This is a topic I am very interested in right now. I know just enough, to know how little I know. Sigh! My current library uses the library of congress system. I miss the Dewey :-( I need to stop reading books about research and just looking on my own, and actually talk to a librarian. My newest book Ready! Set! Research! says librarians find this phrase irresistible, "can you help me please?" and is why they became librarians. I resist asking for help, and it really is necessary, because each library is very different. Yes there are basic skills to learn, but one skill is to learn how to use the LIBRARIAN. I feel like I need a set of worksheets entitled "How to talk to librarians" :-) or maybe even a whole book devoted to the topic :-) I recently tried e-mailing my library about whether we have free online access to Worldbook encyclopedia, and got all sorts of computer generated confirmations that they got my question, but never an answer. Sigh! Why do I resist picking up the phone or talking to them face to face? I actually thought of paying for a subscription to the Worldbook site, just to avoid asking for the link. I really want to MASTER being able to write a basic 5 paragraph research essay, using a wide variety of interesting resources.

I love Nancy Loewen's books, to encourage young writers. I don't think his stories need evaluating. Just supply good examples and ideas for him to glean from if he so desires. http://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Loewen/e/B001HCV01I/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

This is an excellent guide for a general ed student, or a student playing catch up. One of the hardest parts of doing a research paper is organizing the paper. This guide suggests using an encyclopedia outline, but then using other sources to fill it in. So the student gets to complete a true research paper while practicing all the other parts of a research paper, but skipping the one hardest part. After doing one or more of these canned reports, the student can then work on making a true outline, and then breeze through the rest of the report, having already mastered the other parts. Another idea is to do a research ESSAY and have the student adapt a typical 5 paragraph essay into a short report. This book is perfect to accompany a lesson in writing a 5 paragraph essay. That is what I bought it for. Amazon sells the book new for $8.99. I got mine much cheaper. I really like this book. It's the first book that feels just right for the level I'm at.

Maybe one of you literature experts can create a generic worksheet that can be used with the poems in this book? The Short Story book is also good, but I wasn't impressed with any of the other titles. The film classics book was well done, but many of the titles wouldn't be of interest to most families here.

Some child do better reading mostly nonfiction, with a few short, but intense lessons on literary analysis thrown in, using poems and short stories. Have you ever seen the Loeb classics? Little hardcover books. The red are Latin and the Green are Greek. English is on the right page and the classical language is on the left. One of my sons adored them, even at a young age. With literature we pretty much jumped straight from learning to read, to the Bible and biographies, to the Loeb classics and a few selections from Adult Great Books lists. We never read many full length pieces of fiction for "school". My children read some Star Wars books and such in their free time, and few "classics" especially Dickens, but I didn't assign them.

Sparknotes has out a book called Poetry Classics. I can't seem to find it anywhere else for sale other than at Barnes and Nobles. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Poetry-Classics/SparkNotes-Editors/e/9781411404328 It's only $9.99 includes the poems and has extensive commentary for each one. This would be an excellent book to use with some type of generic poetry worksheet.

I'd plan some type of nontraditional survey course at home. Topology is interesting. There are courses on problem solving. I'd cover some easy trig, probability and statistics with some European middle/high school materials, that present these topics earlier. If you do CC, I'd do the college algebra, because more of it will be review than the statistics, and it will be easier.

Buy some Skittles :-) Do one challenging problem at a time. You and DS race to see who gets the right answer first. The winner gets a skittle. Challenge in very tiny bursts and offer a reward. Do challenging things out loud, instead of in writing, when possible. Offer challenging material that doesn't require a response, or that doesn't have a "right" answer.

One of the links gave me an idea. I'm going to hang up a world map in the kitchen and start adding recipe cards and pictures, to it as I prepare and eat new challenging foods. Maybe even photos of me and friends eating some of the more challenging foods.

The bible was my children's primary reading book when I was homeschooling. It was great for teaching reading comprehension, but I didn't know enough then to be able to teach it as literature. As I begin my own self-studies now, I have returned to the idea of the Bible as the primary language arts book. I was able to purchase SOW (Student of the Word) from a member here, and signed up for a free 30 days at The Literary Study Bible site. I started a thread recently about the Bible as Literature, that is a couple days back.

It's funny that many people measure high school academic rigor, primarily by what type of science class a student is taking. When I got totally overwhelmed, when homeschooling my youngest, the first thing I decided to drop was the chemistry textbook. We started aggressively mastering everything in Science Matters read real books to supplement it, and focused on the scientific method, research, and writing about science. I sensed we were not getting enough payback for the time and money we were investing in trying to keep up with the high school science Jonses. I knew others thought I was crazy...but...I had to follow my gut. He had all sorts of other advanced things to do that produced a better payback, that validated to me that we were not slackers, and would produce a better quality of life for him as an adult. Copying PS science methods is just not a good investment of resources for many, many homeschooling families...but...most of us have been conditioned to fear skipping it, and use it to disproportionately measure our success.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the regular yearly standardized tests, test different things than the SATs and APs, don't you think? As a low income, poorly educated homeschool mom, I had no trouble at all helping my children ace the yearly standardized tests where my children were being compared to ALL students in the town, on BASIC skills. In fact as a middle schoolers, my younger son had the highest scores in the entire town, and was the ONLY student who qualified to take the John Hopkins SATs that year and needed to take them in a neighboring town. But by the end of high school, as my health and our finances slipped even more, it became impossible for me to help my son prepare for the large assortment of highly specialized, and higher order thinking skills tests where he was being compared to a small SUBSET of students who had access to a LOT of resources we didn't have. At that point no one was giving him yearly standardised tests anymore because I was begging them to take him back into the school system (long story and no money to hire a lawyer) but I have no doubt he would have aced those, because he got very high marks on the GED and had the highest scores of the week on the entrace exams at the junior college, even though he was the youngest to take them, and we showed up there with holes in our clothes and me trying desperately not to faint. I was filled with shame about what a horrible job I was currently doing, but the dean of the college was just shaking his head and mumbling a lot, and trying to reassure me that things were going to be fine.

I've lost ALL my books as an adult twice, and several times as a child. I have both electronic and hardcopy books and neither feels safe. I have had to learn to deal with not feeling safe, and having to start over with less, much less. But...that itself is an opportunity to learn...so... Right now...I have to say my current collection of books, all in all, is the nicest I've ever had :-)

There is something far sadder than low expectations! Many homeschoolers set their sights higher than they are capable of achieving, with the resources/abilities available to THEM and then flounder, and don't FINISH anything MEASURABLE and feel like failures. Many of us have/had some amazing obstacles to overcome. And then...many homeschoolers have DIFFERENT goals than those easily measured by SATs and APs. Sometimes a coop really would serve its students best by FINISHING a course on scientific literacy, focusing on how to research and follow the scientific method and MASTERING a middle school level research paper, instead of wallowing around in a bunch of half understood and unfinished projects, that cannot be used as a stepping stone to the next level. Proper goal setting is an important skill that has NOTHING to do with comparisons to what others are doing, or fear.

Thanks for the links :-) All in all I have more opportunities to interact with nature here in the city than I did when I lived in the suburbs. More...but...different opportunities. Urban ecology is FASCINATING!! But the view of the eastern sky from my balcony is blocked by a very large sports stadium :-( I can only see things that rise in the north east and then are fairly high in the sky by the time they move fully eastward. I can also see things that set in the Northwest, but not full west. And south is on the other side of my building, so the view is completely obscured from my balcony. Sometimes my girlfriend and I try to look up the coordinates and then roughly measuring degrees with the size of our fists, and a general sense of direction, run around the neighborhood hunting for a peek at the moon. It's kind of fun.

The Bible and it's Influence looks so good, but both the SE and TE....wow :-( maybe at some point I will try and just get the SE. The Library has Walking the Bible on DVD. I'm really excited about that. I saw a bit of it on YouTube. Are there any supplements or lesson plans for the DVDs? A wonderful member of this forum offered me SOW at what I could afford. I'm really excited to see this curriculum. I've been looking at it since the 1990s and was never able to get it. I have always drooled over some of the worksheets that can be used over and over again for literature response. I added some of the other books to my wish list, and am going to check out interlibrary loan.

I went through a phase of sharpening my pencils with my pocket knife and then a retractable xacto knife, but people kept freaking out while I was in public...so I stopped. I like drafting mechanical pencils with soft thin leads, and fine and ultra fine black pens. I watched a couple YouTube videos on fountain pens and I got really anxious just watching them. The lines are too thick and the letters too big. I do a LOT of writing on cramped worksheets for group therapy, my 7 habits forms, calendars, and homework from the dietician and my therapist. Today I realized, I absolutely do NOT want to write at slant! Looking at fonts today, I learned about the Romany and the Apricot. They are very round fonts. I also learned about ligatures. I think sometimes I am more interested in how my letters join, than in the letters themselves.

I'm in a city. The best I can do is try to track the moon, as it hides behind the tall buildings. There is too much light pollution to see stars and planets. I love to keep track of the moon though. I need to get a compass and...is it an astrolabe? I have an app on my iPod that gives me the moon's location, so I know where to look for it, but the app is kinda finicky. Does the magazine give moon location in degrees?

What materials are available to use the Bible as a reading/literature book? For those who prefer to teach/learn reading/literature only with unabridged Great Books, the Bible is the easiest piece of literature to start with, and there are lots and lots of resources, many of them free to study it. Student of the Word is great, but expensive. Rod and Staff has a nice middle school aged curriculum that is excellent for the KJV to cover vocabulary and historical background and geography. Dramatized audio versions of the KJV teach us to develop an ear, for literature written in the 16th-18th centuries. What else is available?

Thanks for asking this! You saved me from having to :-) I see a crossover between Waldorf and some stress reduction and recovery methods. There is no need to completely adopt a method, to be able to glean a few tid bits from it. On the high school board we are discussing graphotherapy, and the most common handwriting style used for graphotherapy, has been endorsed by Waldorf. I think I also remember Waldorf being known for unique ideas for interior decorating. They were mentioned in a book I read on interior decoration ideas used by a well known Italian preschool that I cannot remember the name of. Thanks again :-)

Video lectures and sermons. If you are just concentrating on note taking, and not the content itself, let your child pick a weird how to on YouTube.

I was just remembering, that in most/all ancient alphabets, each letter had a meaning. In Hebrew the 1st 2 letters are house and ox? The Celtic alphabet had trees assigned to each letter? The Germanic alphabet now known as runes started with a now extinct wild ox and the second letter domesticated cattle, and later on fire and ice? I wonder if the Latin alphabet originally had meanings? I'm not sure I fully go along with even the placebo affect of some of these curricula, but it's a fun idea, to learn the letters as more than strokes. For each letter to have something truly individual about it, rather than just one piece of a large whole. And the potential to turn the learning of each letter into a rich art experience, or time to doodle is an interesting idea. There was a Waldorf book that presented the letters x with a child having crossed his arms while playing the xylophone. They like to include body movements with each letter. I've looked at Drawing on the Left Side of the Brain a few times and not been impressed, but sometimes I just am not ready for a book that will fascinate me later on, after something specific has caught my attention elsewhere. The study of brainwaves is fascinating stuff, but unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation being handed around, mixed in the with the science, and lots of people wanting to make a profit off of vulnerable people. Some of the most trustworthy studies are those performed with cancer patients. Nan, what am I looking for at that site? Last night I was devouring Exploring Visual Design and am fascinated with how the elements and design principals of art are applicable to talking about a font as a whole, and each of the individual letters. A font is truly a work of art. Using a fountain pen causes the letters to include even more art elements and principals, than those written where the lines are all of identical widths. I know I just want to use a pencil for now though. I am fascinated by line. It is my favorite art element. I drive art teachers crazy with my total lack of interest in shadow. They try to get me to at least use width of line to produce a slight shadow affect, but i always resist. It fascinates me to try to represent depth with just a regular line. I guess it is no surprise that alphabets and fonts have now caught my attention.

No I haven't seen French handwriting. I will have to google it. Now, I've been researching Waldorf letter stories, and finding it quite interesting. The letter "K", for instance, may be introduced by telling a fanciful story about a king. Then the teacher may draw a picture of the king standing in a pose that looks similar to the letter "K." This process hearkens back to the picture writing of early man, and gives our modern symbols real and living qualities to which children can relate. I'm not trying to sell any this to people...just interested in their reactions to some of the ideas that people have been tossing around for decades, and longer, but that I'm just learning about now.

I knew I remembered bees being one of the very easiest subjects to study for free :-)

I plan on continuing to participate in handwriting threads here, so we will be in touch. I'm really fickle about finishing things, before I jump onto yet another and another new project...but this one...is going to be at least a reoccurring discussion. I have already completely changed my handwriting once, so I know I can do it again. It really causes problems at banks :-( and when my signature no longer matches my license and charge cards or any legal documents :-( Sometimes it is more complicated than a name change. And the bank tellers and cashiers just look at you in disbelief when you tell them you changed your handwriting, and say, "why?"