I highly recommend the book Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz. It has great discussions of what dyslexia is as well as recommended approaches to early intervention. She seems to presume that kids are in public school and talks a lot about how to get the school system to respond appropriately, but I found many of her recommendations easily transferrable to homeschooling. She is a very strong advocate of early intervention, and so am I. I wish that I had known earlier what to work on with my son. I for too long assumed that simply using a phonics-based approach would take care of learning to read. I, unfortunately, kept believing the reassurances in the Well Trained Mind that "Reading is easy" instead of recognizing that we were actually dealing with a learning disability. What worked for us was using the Spell to Write and Read program, paired with lots of daily fluency work. My son is 10 now, and reading well, though slowly (I imagine he will always read more slowly than the average person). His comprehension is very high, however, and I feel like we're on the right track. -Kim in Iowa

I read WRTR and then purchased the SWR curriculum. This will be our third year using it. My son (10, 5th grade) has a visual processing disorder and learning to read was slow and tedious for him. We started SWR in 3rd grade, partially for spelling but mostly for working intensively on increasing his reading skills. Learning and drilling all of the phonograms worked amazingly well for him. His reading skills really began to blossom and his spellling also improved. Two years later, and my son's reading comprehension skills are high school level. He is still a very SLOW reader, but he reads well and his spelling is at or slightly above grade level, which for him is fantastic. We no longer follow all of the recommendations, but we work on the spelling lists each week and still mark all of the phonograms using their methods. I wish that we had started out in first grade with SWR. -Kim in Iowa

I keep a journal at our school desk. I write down which books we read from each day and manage to keep it up pretty well. I don't write down the free-reading books (bedtime reads, etc.). I only have one child homeschooling, however, so there is much less to keep track of than if I had all three kids at home. -Kim in Iowa

We are doing Little Britches as a read-aloud and really enjoying it. I want to order the next one in the series, but I can't figure out which one comes next. Does anyone know the order of the books in the series? -Kim in Iowa

We take the summer off from school...a full 11 weeks. My daughter attends PS, so we follow the PS schedule. My kids are VERY social during the summer, going to a variety of camps and doing lots of creative things. We also took a driving vacation to Washington D.C. and had a great time. It's funny, because I see much less of my son in the summer and always look forward to things getting back to normal when we start school again. We will get back to work on August 18th. -Kim in Iowa

I love this idea of taking a walk in the morning to get things moving. Last year we would start our schoolwork relatively late, though my daughter, who goes to PS, has to leave the house at 8:15. I'm thinking that if I get my son up and we walk her to school together, we'll be much more invigorated to get our schoolwork started earlier. My son is starting 5th grade next month, and I anticipate increased work load this year and needing more time to get things done. And since my daughter is at PS, we pull the plug on schoolwork at 3:00, when she's done. My son loves to sleep in.... -Kim in Iowa

My advice is to try to do the things that you both enjoy, and things will get better.... I had HUGE expectations regarding reading lessons for my older son, who LOVED books and history and read-alouds. But reading was hard for him, and pushing the reading lessons didn't help. The great thing is that there are so many other things to do with a 5-year-old. Try to have fun and relax. Read lots of books together, play games, play in the sandbox, go for a nature walk, etc. My son is 10 now, and he reads quite well. We eventually found that he has a visual processing disorder and that looking at text is very difficult for him. Although his reading level is very high, he now just has problems with stamina. Reading more than 15 minutes at a time is a challenge for him. But he's a wonderful kid, and we love homeschooling. -Kim in Iowa

My two older kids, 9 & 10, are like night and day. My son (the older one), has been interested in history since...probably since he began to walk and talk. I remember a moment when he was 4 and my daughter was 3. They were both sitting in their car seats, and he was trying to explain the cold war and the cuban missile crisis to her. Even when he was really young, he spent a lot of time trying to order things in his head ("Mom, the civil war came after the revolutionary war, but before WWI, right???"). His interest in history has never flagged. We started with the ancients, have slowly moved through our history cycle, and are planning to study the 19th century this year (he will be a 5th grader). We also continue to study the ancients, and will focus on Ancient Greece this year. My daughter, on the other hand, has no deep interest in history and chronology. The only things that have been successful for her in terms of teaching history are focusing on personalities. She wrote a long research report on Benjamin Franklin last year, and THAT was meaningful to her. But if she were asked to put Franklin on a timeline, I still think she would be stumped. She's more interested in and keyed into people than the sweep of history. She's also very interested in art, and she's been taking wonderful art/art history classes for the last two years. She has a great understanding of artists and their styles, but again, putting that into historical perspective is very difficult for her (and not particularly interesting, I think). Honestly, I was horrified this summer when I took the two of them on a trip to Washington D.C. First, she claimed to not know what the Declaration of Independence is (?????). Then, when we were in the Air and Space museum and I pointed out Lindbergh's plane, she said..."Oh yeah, I remember something about that. Didn't Rosa Parks fly that?" Heavy sigh. I was tempted to say "Yes, but they made her sit at the back of the plane," but I managed to keep my mouth shut. So, all this is to say that history speaks to different kids in different ways, and I guess it's our job to figure that out.

I got an Amazon Kindle for my birthday in May, and I absolutely love it. I have never been interested in ebooks before because I don't like reading off of the computer, and it feels like a hassle to print things out. But the Kindle--what a revelation. Reading from the Kindle feels to me like reading a real book, and the downloads are fast and easy. I am getting many of our school books for this year from manybooks.net. It has been easy to do the downloads, and I love having access to so many of our books in one bookreading device. Right now, I have close to 100 books that I'm carrying with me all the time. I don't like reading from a computer screen, but the Kindle uses e-ink technology, which is easy on the eyes and feels like reading print on paper, not pixels on a screen. I never believed I could become so attached to an eletronic device, but I take it with me everywhere. Honestly, I hardly go from one floor of our house to the other without bringing it with me. Last night I was at a concert, and during the break I whipped out the Kindle and spent a good 15 minutes reading Emerson's essay about Stonehenge. I NEVER would have had this with me without the Kindle. -Kim in Iowa

We read George Washington's World last year as part of our American History/Revolutionary War era study. It was ideal for a slow and steady approach throughout the year. We read about 10 pages/week, and really loved the variety of stories. This year we're moving on to the 19th century and will read Abraham Lincoln's world (5th grade). I hope we like it as well. For my son's 3rd grade year we tried The World of Columbus and Sons, but for some reason it felt like the content level was too high for what we were doing. We stopped after a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to reading it in a couple of years in our next history cycle. -Kim

My son is going into 5th, and I plan on ordering TT6 for him. We have done a mix of programs in the past (Singapore, Saxon, some older textbooks from the 1930/40s), and I have both liked and disliked all of them. I really wanted to like Saxon, but I hate the pattern of introducing something new absolutely every day (especially when it's usually something completely unrelated to what you did the day before). I don't dislike the repetition in Saxon's problem sets, but I wish that there was more "clumping" involved in how the subject matter is introduced. I like Singapore more than Saxon, but I always end up feeling that we need more drill and review than Singapore gives us. My son (10) is indifferent. He likes math a lot (often says it is his favorite subject), and he likes us working on math together. He has a visual processing disorder, and though he gets math concepts quickly, he has a hard time working through math workbooks, as they tend to be too busy and don't give him the white space he needs to work the problems. We currently work together on math, and I give him almost all of his work on white boards, which we trade back and forth from problem to problem. This year, however, I'm hoping to ease him slowly into doing SOME independent math work. My hope is to have him listen to the TT "lectures" and work some of the practice problems on his own. We will then do some work together later in the day, using the white board and our back-and-forth method. I like it that TT reads the problems outloud, and that the print is sufficiently large on the screen. That is a huge plus for my son. I think the whiteboard format is visually appealing and easy to follow. So, we'll see how it goes. I like the looks of it. My son's opinion, unfortunately, is that though it looks good, he doesn't want the computer as his teacher. He wants ME as his teacher. I'm hoping we can come up with a compromise that works. -Kim

We have tried a lot of programs, but I love Lively Latin. We supplement with Minimus and now Minimus Secundus, and with Cambridge Unit I. My son is 10. And for my Latin learning, I can't recommend Lingua Latina highly enough. -Kim in Iowa

My 10-yo son just finished reading Ben and Me by Robert Lawson and really liked it. We also loved Johnny Tremain as a read-aloud.