no. No reason to call him a 3rd grader again. You just go forward from where he is as far as writing and keep moving forward at his rate.

You've got one in the grammar stage and one in the logic stage. So I would assign independent reading from each separate list either from the Well Trained Mind or from Story of the World reading lists for the younger or something similar. Then I would read some aloud to both. For us, also in an ancient year, I have one in logic stage who is not a strong reader yet and one in high school. So for Egypt I read aloud a novel set in the time period just for fun, a few pages from a colorful encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt and an art book we use. To themselves dd14 read and wrote about a couple of books from the Old Testament including the stories of Egypt. DD13 read a Theodosia book. I am using the booklist from Classical House of Learning Literature blog logic stage ancients for her and the WTM for dd14. For Babylon I read a picture book of the Epic of Gilgamesh aloud to dd12. DD14 read an adult translation to herself. And to both during that time I read from unrelated to history books. At the time it was advent, so we read from an Advent study from church and some other Christmas books. And dd12 read from her Golden Children's Bible and a novel of her choice at the time. Now for Greece, dd12 is reading Aesop's Fables to herself. Dd14 is reading the Illiad. And aloud we are reading DuLaire's greek myths and a book called The Bible Through the Ages which covers a lot of ancient history alongside the Bible history. And we are reading several art books. One is art history. One is How Pictures Work on art composition. Hope that helps. I have a reading list for both. Sometimes I pick one from the reading list to read aloud. Other times they both read from their own lists and I pick something related to read aloud from. We usually have a couple read alouds going at once. Other examples. Last year during modern studies we had a book from the library that we used as a guideline through our studies of each war. So during the Civil War I read aloud from the library book I chose. Then on their own they each read their history books, plus literature. One read Frederick Douglass' Narrative. I read a picture book on Douglass to the younger. The younger read Little Women I think at that time on her own. Older had already read it during her logic stage. Together we memorized the Gettysburg Address and Constitutional Amendments during this time.

I didn't buy them with either of my kids. The flannel board, flash cards, speed drills, games in the book, and workbook pages were plenty in all of the grades. One of mine has finished through grade 8 and is now in Algebra. One is almost done with the 6th grade book. When I have wanted extra practice in anything we have used Kahn Academy and xtramath. org.

It's not 1st grade work, like others said. My younger one is two years younger than her sis, so she didn't start ancients in 1st. She jumped into SOTW 3 in 1st grade since her sister (who did do SOTW 1 in 1st) was up to 3 in her 3rd grade year. Younger didn't do SOTW1 and biology until 3rd grade (when her sis was starting 2nd rotation in 5th grade with logics.) That way I have kept them together in the cycle. They both work where they are as far as reading and writing. It is just about whatever content we are in for the year. Currently they are both in an ancients year. One is starting her high school rotation in 9th grade. The other is in 7th grade doing ancients. For her this will actually be nice. She will have ancients in 11th grade if we stick to this schedule. The readings of the Illiad and Odyssey and Greek plays and such will be easier for her at that time than they would in 2 years. She can have some easier to read modern books for 9th and 10th grades.

Mine hasn't either. I called last week to check ,and they were still getting them all entered, and hadn't gotten to mine yet. They said if I didn't receive my registration card in the mail by end of week to call back. I didn't. So I called back this morning. Sure enough, they now have me entered, and said the rest of the registration cards went out Friday, so I should be getting it soon. My check still hasn't cleared either. You can always call and check, but I bet you'll see it all go through this week.

I do like above with R&S with my one who can handle it. She reads it on her own, does the workbook page if there is one. Other days that there isn't one, she and I look at it after she has read it. I decide if she understands the lesson and needs to do any written work that day or not. For my other student that has more trouble with language arts in general, we generally do the R&S together, but not a lesson a day. It may take us 3 days to thoroughly understand prepositional phrases and diagramming them. So with her I read the lesson, do the oral drill, assign some written work, either from the workbook or from the page, and check it carefully before she moves on. FWIW, she is in 7th grade and still working from the 5th grade R&S English at this point. It is right on target for her. And I guarantee you I was not introduced to diagramming prep phrases until middle school in public school, so I do not think she is ill prepared for high school. (My 9th grader is using the R&S grade 8 book for part of her high school English right now. I think at a certain point, R&S does not need to be on grade level. She will still finish all the way through 9/10 before she graduates.) My older dd did do the R&S spelling which included vocab. work as well as doing Latin, but it was not priority. She is an excellent speller, so it was quick work. The intro to french and greek spellings and roots was something she wasn't getting from doing Spanish or Latin, so I liked having her do it. She could get it in, again finishing the 8th grade spelling midway through 9th grade. Now for 2nd semester she is only doing Latin. She will pick back up some vocab study as testing approaches later. My current middle schooler cannot get the R&S spelling and vocab work in. She works on Spanish daily, Latin daily, the R&S English with me a few times a week, writing, reading, etc. She has trouble with spelling and needs special attention in that area. But phonics based doesn't work with her. So we are doing a Dyslexia Games workbook and some practice skills for learning new words that I learned from a special ed teacher that worked with her. She may never get the vocab work or the highest levels of R&S English. We shall see. But she will continue to move forward. Other factors for us are our outside activities. My kids spend several days a week in their dance classes. WTM has an article somewhere that discusses this. They are heavy into writing in SWB's household, and do similar to what is in WTM. But if you have a kid that is doing gymnastics or piano for hours a day, then that amount of writing isn't possible. Every household will be different. We are focusing on writing this semester heavily. But last semester, my high school dd did Logic as an elective. We just couldn't put in the time on her writing curric. She continued writing in all areas like from her R&S English and for her Great Books study, but we couldn't put in the time for specific WWS lessons. Now that we finished Logic, we have more time in a day and get to much more intense writing instruction vs. just the assignments from across the curriculum. We can't always do them because we have to get out the door by a certain time each day. So I am very scheduled in what gets done each hour and rewrite our schedules as we finish things or when we are focusing on other things to get it all in. We just don't get it all in every day the full year if that makes sense.

We have a set time in our day. 9-10 is for writing. What we use and what we do for "writing" changes depending on what we have going on. In general, dd12 has a Do It Yourself Homeschool Journal from Thinking Tree. She works in it daily at this time. It has writing prompts, pages for copywork, and a lot of space for me to assign work. I assign things like outlining or copying a poem, or whatever we need to work on. She also is working through R&S English and we do those writing assignments. But we have a separate time slot for English, and an assignment there will get started during English one day and finished the next during writing time if needed. We also do our pen pal letters, Bible journaling once a month from a devotional I do with them after my mom's group does it at our meeting once a month that we do in our journals. She isn't working through a "writing program" yet besides WTM style assignments across the board and these. She is working through Classical House of Learning Lit during our reading hour. It assigns dictation and some writing assignments at the end of each book. We will use this time for those assignments when we get to them. DD14 is working through WWS I and doing assignments from R&S English which get done in the writing time if she is working on one. She writes pen pal letters, does journaling exercises with us (things like writing out our New Year's Resolutions or the occasional gratitude list when the mood strikes me) and the devotional when we do during this time as well. We have career journals in which they interview people about jobs and fill out a sheet about them, also from Thinking Tree, that we work on during this time if we have recently interviewed someone on a field trip as well. She does writing ala WTM rhetoric stage Great Books study, but she usually does it during her reading time later in the day. But she has this hour to carry it over if necessary. To keep us motivated the Thinking Tree journals were very inspirational to my one dd. They are written for dyslexics and have elements in there that work well for them. And the journaling together topics and such really motivated my teen when she was getting writer's block and just staring at her WWS and not getting it done. Once we spend a day discussing and journaling together, the next she is better able to pick up WWS and get it done. It gets her creativity going I think. For us it took some time to figure out what would motivate her, but the together time seems to have been it. (and the journal for dd12. I did pick up ones for all of us to use together next year during our journal/writing time that I will work out a plan for for next year because it was so successful this year.) **** ETA colored gel pens for the personal journal pages and encouragement to doodle on those pages and to make them pretty was helpful too. But that may be just a girl thing, lol. I don't have boys.

My dd started high school this year using all WTM recs: History of the Ancient World, Timetables of History, and a history encyclopedia. We've done it WTM way from the beginning with the four year cycle, and will keep it up. It works well for us.

And yes, it's working. She is transfering the skills to other areas.

I haven't started it with my 7th grader yet. We are doing outlining on our own from other sources. She does writing assignments from R&S English and creative writing from another source, plus she still does pen pal letters. My older dd is in 9th. We tried it a couple of times starting in 6th grade or so, but we were also doing all of the above, plus assignments for co-op classes and such, so we never had time to devote to it. Finally this year in 9th we are dedicating some time to WWS I, and it is going so well. She has really embraced it. So I am not stressed that we waited. We also didn't end up doing logic until this year for 9th grade, so she won't start the WTM style rhetoric studies until next year after having completed logic and writing. I am ok with that.

We've found WTM logic stage to be pretty simple. I had to teach them to outline at first which takes some time, but the format is the same and easy to do on own: outline from KHE, fill in timelines, read more from something. Write a summary however often you assign. I just assigned a day: reading and timeline dates one day, outline the next, extra reading on a topic, summary once a month, that kind of thing. We definitely don't outline every topic.

That's how we did it too. We also used the Usborne First Encyclopedia of series (Earth, Space, Earth) as our intro to new topics and made notebook pages.

I keep the Usborne art books in our read aloud pile alway, btw. :) A page here or there always goes with what we are reading somewhere.

I love the Usborne Introduction to Art. It is beautiful and fantastic. I also have their Famous Artists one. Sometimes we go and read a biography of the artists from there after learning about them somewhere else or after studying a painting from the Intro to Art. I do also have the Annotated Mona Lisa mentioned above. It does give more info about composition and history than the Intro to Art. It is meant for older students, but the Intro gives a lot of info about history and composition as well I think. And it has much better pictures, many full page or at least half pages, all in color. The Mona Lisa has mostly very small pictures, like very small, and most are black and white. It is more reading about the art than appreciating it. It is a good complement to the Intro to Art (as is the other Usborne Famous Artists one that I have. But that info can really be looked up on wikipedia or something after reading the Intro.)

I love this tip for my leftie. Mine is only 2, but she will be my first leftie. So I am new to this. For me, who always has a ton of cheapie spirals around that the kids use for their nature journals and carrying around to draw and such, this will help me right now. Thanks!

What about doing science only during your school breaks? So if you usually take june and july off from school, do science a couple mornings a week the days that you are home?

What are your math goals? I had planned on mine doing Alg. in 8th, but when we got there, I thought about their high school plans. My current 9th grader has a liberal arts/language arts focus. It isn't STEM. So we took a bit more relaxed time with preAlgebra and Algebra, and she is wrapping up Alg. 1 in 9th. If she does 4 years of math in high school, she'll get plenty starting from Alg in 9th. If she does 3, she'll still be fine for what she is going to study in college.

Have you looked at your library? Ours separate all holiday books, including Valentine's, to certain areas. I just go there and peruse when looking for a holiday title of any kind.

Rod and Staff here. My odd used spelling and English including the composition assignments through middle school and is using in high school. She has worked some through WWS. We pick it up and put it down as time allows. And we have done all of the WTM style writing over the years across the curriculum. Lit has been WTM style almost exclusively. We threw in one MP study guide last year for a Shakespeare play. It wasn't anything special, so I decided one a year for some guided study is good. So for 9th this year she has done the reading and writing using WEM and WTM, but I bought one MP guide again on top of her R&S and WWS. My next one is moving through R&S and WTM literature as well. For her though, R&S spelling doesn't work. She is more right brained, so we have picked up some Dyslexia Games workbooks for her to work through. Both do Latin as well in the Form series through middle school.

And I put that in my cart, but decided to look through R&S 9/10 which I have on my shelf. I looked immediately at a section called poetic devices and it is a lesson on alliteration and onomatopoeia. So that is covered there. I am off to look over the rest of the index to see what else these cover. I bought them during a seconds sale, but haven't perused them yet. ETA... just found the lessons on hyperbole, simile, personification, etc. So I think we will stick w/R&S since we have it and it is eventually all there it looks like!

This is a good discussion and useful to me. I have a 9th grader that hasn't had some of these things in depth yet. She is doing WWS I, and today she had to decribe characters using metaphor. I want to say our R&S English has at some point discussed similes, metaphor, synonym, homonym, antonym. Alliteration and so forth have been discussed by me, but have not come up in any of our usual WTM recs yet either. For beginning high school english she is still in R&S 8 English and is using the WEM for literature, but that includes no lit guides, so I am going to have to look for the book someone mentioned above, Essential Literary Terms. I am off to look for it on Amazon right now!

Good question. My current 7th grader doesn't have the slow issues. She pretty much likes to get her work done with me, and is very social and very motivated to get it done and have free time. So she works my assigned schedule from around 8:30 in the morning to around 2 or 3 and gets the majority of her work done in that time period. She does wander off to play with her little sister at times, so will lose time. She also rarely gets math finished in the 8-9 time slot mainly because she doesn't get at it until closer to 8:30 or 8:45. So we work for 15-30 min. Then she puts it up and pulls it back out later to finish in her free time after school which she does very quickly. If she wandered off a lot during her Latin time period to play with her sister, then she would have Latin to finish in the evening too. And she pretty much does her science on her own in the early evenings. She does a co-op class with assigned work. Once or twice a week she needs to pull it out and read and do some notebooking or the occasional at home experiment. We don't have a scheduled time in the day for this. We do our together work during the day. So after dance classes and such she may have 30 min to an hour of work left to finish for a day. I am not against homework at this age to help them manage their time. My other dd is more like you described. She is just slow at everything. Always has been. She makes fine grades. But she works several hours on her own every night. She doesn't mind. She prefers that to moving quickly during the days. We have trouble getting her up and going in the mornings. And she can sit and stare and do nothing constantly. So it works better to keep switching our subjects at the given time, then put it up for her to finish later. Otherwise she would sit and stare at one subject for 3 hours and still not finish one subject in a morning and not have much to show at the end of the day. So at night, the nights we don't have late nights at something, she often works 2 hours or more on her own. I don't do school at night.

I think there are places where he is learning to self study and pace already- like with the science class. If it is anything like mine, the kids have a chapter to work through each week at home on their own, and they do the lab once a week at co-op with the teacher who discusses the chapter a bit as they do it. So my 7th grader does the reading and studying to stay on track with that. I do check in with her and look at her syllabus a bit. As for the history, could you find a place in the day for reading aloud once a day? Not teaching. Just reading it aloud and discussing in place of teaching? That could be the one time in the day that you sit and read to everyone for 20-30 min. Occasionally you could assign work when needed or wanted.

One lady at my co-op does it the typical 4 years using one year of ancients, one of middle ages, one of early modern/explorers, then one year American history, one year of State history. I have just done the 4 year WTM cycle doing, modern/American/state the same year in the logic stage. We covered a lot of history that year to do it thoroughly though. In elem. cycle, we did state as we went, gently, doing small units. In logic stage we did the equivalent of 2 full histories to do each as thoroughly as I wanted. It was fun though. We just did all of our other subjects around those- art, writing, etc.

I think of it as I can say "I love you" without the pronoun. But if someone wants to know who loves someone, I would use the pronoun for emphasis because that was the emphasis of the sentence. 'Who loves you?" 'I love you." (not him, I do!!) That's how my brain does it.