Have you seen Queens handwriting books? My dd hated copying the letters a zillion times each like most handwriting but we found that the picture study and actual meaningful sentences helped a bunch.

Can you post a pic?? I have been making my own too and I am following a template I saw online from SCM....only prettier :)

I am looking for the most "complete" curriculum out there, just to be curious. :) Many people supplement their math and LA's programs, using several things at a time. I want to know what you have used that you did NOT supplement and felt that it was complete or maybe even advanced. Go! Just in the spirit of this post, I would say that Spelling Wisdom gets my vote for the best and most complete spelling program that we have used.

We use workboxes, but in a very different way. I do not include any of their core work in the boxes that I know they will need momma for. I put fun things like puzzles, games, extra practice, jump ropes, wii time, computer time cards, chore time, etc in there and we call them our "busy boxes". This way, if I need to help one child, the other one can be busy with their extra activities. Here's how it works: 9am: Phonics with 5 year old, 9 year old does busy boxes (usually chores or a warm up game) 9:15 5 year old finishes phonics and handwriting alone, 9 year old gets math lesson taught by mom 9:30 5 year old does math with mom, 9 year old gets independent math work done 9:45 5 year old does math page, then busy box, 9 year old gets language arts time with mom 10:00 5 year old does language lesson with mom, 9 year old does LA independently then workboxes 10:15 break all 10:30 read aloud 10:45 5 year old busy box, 9 year old gets additional help with mom on whatever she chooses 11am Catch up time. Any questions or extra work with mom, together or child does a busy box if no help is needed 11:15 history/science all 11:30 project 11:45 additional reading 12 lunch!!!! 1pm any additional work is done. If no work needs to be completed, we spend the afternoon doing fun things together or I let the kids finish workboxes while I throw some laundry in. Then we are done for the day. So, while I am with one, the other can do stuff by themselves. If they are done before time runs out, they may start on a busy box. We run our schedule every 15 minutes of the day because we love the CM method and our lessons are short anyway. So we always alternate between teacher time, independent work, and busy work in short increments. This really breaks up our school day to where we are always doing something new. I would imagine with 3 kids or more that this would work. 1 with mom, 1 doing independent work, 1 doing a workbox activity. Then switch! It may not work for everyone but this is a very rough schedule of what we do.

That makes sense to me but I don't like it! lol. I know that I can go into a used curriculum store and pick up things cheaper and I wish there was some type of option to get a PDF cheaper.

I was just wondering if selling a PDF....say Spelling Wisdom or SOTW PDF files is allowed once you have bought them. I would think that once you buy them that you would own the PDF but, I am not sure if that reselling the file would be allowed. Anyone have any experience with this?

Amana, I would really be interested in seeing your schedule! :) I cannot wrap my head around doing 2 sciences, 2 histories, 2 arts, etc. I find it way easier to combine as much as I can. How do you keep up with doing that many different activities in a day? I tried it once and we ended up spending around 7-8 hours on school everyday. Whats your secret to making everything flow?

You have to use an unsecured PDF, meaning that the author gives you permission to change the file. Like worksheets for example, you can annotate on them. You would need to download an app that allows you to annotate the file and open the PDF through that app. Then you can write one the file and save the results. There are several free and paid apps out there that allow you to annotate (write on) a file. You can google it and see what fits your needs. I would play around with free or cheap ones first.

We live in SC just below Charlotte NC and we love the area. There are so many great resources for homeschoolers around the area. I would say move around the Charlotte area. It's absolutely great for homeschool. You would never run out of things to do.

You could have the 4th grader "help" the K'er to give them practice of the material if you chose to do that. It also teaches them how to work with their siblings which is a great benefit. I will have a 1st and 4th grader next year and we are combining a lot of subjects. History, science, art, nature study, music.....pretty much everything except for language arts and math. My dd 4th will be helping my dd 1st with math and language arts. I have them do math and language arts "centers" together for at least 1 subject a day. This gives my older dd a chance to be in charge and it's a great way to sneak in review for her. My younger one enjoys the practice coming from someone else besides mom.

I get books from the library a lot on my kindle. My library will loan you up to 5 at a time and they are automatically taken off my kindle at the end of 2 weeks. Great resource for free books! Also, if you search words like picture, young ones, children, illustrated, etc. then it will come up with great books that are free. I will give you a little hint....I DESPISE looking up books on amazon. It will always pull up paid books and you have to go click on the filter button a lot. Plus, the previews are not that great. I look up books on google and I like that a lot better. Just transfer them to my kindle and I am ready to go. We have many many primers for free off of google books. I love them!

I forgot to mention the art and music. We are doing SCM artist studies and taking music lessons right now and will probably continue. My kids do ballet and performing arts so they are pretty well rounded. I love Queen's stuff but I thought that we could add in a little more because we finish her lessons in literally 10 minutes. I was thinking that adding in another short program like ILL would at least give us 30 minutes of study a day. :) I have never used Total Language Plus so I wasn't sure if that would even work for us. I liked that it was linked to particular literature and would skip most of the spelling, writing, and other tasks. I thought it would just be used as a literature study very loosely. As for WWE1, thanks for the suggestion! I really didn't think about any kind of writing with my 1st grader other than penmanship. We were going to focus on reading and snuggling this year. ;) I will have to look at it.

I Finally made a list of what my dd's 1st and 4th will use next year. Please offer any friendly advice as we are using almost all new material. 4th grade: Language: Queen's LL for elementary child 1 5x week Intermediate language lessons 3x week Spelling Wisdom 1, weekly Word Roots CTC 2x week IEW ancient history writing (through a co op) Picture in Cursive (Queen's) 3x week Total Lang. Plus 5 books/year Math: CLE Math 4, 4-5x week Fred Fridays Read aloud and do together 1st grade: Language: Queen's LL for little ones 2, 5x week Possibly ETC? ***Child is reading CVC words so I am not sure if this is a phonics program or what it is...still looking into it. Printing with Pictures (Queen's) 3x week Math: CLE 1 or Math lessons for a living education book 1 and 2. Fred Fridays Science and History is done together using Apologia and SOTW. I want to keep my dd's on grade level for math and LA. So those are the areas that I want to make sure I am not lacking in. I feel like I am leaving something out. :001_smile:

I am looking at workboxes for next year. I like the fact that one child can work independently while I am helping the other child. But how practical are these in reality? Can I expect that my dd5 can work by herself on a worksheet while I help my dd9? Or vise versa? I need a simple way to organize our homeschool where we can get through math and LA's without feeling like I am being pulled from one area to the next. Would workboxes (or any other method) help this? My kids hate independent work. I am not sure what to do about that problem. How do you organize your day?

I am doing Ambleside online and Sonlight's reading lists. I assign 1 book for every 10 days throughout the year and my child keeps a book log for me to check. I really like AO's classic books and Sonlight's modern books kinda mixed in. I also printed out the 1000 good books list http://www.classical-homeschooling.org/celoop/1000.html and I try to do read alouds from this list.