I know they are a little expensive, but we have a couple from llbean that my parents got us for Christmas. We love them. More comfortable than any others we've tried out. We are big llbean fans for things like this since you can't beat their lifetime guarantee. I returned a purse that tore out after having it for 3 years (I hadn't used it much since I had a child after I got it and a diaper bag became my purse, and it was an expensive leather purse). They didn't bat an eye and gave me my $$ back.

Amanda Bennett has a unit study on football. http://www.unitstudy.com/FootballFrenzy.html Might be something fun!

I am using essentials with my 6 year old dd. we never used foundations as it wasn't out when I first purchased essentials last year. It is totally doable for younger kids if you spread a lesson out over 1 or 2 weeks. We do 1 week. I went through it at a lesson every day or two with my ds9 and had a problem with where to go next. Every grammar program I looked at "at grade level" was far too easy compared to the grammar that was done in LoE. We finally decided on MCT and so far so good with it. I'm not sure how much overlap their is with foundations and essentials, but I can't imagine it would be too difficult to glaze through the repetitive parts or just use them as review?

Thanks Pawz, that looks perfect! We were able to get reservations for Monday thru Friday that week. Any suggestions for what to do in charleston?

We are looking at taking a last minute vacation after next weekend. (Starting April 28th). We will be leaving from east central Indiana. DH and I love Maine, and would like to take the kids there, but a lot of campgrounds along the way are closed until mid may. Here are our requirements 1 must have campgrounds that we can stay at in our camper 2. Must be pet friendly as our lab is going with 3. Must have a mix of things to do. I enjoy hiking and camping, but I've been pretty much home for the entire last year looking at the same 4 walls. I don't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere looking at the 4 camper walls. And I'm not in primo-hiking shape to want to walk for hours on end on rough terrain. We enjoy zoos, museums, as well as seeing historical architecture and monuments etc. we are looking for somewhere east and/or south and have about a week or a little more for the trip. The kids are dd6 and ds9 Finally, I'm a planner, and obviously have precious little time to plan, so nothing that needs a whole lot of planning. We've done Disney quite a few times in the last few years and won't go again until dd grows 2 inches so we can do it all as a family. We've also done southern Florida last spring. Any help would be appreciated.

When I was first researching LOE I went to a couple of her seminars at a homeschool conference and she said that her curriculum is a similar method that is used with dyslexic students. We purchased it and LOVE it!

I feel you. We had an issue while we are the Cincinnati homeschool convention. I got an email about possible fraud, then my husbands card was declined at a booth. I called the cc company because I thought maybe it was just all of the out of town charges. However, my husband hasn't used his card up until that decline and it was his card that had the suspected fraud. So I shut his card down, and they assured me I could use mine. And then mine got declined! I called them back, threw a fit and they fixed mine and kept his inactive. When I returned home I did find a false "PayPal" charge on my credit card account that was not listed on my Paypal statement. It was only $87, not a lot in the scheme of things but it caused a headache while out of town and no way to really research the charges.

I can't answer all of your questions concerning comparisons to SWR because I'm not familiar with it, but I can say we love logic of English here. It's very simple to do even when you don't "know" a lot of it yourself before hand. I learned a lot as I taught it to my son and as I'm doing it slower with my daughter. It's gently scripted but not so much so you can't ad lib it a bit. It's very incremental and builds on itself. I love it as a whole package of phonics, spelling rules, vocabulary, grammar, etc. Spelling is a little simple for some younger kids, but there are more difficult advanced lists online that correspond with the rules each lesson that can be used. I highly recommend the whole thing. We have the flash cards and use them at least once a week to run through as review. I'm not sure if they are different than the ones you have though Good luck

I've been a x-ray tech for 12 years and taught classes at the college I went too for radiation protection and radiographic physics. I've never heard of this. Sorry.

I use the reminders that come on the ipad all the time. If you log onto your icloud account on the computer, I think it's easier to make different lists. I have one for shopping, one general one for things I don't want to forget, and I also have one linked to my son's account to give him his weekly assignments that he does on his own that he can access from an old iphone we gave him to use as an ipod touch. I just purchased numbers ($10) spreadsheet app and am going to try to use it for lesson planning. However, I am using my husband's Macbook to set it up initially. It's easier for me to move things around on the computer screen vs. the iPad. But then I save it to the cloud and can pull it up on the ipad during the day to see what I had planned for the day. I lean towards a list method for planning each subject. Meaning I make a continual list of the next lesson for each subject and we just keep moving down the list. If we don't get to one subject that day, no big deal. We just do what's next on the list on the day we do get to it. I do have a loose schedule of how many lessons I'd ideally like to get to in a day. When the list is getting short, I know I need to plan more lessons for that subject.

The last few weeks, I've been entering math, language arts, and writing assignments into a reminder list that is shared with ds9s iPhone (it's dh's old phone without a phone plan on it). This way he can check off his assignments as he does them. I give him a weeks worth of each. If he chooses to do 2 math and no language arts in a day, that is his choice. He learned the first week not to save the more difficult stuff for last. The rule is if its not done by Friday he will have to sit and do them all until he's finished. It has worked quite well. I was very intrigued by the self propelled teaching methods that are talked about on URthemom.com It inspired me to start giving him control over what was done when. I do encourage him to space some things out. Like writing a little each day undead of having it messy from doing it all at once. I just drug myself into doing computer lesson planning instead of paper and pencil so I plan on still entering his into the reminder list, but also giving ds6 her own printed list to look at and check off through the week.

I recently saw an idea online to put puzzle pieces in the GFS and then the kids have a puzzle to put together when they are done hunting. I thought that was a great idea!

I'm at a total loss. My daughter is a young 1st grader and this is our first year homeschooling. We chose LOE for this year (essentials at a modified 1 lesson per week pace). She is doing awesome with it. I keep saying I will drop the grammar when it gets too difficult, but as of now we are on lesson 25 and she has such a good grasp of finding not only nouns, verbs, etc....but she can say if they are the subject noun, direct object, indirect object, action verb, transitive verb, etc. This just blows my mind. I plan on finishing the book before we move onto something else next school year, but where do I go from here? Her reading ability has really taken off compared to what it was, but she is probably only at about a second grade level which is great but not prodigy if you know what I mean. I guess what I'm asking is if I try to do grammar that goes back to every sentence begins with a capital letter she will not be happy. I'd love something all inclusive with readers, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, etc (all except handwriting, I'm fine doing that on my own) but am definitely open to piecing it together. I love the readers from sonlight but just don't think the meat is there with the other aspects. Maybe just have her work though those books as readers and use something else for grammar? I'm going to Cincinnati next week so I'm looking for ideas of what I should look at in person! Thanks!

I've been looking for the same kid of thing. After many weeks of the same thing I want to poke my eyes out. Trying to just pick a topic and find things to do with it drives me insane and isn't good for the detail oriented-ducks in a row - type a personality that I possess. Haha. I hope someone has a great idea! Only thing I've considered this far are Amanda Bennett's unit studies

I'm familiar with both, but haven't used either, so take this with a grain of salt. I think MCT is more of a whole curriculum and Marie's words is more suited as a supplement. I am planning on looking at both of these items at the Cincinnati homeschool conference in a couple weeks as I'm interested in using both of them. Perhaps use them together. MCT for the why and how. Marie's words just for vocab building?

Rainbow resource sells them at a reasonable price, but they come in sets of three I think (1-3, 4-6, etc)

I would do the light blue. It's very easy to skip lessons they already are proficient on. Both of my kids just moved onto the next grade level last month and I actually looked ahead at the pages and didn't print the pages I knew would be redundant busy work for them. So if your son is doing fractions already, just skip through that chapter, or just do a few problems to ensure he remembers how to do it and move on! It took me a bit of getting used to actually letting the, leave problems (or pages!) blank.

I second the logic of English. It takes the time to learn all the multi letter phonograms and then goes further by explaining when you use each one. My first grader is even understanding way more than I thought she would. The grammar in it is also very solid in my opinion.

I got ours at hobby lobby with a 40% coupon printed from their website. Serves our purpose and it was inexpensive!

Noeo let's you purchase all the books, but I got a manual on eBay thinking I could find the books at the library, or a substitute...ugh. Pain in the rear. I'm going to watch this thread too, I want an all in one place textbook, not a teachers manual that tells you what other books to use! We did the free life science from Mr. Q and that was fine, but not super exciting IMO.

If it appears to be getting a bit better, I'd give it another couple days to watch for improvement. I feel for you, our lab cut his foot (again!) and had to go to the vet Saturday because he wouldn't leave it alone and was being uber neurotic about it and was getting very stressed and anxious Friday night. He has a history of seizures, so we didnt risk it...but the cut was getting worse since he wouldn't leave it alone. If things are somewhat improving, I'd wait a bit to see if she is continuing to improve.

The grammar in Logic of English is very rich and thorough. I used it at an accelerated pace with my third grader at about a lesson every day or two. By the end, I dropped some of the grammar, because it was over his (and somewhat my) head. I am also doing it at a 1 lesson per week pace with my 1st grader. We are on lesson 23 and she is doing amazingly well with all of it. To note, we never used foundations, we began with Essentials before Foundations was released. Her reading ability has increased dramatically, and she has kept up with the grammar suprisingly well thus far. She can pick out subject nouns, adjectives, transitive verbs, direct objects, indirect objects, and articles so far. I'm very lenient in my expectations for the grammar section, but she has surprised me how well she understands it after the repetition that is present in the book. I do feel that once we get to a certain point, I may drop the grammar all together because what first grader needs to know suboordinating conjuctions? But for right now, as long as she gets it, I do it. I would take at his pace and let that be your guide. If he doesn't get the past the direct object/indirect object parts, just keep having him underline them as nouns, verbs, adjectives. There is plenty of time to identify the "jobs" in the later years. (ETA: Sometimes I do some of the exercises verbally because it can be a lot of writing, although it may not be over 2 weeks. Some of the dictation and composition I just have her do a couple instead of the 5-10 it has space for.) I love Logic of English! As far as vocabulary, it does do some work with developing vocab through prefix and suffixes, but I think more vocab comes from just reading good books at this age.

If the housing values are so low, have you considered a short sale? It would ding your credit though. I'm kind of torn on this. I understand the desire to leave a bad or declining area, but I would probably suck it up, cut my budget until it screamed, work extra hours until I fell over, pay the difference in sales price vs the mortgage price that you morally obligated yourself to pay (instead of a short sale i mean) and walk away happy as a clam that it won't come back to haunt me in 5 years if the market decline further and you are in the same position except with 2 mortgages to pay. Btw: we did the budget/extra hours thing for a year to be free of our consumer debt.

This would scare the bejesus out of me. I would not want to sign over the control of renting out a home that I hold the mortgage on to anyone. No matter if the guaranteed me 10 years worth of payments. Not all renters are good and they certainly aren't invested in keeping your home in the same condition you would as an owner who wanted to sell it. You also can't guarantee market conditions in 5 or 6 years. It may be worse than they are now and then you'll be stuck with two mortgages. I always live by if it sound too good to be true...run away! But that's just my opinion. We built our home ourselves piece by piece while living with no walls or floors. We didn't have heat for the first few months, no shower for a couple weeks, just a floor drain and some pipes rigged with a shower head in the basement. I didn't have a kitchen for a year. If I ever see a frozen skillet meal again in my life, I will scream. Slow and steady. It's really the only way to be secure in your finances. Sacrificing now with space and bathrooms, etc will result in so much more potential in the future. You also mentioned $30 for a half percent increase, and a couple percent would cripple you? That's a scary statement when you're looking at tying up such a large portion of your income.

Yikes, I forgot to keep track. I may be missing a couple things but its close, and it was all cash! 2/15 - eating out with DH $13, kids night out at the local gym for my kids $16 2/16 - gymnastics meet admission $12 DH got a couple snacks $5 2/17 -$0 2/18 - $10 for carpet sliders for some gymnastics exercises for dd 2/19 -$15 for wrestling pictures 2/20 - $5 for open gym at gymnastics tonight for dd