I found the blue's phonic program a little shallow so we continued our own simple phonics review alongside that year's LLATL and that worked well. I've used blue, red, yellow, orange and part of purple. As you would expect for lower elementary, the blue and red levels are definitely teacher driven. From memory... although the middle elementary levels could have been more independent, some of the directions were still contained in the teacher's manual and it was not always predictable as to when you (the teacher) would be needed. With something like Rod and Staff, it was predictable. I knew I would teach the lesson from the TM and then set the independent work. LLATL is very different. Just mentioning because that might be an issue. Yellow would be one of my favorite levels and orange had some nice units in it, including a lovely one on poetry. I think LLATL is best suited to families who are happy with a very gentle introduction to grammar and writing, who don't mind a few varied activities and who are willing to supplement as needed.

:bigear:

:bigear:

I was wondering this too. How committed is your dh to homeschooling? Are you worried about leaving ds alone because of his physical safety or do you doubt he would be able to work independently? I notice he is only 13 which obviously means he is quite a young teenager.

I'm so glad you didn't go. But it sounds like this is really part of a bigger issue which needs to get sorted out (easier said than done). A special needs lawyer sounds like a great idea. In the meantime, I hope you feel better soon. Wanted to add, that in my family, sick people stay home! I don't understand why anyone would encourage sick people to leave their homes and spread germs :confused:

If this is the case (bolded), then you will need to start setting some boundaries in place anyway so that everyone has reasonable expectations of your sister's future care. You might as well start setting some boundaries now. At the moment, you are just as needy as your sister and you deserve to put your health first. :grouphug:

Well, I am not a fan of ACE and I agree with some of the comments that have made here. I also don't think that switching to ACE would necessarily help in your situation as your oldest is probably still too young for independent schooling. (I know mine were at that age). I did want to caution though that with any curriculum that has been around a long time that you need to check when people used it. There may have been significant revisions since that person used it. I believe the a lot of the ACE curriculum underwent revision in the late 1990's and that new editions of social science (and maybe science) have been recently released. I don't know whether these revisions eliminated the "fill in the blank" style of ACE (I doubt it :) ) but it may have improved it. I really don't know but I think it is worth considering. I have used the ACE creative writing and literature (grade 1 and grade 5) and it is not as much "fill in the blank" as I thought it was going to be. I think the English and word building are worth a look for some families in some circumstances. Maybe you could share what you have been using so far and people might be able to suggest ways to make it easier?

Thanks! I will check out those websites. I would like to exclude wheat, corn, nuts, lentils and limit dairy and beans (IB issues). I would need to have recipes that are low IG and low fat.

can someone can give me a link to a recipe website where you can exclude ingredients? Thanks

Thanks! I've had a quick look on the Pearson website and their etexts are much cheaper.

Thanks for all the information - I'll look up this website. Is there any way of seeing what textbooks are used in the American School (ie. booklist) or is that information only for enrolled students?

Thanks! I'm not sure where we are going with math in the future but I know having the solutions worked out will be very important.

just wondering if you continued to use BJU past 7th grade or whether you switched to something else....

I am disappointed we came to BJU english so late with grade 5. We both found it difficult to adjust to the grammar for one thing and I felt we had really missed some of the groundwork in the earlier grades. But I was even more disappointed when I looked at the samples of BJU English 7th grade and saw the format had changed! I'm still not sure whether we will go back and do BJU grade 6 or not.

yes, I agree. The samples on their website look fantastic. I actually enjoyed teaching BJU English and I now feel much more confident teaching writing at this level because of BJU's excellent step-by-step instructions. But up to that point I had only used homeschool curriculum so I naturally noticed a fair amount of instructions that I needed to weed out since they were directed towards the classroom teacher. That just led me to my original post as to how adaptable textbooks are to the homeschool setting. Looks like BJU is pretty well regarded here so I am looking more into it.

Mosdos press looks really good and I have never heard of it before - thanks!

:lurk5:

For some reason I found the CLE TM less useful as we went along and by the time I got around to ordering level 5 I decided to purchase the answer keys instead. Maybe that was a mistake? Anyway, I am considering ordering the level 6 TM soon as it really is quite inexpensive.

Thanks Amy :)

Thanks for your reply. Yes, the cost has always been a deterrent to me too. I am really looking for middle school textbooks and up for my dd11. I also have a 7 year old who looks like she may be suited to a textbook approach in the future but for the short term I will probably just continue to use and adapt what we have to save money for the more expensive years of schooling! I was probably a little vague in my OP since I wanted all suggestions of textbook publishers so I could browse their websites. At the moment I am not thinking any particular subjects. I have only used BJU English grade 5 (latest edition). I have noticed that Christian Liberty press sells some answer keys to some BJU textbooks. Since you use some BJU would you recommend buying them to save money or do you consider the real BJU TMs to be essential?

Thanks - I will check out Kolbe academy.

DD11 uses CLE math, currently finishing level 5, and I mark her work using the answer key. I don't own the TM. We do supplement a bit with other resources, such as CWP. I have noticed the CLE answer key only provides the answer and not the solution to some problems. This seems to happen when the problem type is more review in nature. I sometimes get impatient because the other math resources we are using do not have solutions so I am having to work those ones out already when dd makes a mistake. However, my main concern is when the math is too hard for me for me to work out and i will need the full solution myself! I don't think the CLE TM has the full solutions either but I could be wrong. (If it did, I will buy it!) So, am I expecting too much to want every problem to be worked out? I think Teaching Textbooks have a full solution to every problem but maybe this is unusual because it is on CD?

That is exactly our background too :)

That makes sense - thanks!

Thanks, that's interesting. I actually found the BJU TM very well laid out in many ways; maybe some of my difficulties came from the fact I wasn't used to using a school TM. Prior to using BJU I had used more curriculum for the homeschool community like MFW and HOD.