Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do about It by Diane McGuinness Elementary Mathematics for Teachers is OOP but used copies still float around, and it's a good companion to the Liping Ma book, especially if you actually do the problem sets. Why Don't Students Like School by Dan Willingham

I definitely think you could use Athenaze as you planned to use Wheelock's. Get the workbook, too. I'd also add some audio recordings to get the Greek in your ear (Luke Ranieri's are good and, I believe, still available for free on his patreon), and if you find you want more reading practice, the Italian edition of Athenaze has excellent additional text. If you wanted a self-paced video course, you might look at Seumus Macdonald's. We haven't used this particular course, but have been happy with his live classes.

Tom Holland's Dynasty - my high schooler has read another of his books and enjoyed it. Holland also co-hosts an entertaining podcast, The Rest is History. Barry Strauss's Ten Caesars. Mary Beard's new book Emperor of Rome has been getting good reviews, but tbh, I found her previous book, also critically acclaimed, a total slog, so I haven't looked at it yet.

If you need to go even simpler, there are several easy readers for mythology: https://www.amazon.com/Trojan-Horse-Greeks-Step-Reading/dp/0394896742/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QKKKMZO493EO&keywords=step+into+reading+mythology&qid=1702402282&sprefix=step+into+reading+mythologoy%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/DK-Readers-L3-Greek-Myths/dp/0756640156/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2FJU25VPP3O6E&keywords=easy+reader+mythology&qid=1702402310&sprefix=easy+reader+mythology%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Surprise-Trojans-Trojan-Ready-Reads/dp/1481420860/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2FJU25VPP3O6E&keywords=easy+reader+mythology&qid=1702402310&sprefix=easy+reader+mythology%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Super-Readers-Level-Greek-Myths/dp/0744072352/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2FJU25VPP3O6E&keywords=easy+reader+mythology&qid=1702402310&sprefix=easy+reader+mythology%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/Do-Not-Open-Ready-Reads/dp/1442484977/ref=sr_1_10?crid=2FJU25VPP3O6E&keywords=easy+reader+mythology&qid=1702402310&sprefix=easy+reader+mythology%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-10

8, since i know you have had an even larger-age span than I do, do you have an advice for managing the younger kid noise factor when everyone is working at the same table? My 15yo looks for the slightest pencil tap or paper shuffle to claim it's too distracting to work in a common area.

We have Charlotte's Web read by E.B. White himself, which is fantastic. William Stieg's books that I think of as kids' novellas: Dominic, Abel's Island, and The Real Thief. The Paddington books read by Stephen Fry The Children of Noisy Village is my actual favorite Astrid Lindgren book and not too long, but there's also Ronia the Robber's Daughter and, of course, Pippi Longstocking. Rosemary Sutcliff's epic retellings aren't too long: Black Ships before Troy, the Wanderings of Odysseus, and she has a Beowulf one too. Roald Dahl

My son went straight from MM7 to Dolciani Algebra 1 with no problems and zero need for any supplementation or gap-filling, and I plan to do the same with the rest of my students. We used the 1981 edition.

This is true, and I'd reiterate that my 15yo started Latin grammar study in 6th grade - we have not spread grammar study out slowly over years and years. Still, it seems to me if there is value in starting a modern language in elementary school, there can be value in starting Latin then if the methods you select are appropriate.

Yes! There's also a really good, but not-as-scripted, book from the Polis Institute, Unus Duo Tres. And ever increasing amounts of simple comprehensible Latin on youtube. I made a list of some of these resources a few years ago, but it could use updating - the 12yo mentioned there is now a 15yo heading into AP Latin this year. Tempus fugit!

I want to add that I agree with what 8 says above - if you are going to follow a traditional grammar-translation approach to Latin, which is what the vast majority of Latin programs do. I have seen many, many homeschool families start Latin young and burn out in late elementary/middle school years. However, there are ways of teaching Latin that approach it more like how we teach modern languages, and I think these can be appropriate for younger children. But there are not the same number of easy-to-use resources available to homeschoolers to support that approach. The new program from UD that I linked to is one, the most complete that I have seen and also totally scripted, which is why I am very excited about it. There are additional optional grammar lessons with it, but you don't have to use those and I do not with my elementary aged students. No one here gets formal Latin grammar instruction until 6th grade.

I'm using UD's new Latin through Stories with my 6yo.

I agree with Mrs. Twain that some sort of external stimulus is really helpful for motivation around memory work. Without it, we have a hard time dealing with the tedium of drilling flashcards - both me and the kids. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of external incentives around here, so there hasn't been as much memory work done as I would like. I do remember there were some good threads on here a while back by a few members who did manage to use Anki very successfully, though, and those might be worth poking around for. ETA: I also meant to recommend Dan Willingham's new book on study skills, Outsmart Your Brain.

Read alouds that have worked here for a large age range (high schooler down through 1st grader): Great Expectations and Hard Times PG Wodehouse Lloyd Alexander beyond Prydain (we're currently reading the Westmark trilogy) Kipling's Kim Eagle of the Ninth Emily Wilson's Odyssey (her Iliad is coming out soon I think) The Scarlet Pimpernel The Prince and the Pauper Treasure Island We also read Shakespeare with people taking parts.

Montessori was the first to really get me thinking about education when I started having babies, but her methods seemed totally unsuited to a homeschool setting. Then I found the works of Ella Frances Lynch, who seemed to share much with Montessori on an anthropological and pedagogical level, if expressed in a different mode, but were written specifically for the home setting: Book-less Lessons for the Teacher-Mother and Educating the Child at Home. The works of Francis Donnelly, SJ, especially Principles of Jesuit Education in Practice and Literary Art in Modern Education, radically changed how I think about the purpose of general education. On the practical side, I like Dan Willingham's book, Why Don't Students Like School? and Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design.

Increasing homeschool mom self-confidence in the face of bogus marketing claims is actually VERY important! 🙂

Oh, yeah, Jerome Bruner was really into spiraling the curriculum, I forgot about him. And poking around some more I did find a the use of "spiral" as a descriptor in a few non-homeschool math contexts, including UChicago's infamous Everyday Mathematics. My sense is that Bruner is fairly out of fashion these days - I wonder why the spiral language seems to have stuck around in math more than other subject areas. You do see the concept elsewhere, like in history rotations (not spirals). I suspect most programs, spiral or mastery, do not provide enough practice for many if not most students and that real overlearning requires way more reps than we generally realize (and that's why we might want to be attentive to tools for making our practice as efficient as possible). Zig Engelmann, the original Direct Instruction guy, estimated that most students actually need about 5x the amount of practice contained in most programs used in schools. My hunch is that (some) homeschool math programs do better than this, but still don't generally provide enough practice, at least if we go by how many of us find ourselves needing to review previously studied topics or have to supplement with extra drill for things like multiplication tables.

I'm not sure where the terms "spiral" and "mastery" originated - I've only ever really seen them used by homeschoolers. If you want research on the underlying pedagogical questions, though, you might look for stuff on "spaced repetition" and the "forgetting curve," "interleaved practice," and "overlearning."

We've just finished our first mostly oldschool high school year. The only things I totally outsource are math, because a good friend and former brick-and-mortar math teacher offers in person classes locally, and Greek, which is more of an enrichment thing for us than a core academic course for now. If you have not already done some explicit teaching of study skills, plan to do this immediately. I never got this in my own education and survived, so I initially underestimated how important it is to teach explicitly. My current favorite resource for this is Dan Willingham's new book, Outsmart Your Brain. He's a cognitive psychologist at UVA who has written a lot of accessible work on the science of learning. The more specific, granular, and clear I made assignments, the more successful my son was in working independently. We had a meeting on Monday mornings to which he brought his planner and filled it out sitting next to me while we talked through his assignments for the week. Most days, we also met in the afternoon for some discussion or instruction from me. I did a lot of instruction a couple of times a week in subjects I'm very comfortable with (Latin, English - next year this will include history) and almost none in areas I'm not (physics, world geography), but I expected discussion across all the subjects. When we met for Latin and English lessons, he also had to tell me about what he was working on in subjects I was not offering instruction in. I would ask for elaboration or for him to explain concepts to me, so there was that less-formal checking in on a near-daily basis. So yeah, I would second Lori's emphasis on discussion, discussion, discussion. For my son, he could easily slip away into his room and work in solitude and probably do okay enough on written output, but I think for us to really get everything we want to out of oldschooling, lots of interaction and conversation are essential. I am fortunate that my husband really helps out with this during dinner conversations. He expects at least a daily report on each kid's school work for the day and often draws those reports out into more in depth conversations. I also agree that things go best when I try to learn as much about the subjects he is studying as I can. This is hard because there's only so much time, so I've had to decide how to prioritize what subjects I try to teach myself more about (geography over physics this year, for example). And we don't "combine" students, but I do try to have his studies at least somewhat overlap with what I'm doing with the younger kids to get more bang for my self-teaching buck (next year everyone is doing some sort of biology, for example). The last thing is that the more I get his input on the planning, the more cooperative and diligent he has been carrying out the work. So things like picking (from a list I've created) what he's reading in Latin, or what aspect of biology he will focus on. Also stopping periodically throughout the school year for a big picture check in and being willing to change course if things aren't working (we totally rehauled our science plan about two months into year) helped a lot with buy-in. Good luck! It wasn't perfect, but I enjoyed our year immensely and am looking forward to the rest of high school mostly oldschooling. To me, it feels like such an awesome pay off from the investment of the early years, although admittedly a ton of work!

I had one other thought of something that works well for my voracious-for-five-year-old-reader who is hard to keep supplied with appropriate books: she is often overly ambitious and picks up books she doesn't quite have the stamina for. A lot of these are available as audiobooks through our library, so I'll check out the audiobook and she will sit and listen while she mostly follows along in the book. In this way, she has "read" stuff like the Little House books, Children of Noisy Village, Paddington, Dominic (by William Steig), one or two of the Chronicles of Narnia, Charlotte's Web, etc.

Betsy-Tacy - there are lots of these that end with Betsy all grown up and getting married, but the first two are episodic and my current 5yo has enjoyed them. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books - haven't read the new "Missy Piggle-Wiggle" ones, but the original four are favorites here. Calpurnia Tate, Girl Vet - the main character is originally from a book for older readers, but this series is shorter and illustrated. These are what got my now-12yo reading chapter books. They do have one storyline continued throughout each volume, so probably a bit more advanced than the other two.

Verba?

Gibbon is really fun to read, and you don't have to tackle all six volumes to get a sense of his style and influence on the interpretation of the Roman Empire. Tom Holland has books that cover much of the period you are looking at. The book Matryoshka mentioned is on my TBR list - I've heard very good things about it. Maybe Peter Brown's biography of St. Augustine to get a look at late antiquity?

Glad my hours spent trolling the interwebs for old Latin books can be of use to someone - fēlīciter!

Composition is an enormous work of synthesis, which is why I think it is so valuable, but yeah, it is also very difficult. The books I linked break things down very granularly and give structured practice using different constructions. The exercises look at first like simple English-to-Latin translation, but as they progress they require selecting the right constructions based on the meaning to be conveyed. FYI, both books start at about the same level of difficulty, but The Gateway ends with more advanced work. There are also lots of other vintage school books along these lines if you wanted to poke around and find something that perhaps suited you better. Some have imitation exercises based on classical literature, which I might use down the road if we read said literature. Another traditional exercise we do as a stepping stone between grammar exercises and original composition is trying to translate bits of English literature we like into Latin - my ninth grader was just working on Bilbo's self-introduction to Smaug (under hills and over hills, guest of eagles, barrel-rider, that whole thing) last week. They used to publish whole books full of English selections for this purpose which are kind of fun to peruse.

Ok, between that and Gunnison and Harley, you have absolutely covered all the grammar you might need to read anything. Is there something specific going on that makes you think you need further grammar study? Do you know specifically which constructions your students have mastered and which they are still shaky on? I do think there's just only so far that isolated grammar study will take you - and only so many years most kids will chant amō amās amat or parse types of ablatives without going Vercingetorix on you. There will always a bit of a leap between grammar book Latin and actual Latin literature. Personally, I would do one of those Latin composition books to practice the grammar and hopefully underline how the forms produce actual meaning and then just read, read, read. You could tackle whichever author seems appealing, but it could be a bit of a slog. Maybe back up a bit from Caesar in difficulty and work on increasing reading fluency. Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles is fun if mythology is your thing, or Viri Romae if you're more interested in history, or the Epitome Historiae Sacrae if you want to prep to read the Vulgate. If those are too difficult to just read without having to parse every other word, go back to Julia or Cornelia or Ora Maritima or Carolus et Maria and work your way up.