource so I can get the free shipping with them. I really hate to pay shipping. Also, we basically can't get anything locally, so that is not an option...oh well.

Sorry, I did mean Peak With Books vs the 5-7 year old curriculum (I am not very familiar with MBTP myself). Thank you for the feedback. It is good to know that he would need to be able to write. I will let her know about that. I am not sure where he is as far as his writting skills go.

Good to hear that it has worked well for others. It looks a little more fun than some other things I have looked at. I am considering checking it out.

I am asking this for a friend. She wants to use MBTP and is unsure weather to get the prek or k curriculum. I have no experience with it so I told her I would post here. Her son will be 5 in December. He is pretty bright for his age I think. He reads cvc words and two consinent blends, maybe even other things I am not totally sure. I told her from what I have seen here she probably will want to do some phonics and math in addition to MBTP? Her main question is weather to get the prek or k. Is the prek pretty easy? Or Challenging? Would the K level be too hard for him since he will still be 4 for a while? Thanks!

Has anyone used this? How did you like it? I saw it while browsing timberdoodle and am just curious.

Thanks! My son would love that. He loves to make up stories and put on "plays" so that is right up his ally. I also have an almost 2 year old who I think would get a kick out of participating in the acting out part. Always a bonus when I can figure out what to do with her while we are doing school stuff. :001_smile:

My son (5 yrs old) is around lesson 80 of OPGTR. He is doing great with it, but I feel like we are both getting a little burnt out and bored with it right now (even with all of my extra little ways I try to make it more exciting for him--letter tiles, white board, making little books, etc). I just feel like we need to take a little break from it and do some really FUN stuff with reading. I definately want to go back to it, and I don't want to completely take a break from phonics all together because I want him to keep practicing and improving fluency. I started this one game with him where I write a list of words and he has to "speed read" them (read them without sounding them out) and he crosses off the ones he is able to to the first time and leaves the ones he cant, then hegoes back and tries the missed ones again until he gets them all. He loves this. I would like to find a couple more activities like this to just help him practice. Thanks for any ideas you can share!

This is why I really like Right Start. My son begs for "More Math!" This week I tried to take a week off (because I needed it) and my son said "OK, but we are still going to do math right?" So that is the only thing we are doing this week.

Yahoo! I am glad we were not the only ones with this problem and that I can just forget about it for now. Thanks to everyone for responding.

So my son and I are about 3/4 of the way through Right Start A and we both really enjoy it. However, today we did our first lesson with the calculator and he was completely frustrated using it and remembering all the steps to make it skip count. Honestly, I kind of felt like "What is the point of him learning to do this on the calculator?" So my question: If I just of ignore the calculator and have him do the lessons without them are we going to be missing out on some critical thing that will be a problem later? Thanks!

I got really lucky and was able to get a couple from our local kids' consignment shop. If you have anything like that where you are I would look there. I always get great stuff from ours. You have to check often though because good stuff goes fast.

Just an idea...I am doing OPGTR with my son (almost 5yrs old) and he takes a lot of practice to read fluently too. What I do is before each lesson we do a speed reading game I got out of "Games for Reading" by Peggy Kaye. (I changed it a bit to fit our needs, but the general idea was from that book.) I just write a bunch of words that he needs to practice on the white board. Then he has to try to "speed read" them (i.e. read them without sounding them out). If he can do it he gets to erase the word, if not it stays up. Once we get to the bottom we go back to the top and repeat the words he missed until he gets them all. Sometimes I will give him a sticker at the end or something as a reward for a job well done. My son completely HATED review before and would fight me on it all the time. Now that is his favorite part of the reading lesson. Hope that help. Tamara

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. I am really leaning toward BFSU. I really like how it is all connected together. It makes a lot more sense to me than the the more traditional way that I was taught science. I admit that I am a bit intimidated by the fact that I will have to do a bit more planning and figuring out on my own (this is a result of my own inadequate science education and consequent lack of confidence in this area), but I am going to talk it over with my dh and see what he thinks and maybe he will help me a bit with the planning at first until I get confident. The fact that their is a yahoo group makes me feel more at ease. Thanks again for all the responses.

I think that you are going to have to learn and speak with them. My husband is totally fluent (Spanish is his first language) and I get by ok. Our kids both speak Spanish and English with basically equal proficiency, but even with this situation we have to be the ones to initiate the conversation in Spanish or else they revert to English. We started a rule that whenever dh is home (evenings and weekends) we only speak Spanish. This has mostly just been a challenge for me because my Spanish is the weakest by far, but it is really important to us. We also do the only allowing them to watch videos in Spanish. This mostly works as a way for us to really limit what they watch. Honestly, I think if you really want them to be fluent you are going to have to work at speaking it too. For a long time I thought that since dh is a native speaker and has only spoken to them in Spanish (ever, since birth) that this would be enough, but even with this ideal situation they began to complain and not want to speak Spanish, so I had to grit my teeth and dive in. The plus side...my Spanish has is rapidly improving :001_smile:

My son (5yrs)...who is obsessed with Leap Frog videos...recently made a sign for our school room door (with out any prompting from me) that says "The Learning Factory". Well, actually it says "The lerning factry" but you get the idea. I asked him and he said that was the name of our school...so I guess we are going with that.

My ds5 does gymnastics, soccer, and drama club (with a local homeschool group). We also have a regular, once-a-week meet up with a couple of other homeschool families where the kids play and one of us mommies plans a couple of relaxed, but "schoolish" activites. I feel like this is a little too much for me, but he loves it all and I can't get him to drop anything. He really wanted to do soccer and I took him out of gymnastics when we signed him up and after a month he was begging to go back, so now he is in both. The Drama club and other meet up are places he gets to hang out with friends regularly and I like that for him.

I am pretty new to this, so I haven't tried too hard yet, but I live in Hawaii, and I am finding that once I factor in shipping from a bunch of different places to get used stuff it comes out about the same to just order off Amazon and get free shipping or do a bulk order somewhere else and then they can at least ship everything together and I save that way. Also, usually people who ship used stuff want to ship media mail...this takes up to 8 weeks to get from the mainland to Hawaii and is very unreliable (I have had a number of items shipped to media mail that never made it). With bigger companies they usually will only ship priority to Hawaii. I honestly don't think buying used is going to be worth it for me, but that may just be because of my location.

Thanks for mentioning these. We do use these videos too. Our library has just about all of the "All About..." series and my son does enjoy them. He absolutely LOVES Magic School Bus. I have been able to find most of the complete episodes on youtube and my mom is in the process of recording them for us every Saturday morning off the Spanish tv station where she lives (we are a bilingual family), and I think we have checked out every Magic School Bus book ever written from the library at least twice...I even started requesting some through interlibrary loan because I wanted something new.