I'm not sure he's ready for them now, but Clyde Bulla has a lot of great books that my dd has enjoyed. Riding the Pony Express is one of the easier ones. You can search for his books at amazon and use the "see inside" feature to judge the print. She hasn't been disappointed with one yet.

We used the Primary Phonics readers. There are 6 sets of storybooks, and you can use them independent of the workbooks in this program. I believe you can purchase most, if not all, of the reader sets at Rainbow Resource.

I'm one of the odd ones that thought Vos didn't stick closely enough to scripture. :) Of course, I made that determination early on, so perhaps I didn't give her enough of a chance. I prefer children's Bibles to just tell the story as closely to scripture as possible without adding any commentary or interpretations. So far I am very pleased with The Golden Bible. We haven't found it to be dry or boring at all. Dd loves to have me read it to her, and we often go well past the reading scheduled for the day. We are using it with Memoria Press' Introduction to Classical Studies.

I'm currently trying to figure out where to go with my 3rd grader. We did SSL last year and have been working through PL and Minimus this year. I've also been considering GSWL and adding a lot of fun elements. A couple of resources I'm planning to purchase are Latin Memory Songbook & CD and Mater Anserina which also comes with a cd. I was very inspired by Angela's blogpost here: The Grammar of Latin.

I know this is an old thread, but I just wanted to say thanks so much to Angela. I also wanted to bump it up as I know many mothers are, like I am, in Latin planning mode. This has been very helpful to me.

I don't know what your plan is, but since your two oldest are so close in age, I would do the FLL/WWE process until your oldest ds is in fourth. Then I would do the Island series with the two oldest at the same time. I think that would work very well, but time alone will tell. Many people actually continue WWE after starting MCT, so that is an option as well.

This is great advice. I need to start doing this as well.

Mondays are typically very hard, but we've also often had marvelous Mondays and terrible Tuesdays. There are a lot of factors...how busy or off-schedule the weekend was, developmental issues, etc. However, I appreciate the break that comes with the weekend and don't think I could give that up in the hopes that it would change the issue. As previous posters have already said, I try to make sure Monday is not overloaded, and I let her choose the order of the schedule sometimes which helps. We do several subjects only one or two day/s a week, so if Monday is heading down the tubes, I'll bump extra subjects off to another day and focus on getting the essentials done. I also have to be very conscious of my own contribution to the day...sometimes after a particularly tiring weekend I have my own bad attitude to reign in.

Perhaps you were thinking of Noble Knights of Knowledge I've heard it referenced in threads about similar items to the format of Grammar Island (which is strictly grammar) and LoF. I have not used it, so I can't vouch for it; however, I have used Times Tales with great success. I was about ready to pull my hair out when I decided to try it, and we've been very satisfied with the results. We also just recently purchased The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat (and More Adventures...). I haven't started using them yet, but they may be of some interest as well.

The Proverbs People 1 and 2 books are good character studies using the book of Proverbs. Apologia has a new series...so far only the first book is out: Who Is God. There are supposed to be three books in development to complete the series. This would be one you could read aloud as a family. We are also reading through the Golden Bible. Much discussion can develop just from reading the stories of the Bible. Another option for family time is Greenleaf's Guide to Old Testament History. Be sure to shop around for them...you can sometimes find them used at a great price.

There are many here more capable than I am in explaining these things, but I will say that in the case of "h" words, there are rough breathing marks that cause the "h" sound at the beginning of the word. In both the words hydro and pyro the greek letter in the place of the y is the upsilon...I don't know enough about pronunciation to understand why that is, but again, perhaps someone else will know that answer.

We've had great success with the Sonlight 2nd grade readers. If you don't already receive it, request a catalog from them just to see all the great book ideas. The biggest hits: Betsy-Tacy series "B" is for Betsy series by Haywood Encyclopedia Brown Virtually ANYTHING by Clyde Bulla

Here's the full blurb from the website:

I know this is new, but I just wanted to see if anyone had started using it yet. I tried to search for reviews, but it was so new that no one had responded to previous inquiries. Perhaps now someone has had a chance to use it and can offer a review? Logos Latin

I'm right there with you. Planning for Latin is killing me as well. We are finishing Prima Latina this year, and I was SO excited by the prospect of Karen @ Lone Pine's Stellae class being offered, that I FINALLY stopped stressing. Then she emailed to say it may not be offered...and here I am super stressing again. I'm currently planning to continue into LC1, but I'm not crazy about the idea (not sure why). I'm also not crazy about LFC. I'm concerned with all the supposed errors of LL. Logos looks interesting, but with no reviews it's hard to really tell. I have Latin: Book One, but I know it is still way too much for my dd. I know I'm making this into a much bigger deal than it should be... Karen, I'll be very interested to see which direction you do take. I'm sure you'll have a much better idea after your convention. GLA has intrigued me as well, so I'd love to hear what you think of it once you've looked it over. Hope you find the perfect thing (and then tell me what it is so I can use it too :001_smile:).

We're doing the Island level. For history, we are using A Child's History of the World. We are also using Memoria Press' Introduction to Classical Studies which incorporates readings from the Golden Bible, D'Aulaire's Greek Myths and Famous Men of Rome over a three year period. Other than that, we don't have a literature program...dd reads a lot of Sonlight suggestions and from her CLE, R&S and CLP Nature readers.

Cut the vocab down to MCT. I'd either take Elizabeth's advice and let PP be spelling as well, or use a spelling program with phonics and cut out all other phonics. If she's reading well, I would just let her read. If she will be reading the TOG books, I'd save the McGraw books for free time reading, if she's interested. If she's not, I'd cut those altogether. Focus on the MCT for grammar and decide once you're well into it if you want to add any other grammar in. You'll probably still want to continue WWE, but you can wait until you start progressing through Sentence Island to decide. For science, just keep your shelf stocked and let her lead. Focus on Saxon and add in the Singapore as you have time.

The Borrowers Dangerous Journey The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Little House series Chronicles of Narnia

I haven't read the thread yet, so I may be all alone in this...but I absolutely loathed reading Pinocchio. Ugh. That silly little puppet nearly drove me mad.:willy_nilly:

:seeya: Eclectic soul here! We started off the year with CLE LA 3, and I was very pleased by the thoroughness and the review. Dd also enjoyed it. However, when MCT became the "talk of the town" :) I became intrigued and began to investigate it. My dd does well with workbooks, but it is not her favorite method. She has always been creative with words and has written stories since she was able to write. I loved that MCT seemed to be the kind of grammar program that would nurture her love of language and inspire her to continue in her creative pursuit of it. I purchased MCT's Island series to use next year. When it arrived, I was so excited by it that we decided to take a break from CLE at the half-year point and move right into MCT. My dd LOVES MCT, and I am very impressed with what she is learning through it. However, I still love CLE as well. Since dd is only in 2nd this year, my plan is to finish CLE 3 after we work through a little more of MCT. Next year we'll likely do the same with CLE 4 and the Town series. To us, MCT is a delightful, breath-of-fresh-air supplement to what we're already using.

Oooh...this makes me very :001_smile: too.

Check out donnayoung.org for lots of planners. It helps to break the year down in to 6 wk blocks so you can have an idea of where you should be at each point. I use her writable pdf weekly grid planner to type in our plans for each week. I've found that if I try to plan out too many weeks in advance I end up having to shuffle too much around if anything happens (or doesn't happen :) ) Another great planner is the Tanglewood corebook. It also walks you through how to plan your year, breaking the year down into 6 wk chunks. HTH, Dawn

LOVE THEM Interestingly enough, we used them at Montessori, too. I continued the series at home. There is more writing involved in Primary Phonics than with ETC, but that was one thing I liked about them. The storybooks provided great practice. I'm not certain about ETC, but Primary Phonics also helped with color word recognition. I haven't used any of the comprehension workbooks, though. However, I was very pleased with what we used, and dd really enjoyed them.

Check out CLE for LA. It's very thorough and the instruction and practice are contained in the individual workbooks.

You should look at Minimus. I think it will likely be too much for the youngest, but I'm not certain.