Ohhhh, these look lovely.... These would definitely speak to my artist daughter. The material might be simple/boring, but I'm really just looking for it to SINK IN as it hasn't before. What is the daily flow like with these curricula? Do they write in the student book, or on a separate piece of paper? How long is a typical lesson (ballpark)? Is there a lot of teacher involvement, or is it more student-directed? I'm just trying to make sure that whatever we land on fits into the flow of our days this coming year. And can I ask those same questions for the vocabulary and poetics books? I love the look of those, too. 🙂 Thank you very much!

I need some ideas for grammar for this next year. We've been using FLL all the way through (DS levels 1-3; DD levels 1-4 and then Rod and Staff this year), and I'm having to acknowledge to myself that I just don't think it's working. Both kids can rattle off definitions and lists like nobody's business, but ask them to actually identify parts of speech in a sentence when we HAVEN'T just spent five minutes talking about that part of speech, and they look at me like deer in headlights. My son can easily tell you that "A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought" and "All sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark" - and yet he routinely begins his sentences with lowercase letters. 🙄 The memorization just isn't making its way into practical use. I'm looking for something that, ideally, would cover grammar in a thorough but incremental manner, in about 15 minutes a day, with CLEAR explanations, plenty of practice, and in a format/presentation that's attractive and interesting to my kids. DD11 is an artistic, dreamy soul who'd love to spend her whole day drawing and listening to audiobooks; DS9 is a budding engineer who's preoccupied with Legos, pistons, gears, and the like. They both blanch at the sight of densely-packed or tiny text on a page, and each has a tendency to get lost in their own thoughts if something doesn't hold their attention. I don't even know where to begin looking. We've never used (nor really looked at) anything but FLL, and I've kind of been waiting to see if all the memorization would begin to pay off in practical application...but I'm just not seeing it, and I think I'm facing the fact that we need to try something else. Thank you so much for your help!!!

I need some ideas for grammar for this next year. We've been using FLL all the way through (DS levels 1-3; DD levels 1-4 and then Rod and Staff this year), and I'm having to acknowledge to myself that I just don't think it's working. Both kids can rattle off definitions and lists like nobody's business, but ask them to actually identify parts of speech in a sentence when we HAVEN'T just spent five minutes talking about that part of speech, and they look at me like deer in headlights. My son can easily tell you that "A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought" and "All sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark" - and yet he routinely begins his sentences with lowercase letters. 🙄 The memorization just isn't making its way into practical use. I'm looking for something that, ideally, would cover grammar in a thorough but incremental manner, in about 15 minutes a day, with CLEAR explanations, plenty of practice, and in a format/presentation that's attractive and interesting to my kids. DD11 is an artistic, dreamy soul who'd love to spend her whole day drawing and listening to audiobooks; DS9 is a budding engineer who's preoccupied with Legos, pistons, gears, and the like. I don't even know where to begin looking. We've never used (nor really looked at) anything but FLL, and I've kind of been waiting to see if all the memorization would begin to pay off in practical application...but I'm just not seeing it, and I think I'm facing the fact that we need to try something else. Thank you so much for your help!!! Eta: I realized I accidentally posted this in the wrong topic...and as I can't find a way to delete it, please pardon me! 😳 I'll go post in the K-8 curriculum board where it was meant to be.

I'm looking for Christmas gifts for my littles, and I have a bright 7-year-old boy who's reading at about a fifth grade level and fascinated by space. I'd love to find a meaty space encyclopedia with plenty of material for engrossing reading, appropriate for that reading level. Special challenges: We are neither young-earth creationists nor secular, and those seem to be the two versions of such books out there that I'm finding. I'd love to find something that really sticks to the facts of what we know about space, without editorializing on purpose/design/lack of design, and particularly without speculative flights of fancy about alien races and terraforming Mars. (Seriously? It would cost billions upon billions of dollars to terraform Mars, and even then it would only last one generation.) I don't know that there's anything out there that's explicitly old-earth creationist/intelligent design focused (that's our bent), so I'm looking for something I guess that stays silent on controversial points, so that we can teach all the different sides of those debates as we get further on in science. Any recommendations? I'd love to hear ideas from the hive mind. :) Thanks in advance!

Thank you!! This is very helpful!

We're taking a year off SOTW next year (what would have been SOTW 4) to do a year on American history, and I'm kind of leaning toward using Simply Charlotte Mason's guides. We'd combine the Early Modern and Modern guides and just do the American history portions and North American geography. Thoughts on this curriculum? I know it seems a little lighter, but honestly...I might want to try that for a year. I think it would give us more scope to go off on rabbit trails and linger on things without me worrying that we won't finish. I do plan to "bulk it up" a little by omitting the study of Billy Graham at the end and pulling in a lapbooking unit on US Government. So yes...thoughts? Is it just TOO light? Thoughts on book choices? Scope? Combining the two years - would it work? Thank you for any thoughts you have! :D PS - I'll have a 2nd grader and a 4th grader next year. :)

We have definitely experienced some of this with SOTW3 as well. Thanks for sharing your experience and ideas!

This is exactly what I haven't loved about SOTW3, which is probably also part of my reason for seeking out something more fun and engaging for next year. I'd like to find something that lights my kids up and gets them intrigued and passionate about history, as opposed to leaving them bewildered by a litany of historical events that they (especially the littler one) don't really have the ability to absorb yet. I like your idea about 20th Century heroes and will consider that as an option! Thank you! :)

I'm LOVING all of these ideas; thank you so much, everyone! I am leaning toward taking a year of American history, and I'll check into the resources mentioned. Any other recommendations for good, engaging, one-year American history resources for this age?

Thank you. I appreciate your perspective and experience. I'd still be open to hearing alternative recommendations - I'm not going to shelter them forever, but I'm also weighing maturity and ability to process what we're learning about (mostly for my 7-year-old) and wanting to consider my options. Thanks!

We have been using SOTW and have been largely pleased with it (though tbh SOTW 3 has been more dry), but I'm looking for something different for next year. My primary reason is the content warning on SOTW 4 that it contains material that's difficult (understandably so) and that you may not want to use it with kids younger than 4th grade. We do history with both of my kiddos together, and next year I will have a 4th grader and a sensitive 2nd grader. My idea is to skip SOTW 4 and then jump back into our history rotation with Ancients the following year. I'd be interested in finding either an alternate resource for modern history that's...more gentle? (Does/can such a thing exist??) Or, alternately, I'd be open to finding a yearlong curriculum of American history or even a completely different focus that would fit in nicely. I'm really not sure where to start because I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Something along the lines of SOTW would be nice, or I'd also be open to a unit-study style curriculum. I'd love to hear your recommendations! Thank you!! PS - Both my kids are reading ahead of grade level, so something designed for a little bit older ages could be okay. :)

This is beautiful. This is how I am learning to survive, too. When my littles were preschoolers, I was so excited about homeschooling and so full of beautiful visions of our idyllic days curled up together with books. Then the rubber met the road. XD This has been the year of me and DH (an ENTP) realizing what a much better mother, homeschooler, and sane human being I am when I get alone time. It has been life-changing to stop fighting how I'm made or wishing I didn't need a break from mothering (like all my ISFJ friends who seem so happy to just hang with the kids all day and bake and take care of the house, without needing to disappear for hours to read and write and think) and begin embracing it. It enables me to be fully present and available for my family when I'm with them. 💜

That's so interesting! You know, I do find that I have to find curricula that teach something in the way I understand it and what works for the kids, and I have a penchant for splicing programs together or designing things myself when I can't find what I want. So in that sense, I can totally relate. Now, I feel like we've found what actually works for us for where we're at. Maybe as I continue to homeschool and get less fearful about improvising and "missing something," we'll find ourselves putting things together more as you did. :)

She's in WWE3 at the moment (we had a move this fall, so she's only about five weeks in atm), but that helps. Asking the leading questions does really seem to help her put it together with WWE. Idk why I didn't think of that with this also. I guess it just seems in the SOTW workbook that kids should be able to pull the salient points out of the air. XD Thank you for that!! Still would love to hear other thoughts and suggestions, especially thoughts about realistic expectations at this age. I tend to be a perfectionist and have to reel in my expectations from time to time.

After doing a lot of the negative process of making choices that Mrs. Tharp mentioned above ("Okay, this sounded good, but REALLY doesn't work"), we've hit on some things that are working for us. I am an INFJ (absolutely no question, by cognitive functions as well as the tests that look only at the four dichotomies) and an adult education professional. I LOVE teaching in classrooms, but I find that with my kids, I do better with a mixture of subjects where I'm teaching hands-on and subjects where they do independent work and I come in as a resource person to support and guide them. I need breathing space in my day, because I'm strongly on the introvert side of that I/E split. XD We're currently using a LOT of Susan Wise Bauer's resources. I like them because they're well-organized and easy to implement and the daily/weekly structure makes sense to me. So we've used OPGTR for reading, FLL for grammar (plus, for my 3rd grader, a daily grammar practice workbook from Evan Moor), WWE, SOTW for history, and a science program called Elemental Science that basically fleshed out SWB's recommendations into a planned-out curriculum. It includes experiments (or demonstrations really, at this age), but they're usually pretty simple and require mostly items we have around the house. We started with Right Start Math, and I'm glad we did, because I love the conceptual understanding it put into place for my kids, but I found that it lost them and me somewhere in the middle of level B. When I started hitting occasional lessons that required 45 min of hands-on teaching for one subject for one kid, I couldn't do it. I needed something more predictable and less intense for me. We've switched both kiddos over to Math Mammoth now and they're loving it. Lots of conceptual stuff still but in a worktext format, where I can be a resource person instead of doing all the teaching. Our trade-off was to switch to All About Spelling this year, which requires more hands-on time from me but is working like a DREAM for both my kids. I LOVE how organized, logical, and fun this approach is, how much sense it makes, and how it's really clicking for them. My eldest is starting Rosetta Stone for French and we outsource piano lessons. We also attend a co-op where I teach (classroom, yay!) PE and art classes, so they get those things there. Big messy projects don't often happen for us except at co-op. I have tried, but I tend to burn out on them after the first month of school. I've always found that having a predictable rhythm and structure is really important to me to be able to get everything done. I used to hate that about myself, but I've learned to accept it. I may not bake and build enormous awesome things with my kids, but we have a really good connection and talk about a lot of things that matter, and they can get the big messy projects at co-op. ;) FWIW, my two kiddos are very different; one is a feeler and one is a thinker. I'm guessing they will turn out to be INFJ or ENFJ and INTP as they grow. I feel like I've rambled on forever, but those are all my thoughts. XD