Yay! I sure hope the MFW booth has a chair. I'm gonna be there a while. LOL.

Wow, thanks everyone! I didn't realize the Usborne book was a "filler" and that the Notgrass one was more of the spine. THAT I can understand! AND it hit me - DUH:tongue_smilie: - that in ancient history much of the history is BIBLE. No wonder I didn't notice it down in the other sections. (Yes, I am a natural blonde LOLOLOL!) Yes, Donna, I would be one who feels that TOG is overkill. Truly if my senior in high school only made it through the D level in TOG, I would have been very pleased LOL. Anyone know more about the SMARR guides they use? Cathy Duffy's review said that they don't do a wide variety of writing assignments - does MFW change those a bit so that there IS a wider variety? So far (the whole 2 days we've used MFW RTR LOL) I am loving MFW, and I am thrilled to bits to find something that seems to work AND go all the way through high school. Wahoo!

Anyone using this? How are you liking it? I just looked at the sample online, and it looks sort of "light?" HOWEVER, that is taking into account that I'm coming from TOG, and their R stuff is college-level, IMO LOL! I guess it just struck me as odd that they use a resource for MFW for high school that TOG assigns as a reading for the UG level. (It was too much for my UG student at the time. ;) ) Do they do the Book Basket for high school too, with supplemental reading available? Or is all the work on the schedule, and if I think it needs to be more rigorous, I'd need to come up with something? What are the writing assignments like? How is the literature instruction? (I'm VERY excited to see that it includes literature!!!!!!!)

That's why I don't plan stuff on specific days. I just plan the order. That way if something comes up I don't have to redo my plans, I just bump them to the next day.

I am most definitely a planner. We may not actually FOLLOW the plan, but I have to have a plan, otherwise it DEFINITELY won't get done! I use Homeschool Tracker to keep track of all my plans. Even stuff that is in a different book (like MFW, for example), I usually try to enter into HST so that everything is in one place and so I can print out assignment sheets for my kiddos.

Agreeing with the others. We used word families for years. Like 4-5??? It effectively taught my kids to sight read.:001_huh: Now at ages 11, 10, and 8, I'm REteaching them how to read and spell with Spalding. I think it will go faster than if they had been taught TRUE sight reading, but they definitely learned "phonics lite."

We don't really do the notebooking at all right now, but we have in the past. I've had them narrate to me what they want to write, and then I write it down. We are using the lapbooks from LiveandLearn Press. I write those as well. I write the experiment sheets also.

We're going to start with RTR (actually week 14:tongue_smilie: ). And I don't plan to use ECC at all at this point because we are already doing a geography/world cultures study through Trail Guide to World Geograhy.

My Mavis Beacon 16 says it won't work with Vista, but it does.

Mine! But I do them anyway.;) My older 2 are boys, so when I was trying to get them into chapter books, I pulled out How to Eat Fried Worms. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was another favorite. For a long time we stopped reading at night because it was just too much effort for me to have to break through. But I finally said enough is enough recently, and we started reading the Narnia books (my kids are 11, 10, 8, 6, and 4 now...the 4yo doesn't really listen LOL). My 11yo moans and groans, but I tell him tough, it's good for him.:D

Ditto.

That price is correct.:D

We've been using Easy Grammar. Once I decided to use JAG and AG in the fall, I stopped all grammar with the younger ones. I figured, why bother. LOL

Very interesting. Why do some people have to see it first before they can spell it out loud? Does he say that spelling is totally auditory in everyone? Or just some people?

Definitely do the placement test. My dd finished BJU 2, and I actually put her in Alpha since her addition facts are not solid (she still needs manipulatives/fingers). So I'm having her go through it at a faster pace till I find where her instructional level is.

This is what we are doing also. Yes, we are only doing The Spelling Lesson chapter. We are not doing The Writing Lesson or The Reading Lesson (since the reading is more like comprehension and stuff, not actually decoding). We do exactly the process that Ellie said, except once we get the phonograms learned we'll write the rules, since my kids are older.

I have been pondering this exact same thing! :lurk5:

That and I think it moves a tad slower. For example, the first lesson in AG covers 3 parts of speech, I believe. Those are all separated out in JAG.

Exactly part of my quandry...WHAT TO USE??? Blah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:tongue_smilie: But I do have to admit that I still feel somewhat like I'm floudering with DW's materials. Not AS badly as with TOG, but still more than I'm comfortable with.

If I decide to go to the convention, yes. I'm trying to decide since I have "issues" with the leadership LOLOLOL. Do I take a stand or not?:confused: David Hazell is even speaking, so that makes it even harder!

Oh, I definitely tweaked.;) I gave up on the Evaluations right off the bat - that was money down the drain. I got very frustrated that even the stuff in the people/vocabulary lists on the overview pages didn't match, so I quit looking at those as well. So we just read the books, did the mapwork (which frustrated me to death as well since it often didn't match, but PRAISE GOD I bought the R-level Bible atlas - otherwise I would have pulled my hair out at the very beginning...not sure how people even DO the mapwork with LG/UG students if they don't go ahead and buy that!:confused: ), did some of the crafts now and then, and went on our way. History got done, but it DEFINITELY wasn't good enough for me to look for something else. It's sold, I'd have to buy it again, and I am not impressed with the DE stuff, so oh well. But that's OK...it really didn't work, no matter how much I wanted it to.

The bolded part is something I hadn't considered - doing it all together vs. individually. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Do you choose something that works best for you? Do you choose something that works best for your children? A combo of both? What if y'all are polar opposites - for example they love crafts and wish books were never invented, and you hate crafts and love books?

I love the IDEA of TOG, and yes, it does do exactly what I want. But I've BTDT, and while history got DONE, it really drove me nuts.:blushing: I had to work REALLY hard to get it to work, and I felt on the verge of drowning those 2 years I used it. I'd think "oh, this is going OK" and then at the end of the week discover that hm, funny thing, yet AGAIN the reading didn't cover what it said we were supposed to cover. Too frustrating.

MFW questions - what does the child read and what do I read aloud? Or do I read aloud everything except the book basket stuff? It looks like the science would be pretty easy to leave out if we already have a science we are doing - is that correct?