Heart of Dakota History Odyssey All About Spelling

Swallows and Amazons to my 11yo and 7yo. I also read from a Greek Myths or Andrew Lang's Fairy Tales once a week.

Same here. We focus on biographies of famous Americans and a light overview of American history before starting Ancients.

Thank you! Yes, John Holt was who I immediately thought of.

I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but I thought I should also mention that this would be for a Christian family in the UK. Their oldest just turned five, but started school at four.

but not unschooling. I have a neighbor interested in learning more about homeschooling. The appeal to them is allowing the child to follow their interests, but not necessarily unschool. What would be a good book to recommend?

Lately we have been spending about an hour to just under two hours doing "book basket" time. We pray, read the Bible and poetry, review the poetry or Bible passage we are memorizing and then I choose two to three of the other books we have going to read. Generally, we have a classic literature book, historical fiction book, myth or fairy tale book, missionary story and Shakespeare in the basket. I am toying with the idea of assigning each type of book a day of the week (i.e., the classic literature book would be our Monday book, the missionary story would be our Tuesday book, etc.) so I'm not reading so many books on any given day and we can read a larger amount of each book at a time. We are also going to start a lunchtime audio book that we will try to listen to each day. Now all of this is with my 11 and 7 yo. My high school students do all their own reading. I stopped doing read alouds with them last year, and I only got one book read to them then. They don't like for me to read to them during the day because they like to get on with their individual studies, and it's become too difficult to find the time in the evening due to babysitting jobs, youth group, Bible studies and other social activities. I may keep trying. Even getting through only one or two books a year is better than nothing.

So helpful, ladies! Thank you!

Thank you!! This is very helpful!

Good point. And after looking into it further, I can get FLL3's TM and workbook here in the UK, but for some reason only FLL4's workbook is available. Just the workbook won't do me much good. So if I decide to use FLL I will definitely start with 3. We will have visitors from the US in late spring who could bring me the FLL4 materials.

Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who owns FLL4 to get a good look at it. I'm overseas and there aren't many homeschoolers in my area. I have Winston Grammar, but I think it might be a bit much for him right now. I thought I would use FLL first, but now I'm thinking maybe I should just try Winston and go slowly, taking two years to go through it if necessary.

If you just want to finish out the school year with some American History and then continue on with Sonlight next year, I would just read the BF Early American Primary books without doing all the extras. If even just reading through the books would be too much then I would only read the D'Aulaire biographies. They are wonderful, and that's all I do with my first graders for history anyway.

I used it to teach my oldest to read. We never even got to the 100th lesson. I think by lesson 75 she was reading pretty fluently. It did not work for my other three dc, especially my boys. The pages were too cluttered. FWIW, my two favorite resources for teaching reading are The Reading Lesson and Phonics Pathways.

I used it similarly. After anywhere from a 1/2 page to two pages of PP, we would read a Bob Book or I would read a chosen picture book pointing to the words as I read. That was it for each day's reading lesson. Now with a couple of children I did use Explode the Code workbooks on the side, but only with the children that liked them.

My 10yo ds hasn't had any formal grammar yet. He's dyslexic so we were concentrating on getting his reading and spelling up to par. I think he's ready, but don't know where to start. I'm about to begin FLL 1 with my first grader, so I was thinking it would be nice to use FLL with him as well. Can I have my ds jump in to FLL 4 without any previous grammar experience?

:iagree:

We have many forest schools near us here in the UK. They are very popular. http://www.treehouselearning.co.uk/what-is-a-forest-school-/info_1.html http://www.forestschools.com

Yes! My 7yo dd LOVES Dick-King Smith!

I agree.

Wonderful! Thank you!

My 10th grade dd is trying to finish up the Saxon Algebra 1 book. At the rate she is going, she should be finished with it by the end of October. However, she is spending two hours a day on it and that's not even doing a complete lesson. She spends at least 30 minutes going over the lesson and doing all the practice problems. Then she does either the odds or evens (depending on the day) plus any extra on which she feels she needs more practice. But she still tends to get three or four wrong each day. She claims they are mostly silly mistakes and not a result of not understanding the problem. However, some days we do have tears over how long the lessons take or a missed problem that she can't understand how Saxon got the answer, even with the solutions manual. Her test scores are mostly in the 80's or low 90's. I want her to finish the Saxon Algebra 1 book since she is so close, but where do we go from here? I had her take the MUS placement test and she didn't even pass the algebra 1. I've heard some people claim that Saxon students can only do the problems if they are presented the exact way Saxon presents them. She says she can see that that's the case. However, she also took the Teaching Textbooks placement test and scored (by the skin of her teeth) ready to go into their algebra 2. I would imagine that score would have been much better if she had already finished the Saxon book. She is not a STEM student. She is interested in history and government, and is thinking about going in to law or business. We would REALLY appreciate some advice. TIA!

My oldest used BCM in 8th and did fine with it. However, she wasn't able to place into Saxon Algebra 1 for 9th grade. She had to do a quick run through Saxon Algebra 1/2 last year for 9th before starting in the algebra book. Now she's behind a bit as she won't finish the algebra 1 book until October. If I had to do it over again I would not have used BCM. I would have used Lial's Pre-Algebra or Saxon's Algebra 1/2 in 8th.

Thank you! I was all set to order the AG, but now I'm thinking of just ordering Bibilioplan. It seems to have the church history and Famous Men book scheduled in for me.

Has anyone lined these up together? Actually, I'd be interested in any schedule using SOTW 2. Also, do you find the activity guide helpful? The child I'm doing this with doesn't enjoy hands-on activities. Besides SOTW, we will probably just do lots of extra reading and some narrations. We have our own resources for map work, so I wouldn't need the ones in the activity guide. Would it still be worth getting? TIA!

I just finished reading The Adventures of Odysseus by Hugh Lupton to my 10yo and 6yo. They really enjoyed it.