I can't tell you how relieved I feel too. Today we are just doing math, compostion (in our case: Queen's, Spelling Wisdom and oral/written narration of Famous Men of Rome), Latin, and one narration from our lit book. Ahhhhh, so much relief. We will do our SL history and readers at night for free reading and read aloud time. :party:Blessed Relief!!!!

You know I never thought of it that way. I guess we did do about that many a year before I started box checking ala SL. Reading your post makes me realize I need to take a :chillpill: and keep school LCC and let the rest fall where it may.

:) That is us too. When we move for the military we have to add a trailer just for my books or we have too many lbs!

Ok, I am typing challenged, but you get my point.:tongue_smilie:

I just re-read the LCC book and I just love how is it so simple. I have a confession... I am a terrible book adict. I would love to pair down and focus on LCC, but then I see my shelves of SL books and wonder how I can let it all go. I really want to focus on a few great books and make our school day a little less hectic. If you have implemented LCC in order to simplify your life do you add back in other books as free reading? I am terribly tired trying to cover two SL cores. I LOVE the books, don't get me wrong, but my day is soo long. Hence my pulling LCC off the shelf again.

We just finished SL 3 and I kept thinking it was a great education for me.:) The spine is quite adult. If your son really digested everything in that book, he would be doing well. There are so many other early American history books you could use to beef it up. Primary souce docs would be great--like Ben Franklin's auto biography or the Constitution itself. I think a great study would be a study between the Constitution as it was written and how it is being interpreted in this day and age. I thought core 3 was very much an "ageless' core. My husband and I learned so many new things.

We are going to do SL 4 next year (already have it). I like SL because it does not have hands on activities. My kids do their own thing like tee pees and Spanish forts during core 3, but they did it all themselves and I didn't have to participate.:) We did WP Animals and Their Worlds and I got behind because of all the little projects. If you like hands on, then WP is good. I love SL for all the great books and how easiy it is for me to teach.

I haven't used the American History one, but the format is the same. On day one the child reads the source text, narrates orally and then writes the narration on the summary page--or they can use their own notebook. On day two you do copywork taken from the text. Day three is prepared dictation from another portion of the text. Day four is reading a different story with copy work. On day five you do another prepared dictation taken from the day four story. It works quite well and it is nice to have the stories all ready for you along with the copywork/ dictation selections all ready to go. I used to like to pick my own from living books, but I would get behind and not get things done. This makes CM very easy to implement. :001_smile:

We have used it off and on when I need a change. It is good and very CM. Some of the source texts in Write from Ancient History Level Two can be a bit difficult. We mainly did the ones that had a definite story line. My kids also copied their work into a composition notebook. Oh, she is coming out with Write From Medieval History soon. I am definitely getting that. :)

Woops, sorry, I just caught the don't want diagramming part. I just like grammar that takes 5 minutes a day.:001_smile:

You are in the same boat with me. I actually began to understand grammar better now that we are applying it to latin. My kids seem to get grammar better because they started with Latin. Latin grammar is so much less confusing--to me anyway. Have you read The Latin-Centered Curriculum? That book really showed me how Latin really can cover it all, especially in the early years.

I just got DGP Grammar and it is really neat. One sentence per week ending in diagramming on Friday (diagramming starts in grade 5). It should take five minutes or so per day. By 12th grade it is very intense. It has short lessons, but it is not full of "fluff". I plan on doing it on our marker board and having the kids work on it each day.

Well, my boys did LC 1 this year and I just started formal grammar (diagramming and all). So far they have used their latin to make sense of English grammar. We were learning about the nominative case and they all started reciting, " nominative--subject, genative--possesive, dative--indirect object....:001_smile: All that is from Mrs. Leigh on the DVD's. I, personally, think you can go Latin grammar to English grammar or visa versa--but then I am a CMer who is grammar lite in the early years. I know that I understand grammar much better now than before studying Latin. I only started formal grammar because my 11 year old was ready to get into the nitty gritty, but LC 1 for anyone younger would be all that I would do.

I am a Montesori teacher, but chose to use the CM method for homeschooilng. It was just too expensive to outfit my home since you can't really "wing it" with Montessori's methods--at least in the early years. All those neat wooden manipulatives are so expensive! Montessori and Charlotte Mason based a lot of their work on the same foundational research and came to different conclusions. Both have very interesting points. If you have a hands-on learner Montessori is amazing. Are you looking to use the methods at home, or are you thinking of a school?

Latin will definitely help with grammar. My boys had some understanding of the parts of speech before latin, but they really understand case, gender and parts of speech now. If Calvert doesn't work out Spelling Wisdom by Simply Charlotte Mason is wonderful and Queen's also has a Spelling Through Copy Work series. My little daughter just drew a chicken did a picture study today for her Queen's lesson. She is four, but she loves the lessons as much as her brothers. :001_smile:

I tend to change things mid stream. :tongue_smilie: The only sure things are copy work, dictation, narration, artist study, composer study, Simply Music piano, and reading independently and aloud. Here is what I am planning so far: Language Arts: Queen's Languages Lessons--everyone Daily Grammar Practice--everyone Spelling Wisdom or Simply Spelling, differs per child History: Sonlight Core 5 and 1+2 until completed, then core 4 with everyone ..constantly being tempted by Ambleside. LBC or MFW I would just like to see how I like them. Alas, I cannot afford to it. Science: Apologia General Science with notebooking for ds 11 Narrating from The Handbook of Nature Study for ds 10 Christian Liberty Nature readers for ds 8 Latin: First Form Latin and Prima Latina for ds 7 until finished The Arts: Paintings to Study Simply Music Composer Study

How old is your child? Some younger children tend to embellish quite a bit. If he is older I would use very small sections--maybe a paragraph or two and work on accuracy. Then move to bigger, more complicated material. Smaller chunks help to let the child get their mind around what is going on. Over time he will be able to do much more. :001_smile: Narration will really help in the long run, but it is a skill to be worked up to. Hang in there.

I have these books too. I loved her approach, but needed more handholding. I am a chronic box checker.:001_unsure: Too many choices on any given day scare me. She advocated notebooking through the bible each day--which is wonderful, but I am not the crafty type and my brain hurt trying to keep my kids organized and neat. If, however, you love being crafty then this is an AWESOME Bible based curriculum.

I am a lot like this. My kids read books and then narrate to me. Sometimes they draw pictures, build something or prepare a meal that goes with what they read. Trying to hunt and peck for answers doesn't teach much except how to hunt and peck for answers.:confused: Things that they glean themselves stick better in their memory. My job is just to make sure that they read small enough chunks so as to not miss too much. Narration really makes the child think about what they remember and not what the teacher or test wants them to remember. Of course, this doesn't apply to progressive subjects like math, but pretty much everything else.

Oh, I am so loving this. It is complete with little check off boxes for the OCD homeschoolers among us--that would be me ....:drool:

We use the Queen's Language Lessons and my 9, almost 10 year old, is using the book you mentioned above. It is very gentle and he likes it a lot. I also add studied dictation (Spelling Wisdom from Simply Charlotte Mason) and he writes a narration each week on something he enjoyed reading. I don't edit these yet. They are just for practice. When my kids turn 10 I add in formal grammar, but Queen's has enough for now. Oh, my kids LOVE the picture studies. It is really a unique thing for language arts.

You could drop them, but sometimes it is kind of fun to see how he ties in history with the bible story. I don't think it would mess up SOTW or be confusing to just read and discuss what he has for history. We used a timeline and just added the historical events to it as they came up. My kids often remember the bible story better when they have another historical event to tie it with.

The first volume is fairly light, but it does get more meaty and it also revisits topics over and over again. We often went on rabbit trails if something interested the kids, if it didn't, we moved on knowing we would come back to it again. He is planning to key the volumes into high school level science texts like Apologia so that the older kids can expound on the lessons too. An example of topics covered in volume 5: Psychology 10 lessons Sociology 14 lessons Apologetics 7 lessons Biology 28 lessons Earth Science 8 lessons Chemistry 6 lessons Physics 10 lessons World History 11 lessons US History 17 lessons Government 8 lessons Ecomomics 6 lessons

You can most definitely jump around within the volumes. He just finished volume 7 which covers the life of Christ. I just ordered that one. What is really nice about Bedell is that he always adds in verses from the NT while studying an OT lesson and visa versa. He covers both in each lesson so that the law and the gospel are covered in each lesson. I use them for devotion and it takes anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour depending on how much discussion takes place. I would say the average is 20 minutes if we read the lesson and have the kids narrate. Each lesson is divided into two parts: one for K- 3 and a more in-depth one or 4-6 with research questions for 7-12. I use Bedell a lot when we travel. It is very car friendly. or park friendly--you get the idea. Now if I could compile SL style readers for each volume it would be perfect.:)

Yes, you could put your own things together. It would be vey personal that way, or you could modify SOW to suit your family too. SOW is really nice--I do really like it, but I just changed it so much I ended up losing my original intention. When we did Bedell we really just expanded on the lessons with the internet or books. We would read the bible and any additional science or history that stemmed from that. For instance, when we went through the 10 plagues of Egypt we spent a good deal of time gleaning for even more info on frogs, lice, flies, boils, etc. In that way it all tied back to the lesson. Notebooking would be a great tie in with Bedell... Today we read a lesson about Jericho and how the captain of the host of the Lord met Joshua. This led into a lesson on the American armed services and the fact that our military is led by a civilian in order to help prevent a coup. He also touched on Revelations 19:11, 14 where it talks about the armies in heaven following Him... So a general understanding of armies was introduced through the battle of Jericho. Much more will be covered on this because the next few stories are all about battles so the volume will continue to expound on things like that. I find it to be a very pick-up-and-go curriculum with the Bible as the starting point. Right now I am just using it for our devotions, but for years I used it all by itself.