Dancing bears. Funny, not babyish, lots of practice,gets done quickly. Content warning: Very secular and British, so lots of mention of bars, beer, and jail. Also nude Danes. And hedgehog crisps (my kids favourite). Age appropriate, but it does assume a degree of worldliness that some might find objectionable.

My very similar son struggled in the first few chapters of AOPS pre algebra. We worked together, and did it very slowly, 30-45 mins, no stress or goals to finish. I let him struggle a little, then offered hints and help when necessary. He also got to see me and his dad struggle with some of the problems, which was funny and I think reassuring for him. Fast forward a year, and he is flying through it and happy and independent. We also grab another book to drill anything he needs more practise on. He will take abou 18 months to finish the prea book, but well worth it. About 9 months of that was chapters 1-5.

The book tells you pretty much everything you need to teach the lesson, but I do find the TM helpful for the answers.

Love MacBeth.

The wand might be a good fit. From BraveWriter. The books, copybook and dictation were great for my kids. Mine needed much more detail in the phonics, but we're all struggling readers. It would likely be ample for your kid.

Honestly, go outside and look at stuff. Maybe draw pictures. Look things up in a field guide. Find an older adult interested in nature or history and hang out with them. Go to the library and take out books with colourful pictures on topics that interest your kids, and read them together. Teach them some oral narration, and chat about what you are reading. They are so little, but will remember and learn what inspires them.

Lots of colouring, little cut and paste worksheets. The first book or 3 in the R&S preschool series are ideal for this if like me, crafty is not your thing, but you can find this stuff for free easily. Don't aim for their standards of neatness. HWOT suggests colouring with regular crayons for hand strength. Threading beads, play doh are all good. My kids typically do little writing other than the printing book or copybook until age 8 or 9.

The program we are using is classical. We don't hear Latin in church, except my son is now in a liturgical choir and singing in Latin. It's not a problem, and now when he reads from his book, he sounds beautiful (Italian vowels and the lovely r's). So, I wouldn't sweat it. But if you hear Latin in church, and have a choice, choose Ecclesiatical.

Percy Jackson? The Great Brain series? Anything by Gordon Kormon (not great literature but lots of fun, not too intense.) I was sensitive but loved the Big Red dog series (can't remember how to spell the authors name and must run, sorry). Good luck.

All of the above, and keep it short! If they aren't listening, it is too long for them. I let littles leave if they are bored.

So, we have a five week old and are starting the month from you-know-where. We are out of the house most days, and having to drag bambina and the masses to many musical events. I don't think your plan sounds too unrealistic assuming that you don't have too far to drive and you can change your schedule if it's too overwhelming and you are okay with the fact that not everything will get done on your off days. If they aren't too judgy at CC and the coops, or you are the kind of person who doesn't care about that, then it could work. Big things to think about-getting a baby out the door takes twice as long as you think it will, and that's assuming they don't decide they are starving or poopy the minute you have to leave. So plan on being hopelessly early or tragically late. Also, getting babies out in bad weather is even harder. We have been very blessed this time with a mild winter and spring, but try to shovel out a car with a screaming baby and kids yelling because they are late, and it quickly makes more sense to stay home. The social thing is critical to me, so I totally get needing that, and would make that a priority for me. Anyway, I'm certainly not an example of sensible parenthood. My son and husband went on an exchange trip to the Arctic two weeks ago, and I'm trying to figure out how to get my son from swimming to a choir concert 2 hours away to sing Monteverdi next weekend, and our two year old just had his first bath in 2 weeks. So, actually, ignore anything I say :-) and good luck.

Grade 4 and 2 are certainly not too late to change math. However, you likely will need to go back a bit in order to make sure all the topics are covered. I have no experience with RS. I love MUS. However, it will take your kids out of the standard sequence, and your 9 yo will likely test into beta or gamma. This is not really a problem, because you can get a very solid foundation that way, but it gets pricy as you fly through 2-3 books per year. And it can make an unexpected transition back to ps tough. Also, MUS can be dry, so I supplement with BA and games. I love math, and my kids generally like it, so this is working pretty well for us. Also, many people feel MUS is "light" by the time you get to the high school level. No personal experience, so I can't really comment at this point.

Honestly, I would keep the math, spelling if necessary (and simple) then ask your daughter what she wants to study, and take her to the library and get out lots of books (fiction and nonfiction, and not necessarily related.) Talk about what she is reading. And let her dream up a project if she feels inspired. Free write and do poetry tea now and then, with copybook for language arts. Let inspiration guide, and don't plan. But keep a simple record of what gets done, and you will be surprised at how much actually happens.

Sounds like your daughter is in too high a level. D (no dyslexia but ADD) had the same problem with the first half of A. He is doing better now, but still has lots of anxiety about the mastery tests. If I had it to do over again, I would have restarted with A1. In general, their books work best if easy. The spelling books suggest that unless the kid is achieving about 90 percent accuracy, the book is too hard. Wrt the cursor, I uncover the whole word from left to right quickly, then go back and chunk the word if the kid needs help. But, my kids don't have dyslexia. I've completed the series with one kid, one is most of the way through B, and one is in A2.

I'd just say, thanks for the video, and I'm glad this approach worked so well for your son, I might ask how the diet was working or where she found this approach so she wouldn't have a chance to ask if I'd watched the whole video. I usually nod and smile when I get dietary advice, and say that's interesting and I'm so glad you found that helpful. In general we are very open about our kids' labels. When they were young, we got lots of denial type comments. I suspect it's more wishful thinking rather than dismissing our concerns. As everyone knows us better, we get less of it.

I would certainly discuss it with him, and consider full evals. I have found John Elder Robison's books to be very helpful. I also really like the blog called Snagglebox. Not sure how active she is now, and while she herself is autistic (her preferred word) her blog largely deals with issues for younger kids, but there may be some useful posts.

He may not be able to concentrate for that long. I'm all for reading aloud, but for some kids, it's not the best way to retain information. With my kids, I've found I needed to teach them to pay attention and narrate orally. What I did in that situation was read one paragraph (or one sentence if the kid couldn't manage a paragraph) and get the kid to narrate it as best they could. I don't criticize or demand certain points, I just praise whatever they get. Once they can do that, we increase to 2 paragraphs, then 3 etc. If I'm reading to older kids, I'd then keep reading and stop at the point I think the next kid is likely to be able to narrate, and get each kid to narrate from the point the last child narrated until we finish. The younger child who is not all that focussed usually hears a summary, so hopefully gets the main points (or not). If a kid was struggling with vocabulary, I might stop after a tough word and ask if anyone can tell me what the word means (the older ones will usually chime in, letting the younger kid off the hook.) It really helps to keep this work short (maybe 10 minutes) and not necessarily have a goal, otherwise it can end up being long and painful. My older two (my second is the same age as your son) certainly appear to retain more reading themselves than from oral reading, and I just get them to read a bit and narrate the book to me. It's quicker, and less dull for them. With my oldest, who did struggle with all of this, the switch from narration from listening to narration from reading required going back to very short segments and then building up. If they are struggling with vocab, we'll go through it together and practice looking words up, using google, or whatever your tool of choice is.

We brought our oldest home at that age. He hated school but was really not keen on home schooling until he did it for awhile. He is super happy now. If your daughter tries it for a year and hates it, she could always try school then. Makes it feel less permanent. It was hard for all of us to imagine life without school, until we did.

With these, I redraw the figure and we colour the horizontal segments one colour and the verticals another. Or colour in separate shapes. Whatever makes it easier. A whiteboard really helps for this.

Once they get good at it, I just underline a sentence or two in the book they are reading.

My 11 yo had quite interesting echolalia. He would use the "correct" sentence, but only that one sentence for a long time. So it wasn't the classic quoting from the movies or quoting back the question, but his speech was very limited. He'd say, "I want to sit at the lunch counter" if he was hungry. Or, after school I'd say "tell me two kids you talked to" or "two things that you did." After a while, I'd realize he'd tell me the same two things every day, same phrases. Until he started having more novel language, I really didn't realize how limited his speech was, because what he said sounded "normal" just restricted. Interestingly enough, most of his novel language started after he learned to write. In grade 1, he'd come home with these stories that I could not believe he had written, because he never could have told me any of that stuff. Then, he just started talking more and more and more, and he obsessively wrote stories for 2-3 years, with lots of pictures. We have shelves of his books from that era. I will never forget the day when I thought "I wish S would just be quiet." After years and years of silence and very limited language, it was something I never thought would ever cross my mind. Anyway, his language tests very well now (receptive high 80s and expressive in the high 90s), though he still has problems with generalizing to people outside the family. I think he mostly reads as shy, though he can come across as disinterested if he's tired or stressed. He can seem very distant after a concert, for example. With him, it seems that symbolic language made much more sense than aural language. He seemed to get most of his receptive language from reading, and his expressive language from writing. It's all backwards, but it worked for him. In general for most of his development, he has done everything eventually; he just did it all in the "wrong" order. He also really likes grammar; it seems to appeal to his logical mind. I realized around age 6 that music made so much more sense to him than English, it was like it was his native language. He now absolutely loves music, and spends most of his free time listening to music, composing or studying scores. He started studying scores about 2 years ago, and he never played them, so I wasn't sure what he saw. Then he discovered you-tube, and found all these scores with the music playing in the background. By about a year ago, he told me he could hear the music in his head just by looking at the score, which is really cool, and he has perfect pitch. His compositions initially didn't sound great, but now are really beautiful and musical. Anyway, I never can figure out how his brain works, but most of the time, it works pretty well, just not like anyone else's. Sorry for the ramble, but it's a fascinating subject.

I actually have done this for a year (paired MUS with BA) with my 9 year old, and I'm starting the same combo with my 8 year old. I actually think they are a match made in heaven, especially for kids like mine, who are good, but not spectacular math students, and who need a bit of extra drill. I like how MUS teaches arithmetic with minimal fussing and confusion. Love the big, wide open pages. The word problems are very standard, but they are the problems you need to be able to solve without thinking too hard. The big weakness is thinking mathematically and word problems. Fortunately, these are BA's strengths. Also they do lots of mental arithmetic with BA, another weakness of MUS. Also, BA has a ton of geometry to make up for MUS. The sequence differences just helps to do more review and consolidate skills. I was trying BA on it's own with my 8 year old, and it just wasn't quite enough, since he needs more practice with calculation, so I'm adding in MUS for him too. For my 9 year old, we liked MUS and she begged to do BA, so we started it. She loves BA (with puffy hearts), and it's amazing how strong her problem solving has become. We started off doing about 20 minutes of BA and maybe 30 mins of MUS later in the day (usually 2 worksheets/day or 1 if they are long). Now, she's doing 45 minutes of BA with me and most of the MUS on her own (I teach the lesson rather than using the videos to speed things along). At that speed, we get through 1.5 books/year or so, so this approach gets pricey. But I'm really happy with it. Also, my oldest went into AOPS after mostly MUS (and a bit of MM because of the cost of the books at his speed of more than 2 books per year). I actually found him to be confident and well prepared. I did change certain things I didn't like how they were taught (like cross multiplication vs. finding common denominators). Obviously, there was a bit of a jump to much higher-order thinking, but he's done pretty well, all things considered. PS-my hubby is a math prof, and he likes the clarity, manipulatives and orderliness of MUS, too. He also likes AOPS/BA, though he gets frustrated when he has to go think about the problems for a while. It's good for the kids to see, though. Anyway, hope that helps.

MUS can be a good place to start, particularly if your child is struggling. The books are out of sequence from standard but allow you to catch up easily, since the books don't have grade levels. I personally think the sequence is very logical, but it isn't standard. You must do a placement test. My child at that age started in beta. There is lots of review between books. The books are easy to teach. The videos are helpful if you need them or want them, depending on your kid. It's reasonably conceptual. MUS weakness is word problems. They are standard and practical but not challenging. If you are dealing with dyslexia, you may not want to challenge your dd in that area. There are some great options if/when you do. For LA you may want to go over to the Learning challenges board. Many moms have tons of experience teaching kids with dyslexia. Good luck and enjoy the ride.

We did no geography up to this point (other than looking at maps when people were interested.) ds 11 is doing Ellen McHenrys Mapping the world through art and he's reading Marco Polo and we have a big, beautiful atlas to look at. We will see how that goes. So far so good but it will take some time to see what sinks in. The biggest thing, though, is just looking at maps when kids have questions.

This is always a fun conversation! It's interesting, just because in my family, we have a big variety of reading ages, and it doesn't always turn out how you might think. I learned to read at 7 in school, my dh and sister both learned to read at 2. We are all highly educated adults. I certainly read more than my husband, and possibly more than my sister. Certainly by age 9 or 10, no one would have realized that I learned to read much later. With my own kids, S learned to read at 3 (he mostly figured it out for himself). T learned at 7-8 and needed lots of explicit phonics. She learned nothing in her preK and K, which both taught reading (though whole language). It took years of direct, intense, phonics teaching to get her reading. D is very similar to T (he's really breaking through now at 8), and Miss M is learning at 5 much more easily than her sibs (but did not read spontaneously and does seem to benefit from explicit phonics, though she is learning quickly). We are a heavily "print rich" "reading" family. The kids hear tons of read-alouds, watch parents, grandparents and everyone else read, dh and I discuss books, etc. T is now at 9 a voracious reader, and reads as well as or better than S (she just finished Robinson Crusoe, can read Louisa May Alcott, etc). S is also a strong reader, but less enthusiastic. D will get there-he wants to read, but it is still hard. Now we aren't the most neurotypical family, but it really has not, at least so far, seemed to matter whether one learned to read easily and young, or slower and later, so long as you learned to read well. Also, the catch up time between the early and later readers was relatively short. Part of this was probably related to the very solid oral skills and vocab the later readers had from living in a print-rich environment. The thing is, at least in my experience late reader vs. early reader does not necessarily translate into "bad" reader and "good" reader, but it's easy to assume that may be the case when the kid is 5 or 6. And those labels can be internalized. Beverly Cleary struggled to learn to read (age 8) and she always puts a slow reader in every story, because it's so hard to be that kid, and to believe that will never change. Of course, none of this is a reason to hold back a motivated and mature 5 year old who is ready to read, but maybe it is a reason not to frustrate a 5 or 6 year old who is not ready, when a year or two, and some solid teaching may turn out an equally excellent reader. (AKA what they do in Finland :-})