My kids are 6th and 4th grade: Daily: 1 lesson from Saxon Math - that's 25 practice problems 1 lesson from All About Spelling (my 6th grader teaches this to my 4th grader) About 30 minutes of me reading from Sonlight History About 30 minutes of self reading from their Readers About 3 sentence editing exercises Three days per week: Work on IEW - Writing their paragraph (about 20 minutes) Work on vocab and other memory work About two days per week: Watch Drive Thru History or NOVA or something fun Cursive Handwriting - About 20 minutes twice per week I read Apologia Science to them, and we do an experiment (once a week experiment), about 20 minutes reading twice per week

This is our first year with CC. My kids are 12 (6th grade) and 10 (4th grade). They are doing Foundations and Essentials. At first, I expected it to be very supplemental. We are in Cycle 1 this year, which is Ancient History and it goes by FAST! There is no way I felt we could keep up if we went in depth on anything. Also, the Classical model of education has us in the Grammar years, which is memorization and building that foundation. In Challenge A and B they'll move into the Dialectic stage and start learning the studies more in depth, so I'm not worried that they don't learn things in depth yet. So, as I said, we planned on using it purely as a supplement to our current studies. However, that was challenging so now I've developed a more hybrid approach that works well for us. We toned down our home curriculum, and we spend a couple hours per week watching you tube videos or checking out books that cover the topics they learned at CC that week. It feels a little chaotic at times, but the kids really like the mix up! And when we come across something they've memorized at CC in their regular curriculum, they get excited and start singing the songs! I think you should consider Essentials too. The fact you are already doing IEW means you'll have a slight advantage. Essentials is pretty intense for us, but my kids are learning so much!! I think it's prepping them well for High School. The curriculum we use at home is Saxon Math, Apologia Science, Sonlight History. The rest we get from what we learn at CC. Good luck with your decision!

I also have a son who has focus issues. He went to public school from K - 4th and homeschool from 5th to 6th (currently). He still has focus issues at home, probably a little worse than at public school, or so it seems. I think that if you put your son into public school, it will appear that the focus issues improve. They are not going to allow him to take 2.5 hours to finish his language arts, so he'll either not finish it in the time allotted, or will carelessly finish it. His teacher may report that he stays in his desk and thus, focuses, but if he's not actually focusing and thus not actually learning, you haven't solved the problem. I could be wrong, but this is the case with my son. He doesn't focus well at home either, but if it takes him longer to complete his work, so be it. At least I know he's completing it correctly and learning it. Good luck with your decision!

I also don't like the flu shot and I am more nervous about the huge push to get vaccinated than I am about the flu virus. Our doctor has never pushed the flu vaccine on us, simply asked if we wanted it and went onto something else when I said "no thanks." This year I was pressured too. Both the nurse and the doctor made me feel guilty for not vaccinating my kids and me against the flu, saying I was putting others at risk too. I weigh the pros and cons carefully with vaccines, because (and I admit I'm a little paranoid when it comes to stuff like this) I don't 100% trust our government to not "sneak" something else in there and I don't 100% trust the manufacturer to not use poisonous ingredients. None of us are in a high risk group (no babies, no asthma, no extreme exposure, etc). Personally, I think it's mostly media hype, like everything else. I do know it's a rougher year than last year, simply because I know more people who have had the flu this year. But, I'm not overly worried about it. We did increase our immunity vitamins. :)

Drive Thru History!!

Thank you so much for the advice! Today went a *little* better, but I scaled down the workload quite a bit. I don't want to do that daily or we will fall behind. They watched Animal Planet during a break this morning too, and I didn't wake them up at 7am as usual. I let them wake up on their own, which was 8am. We got started with school around 9am, which is about an hour behind, but I was trying to let them lead the schedule. My main problem probably boils down to respect and discipline. Because I can't focus 100% on them 100% of the time, they take advantage of that. I work in technical support for an accounting software program, and January is always our busy month with companies doing their year-end close and preparing their taxes. So, I was on the phone a lot today. Everytime I got on the phone, they would stop doing their school work. Often times one will come up to me with a note, "Can I take a 5 minute break?" or "Can I have ice cream?" And when I'm on the phone, I just say yes to all this. However, they NEVER come back from their "5 minute" break until I call them back. If I'm on the phone with a client for an hour, well there goes an hour! This lack of self discipline has been extended into other areas too. Tonight they both stalled severely when it was time to get ready for bed. I read our history book to them tonight, and they both kept interrupting to talk about an unrelated subject, or getting up to get a drink, or go to the bathroom, or my daughter to change her pajamas, for no real good reason. I kept having to fuss and yell because of all these interruptions, and to that they respond with their own fussing and yelling, The second root cause of our problems is that they don't seem motivated to learn. I like the ideas of letting them choose a science project, or even a science unit. We are learning anatomy and physiology and none of us is too excited about it. We bought them a remote control machines kit and a k-nex roller coaster for Christmas, but haven't had much time to play with them. I think we'll sit down and do some building tomorrow, and skip the respiratory system! :) Today I asked them what they'd like to learn if they could learn about anything, and neither one could think of anything. This weekend we'll talk more about it, but I'll give them some suggestions to choose from. I do think that will help. My son is an EXCELLENT speller. My daughter struggles with spelling. So, I told my son today that I'd like his help teaching his sister her spelling units. He's glad he doesn't have to do his own spelling work anymore (he aced everything anyway) and he really stepped up to help teach his sister. He even took some time to read the teacher's manual. His sister seemed to enjoy learning from him too, so that might be an area I could tap into as well. It took a subject off my plate, and the kids really enjoyed the new teaching dynamic! Thank you again for the suggestions, and any others I'm open! Laura

They did refund all my money, yes. But they do still claim a $5 restocking fee on their website. I think mine was refunded in full because for a week I never even got my email confirmation. When my email confirmation never came, I finally told them to cancel my order. And then my email confirmation came through. So, I logged in to try it, but never could setup our school. I just kept getting an error message on the very first setup page. So, I emailed them that I still wanted a refund and they gave me a full refund. I might have been an unusual case because I never even got to the setup. I agree, how do you restock an online purchase? A good product would offer a full money back guarantee. I do still have hopes for them though! Laura

I would check the law regarding how many days of school a child is allowed to miss (public school). Because, if it's less than three weeks, I would not bother registering. I can't imagine anyone is going to know any different, and if you are within the allowed time to be absent, then there is nothing they could do about it anyway. Good luck on your move!! :)

I'm really glad I came across this. I had the EXACT kind of day today, and more and more days have been like this. Kristina, thank you so much for your words of advice. You give me SOMETHING to cling to tomorrow, and I have hope for a peaceful day, with hopefully some learning too! :) Laura

I ordered Well Planned Day a few weeks ago, and had some issues. They were very nice to refund my money and I'd like to try it when they work out the bugs. I think it has a lot of potential. I use their paper planners and love them. For now I'm using HST+. But yes, Well Planned Day had issues for me a few weeks ago. Laura

This is my first year homeschooling. I have a 6th grade son and a 4th grade daughter. I also work from home from roughly 9am to 5pm, but I have flexibility so I've built times into our schedule to help the kids with their lessons. The schedule is a lot for me, and I spend a lot of late nights prepping assignments or catching up on work, but I'm ok with that. What's been frustrating lately is that I feel my kids don't want to learn ANYTHING. They went to public school until this year and they both pretty much hated school. My son is on the autism spectrum (high functioning) and he was always struggling with something at school. My daughter is super shy and she was always being bullied or teased at school. Both would always beg me to let them stay home from school, or they'd pretend they didn't feel well, only to act just fine once I agreed to let them stay home from school. Getting them to read 20 minutes every night, and fill in their reading log was always a challenge too. I had really high hopes that getting them out of that setting and into the nurturing and loving home setting would develop their love of learning, but it hasn't. I know we are fresh back from taking two weeks off for Christmas, but this week has been awful!! I started the week off introducing some new things, hoping they'd be excited about a change. I bought a couple Life of Fred math books, because my daughter hates math so much (we use Saxon), I thought this would make it fun. Her response, "Am I still going to learn, because I don't want to do it if I have to learn." Every subject we study, I get resistance, lack of focus, goofing off, and complaining about all the work. Talking with my husband, he thinks the problem is that I'm teaching the same way public school taught. We have our books, our schedule, our worksheets and quizzes, etc. He pointed out that in public school (which we both attended) we had good and bad teachers. We always learned SO MUCH from the good teachers who we liked. It's like their teaching style matched perfect with our learning style, and we loved learning in those classes! So, I think my problem is that I need to find a way to teach in a way that my kids love to learn, but I'm at a total loss on how to do that. They are too old for math via making a pie, and science via planting a seed. They need more meat in their studies! So, I'm hoping someone here has conquered the same issues I'm facing and can provide some suggestions for making learning more fun for middle school aged kids. Also, any advice for me is appreciated, because right now it sounds so nice to put them on the school bus and have the day to focus on my job, and the evening to focus on my kids. I want homeschooling to work so bad, I don't have the heart to send them back to traditional school, but I'm struggling to make this is happy experience! Thanks so much for reading my long book! :) Laura

BJU Math 6 DVDs. A few things about it: 1) It's from the 1990's so the teacher looks so old fashioned, however she is VERY sweet and easy to understand, 2) There is a LOT more than just math discussed. A lot of character and bible, not that those are bad things at all, but when we were focused on Math, it was distracting, 3) My son was using the BJU DVD while my daughter used the Saxon DIVE CD. She would finish hers in 20 minutes, my sons would drag on for an hour some days. He didn't like that. 4) It was soooo expensive! My biggest frustrationis that I got talked into "renting" the DVDs at the convention. After a couple weeks of trying to enjoy the program, I decided to just eat the cost and buy a new program. I bought Saxon for my son with the DIVE CD (just like my daughter) and will never try a new Math program again! We LOVE Saxon!!

Check out CurrClick. Some of their courses are free (these are more of the elective courses, like Lego Club and Book Club). We took Apologia Science through them and loved it!

Yes, I bought All About Spelling (been wanting a real spelling curriculum and am excited) and two Life of Fred books (which we've also never tried). The rest we are using on a ski vacation in January!! Yeah!!! p.s. This is my first post on these boards, so I hope this works! I've been a reader for a while, excited to be a poster! :)