I think trees shudder when they see my house. We go through reams of paper and now with all these icky perforated notebooks papers come loose all the time! I would like my children to do their dictation/copywork on something that will feel like a pen or pencil and will look like it was written on paper--for a little while, but then can be erased. I would like one or two examples per week on real paper for a portfolio or the like, but I do not want to fight the paper monster anymore. Currently, we have marker boards from Wal Mart with those huge expo markers. The thin markers are not much of an improvement. I don't like how a brush of an arm can erase things as the work and wet erase markers are still a little too big. Someone had mentioned gel boards or magnet boards a few days ago. Any ideas about these or other ideas for a travel friendly, but reusable writing solution? Math assignments will be done on this too. I keep tests, but not much else. Thanks!

I LOVE this site. I got my Sonlight Core 3+4 IG for $15 and got the books (90% of them) from this site for $130 with free shipping. The rest cost about $50, so for under $200 I got everything and a lot of the books are hard cover too. I recommend them highly. They have great service and a great selection.

I am curious about this too. My kids worked through LOF Fractions and Decimals and Percents so I bought Beginning Algebra. I started to work through it and decided they needed some more practice so I got MUS Pre-Algebra used. I think it will be a gentle transtition and I wanted to have some hands on, concrete learning to supplement LOF. We hs year round and I also wanted more "stuff" to work through. My kids have found it too demeaning to start a book over and do it again :bored:. DH would just prefer them doing LOF all over again, but they all groaned and wanted to move onto something new...so we got MUS. So MUS Pre-Al is not really needed, but helpful for transition into LOF Beginning AL?

Blech, blech, blech.... I am in AL right now for the military, but we own a farm in MN. So if my husband has a teaching degree and he is the "head teacher" I can be exempt from testing and quarterly reporting? Yuck. Here in AL we have to have a cover school, but I have an unschooling-type cover that requires nothing. I so do not look forward to going back to MN for homeschooling. If you own a house in TX can you claim that as your home state? We may move to El Paso briefly for the military and I'm trying to find a way to keep the govt. out of things. Pray the UN Rights of the Child doesn't come to pass here. We all will be up a creek no matter where we live here.

How about The Landmark History of the American People by Boorstin? I just started Core 3+4 and am not sure if I will like this or not, but Sonlight seems to think it has a very unbiased view. If you've used it, do you love or hate it? :bigear:

If you are interesting in the other curriculum you can find it at: http://www.citivu.com/usa/sigmaed/

I love these books. The only reason I stopped was the lack of books to move into after we finished. All of my kids really enjoyed it and there is something so neat about the kids clacking away on their abacus'. I just didn't know where to go after they finished the second book. Personally, I didn't feel that I could get the more advanced techiques down enough to be able to present them. There is a nice Japanese man in CA that has a DVD curriculum that goes all the way through advanced math, but in the end I went back to other more traditional things--even though I loved the soroban. Now if only nurtureminds.com or mathabacus.com had books that went all the way though hs level math! All that aside, I am starting my four year old on it. We will probably switch to MUS when she finishes or Life of Fred. The abacus is awesome for understanding place value, regrouping, carrying, borrowing, and mental math. I couldn't move the beads in my head, but my kids could!

:iagree: If I have to back the kids up over and over to make sure they understand something it becomes vegsource fodder...:001_smile:

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Phonics/phonicsbasics.html I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE The Phonics Page! Are you the creator? My children went through these lessons last summer and they all got up to speed phonetically very fast. I had gaps from previous whole language experience and so did my children. Anyway, thephonicspage.org is a great site and a blessing.

or, well.... I added more. :001_smile: We just streamlined by adding Sonlight 3+4. We have always read out loud at night and my last few picks have bombed. Well, after some research I realized I was picking good books that were way above my kids' levels. They were all in Sonlight, just in later cores. So I bought a cheap IG and got the books and we are now really enjoying read aloud time! I also have added some used MUS to my Life of Fred. I decided that LOF is really awesome, but one ds could stand to fiddle with blocks and fraction overlays once in a while. I only paid a little for the older version and it is going well. Re-vamping is fun, albeit expensive sometimes. I could have saved thousands by actually seeing things first---the only drawback to internet shopping for me.

When we lived in Pensacola I l loved the fact that we could watch the Blue Angels over our house and go to the beach if it was too hot to play outside otherwise. We also did "school" all year long. I love the fact that we can leave on the spur of the moment and go anywhere we want. My kids would have missed out on so much had they been in traditional school. I adore not being on anyone schedule.

We did Animals and their Worlds when my kids were in 2nd on down to toddler. They LOVED it. I also used FIAR along with it and it all worked out really well. This year we just added Sonlight 3+4 for Am history and they really love it. I like Sonlight LA a little better that WP. Has anyone REALLY liked HiH? I would love to hear why you liked it and what made it stand out for you and your kids. I have been eyeing it, but have no idea where it would fit in.

Dr. Schmidt said that the Beginning Algebra is Algebra 1 + and Advanced Algebra is Algebra 2+. He had mentioned that it was more thorough than traditional Algebra 1 and 2, hence the +'s. :001_smile: We just bought the beginning book and home companion, but I'm not sure my 5th grader is quite up to it, even though he is just about done with Decimals and Percents. I think I am going to review a lot before starting it...or maybe go through the whole book quickly once more. It definitely moves a bit faster than the first two books!

I just ordered a little book from Queen Homeschool. It was $4 and I think it will be really good. I couldn't get the proper page to copy and paste, but it is under the heading God's Plan for Growing Up.

We continue to use the Shurley CD and say the jingles once in a while, but we have switched to Queen's Language Lessons and watch Cozy Grammar and punctuation. Shurley was the best I've seen for helping kids see how sentences are broken down, but there just seemed to be sooo much of it. It was far too analytical for children so young. All the creativity was sucked out of them. My kids did not like the writing assignments either, and since I have found they do much better with writing narrations and copying great writing. It is a little strange, but my kids love Latin grammar because is seems more like a game, but diagramming English sentences was like pulling teeth! If you did spend a lot of money on it (I got mine used, cheap) I would just skip some lessons or cut the lessons down. If my kids "got" it we just moved on. My sister taught Shurley for 6 years and loved it, but she taught in school and she even cut the lessons down regularily.

I have been a long time CMer and have always distrusted myself... until they start to hate writing and reading due to heavy grammar lessons that I subjected them to in a moment of weakness! I have recently found the Queen's homeschool language lessons and am in love! I love the fact that they have real picture study included and touch on enough "regular" grammar to make my doubtfulness relax a little. We tried Shurley English earlier this year and the kids LOVED the jingles and hated everything else. Shurley is as far from CM as you can get, but I had a weak moment, again. Now we just review the parts of speech jingles here and there and listen to the cd to review. After this experiment I went back to my CM ways and shortly after we found Queen's. I love that it is a workbook, but has real CM lessons. The things I adore about natural language lessons are the oral narration lessons and picture study. My 7 year old narrated from a painting today and it lasted 7 minutes. That is a long time for a little guy to coordinate thoughts and sentences. He had a complete story line with a lot of feeling. Anyway, just another $.02

:iagree: That is why I just can't bring myself to even touch it. I used it through high school and I never wanted to touch or see it again! We love Life of Fred with some MUS here. Colorful manipulatives and humor go along way in our house.

I second that. I use the SCM organizer to log all my kids' work. I also just added the Queen Homeschool Language Lessons and LOVE them. They are very different than what you may be used to, but they are what I have been attempting to make and use for the last five years! They really give you a feel for CM short lessons. My boys couldn't wait to get started.

:D WOW!!! Thank you so much. I am going to print that off and pour over and digest it along with my Sonlight catalog and a cup of cocoa. Thank you so much!!!

I have access to all the old MUS programs for cheap and was wondering if anyone prefers the older program to the new? We used Alpha and Beta before and then I got charmed off by something else, but it was mostly because I didn't want to keep buying new levels (my kids flew through them at the time). Who likes the old and who likes the new? :bigear:

:iagree:I have used FIAR with three children now and I own most of the books. My four year old is just starting. My happiest homeschool memories are listening to their first little narrations. My kids all have very fond memories of each book and still talk about all they learned from them.

I LOVE the Memoria Press DVD's. I know some have called them "dry" or "boring", but I just love them. We tried Latin for Children, but I think the DVD instruction in Prima or Christiana is far more thorough. I really know nothing of Latin (I learned German--from Minnesota :)) and I couldn't do it without the DVD's. I own all three sets: Prima, LC 1, and LC 2. Watching the lessons ahead of time has helped me really grasp things. I just ordered Cambridge Latin 1 for fun reading as we move through LC. My kids are halfway through LC1 and love it. It is academic and does not have all the fun little songs that LfC has, but they know their stuff better when we watch the LC lesson, do copywork of the lesson over the week, review their cards, and take a quiz.

I went to our homeschool consignment store and I bought the 3+4 IG for $15. I bought the LA for $6 (although I am going to use Queen's). I thought for 6 bucks I could beef up Queens if I feel like it. Then... I went to hslibrarybuilder.com and bought all the books I wanted but I left out 10 of them which I didn't think I would use anyway, like the Landmark History of American People and the USA workbooks. I think I want to use a different spine. They didn't seem very cm-ish and I didn't really want to go through and edit a book at length anyway. Any other American History spine suggestions ? :bigear:

We are using Simply Music and Piano for Quitters/Piano for Life. We love both. I, as the mom, like the Piano for Life series, but my kids like being able to play tunes with two hands right away with the SM. I think PfL inspires more creativity.

My sons are in Fractions ( 9 year old) and Decimals (11 year old). We go merrily along until they hit a concept that is hard for them and then I supplement until it is grounded. What I have found with LOF is that is is really one big set of word problems, often with answers of previous problems needed in order to complete future problems. This can be frustrating as my oldest often makes little errors that affect the whole thing and he has to start over. According to my husband this is WONDERFUL because they have to be both careful and accurate all the time. I have been orally reviewing things with the boys and this helps. I say things like, "How do you make a proper fraction improper?" "How do you divide a number by a decimal?" "How do you show a repeating decimal in a division problem?" LOF tends to throw lots of operations at the student at the same time and they have to remember a lot of things at once. This is more like "real life" but can also be frustrating if the child can't remember what to do! We just take it slow and I may even have them go through the book a second time quickly to make sure they get everything.