My boys print was not very good at all(8&9). Then we switched to cursive and to my surprise it looked so much better. It actually looks "good" a lot of the time. They do pentime workbook 1 page a day and also we use startwrite and I create their verses to copy from that. It takes them work but it is getting better all the time they are now 9 & 10. Most of the time on regular work they just don't want to slow down and try to do it well, they would rather slop through it. When writing a card to their aunt the other day they did a beautiful job. I don't require them to focus on penmanship on all of our subjects, my boys would get overwhelmed. But they do have certain times they are asked to really focus and try hard. As they grow and it gets easier and easier I will require it more of the time.

We ended up using Spell to Write and Read (SWR). It is also a spinoff of Spaulding. Wanda the lady who wrote it learned from Mrs. Spalding. It does take a little to learn to teach it but it totally worth it. It really makes sense in so many ways. The Manual Ellie told you about and LOE are both good too! I have not tried them personally but I researched a lot. SWR was the one that was in the middle of LOE & Spaldings Manual in my opinion. It has some organization to it but not as much as LOE.

Does anyone know when it usually gets mailed?

Spell to Write & Read is low cost. Its also a one time cost. They will have an awesome understanding of spelling when finished. I do a certain amount of words a day/week. You go about teaching it the same way each time and its spelled out in the book. The only down side I see so far is that it takes a little work to figure out how to teach it. I have programs that have another teacher teach for most of our curriculums MUS, EIW, Supercharged Science, Veritas History online. BUT this spelling curriculum is one I did not want to pass up and got what I needed to learn to teach it. At first I thought, WOW this is maybe to hard for me. But I stuck with it another week and we all had it down, me and my boys. They love it too. They like that all the phonics make sense now and also the fingergrams. Spelling is now easy and fun and cheap :)

Supercharged Science is what we like. Super hands on. Spell to write and read- We use this for spelling and it also helps with reading. There is a learning curve to teach it at first, but it is very good. My boys have actually been having fun doing it. So that's a huge + for me :) I was having such a hard time the first two years all the phonics for reading and spelling never made sense to me. With SWR now they do! yay

They are in 4th/5th. We just tried R&S 4 and can see its just not for us. R&S is also many years of grammar. I like that I have seen JAG/AG reviews that say it compares to R&S with thoroughness but doesn't take as long. Makes me wonder if its a lot harder? But I do think I will just do something light in grammar that is teaching the basics to finish out this year and start JAG next year.

I do see that they say you can start with no prior experience with grammar. But I'm wondering from those who have used it if you think it would make it easier if we did something else first. Im thinking something like GWG for a year first OR?

He says he really understood Shurley well, that it made sense. It was only level 2 but still he thought it was super easy and understood it. I feel like he was learning what nouns and verbs are in other curriculum and was grasping that. And it seems to me it would make more sense if he were taught what a subject and predicate were first got that solid and then moved on. Then add the simple, compound etc. Maybe its just moving to fast. Im just really wondering if its the "way" its taught by R&S or just needing to slow down or back up. Maybe the drill over and over in Shurley that people talk of is what he liked and helped him understand it. I remember doing R&S phonics and we switched because I felt like it was all over the place. I realize many people love it. So maybe it our learning style that doesn't jive. I do want to give it more of a chance because is it known to be so good. But I don't want to leave my son in the dust or make him feel overwhelmed when he can learn just fine with other curriculums.

We decided to go with R&S 4th for grammar. We had done Shurley English 2 & MCT Island book (just read through it). So my boys knew a little about Nouns, Verbs & possible could tell you what the 8 parts of a sentence were? I thought when I looked through the TOC R&S4 it looked doable. Well, now that we are into it 7 lessons Im wondering if maybe I was wrong. Both my guys are pretty bright and catch on well. But one of them, my 10 year old does not like to be overwhelmed in any way or have something be too hard or he gets overwhelmed. We are going through the lessons and he feels like he has NO IDEA of what to do even when we keep going over it. Since the first chapter is on Subjects and Predicates and he has never really done anything like this before its been hard. He really just doesn't know what they are and it moves pretty fast from lesson to lesson. Lessons are using the words simple, phrases and it looks like compound is coming next! ah seems to maybe be to much. Do you think he needs a better foundation? He does awesome in other subjects but I have always made sure he has a solid foundation and he moves up as he understands. He and I were talking about what confuses him and he said, "I just don't understand what a subject or (insert any of the grammar words here) is". So he is hearing the words and when we get going in a list of questions he can begin to answer correctly because he starts to see what we are doing with those sets of questions. But I don't think he is really understanding what the words mean. So when I ask him again later he has no idea what they are. Just seems like were in over our heads to begin with. Unfortunately I know NONE of this so I'm no help myself. So I too get confused going back and forth trying to understand what all these new words are. Grade 3 looks like it hits a lot on nouns and verbs. But I looked up the subject and predicate stuff and it looks to only go over it a little there? Ugg what to do. this is 4th grade first lessons of R&S. Chapter 1 - Subjects and Predicates 1. Getting Acquainted With Your English Book 2. Getting Organized 3. Learning About Sentences 4. Finding the Simple Predicate 5. Verb Phrases 6. Learning to Observe and Listen 7. Finding the Simple Subject 8. Pronouns and Noun Phrases 9. Diagramming Sentence Skeletons 10. Compound Subjects and Predicates 11. Diagramming Compound Subjects and Predicates 12. The Paragraph 13. Speaking Clearly 14. Chapter 1 Review

We are doing Greece, Rome & NT this year, actually were getting close to done. They love it and are learning lots. We start our morning off with 30 min of self-paced, they would want to keep going if I didn't put a limit :) Sometimes, I do just let them have at it and they will do a good amount of lessons. They do this independently. Then during our together time we read some of the veritas recommended books. The online course does read them a book at the end of each lesson also but we skip that part. They also read readers on their own time. Right now one of mine is reading detectives in togas and liking it. I also got the timeline cards. We add one (laminated) each week to a 3 ring binder & they go through it each morning during their workboxes time for memorization. We don't do the song, but im sure its good. I also add the EM history pockets just cause its fun :) So: 30min daily- online lessons Timeline card review- on their own Reading- Together Reading- on their own History Pockets 2 days a week for about 15-20 min. We love it and will finish it out!

Bible: EBS & Verse Memorization Writing: EIW 5 Grammar: JAG M Spelling: SWR Vocabulary: CE 1 MCT Cursive: Pentime & Verse Copy Work Math: TT4 & MUS Delta, LofF & Sing Chall Science: Supercharged E-Science (by Topics/Units) & EM daily Science History: Veritas Online MARR, read lots of books Geography: Africa, The Poles, Australia, N.&S. America Maps: EM Daily & MGC workbooks Foreign Language: Hebrew Typing: 3 months of something? Piano

I got in way over my head when I began my journey :) So I too needed to prioritize, we were all overwhelmed with the amount of work needed to be done. For us 4th grade it would be: Grammar - 10-15min together Spelling- 15min together Writing- 20min together Handwriting (Cursive)- 4min independently Math- 30min independently Science- 30min together History- 30min independently & 20min together (This is also our special "reading together" time) Geography & Maps- 20min together Bible Study-10min together Verses- 4min together, 3 min independently Next year we plan on adding Vocab & Hebrew (about 40 min more). School takes us 2.5 hrs right now together-Bible Study & Weekly Verse, Grammar, Spelling, Writing, Geography, History Pockets & Books & Science. They spend another 1.5 independently which includes reading time, piano practice, EM- science & maps workbooks, Math facts, Math pages, handwriting, history online, bible reading, verse memorization and prayer time. I did a spread sheet up to high school (cause I know HS will be a guess as of now :) But I fit in what we wanted done in between now 4th grade and 8th grade. Latin will have to be a 2 year intense course when they are older unlike what I wanted to do daily since they were young. Spanish will have to wait... But they will get done just not all at once or maybe for as long as I thought. I had to let some stuff go and also simplify the way we were teaching or learning with some curriculums. It was just to hard to do it all. At least for me.

You could always just do a monthly subscription afterwards. But I'm not sure if they do any deals for keeping going after the 5 years is up? Sure, I will check back in :) I'm going at this program as my main science. So we will be going through the topics/units almost in the order they are in (a couple changes). I will read through the main points of each topic (do the reading) and we will do all the worksheets that Aurora has posted. I will probably tell my boys need to complete a certain amount of experiments for the topic and then they can either watch the others or also do them if they want to. I do know the mastery has DVD's and I love that it does. My boys will probably want to watch them for fun :) But, for our main learning we will structure it around the topics on sciencelearningspace.com. I will let you know what we think of the rest too though.

Also they did inform me that, YES they can swing back around again and students will usually pick up more on the topic or understand different aspects of it.

I don't think I can help much since I don't have a lot of experience with it but I will add what I can. Last summer we did e-camp and we really enjoyed it. I planned on doing the mastery program next and we are just now beginning that. Our boxes just got here, yay! Not sure which program you are wanting diamond,silver or gold. We went with dimond and yes the price is a large chunk. But we get 5 years of online which includes all the advanced topics(which usually cost more monthly). When I added up what all the experiments were gonna cost it was definatly a benifit for us. Just the Chemistry set and electronics are a large chuck of $. This last summer with e-camp I collected all the experiment items myself for the rockets topic and it is not to hard to do. But for the next 5 years and NOT having to go gather is a also a bonus of my time. Aurora has it separated by grades from pre/K up, I looked at the 1st grade at it looks good. My boys are 9 & 10 but I still wanted to see what the grades looked like. We are gonna go with topical studies which I can see would work with different ages because the olders could just dig in deeper.

Yes, you can!

Thank you all so much

We love our veritas in this home. One of our favorite subjects. We do use the online history and it does a really good job IMO. The boys remember a ton. We also have the timeline cards and read through some of the books that it has listed on the back. We are almost though Greece, Rome & New Testament. We did use the scholars lesson plans at first but I personally didn't use them much. I could see how someone else might like them though. We will continue this for 3 more years. Then I have planned MOH CD's & Timeline over a two year time frame and Diana Waring for H.S. They should have it down by then :) When I was digging deep on "what to use at what age" this is the idea of curriculum ages I got from people. even though all of these curriculums say they have a very wide age range.

My two boys 9 & 10 do not want to write much at all. One of them will write the first letter of the answer in his workbooks because he does not want to write the word out. If I ask him to he feels a little overwhelmed and like he doesn't want to. When doing our science lapbooks and they need to write information on the individual book parts they feel like it to much writing even when I really try to make it as simple as possible and still understandable. They will do a couple sentences when writing their verses down with out to much complaint. They are doing pentime for handwriting and only doing ½ page a day because I didn’t want them to slop through it anymore and they will try harder if they don’t have as much to do. I just got our new writing program and realize they will need to be writing more than they like to for sure. Im wondering do I go ahead with it and see what happens? OR should I do something else for the rest of this year and get them writing more before I try a whole writing program. We could always start next year in 4th grade. I worried about making them write to much in a writing program and then they wont want to do it. I think they will like making stories up and I also think they could do it as far as understanding goes. Its really just the actual writing that is the problem. But I don’t want it to be so does anyone have some advice?

This is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you

What is the average line up of classes for math?

I'm honestly not sure yet. Waiting for a call back from the company. I would love to put them into 4th but I think from the TC it will have to be 3rd. Im have R&S 4. But I may lose my mind by the end of the day.... So completely sick of trying to figure this out for days. Everytime I think I have it figured out I learn something else or just don't have peace. Anyway, I really want simple. Especially today :) I don't mind doing R&S for grammar and EIW for writing. But if EIW's grammar portion is pretty good I just want to do that. I could probably even do a couple R&S though out the years to make sure their really strong in grammar right? Ugg anyway, you can see Im confused :)

I have been looking into EIW. I'm having a hard time giving up the idea of R&S for grammar. Although I love the idea of writing and grammar being in the same curriculum for EIW. I hear over and over that those who stick with R&S for the grammar come out really knowing it well. I would love to hear if someone thinks the grammar knowledge would be the same as R&S in the end if I just used EIW for both grammar and writing?

Will/do you switch at some point or supplement? Does it teach more structurally or creatively? I'm wondering if it will be a thorough program in the writing portion. I do understand its good for grammar but I never hear as much about the writing. I have not used it or any writing program for that matter so your thoughts on if you liked it would be great. I don't know why I never thought of using the writing portion before now. I was just sold on planning to do IEW, now I'm thinking outside my box I guess.

I just want to thank everyone for all the comments you gave. I feel like I did understand where everyone was coming from. The variety and clarifications helped me to see writing in a much clearer light. I appreciate it!