My DD will be starting Kindergarten in the fall. I used MFW K with my DS and thought I would use it with her too. However, she begged me to teacher her to read, so we are currently working through AAR1. Is it worth doing MFW K with her next year, or should I just skip it and let her do science/history/Bible with DS and Math/Language on her level?

Make magazine. My nephews 13 and 19 both love it! They also liked Robot

You forgot to include the option of "Heck yeah, but make the hubby do it!" That would be me. 😊

X-post My DS (7) is almost finished with the lessons in AAR2. He understands the rules and applies them pretty well. But, he refuses to read any of the stories in the books except the first two. He is intimidated by the length of the stories and the number of words on the page. He also is still sounding out the majority of words (in anything beyond the first two stories). What do I do now? I don't feel he is ready for AAR3. How do I increase his confidence and word memorization?? Help??

My DS (7) is almost finished with the lessons in AAR2. He understands the rules and applies them pretty well. But, he refuses to read any of the stories in the books except the first two. He is intimidated by the length of the stories and the number of words on the page. He also is still sounding out the majority of words (in anything beyond the first two stories). What do I do now? I don't feel he is ready for AAR3. How do I increase his confidence and word memorization?? Help??

I don't use R &S, but I liven our spelling up with hands -on activities (incorporating kinestetic learning). Bounce a ball as ds says each letter. Toss a ball back and forth with each of us saying a letter. Writing the words in salt.

I've heard great things about The Light and The Glory, but I haven't used it yet. (Ds is only 6.)

Try with a magnifying glass made of actual glass rather than plastic. I can never get it to work with the cheap plastic kind.

You might be able to do this with your router. I'm not sure about setting the times, but definitely the web filtering and you can probably assign certain filtering criteria to different mac addresses (device identifiers). What type of router do you have?

I grew up just north of Boulder, in Longmont. Haven't been back for quite a few years, but here are some ideas: Estes Park is very fun, but very busy in summer. Lots of cute shops. Rocky Mountain National Park and Trail Ridge road up to the great divide. (Prepare yourself for a lack of oxygen!) Celestial Seasonings tea factory tour in Boulder/Gunbarrel. Red Rocks amphitheater Flagstaff mountain in Boulder- scary drive, but spectacular views at the top! Casa Bonita in Denver is a cheesy but fun restaurant with cliff diving inside. Denver zoo is good. Down in Colorado Springs there is the Air Force academy and Focus on the Family headquarters. FOF has a great tour and you can visit Whit's End! Also the Garden of the Gods is down there, but I've never been. Pearl Street mall in Boulder is a very interesting cultural experience. Probably don't want to do this with young children. Have fun!!

For those who use AAR, do you save all of the student workbook pages and use them with another child or do you consider it a consumable and purchase a new one for each child. We are only a few lessons into AAR 2 (didn't use AAR 1) but it seems to me that I can just save everything and use it for child # 2 in a couple years. Am I right or do we start gluing/writing on pages later? Thanks.

Orphan Justice: How to Care for Orphans Beyond Adopting by Johnny Carr Absolutely fabulous with very practical suggestions. Also Crazy Love by Francis Chan. Very convicting and inspiring.

My DS is in first grade. We used MFW for K and I wanted to pick up phonics this year with Lesson 27 of OPGTR (Short-vowel words). For starters, he hates it and throws a fit when I grab the book. I have changed to a mix of ETC, word family practice and Usborne Very First Reading books. He seems to have matured and I want to go back to OPGTR after Christmas. What I don't understand is the pacing of the lessons. What does "mastery" look like for these lessons? Should he be able to read the word without sounding them out? Or is it just that he can sound them out without hesitancy? He is very good at sounding words out, but does not recognize very many simple words yet. I'm not sure if I was moving too fast before or if he just didn't like the hard work of it. Any thoughts on when an OPGTR lesson is "mastered"? Thanks.

This sounds EXACTLY like my (newly) 6 year-old ds. He hates OPGTR and will throw a tantrum at the sight of the book. Almost as bad with ETC. I had his vision checked and it is fine. So, I have backed off on phonics and reading. We found some easy reader comic books at the library and he will read a couple of pages of that to me each day. I just tell him the rules for sounding out the words as we go. He is picking some of them up slowly. We're taking a break from the formal phonics instruction. In a month or so we will try to get back to more structured reading lessons.