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.

I am not sure how you do k12 with young kids and keep your sanity. I had a k'er and a 3rd grader signed up with the virtual school in my state and I went crazy. It's a lot of work for any young child and not a lot of flexibility. They claim that you can skip certain work and tailor it to fit your schedule but its not that way. You have to log in certain times, keep attendance records on actual time spent one on one AND total time spent on a subject, and it's a lot of upkeep for the parent. I ended up doing school for 8 hours a day to handle both of the kids getting on and off of the computer all day long. We could never find a flow that made it easier. I ditched it and vowed to never do it again. Now....with a student that can work independently, there may be good use for it. But I would not recommend it for anyone below middle school. I hated the requirements of a virtual school. If you did not have all the mindless record keeping and the feeling of being boxed in then I would recommend it. Based solely on the curriculum, its good. Based on the whole package, a miserable fail.

:iagree:I am an advocate of kids having the primary responsibility for their own education to a large extent. I like Charlotte Mason style curriculums for this reason. They are responsible for thinking outside of the box instead of filling in the blank when they make think totally different from the person writing the question. Narration and dictation are also great tools for having a child think about what you are trying to teach them. You supply the material for study but the child finds the way that it clicks best with them. They may write it several times, or just study it, or make a drawing about the material to help them remember etc. I have been reluctant to try FLL or anything like that due to the scripted teacher's manuals. Not a great reason I know, but I feel boxed in and I know my kids will too. I take learning as a journey. :)

This is perfect!! Thank you so much! :) Have it bookmarked to print!

My dd's are 6 and 9 so that cancels out Notgrass for a little while. But I had a chance to look at it and it looks wonderful. I have it on the list for the future. :)

I LOVE the idea of Spelling Wisdom. After using many things from Queens, I would say the spelling is the one thing I do not care for. To me, once you have a strong foundation in phonics, spelling should then take a "real world" approach. After all, the reason you learn to spell is to aid you in reading literature and writing great pieces. Spelling Wisdom does a great job in using passages from literature and other famous works. We go over words that my dd doesn't understand and use it as a vocab lesson as well. I just love that it's simple. And I think spelling is something learned naturally anyway. I have tried the workbook approach and it's not nearly as effective (for us) as understanding words in their context. Spelling Wisdom forces a child to pay strict attention to the whole context....spelling, vocab, punctuation, and the concept taught. I think it's brilliant! It's so much more than a simple spelling program. I would stress again that having a strong foundation in phonics would be worthwhile before beginning spelling wisdom.

Is there any curriculum out there that just teaches the American symbols and national landmarks out there? Not the history part? I would like to cover things like: The Washington and Lincoln Memorials US Military Veteran's Day White House American Flag Liberty Bell Mt. Rushmore Constitution Various Patriotic Songs National Anthem I want something that would instill a sense of Patriotism into my girls instead of just the history portion if that makes sense. Just a brief overview of all of the wonderful things that America has to offer. Anyone know of any curriculum or books that would be great to use?

So I have a question after reading this thread and I want to make sure I understand something....Say I bought a PDF of a workbook. Am I allowed to use that 1 PDF with multiple students without violating any copyright laws? It would just be scanning a paper copy of the book into a PDF that would be a violation of the copyright correct? I saw another thread that posted about this and it seems like a great idea. It makes sense to me to be able to copy an item that I have purchased for myself but I want to make sure that it's ethical to do. There are some great older books that are no longer published that I would love to scan into my ipad....does a copyright expire?

There are so many wonderful free google books if you know what phrases to put in to find them. Words like: Child, children, poetry, nature study, primary, elementary, young ones, etc are all good phrases. Kids were not called kids back then.....they said young ones or children. Proper english was used which is hard for me to do with a southern background. ;) Also, I found TONS of primers for early reading on there. Amazing little gems that are wonderful to use. My favorite is called Reading without tears. We are using this as our phonics book for the year. I love google books!

Here is what I did. Of course there may be an easier way but I am not using the whole book. Go to the link and then on the very right hand side there is something that looks like a wheel that will bring down the settings menu. It will give you the option to download as a PDF. Then you can save this to your computer. Copy and paste your selections into a word doc. as needed if you want to change them. If you don't you can simply just print the PDF. Hope that helps. :001_smile:

Yep, I just found it on google books and posted about it. They put it up in the last 2 weeks.