I am looking for a good series of biographies of musical composors to read to my six year old (or, I guess ones that he could read to himself). We have some CDs from the Classical Masters series that I want to complement. I was looking at the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers series by Venezia but I read that it has unnecessary cartoons with inappropriate jokes. My son is quite precocious and doesn't need that kind of stuff to keep his interes and would likely find it distracting. Are they all like that? Are they generally a good series? Is there another series out there that I'm overlooking? Thanks!

I was thinking of adding this series of books to our library list for SOTW1 but I am wondering if they are appropriate for a sensitive but precocious 6 year old? Are they too violent? Do they focus on the blood and guts, as one Amazon review said?

Thank you for this post. I have a follow-up question. Do you correlate the lesson plans for these or, as I think you are saying, do each one on it's own at different times duirng the day? Then, if a kid gets stuck in one of the programs, you drop it for a while and only do the one lesson/program a day? And, you ask them to do two exercises a day and they pick which ones, right? Where does the textbook from Singapore fit in with that? Thanks very much! Heather

Thanks! That is a very helpful link. I'm pondering if correlating the lessons is the best way to go or if we should just work through each program separately? I see pros and cons to both. Correlating would allow him more practice and perhaps different approaches to solving the same problems. Separately would allow him to review concepts he has previously learned or allow him to put new found skills to work in unexpected ways. Hmmm... I'm interested to hear from those that have BTDT.

I use these both with my son and I think they are both great. We've been very relaxed with both programs. Now, he's officially starting "1st grade" and we're adding a bit more order to our schedule. I'm wondering what the best way is to combine these programs? He'll be starting with Singapore 1B and we have all of the Miquon books. Should I do a little of both programs each day or do Singapore 3x and Miquon 2x. Has anyone seen anything out there in the big virtual world that matches up the concepts/lessons/pages of Singapore and Miquon? How do you use both? Thanks!

I started my then 5-year old boy at the K level. He has some fine motor challenges but is a smart little guy so I didn't want to bore him with the pre-K exercises that teach him what a letter looks like. He knew his letters, he just didn't know how to control his hands to write them. We went through it VERY slowly with lots of practice in between lessons (I would photocopy their word pages and use those often or write out my own practice for him). He now has pretty good handwriting and we're going on to the next level. The chalkboard and sponges were very helpful for him. We'd also use our dry-erase board on the easle, especially with the lower-case letters. And, I'd make up silly stories about each of the letters as I was showing him how to write them on the chalk/dry-erase board. He enjoyed the K program and it was just the right amount of challenge for him.

Singapore with Miquon

Maybe REAL Science by Pandia Press? It lays it all out for you and follows the classical approach.