We also recommend Sr. Poortenga for Spanish. He is a great teacher and easy to learn from.

Two of my children have had Mrs. Frederick for English for a few years now. She is great and I have nothing but positive things to say about her. TPS English is tough and rigorous as I'm sure you understand doing two classes but my kids have developed amazing English skills through TPS.

Honestly WW through Potters School is amazing.

Use them however you want. Some let their kids listen to them on headphones for a quiet time, or play them at rest time, or before bed, or in the car, or while they draw or have toy time, or just a designated listening time.

Hmm mine is super quiet and I barely notice it at all. Truly. My expensive super quiet dishwasher is louder than my Excalibur. Is there something wrong with your fan or anything to make it that loud? We have a tiny house (under 1400 sq ft and have 6 kids) and it sits in the kitchen all hunting season running doing jerky.

That is the same age my oldest son got into yo-yo tricks. Here's a video that shows the kind of tricks you can do yo-yoing. It really is a great little hobby as my boys can stand for hours working on tricks and take their yo-yo everywhere with them. There are ALL sorts of yo-yos from $5-$200+. If you're looking for the best cheap ($10) starter yo-yo this is a good little starter. It's called the ONE. http://shop.yoyoexpert.com/product/368/YYF-ONE It comes with two different bearings that work for beginners and intermediates and even some advanced tricks. If you are looking to spend more like $20 you can get either the starter package for the ONE yo-yo: http://shop.yoyoexpert.com/product/541/YoYoFactory-Starter-Set Or get this yo-yo, the Velocity ($20) http://shop.yoyoexpert.com/product/703/YYF-New-Velocity

And I have peaches we've done on our shelves from a couple years ago still and they're clear as can be. No clouding at all.

So sorry! Yeah you have to follow the recipes. Sugar is a preservative. So cutting the sugar that far down is a huge problem. IF you use low sugar pectin they will have you add the lemon juice. It brings the acidity up which also serves as a preservative. It's so so so important to follow recipes when learning to can.

it supposedly helps break down some of the phytates in rice like soaking does. I toast my brown rice every time. It is tastier that way for sure.

Allowing drawing, etc. really seems to help inspire my kids to work on their journals. And I sometimes give little prompts to help them if they get stuck like "you can always just pretend you're that person and write a diary entry", etc. Truly though allowing art to be part of that writing process seems to really spur my reluctant writers to do the writing portion. If they draw a castle they have to describe castles or the interesting part they read about how the stones were carved or stacked or whatever. That kind of thing. This isn't my "essay" or formal writing. I want them to find what interested them each day. I want them to have to STOP and think about what they found neat in their science that day and just write about it without being as particular as other writing. Explore. Have fun. Write.

Also, is there any writing, etc. that he does daily with his history? All my olders (8-12) now do a history and science journal where they write daily about what they've learned. Now in science they draw and diagram say the digestive system and write about what they learned. My 5th grader sometimes outlines instead of paragraph writes. My oldest is to either write or outline something from his history reading daily. He may diagram something interesting or trace a map, etc. as part of that history writing as well. If we do a timeline figure he has to do a mini report on that character or event that day. All of this is independent of me. So after they've done all their work they set to doing their daily writing and illustrating.

We're with Tree House Academy. Hated it here. Everything about the way it is laid out, presents topics, etc. didn't work for my children. My daughter literally couldn't remember topics one week from the next as nothing was really done to depth. LOVE LOVE Rod and Staff here.

Here's my son's final intro paragraph with thesis at the end if it helps. Beloved author Mark Twain once said, “Humor is man’s greatest blessing.†Sometimes it seems like all that humor does is cause a little chuckle now and then, but that chuckle may be more important than anyone realizes. Humor is definitely important to me! It has been a part of my life since I can remember. Even as a young child I would try to make my parents laugh with my jokes. Now that I’m older, not much has changed. I still love to jest and try to get my parents and friends to laugh. Comedy remains a huge part of who I am and how I live my life. On top of giving me a giggle every now and then, it makes people around me happy. Humor helps me when I am stressed by both distracting me and lifting my spirits. My witty jokes and silly antics definitely make me not boring. After I look at all the ways humor helps me, I realize it truly is a blessing in my life. I treasure my comedic nature because it makes me a fun person, it is my coping mechanism, and it makes other people happy.

I think it's a large step up from WW as well! We worked long and hard on his Intro paragraph today and we're feeling much better already. Now to do a paragraph a day until I can do his D2 conference and do the final copy the morning of his night class LOL!

Goodness. After seeing that example I understand why my son's got torn to pieces in the comments he got on his! If it's any consolation OPer, my son is struggling with this assignment as well. I'm on my phone and my son's paper is on the laptop or I'd post his. It is nowhere near as rich with long paragraphs as the previous example.

In the elementary years our goals are introduction and familiarity in the same way we might do memory work about history they don't get the depths of. We slowly build and build throughout their education. I don't aim for mastery in any way in elementary.

Yes I LOVE love my Usborne Encyclopedia of the Ancient World~! With 4 cores going this year in total I need them to be able to open and read the pages without any help from me. So ease of use is key this year lol.

I broke down and bought the same book for our Core G this year and struggled with the same thing! I have the Kingfisher Encyclopedia of WH, the Usborne Internet-Linked World History, and 10 other amazing history encyclopedias but not the ONE book that SL uses and has page numbers to in my oldest's Core G LOL!! So I bought it. SL uses exact pages so I figure I needed to.

This year we are doing Veritas Press cards alongside our Sonlight. I'm kind of a stickler about memorizing so we will be working on memorizing the cards. I have one in Core B/C and one in G so they will do the same cards. Then my core F gal just won't do cards.

8yo and up do Crossfit with me.

Multiple cores can be done. Read over on the se7en blog. If anyone makes it seem like you can do multiple cores it's her! http://se7en.org.za/

I will come back tomorrow after my kids wake up. All my kids are Minecraft addicts. My 12yo is REALLY into reading video game blogs and watching certain youtube channels.

Hmm I haven't started thinking about it. I do have a few things on my "if I were to get money" list. One is a lightbox for tracing. We do map tracing and labeling for Geography and they're always fighting for windows. I'd love for them to have a nice lightbox to trace on. Others are GOOD art supplies. With 6 kids I can't ever afford good art supplies. We always have the cheapest crayons, paint, etc. I'd love my kids to have nice charcoal and watercolor pencils, sketch pads for each of them, etc. Another laptop. We have too many kids going at once to have one laptop. Someone is ALWAYS waiting on the laptop. If we had another one it would be fantastic. Our first one is on the brink of dying as well.... sigh. lol. Now you guys have me really wondering what I should put on my list!

You can set a parental control password that would require you to put in a password to buy anything and leave the one-click on.

Don't stress. For many of us it's just week 4 :) We couldn't afford any of our history and a couple little other things and they won't be ordered until next week. Just is what it is. You're much better off doing something you will love than worrying about a handful of weeks.