Also having a Dickens of a time searching. I used to use Google to search the forum (key words + site:welltrainedmind.com), but now that isn't working either. Oh dear!

I've been watching for over a year, and it hasn't (that I've noticed) yet. :glare: :) (I suppose if I ever buy it, it'll go on sale the next week) :D

:iagree:

We schedule 40 weeks. With 52 weeks in the year, and 40 weeks of school, that leaves us 12 weeks of off. We generally schedule this as one week per month: a week at Thanksgiving, a week at Christmas, a week at New Year's (so, two weeks in a row), etc. It's worked well for us for a few years now. Since I divide our work further into quarters, we complete 10 weeks of school in 3 months. Now, life does not always easily fall into neat weeks. So, I have learned to consider "one week off" as "five days off" per month. We may need three days off at Thanksgiving, and two days off the week before, for example. It works for us! But, I agree with all PP, to do what works best for you!

How about Charles Lamb's Beauty and the Beast? It's on Google Books. (Free.)

For the above scenario, I'd highly recommend looking at CLE Grade 1. Scripted (but not as teacher intensive as many of the programs listed above), great for a diligent, bright girl, straight-forward to someone new in homeschooling (and perhaps only interested for 1 year), and economical to boot.

VERY happy with everything except Latin. Switching that. :D I do need to get typing and piano squeezed back into our day, though! :tongue_smilie:

This is a FANTASTIC book! Thank you so much for sharing!!! :hurray:

Yep. I thought about it today and decided that that's the direction we want to go in -- exactly-- for 4th and 5th. I want vocabulary-building in 4th (because he's INTERESTED; he's been reading Usborne beginner books in Latin and such just for the fun vocab. on his own time). (He's got enough Latin grammar down with GSWL to make fun sentences.) Then I want to hit Caesar prep. in 5th (mostly likely with Henle, which just arrived). So, you hit the nail on the head. Wide vocab./narrow grammar in 4th followed by narrow vocab./serious grammar in 5th. **** That vintage speller I linked you to was The North American Spelling Book. Let's see if I can find it. Oh, here. So far, ds has fairly well grasped the two letter combos. of consonant-long vowel. He's having great fun pointing out words like be, so, we, he, etc. in our picture books. :) He's also picked up various and sundry words I've never taught, but that's a different story. ;) Yes, direct, thorough, books of excellent content with little to no scripting work best for me. (McGuffey's, old spellers, old grammars, old arithmetic, old ... anything.) About as scripted as I can handle is R&S English and Arithmetic. :D

Oh no! Remember this thread, Hunter? :willy_nilly: I've been (re)considering my original plan of Latin Without Tears all day long. Maybe I should just give it a shot. After all, it's only 4th grade, right? I can always choose something else next year. Latin Without Tears seems to be the perfect extension for our Latin study after GSWL. Sigh.

This is the number one difference that struck me. Bumping for you, and hoping that someone with experience in both programs can be of further help.

Oh sheesh! I had forgotten all about this, if, indeed, I ever knew it. :blush: Thanks for the clarification. :)

Oh, good. I was afraid that I'd rather overdone the point. :tongue_smilie: I'd definitely like a Latin book written by people with OCD. :D

:D As you know from other threads, I've come to the end of my rope with MP FFL. I do know enough Latin (from college) to recognize the errors. (Yesterday, in Lesson 7, they have children memorizing the four prin. parts of do, dare... as "do, dare, dedi, datus" which ought to be "do, dare, dedi, datum". Now, if I hadn't had "do, dare, dedi, datum" memorized already, I would not have caught the error. Luckily, my Cassell's Latin dictionary on the shelf confirmed what I knew to be the true 4 prin. parts of "dare". ) I just don't encounter those types of errors in older books. In my frugal mind, if I'm going to spend big $$ for a new, modern, flashy program, it better have VERY FEW ERRORS. If not, why not go with an older text, or as in the awesome thread referenced above, no "program" at all? (I guess I'm a snob about this. For this reason, I never buy the coffee-table-book-like knitting books that come out. They have beautiful, glossy pictures but no genius behind the construction. Far worse, they are rife with errors. I don't have patience for that, even though I'm an experienced knitter enough to recognize the errors at once. I'd rather design my own pattern, or use older books written by knitting masters who were more concerned about content and method than a flashy layout.) So, I think I'll be spending the next few days wading through my old school Latin books for what I'd look for in a knitting book: a book written by a master who cared more about content, method, and results than about a flashy (or even easy) layout. In the meantime, ds would probably be quite happy sitting down to read a bit of Latin. I've collected new and old readers that he'll contented read for an hour or so. He's tired of just translating one word sentences from FFL. ;)

Okay! I may just take the plunge and do this. I've had it with Latin programs! Had it! I love Latin. My ds loves Latin. But FFL (with all its errors and tedium) is sucking the very blood out of our day. I dread teaching Latin with FFL. Today, finding yet ANOTHER ERROR in the memory work of principal parts, I felt the final straw break. I'm now off to delete my row in our planner for FFL; in its place will be "Latin" with a little checkbox. Sigh. This is a very timely thread for me. Thanks to Angela in Ohio for your wonderful inspiration and wisdom, and to Hunter for bumping!

Active: The Romans conquered Britain. Passive: Britain was conquered by the Romans. Active: VeggieTales entertained the children while I cleaned the kitchen. Passive: The children were entertained by VeggieTales while I cleaned the kitchen. Active: The novel engrossed me. Passive: I was engrossed by the novel. IMHO, the modern-writing push to eradicate passive writing is just silly. These stylistic trends come and go. It reminds me of the false grammar "rules" they taught us in school, like "Always say, 'Robert and I...' instead of 'Robert and me.'" I know MANY people who think that's really a rule! Of course it's not! Mom gave the cookies to Robert and me. :) It's also NOT a rule to "avoid the passive voice whenever possible." :glare: (At least it's not a rule in my book. ;)) I think it is useful to arrange sentences so that they are strong, but this does not always need to be accomplished "strong verbs", or short, Hemingway-like writing. :) Of course, I'm old-fashioned, prefer pre-20th literature, and NOT a modern editor. :)

We add it to our oatmeal in the morning. :)

We JUST began last week. My ds finds it very amusing, esp. fa fe fi fo fu fy, which we call speaking like giants and do in a deep voice. You know, as in "Fe fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!" Ds likes to do ca ce ci co cu cy in a mousey voice. I have no idea why that is, but I just go with it. ;) All that to say that we haven't got to the sentences yet. :) Good to know about the audio! I'm very blessed that I grew up with a father that was INSISTENT upon drilling us in good, old-school pronunciation. In fact, whenever he visits, he still likes to discuss (or quiz me) on pronunciation, arithmetic , grammar, etymology, poetic forms, Latin references in modern poetry, etc. :D You've got to love a dad like that. :) Speaking of Dad and dictionaries... He recently gave me his mother's Webster's Dictionary from 1942. It is wonderful, and, best of all, well-loved (worn). I never knew her; but now I feel like I have a little piece of her. Maybe she, too, looked up this particular word. Sigh. BTW, it *does* have pronunciations. :) I'm so sorry you suffer from seizures. :grouphug:

Yes, that makes sense. In your case, I'd definitely prefer HTT. I'm teaching a very different student here, namely, a 3 (almost 4) y.o. boy. Grammar would be overkill at this point. :D Since we have plenty of time, my goal is to have ds learn the 2-letter syllables and words in Leonard's syllabary/speller by the time he's 5. At that point, I'll decide whether to proceed with the speller, Alpha-Phonics, McGuffey's, Word Mastery, or something else. :) By the bye, Hunter, I remember you writing in another thread that you liked McGuffey's, based on what you discovered about their word list. What did you mean by that? Did you mean that all the new words ever introduced at are the beginning of the lesson? Or was the word list itself based on some source or system not mentioned in the text itself? I've been curious about this! :bigear: We've gone back and forth using McGuffey as a main part of our program. Now in fourth, we're using the Fourth Reader for vocab. (writing the words with diacritical marks once, without them twice-- then writing the words in sentences), elocution (oral reading and drill), composition, etc. and loving it. Well, that's way off topic.... Sorry! :auto:

:blink: No pronunciations? Wow. :blink:

How about this dictionary? :) I haven't seen it myself...

You're welcome. I spend FAR too much time looking at vintage books. This one is one of my favorites, as it has a syllabary, but includes some syllables NOT in Webster's, has simple reading lessons (like the 1908 Webster's), has a pronunciation system like McGuffey's (which we love and use), and... the kicker... the "Writing" alphabet script is just like my own (and now ds's) handwriting, except for the capital S. :) Oh, oh! and c's and g's are nicely marked for when they are "soft", right in the syllabary!!! Okay, I'm really geeky about these things. :lol:

:iagree: with Hunter and SilverMoon. We're doing this for 4th as well. As a matter of fact, we've already begun (5 weeks in). So far, so good!

Robinson Crusoe.