I have the first two of these books and am considering using the series for my dd10. Please tell me anything I need to know. Is there a good alternative?

*twitch* is right. I do not remember any of that from when I read it. Thank goodness for growth (in me), I need to stop recommending that book!!

Thank you. I have an hour or so before my kids wake up, they just may be on their own for meals today!

I have been searching for the CIRCe thread and can not find it, will someone please link it for me?

I agree about the Bleudorn's theology, my beliefs and scripture interpretation is usually different than most mainstream Christians so I thought it was just me. They are also very conservative, which I am not. I need to pull the book out again and review it before I say much more. I will say that I never did get a clear picture of classical education from them. I know about so e of the links posted below and they were helpful. There are some that are new, thank you!

Teaching the Trivium was the first book on homeschooling that I read, so it is special to me. :) it has been a long time since I have read it, but it seemed like they spent a long time scripturally justifying the decision to homeschool as the only logical choice. I had already decided to homeschool so it seemed like overkill. The rest of the book is about how they do/did it. I loved reading it. I really like their "10 things to do before age..." I have referred back to those sections many times. They made it seem so ideal. I have not been to their website for a while, but they had articles posted on the 10 things to do before age... I am not sure if they still do.

I just finished The Aboliton of Man. I agree with what he is saying, but I have hope that the situation is not as inevitable as he portrays it. My children are the fourth generation to go through school, my grandmother was a high school when he wrote this. I was raised with a moral relativism of sorts. My parents were neither all in the Tao nor all out. As an adult I have come to believe in absolutes and that there is a higher law that all must obey in order to have Harmony in their soul. The problem I have is backing my claim in a coherent way. Lewis does such a good job of making his points. He takes you on a journey such that you don't realize the end until you are there and have agreed with him all along the way, and so his conclusions must be right. I appreciate his writing, but I think he would have been frustrating to have as a friend! Edited to fixed an incomplete sentence

I love Dagny and will use for my next daughter.

I just finished watching the "Ask Andrew" video on Vimeo. It was very inspiring. I am getting The Abolition of Man of my shelf and ordering the other books today. He did a good job of giving my mind a picture of what the normative approach is, now I need to figure out what the analytical approach looks like. I thought that what he described as normative was analysis before watching the video. I am also going to make a card with the questions and topics like he suggested. This small thing is going to go along way toward achieving the goals I have for education in our home.

I avoided textbooks for a long time, but love them now. I ordered k12 Human Odyssey to look at and read three years early because I wanted to read it. I buy textbooks all the time at used bookstores, especially college writing books. I like to read them for fun.

Charlotte Mason Help and Milestones Academy are good lists that I refer to often.

I have a book that contains all of the Narnia books in it. It is long and has pretty pictures too.

Sounds like Utah. I live in a semi rural town of about 30,000. It is not unusual to have a group of horses walk down my street and I live on a main road. Many of my neighbors have cows, chickens, and goats. We are on the other side of a mountain from Salt Lake City, but it only takes us 30 min to get to a much bigger city and 45 to downtown SL. There are lots of places like my town in the state. Our public transportation is great. We have light rail that connects the whole SL valley and busses that are very convenient. We have four seasons, sometimes all in one day. Last year we went X-country skiing in the morning, hiking in the afternoon, and for a bike ride in the evening. It is not unusual to need your heater in the morning and air conditioner in the afternoon in the Spring and Fall. Winters are full of snow and sunshine so we play outside most of winter, summer temps are in the 90's with no humidity and very few rainy days. We have bursts of rain that last from 5 min to an hour, the streets and gutters flood then it is over and we get a cool evening. I grew up here and love it. My husband is from the Midwest and tells me he will never move from here.

My dental office just changed to working on commission. I will never be going back there again.

It looks really good to me too, but the no responses makes me wonder.

Thank you for the suggestion about the maps Paradox, those look great. My children were just asking to do more map work and this will be perfect. The whole outline of your son's history looks great.

I accidentally found this a few weeks a go when my daughter started to memorize it, it made us keep going with it. We were ready to scrap it and do another poem. I could not get the timing right, but this rendition was awesome.

I just tell the spelling to my daughters and after they are done I will go over the spelling rules of the ones they needed help on.

I skipped K 1 & 2 and just did three. I do not think there is anything my daughter missed. She in now doing Singapore 4a and don't just fine. She is 7 by the way.

I realize my comment may have been offensive. I should have worded it better. My children are all young (oldest is 9). I have never been in a virtual school situation, but many of my friends do use them. It had never occurred to me that they would not be considered "home schoolers." I really did just want to know how it mattered, and now want to apologize if I offended or just came off as insensitive.

If you are not a state official what difference does it make?

I have a BS in Psychology and Sociology (double major).

Thank you, I have been thinking of something like this. You saved me a lot of work!

I skipped most of that kind of stuff. I did not prepare anything ever, I just winged it and if it was too complicated to gather real quick during the lesson we did not do it.

If the PDF is on your computer, email them to yourself (I do not know if the MM files are too big for this) or if you can download it from the original site do that, then just open it in an app that allows you to mark up the file.