For our family the kids take piano lessons so that counts toward music. Confessions of a Homeschooler has some nice little studies for composers and artists, but since your kids are so young you could easily just do library books, music CDs, and maybe a field trip or two (most communities have some type of fine arts events that are either free or cheap for kids). For Ohio history, again, I would just look at your library. A few books that come to mind are B is for Buckeye, Cardinal Numbers: an Ohio Counting Book, and The Ohio Reader. I would think those books and a few field trips to some local landmarks would be more than sufficient. Hope that helps!

First, you need to contact your local school board and they should send you a homeschooling packet. There is a notification you can find at this website http://www.cheohome.org/get-started/notification/. It gives an outline of the subjects you need to teach. Then you just include a summary of the resources you will use to teach those subjects. You don't need to be too specific (ex. if you plan to use library books to teach science, just write "library books"). You do not need to send notification until your child is 6 years old for that school year. Then at the end of the year you can either have your children evaluated by a certified teacher or have them take a standardized test. If you have any more specific questions, I would be happy to attempt to answer them:)

I am pretty sure I have seen some of their stuff on sale at HomeSchool Buyers Coop. You may want to try there.

Exactly! We love them with history (we are using MOH) and my kids seem to "get" these books better than some of the current historical fiction books. I am going to start putting together our science for next year (earth science/astronomy) and hope to include some of the YC books in that too. The Treadwell readers are great for narration practice. I am hoping to use some of the American History books as a spine for history in a few years. There are just too many to choose from:)

We have a very sneaky toddler on our hands. Here is Who Has Been Eating All of the Cupcakes?

I got mine for $49 about a month ago. Maybe they do a sale every few months or so?

Well, I will tell you that WS lasted about 10 minutes in my house. It was really too broken down for my liking ("write a sentence", next day-"add a word to the sentence", next day-"add another word", etc. etc.). If you wanted just a supplement you could look into something like Igniting Your Writing (it is pretty cheap at CurrClick). We use that for some "bonus" writing on Fridays. My dd7 sounds a lot like how you describe your dd and she is and has done very well with IEW. We used PAL writing last year and this year we are doing All Things Fun & Fascinating. If she was my oldest I would probably use the Bible Heroes book with her instead. I am using IEW without buying or seeing the TWSS (just don't report me:) and we are doing just fine. I have found that if you buy a guide written by Lori V. she does the best job explaining things in the teachers manual. The IEW yahoo group has so many files to help along the way and I did watch the $10 overview DVD, which was very helpful. There are also several webinars you can access from IEW's website. The thing I love about IEW is it gets kids writing, which is something my dd loves to do anyway! I think IEW and WWE are a great combination, and like you, I am doing WWE style but with our own selections. Even with all of this, writing still doesn't take that much time in our house (maybe 30 minutes or so) and we just take IEW at our own pace. Keep in mind that the IEW books are written with the option of a once a week co-op class so you have the opportunity to spread that work out for 5 days. You can order directly from IEW and they have a fantastic return policy just in case you don't like it. Hope that helps!

We are using and enjoying Mystery of History.

I always forget about Easy Classical! I will have to give it a closer look too. Thank you!

I have looked at ES and it is so far the closest to what I am searching for. I just hate to purchase something and have to add to it, but thankfully ES is pretty affordable. I will have to look into it a little more deeply. Thanks!

Sometimes I wish I could just flip a switch and turn off the need to plan ahead, but I can't so here is my question:) I am looking into next year when we will finish our homemade Magic School Bus science curriculum. In my search I have not found anything that looks like it will fit as well with my kids as our MSB science does. If I need to do my own thing that is fine but I figured I would need time to plan if that is the case. But maybe I am missing something that is out there (and is not too expensive, hopefully). Here is what I am looking for in science: -WTM style science (meaning separate years of biology, chemistry, physics) -an interesting spine (I don't mind textbooks, as long as they are not too wordy.) -living books added in whenever possible, even if it is just picture books -added reading to incorporate scientists that made a difference in the particular area we are studying -some type of vocabulary study -experiments that will actually get done (nothing too complicated) -some type of either notebooking or lapbooking to help with comprehension -the ability to do most of the work together with multiple ages So, does this exist? If it doesn't what would you suggest using as a spine? We have the Usborne Science Encyclopedia which I could use unless there is something better out there. Any thoughts are very much appreciated! Thanks:)

Ours is finally up! http://wateronthefloor.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/what-we-learned-this-week-311-31513/

It depends on how you use it. Personally, I use it for reading, handwriting, and spelling. I know it can be an entire language arts program, but we use other things to cover those areas.

I have learned a lot of grammar from The Big Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation. It has an explanation of the concept, gives some examples, and then there are quizzes to make sure you fully understand. For what I needed, I found it very thorough. I believe there is a website to go with it too that has some more quizzes.

FYI on Easton...My dh is a police officer in Ohio and I highly recommend that if you go to Easton that you do so during the day light. After dark there is a lot of drug trafficing that goes on in the parking lot. I don't want to seem doom and gloom, but if I wasn't familiar with an area I would want to know. We don't live in Columbus, but he has arrested enough people getting drugs from Easton to know. The rest of the suggestions sound great:)

We are currently listening to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the booksshouldbefree website. It is wonderful! There are different voices for each character and it is very lively and entertaining. We listened to 5 chapters this evening already. http://www.booksshouldbefree.com/book/alices-adventures-in-wonderland-by-lewis-carroll

:lurk5: I would love to find something like this too. I looked into LLATL but I fear it would be too much to add this into the language arts we already do. For now I am using these http://www.mhschool.com/reading/treasure_workbooks/national.html. We just started so I am not certain if covers all of the areas you listed but it is at least a start!

Our is up! The Night is Finally Here!

Here are some free phonogram cards http://learningsharingcaring.blogspot.com/2010/07/free-phonogram-cards.html. I think some of the advanced phonograms may be a bit different but the basics are there. It will at least save you making all of them:)

I am not Ellie, but we use the 6th edition so I thought I would share something I did that has helped me tremendously. After reading through the manual I went back and flagged the pages we use frequently with those tabs similar to these http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/592408/Avery-Write-On-Tabs-1-34/;jsessionid=0000WKknC9uNHn4SPnWekanyObW:1659q37ia. Here are the sections I have marked: manuscript instruction, marking conventions, cursive instruction, spelling notebook rule pages, recommended books, phonograms, spelling rules, syllable types, spelling notebook sample pages, spelling word list, and spelling scope and sequence. It makes it so much easier to find what I am looking for in the book! Also, when I was just getting started this outline helped me so much http://www.shalomranch.org/notes.html. Obviously the page numbers will be different since this outline goes with the 4th edition but it gave me a great overview of what I was supposed to be doing. I am so glad I put the time in to figure out WRTR- my kids have greatly improved with spelling and sounding out new words. Now that I am comfortable with it, the program really is open and go!

I could have written your post last year at about this time:) From the time we started homeschooling we have used Sonlight, HOD, and MFW. Like you, I tweaked it so much that it hardly seemed worth it! This year we are finally doing our own thing and it has been wonderful! I no longer feel guilty about wasting money if we don't do everything or pressure to get "everything" done. If the kids are really interested in something we can spend more time with it and not have to worry that it will put us behind in every other subject. I think that is my favorite part- having each subject separate. It is not tied together in a way that feels restrictive to me. But I think that is just my personality:) So yes, if you are comfortable, you certainly can do without a boxed curriculum. I was nervous at first but now that we are several months into it I couldn't be happier. I think our homeschool is a lot more relaxed now that I don't have the pressure to do it all!

We use the LOE app, although I am actually using WRTR as our curriculum. The phonograms are so similar that it has not been a problem. I haven't played around with it too much but I believe it is just quizzing on the phonograms (at least that is all we have used it for). So they will say a phonogram and you have to touch the one they say out of a group of 4. My ds4 is primarily the one using it and I think it is great for him. He is using the iPad so he thinks it is a game, but at the same time he is working on his phonograms without me being involved:) It keeps their score so you can monitor which ones they have mastered. As far as the other app, I am not sure because I don't have that one. Hope that helps!

Ours is finally done:)

We are using MOH and we love it! That being said, I am primarily using it with dd7 because she is combined in history with ds9. Some of the language is over her head, but I try to add in as many pictures books as possible to reinforce what we are learning (I am keeping a running list of books we are reading with MOH1 on our blog- you can find it under the Reading Log tab). MOH lists books that go with each lesson and also gives activity suggests for younger, middle, and older children. My dd also enjoys the timeline we are doing with timeline pieces from Confessions of a Homeschooler. But basically at this age I think it would work as long as you were not expecting mastery of all of the events and people you study. They will study all of it again in the upper grades- so if you keep that in mind I think it would be fine:)