Thanks to both of you! That clears it up completely.

I notice that different publication dates of Lively Art of Writing have different subtitles: -Words, sentences, style and techniquie--an essential guide to one of today's most necessary skills -Developing structure -Understanding forms -A book on composition -Effective style Does anyone know whether these are all substantively different books, or whether they are different subtitles for different editions of the same book? I tried to research this online and just couldn't come up with anything!

Thanks so much for your comments, everyone. Very helpful. Now I just have to figure out what to do! :confused1:

The title says it all! :)

I agree with above comments that it mostly makes sense to integrate critical thinking studies. However, my kids and I recently finished an awesome TC lecture series: Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills, by Steven Novella. We were entranced, and it has informed many of our subsequent discussions and made my kids way more articulate when they analyze weak arguments or reasoning. Highly recommended! A caveat, though...he speaks calmly but forcefully in support of mainstream scientific ideas like evolution, so those who don't like that approach may not appreciate that. Just fyi.

So glad it was helpful, CA! Also, agreeing with you, Lori D., that the author is perfectly up-front about her approach, so no complaints there. I also agree that the instruction on annotation and on thesis statements can provide a good, well-structured introduction to those topics, and they are certainly important ones. CA--have you considered getting collections of Bible stories for children to familiarize your kids with the well-known stories and characters? I bet even simple stories aimed at kids younger than yours would be a fun, quick way to help them catch Biblical allusions in literature. Or maybe they already have that basic familiarity. Just a thought.

Well, I'm not someone else, but I can tell you my experience as the original poster who did buy WttW and tried to use it this year. The curriculum gets great reviews on these boards, and I'm certainly not trying to disrespect anyone's opinion or experience. I'm glad it works so well for many people. We gave it a good try for a few months, which is a few more months than we should have tried it, for two reasons. The first, which is most relevant to your question, is that we were so turned off by the religious aspects. (And we are religious, just not that kind of religious!) This is not to disagree with people who wrote in answer to my question that it can be used secularly. I do agree with what they said. It can. If you bring the Biblical allusions sections more into balance with looking for other kinds of allusions (Shakespearean, historical, etc.), and if you ignore one chapter--I can't remember which right now, but it's on “worldview,†which is a word I'm only just beginning to understand as it is applied in a religious sense--then it works pretty well. There are some comments throughout the book that I didn't really like, and it kind of irked me that I kept having to stop the lesson and discuss those with my kid, helping her see why those came from a viewpoint that is very different from ours. This need not have bugged me much, but I'll admit that in the end it really did. I felt more and more annoyed and alienated from the authorial voice, which is not a nice way to feel when you're just trying to learn to discuss and enjoy and analyze literature. It really turned me off. Then, when we got to the “worldview†lesson, I got really mad. Yes, we looked at it together and I talked with my kid about what was going on there and why I personally found it so distasteful and antithetical to many of our values, which maybe was a good lesson, but it was weird to tell her how much I disliked that section, and then to ask her to respect the other sections and accept the guidance she was being offered. That just didn't feel right. So that's for my reaction to the religous aspects: Agreement with previous respondents, yet it was more of an “issue†for me than for some. My other critique is that I just didn't find it all that good. It follows a kind of approach that I've also seen in other IEW and TTC materials (we do not use either, but I've looked into them a lot because I see them mentioned so much), which does not do what I am hoping to do for my kids in terms of literature analysis and expository writing. It was a bit more formulaic than we like. I'm not quite sure how to say why it didn't quite work for us. But it didn't. Far more successful has been reading How to Read Litearture Like a Professor for Kids and then reading tons, talking tons, analyzing how authors do what they are doing and how successful they are at it--with anything from editorials to essays to novels--and then trying to do it ourselves and talking about how successful we were at doing that. Then more of the same. Of course this is kind of a more nebulous approach, and I am only in the early stages of getting a handle on it. I know, though, that the WttW approach was killing my kid's love of analyzing literature (and she does love to analyze literature) before my eyes. Once we went away from it, read a few books “just for fun†to recover, and then started on this new path, the excitement and interest have returned. I can definitely see why WttW would be great for lots of people, and I don't think it is an objectively bad curriculum. It just was not a good match for us, and I tried here to verbalize why. Not sure if I did an adequate job, but I hope that helps a little!

Definitely TOPS Science topscience.org! Radishes #38 is all about studying plant growth by doing it. There's also Corn and Beans #39. Many of the other units are great, too. They use common household items, and they really work.

Just to say that we, too, LOVED TOPS at that age!

Any chance she'd enjoy this? It's free, but priceless. (Thank you, Stanford!) http://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh We use selected lessons from here to go along with our spine. It's amazing! Real historical documents, all selected and ready to go, that help you go deep into chosen moments in history. You get to ask real, complex questions that don't have simple answers. You as the parent/teacher don't need any prior knowledge to use them. I think that using these without a spine could even be fascinating...just read the documents together and talk about them. Not sure if that helps, but I thought it might be a very different way of studying history that might be worth a try for her. Good luck!

Thank you for replying with your experience, Jilly. It helps me to validate our own experience. I wanted it to work out so much, and it just didn't! Like you, I'm glad to know that I have company.

Well, we've been using (and loving!) Zumdahl's Introductory Chemistry. I admit I didn't tightly correlate the labs to the chapters, but I did loosely. Plus now that we're well more than halfway through, I really don't think I've seen anything that would have significantly demystified any of the labs that so confounded us. I think they're just at way too high a level for our level of chemistry-specific knowledge. I can see it perhaps working better in the situation you describe--large chunks of time, knowledgeable guides, and the chance to spend significant time researching each lab in depth and lots more time carrying out each lab. For us, it was intended as a component of her textbook/problem-solving study, to introduce her to chemistry lab equipment and basic kinds of chemical manipulations that can be done to test or demonstrate a concept. We had so looked forward to this component of her chemistry study, but each lab was just an exercise in an increasing level of frustration. And when the manual says a lab will take 90 minutes, and it ends up taking 3 hours, well, that can really mess up the rest of your day if you had any time-sensitive plans! I'm not proud to admit that I have not managed to subsitute anything else for a lab component. On the positive side, though, once we dropped the labs (which she grew to hate), she decided she adored chemistry and Zumdahl's book in particular. She says she wants to keep studying chemistry next year instead of moving on to physics as planned, and she gets super excited when it's time to work problems from the end of a chapter. We will study chemistry once more before she graduates, and I will be sure it has a substantial lab component next time. So overall I'm not feeling too bad about it all, except that I am disappointed to have spent the money badly, and I'm disappointed that it didn't work out better, as I felt Mr. Thompson dealt openly and honestly with us and I had wanted to continue using his labs for all our high school lab work. Sigh. If only it could be that easy! Hope that helps explain our experience. Thanks for reminding me of yours. Once I read your comments, I remembered that you had kindly responded when I posted last summer asking for advice on chemistry labs. You told me of your experience and asked me to let you know how our experience went. I guess I finally got around to it, in a roundabout way!

We read How to Read Literature Like a Professor for Kids at the beginning of this year (ages 11 and 14). It has been a game-changer! It totally moved our discussion of literature to the next level, and we have built from there all year. I credit this book with a huge, meaningful leap in my kids' understanding about how to talk about and analyze literature and enjoy doing so. I agree with Nan that the adult version, which Iread, has some pretty adult content. We found the kids' version very appropriate, and not too elementary for our 14-y-o.

Just a comment about The Home Scientist lab kits (from the author of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry). We ordered his Chemistry kit for this year. He was very, very responsive and very friendly and helpful over email. I couldn't have asked for more. The kit arrived exactly as advertised, which is pretty impressive given how many little nitpicky components there are. I thought, and still do, that the price was very fair for what we were sold. And I can assure you, from a few exchanges we had, that he is ADAMANTLY secular about science. Last, I really appreciated that he publishes the entire lab manual for free, so you can make a very informed decision about whether or not to buy the kit. All in all, in terms of business concerns, we were and are perfectly satisfied. HOWEVER, I wanted to let you know that the kit didn't work out for us. We didn't quite figure this out by the careful review we made of the manual, but we found every lab we tried--and we tried seven or eight of them--to be, well, just way above our heads. And I consider myself to have a pretty decent science background. I didn't major in science in college, but I took AP bio and chem in high school and I am not at all afraid of math and science. I love them. And I read well. But these labs....I couldn't understand at least 50% of what the manual was saying about why we were doing each lab, what we were supposed to get out of it, how it deepened our understanding of chemistry. I am convinced that, with the right guidance or knowledge, the labs were in fact very appropriate and should have/could have deepened our understanding, but with lab after lab we found ourselves barely managing to just follow the steps without any bigger understanding. Then we'd get done and say something like, "Well, we got a precipitate of the right color, as we were supposed to, so I suppose we succeeded, but so what? What does it mean? Why did it happen? How do we now understand more chemistry than we did?" It was all we could do to mechanically follow each step without understanding what we were doing. I think the lab manual actually probably does explain all this, but again, I think it just presupposes way more science knowledge than a non-science-major has. Which I hadn't expected. And last, a big issue was that every single lab took a minimum of twice the amount of time the manual said it would. So unfortunately, this ended up being an expensive mistake for us. I have to take responsibility for the mistake since I feel the price was fair, the seller's responsiveness was excellent, and we had total access to the manual before we bought. But I just wanted to share our experience in case it turned out to be helpful for anyone else. Also, a quick comment about Labpaq. We considered them before we bought from The Home Scientist. I was monumentally unimpressed. First, the web site is extremely dense. You have to email them just to get a password to see the catalog with prices. Then when you do, you see that the catalog is half-illiterate, with sentence fragments and other grammatical errors that I can't remember any more. Then I tried very hard to see any kind of meaningful sample of the lab manual before I bought. No, no, and no. I asked by email. I asked by phone. (Got the same person both ways.) She wouldn't send me so much as a screenshot of one page of a lab manual. She seemed to think it was enough to list the supplies in the kit, with absolutely no hint about how the labs would be taught. Which is ridiculous. Finally I found this review on the internet: http://jmbe.asm.org/index.php/jmbe/article/view/335/html. It is really quite damning, and convinced me that my growing sense about Labpaq was correct. I think they are worth steering away from, personally. I am thinking that next year we might try labs from Quality Science Labs. I have read a few positive reviews here. I don't have any more knowledge about them, so this isn't really a recommendation. Hope that helps. Good luck--I know the lonely feeling of looking for quality secular science materials!

This thread is inspired by a comment made by regentrude on another thread. She wrote that she can often make dinner in 20 minutes, out of not-highly-processed foods, and gave the example of bread, cheese, and salad. At which my eyebrows went: Zing! We eat all those things. And enjoy them. And yes, they would be greeted as a perfectly good dinner around here. So why am I spending 1+ hours in the kitchen every evening, when that's not what I would prefer to be doing and always feel short of time lately? I would love to have my eyes opened some more. Could we share some 20-minute, not-highly-processed, fairly-healthy dinner ideas? Okay--I'd even go happily for 30 minutes. I'll start: Tonight my husband made a delicious braised Italian beef dish (from Michael Symon's Live to Cook): he spent a few minutes cutting up carrots, garlic, onion, and celery root. Added a cheap cut of tough beef, herbs, red wine. Cooked it for three hours in a dutch oven. Threw it on the table with some bread. It was truly delicious, with meat that just melted into tender, juicy, flavorful strands when pulled gently with a fork. Voila: a delicious, low-processed dinner in under 20 minutes. Yes, we had to be home for it to cook for three hours, but we were going to do that anyway. It took no hovering or checking at all. I'd love to build a little collection of such ideas or recipes!

I can't believe it has taken me this long to get back here and thank everyone warmly for all the great ideas! There is so much food for thought here. This is such an interesting subject with so many possible approaches. It's great to hear about lots of different ideas and resources. Many thanks to everyone!

Just checked mine....it looks like both the Teacher's Edition and the Solutions manual have chapter review/test answers. HTH!

Another vote for not worrying about skipping level 6. We did 6A and skipped 6B, and by then I was wishing we had skipped 6A, too.

rq

The thread "s/o College/University writing instructor rants on high school writing instruction..." has exploded into an unbelievably high-level and intelligent thread! Many thanks to everyone there. It is also deeply satisfying to me, since like many of you I have spent years looking at various writing curricula and not thinking they would be a good fit for my kids. This is helping tremendusly to move my thinking along. I wanted to start a new spinoff because I found myself excited to run with some of these thoughts, but with a few practical questions. I didn't want to hijack that thread, though. Here are my three questions: 1. I feel a renewed desire for good models for various kinds of essays. Economist and WSJ, mentioned in the old thread, sound like one kind of good source. OhElizabeth mentioned a book of nature essays that I couldn't find when I googled it, but I'd love to find it. I know someone (maybe llewelma?) started a thread similar to this topic recently, but it didn't seem to come up with too much that I thought would help us. Does anyone have any other ideas to toss out? 2. This is hard to admit, but I feel unequal to the task of coming up with specific writing ideas that will move my kid toward college kinds of writing. Call them prompts, or assignments, or topics....I agree with comments in the old thread about how prompts are often problematic, but I have such a block about helping my kid come up with a worthy start, even if we have read a good book. Once we have a start, I feel pretty good about guiding her in the writing process, but getting past that first step is so hard for us. For instance, WttW's idea (most of WttW wasn't a good fit for us, but this one part was useful) of analyzing the author's use of suspense in a short story was helpful and led to a good essay analyzing the use of suspense in ch. 28 of To Kill A Mockingbird. I feel silly saying it, but I wouldn't have come up with that idea on my own. But we can't spend the next few years just analyzing suspense in book after book! I wish I had a list of some good general ideas that we could use or take inspiration from. Any ideas? 3. OhElizabeth mentioned making a template from a good essay, like from the Economist, and having the kid fill it in as an exercise in modeling good essays. This sounds interesting, but I honestly don't know exactly what this is. What does it look like? I hope this isn't covering too much territory in one post. I'm just so energized by the old thread!

Listening in, too, as we are using LL8 this year. Has anyone considered continuing with LL's high school packages?

Thanks, Sue!

Is it too much of a hijack for me to ask Sue whether it was edition 2 or 3 of Jacobs that she bailed out of?

It case it helps, here's a recent thread in which I asked almost this question and got some very helpful discussion: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/498393-geometry-suggestions-for-a-kid-who-is-thriving-on-foerster-algebra-1/

Thank you all so very much! This has been a really helpful conversation. Swimmermom: the rest of the sequence, if I can be so bold as to predict (which is totally foolhardy, I know!) is 9th-physics, 10th-bio, 11th-chem, 12th-physics. Not, perhaps, the ideal sequence, but it's the one we seem to be on unless we change things around, which is always possible. OhElizabeth: I didn't know about GAPBS. It looks very interesting. I think we may well use some of its resources, no matter what we do, so thank you very much for telling me about it. And thanks Crimson Wife for mentioning Mr. Q. I need to look into that, too. I appreciate the discussions about what the various Zumdahls are like. I did a lot of research on this forum, and found that the more I thought I knew, the less I knew. There seems to be little consensus, except that his Chemistry is AP. So I sort of gave up and decided that Introductory would be good enough; I am also about to get my hands on his World of Chemistry, which is also hard to figure out from WTM posts of the past. Generally, though, people seem to like Zumdahl. Again, many thanks! I feel like I have a lot more to go on now.