I am sure I am not the best person to respond to this, but since you haven't gotten any other responses ... My 12 year old son is using Visual Latin -- we both really like it. I know they have a schedule/chart showing how it can be used as a supplement to Henle, so it might be worth looking into if you are interested in something like that. The teacher is both clear and entertaining.

I am trying to figure this out for next year as well. Right now I am inclined to use verses from the Navigators Topical Memory System: https://www.usna.edu/Navigators/_files/documents/TMS.pdf

I haven't used IEW and have tried and failed to use WWS. But I am still going to suggest that you combine your kids with IEW. I think the reality is that WWS is going to take a ton of time and energy, and seems like you have enough going on without throwing it in the mix. Just trying to provide a little bit of reality check based on my own experience of grand plans. (My two oldest are 16 months apart but will be in 7th and 8th grade this fall -- I plan on combining them to do Lost Tools of Writing.)

My son has recently started learning order of operations in 4th grade CLE math.

After seeing this thread I was in Target and saw a journal (Rocketbook) whose gimmick was you can microwave it to erase it -- and it comes with a Frixion pen. So I wonder if it is the ink more than the journal? My kids love frixion pens for doing schoolwork -- particularly math. I think they are nice and we haven't had issues with them, though being old I prefer writing my important stuff in old-fashioned ink.

I can’t answer all of your questions, and have some of the same questions about the progymnasta, but if your son really enjoys classical composition and does well with it I would definitely continue along that path. I love the idea of WWS, but have started and quit it 3-4 times with my kids. I think for us it was unnecessarily complicated and I thought the reading passages the kids were supposed to write about were often unnecessarily difficult, for my kids at least. Of course YMMV.

I have the new version but not the old. Yes, there are several BC comics included. And while I haven't read/used the whole book yet, from what I have used and flipped through I have seen zero Bible verses. (Given the nature of the text, personally I think it highly unlikely that any are included anywhere in this text.) The only remotely Christian content in the foreword is the single sentence "I am grateful to God that the book will continue to be published."

I highly recommend Little Pilgrim's Progress as well, though we don't have experience with the audiobook version.

I’ll be the odd one out. If my daughter couldn’t ever read it without totally sobbing I think I would conclude that she was not emotionally ready for it. I might just give her a summary of the rest of the story and have a discussion. I don’t know, it is hard to say for sure. I read the book as an adult and whenever I see or hear the title it still makes me feel awful. Not that it wasn’t a good book with important lessons ... but ugh.

I agree that it is pretty normal to forget skills one hasn’t used in a while (at least that is normal here.). If he picks it up again pretty easily once you have reviewed it (which it sounds like is the case?) I really wouldn’t worry. You can add some sort of short review daily as others have mentioned, or just continue to review topics as needed as they come up.

For going backwards, maybe considering the area of a rectangle would help? Draw a 5 x 10 rectangle. Then the area is 5x10. Or we can cut the rectangle in two and to find the total area add the sums of the areas of the two smaller rectangles together, e.g. a 5x2 rectangle plus an 8x2 one.

I would back off Rightstart for now. I don't know anything about Singapore Essentials, but if he likes it, and he is 5, sounds good. I really like RightStart, but had one child whose eyes would well up with tears when it came time to pull out the manipulatives and do it. Not worth it to me. He was very happy to do Math Mammoth instead, which is philosophically quite similar, but more of a workbook approach.

I'm sure that lots of people here have a lot more knowledge about this than I do, but one easy way to start is Math Kangaroo. They have a test/competition every March, and you can just go to their website, find a center near you (hopefully!), and register. (I believe registration for this coming year doesn't start until maybe October 1.) Practice tests are available online.

We/I like but tend to get bored with Math Mammoth too, and so we tend to cycle between it and Math in Focus. You can spend some time going through the textbook with your child and then use the workbooks for independent practice on what you just discussed. I found almost new used textbooks on Amazon for very cheap (this was a couple years ago, not sure of current status), and get the workbooks from Rainbow Resource.

The 39 Clues audiobooks are fun and very well done.

My 5th grader did WIR for maybe 10 weeks before we quit. We found it slow and repetitious.

Coming back to say I may have overreacted at seeing the Visual Latin schedule for the first time. Really it probably is not much different than what we are doing with some extra practice. I introduced my son to the visual latin Quizlet today and he loved it. I am probably a little over sensitive since we tried Spanish for Children a couple of years ago which was a ton of memorization with little practice and my kids hated it and are only now showing an interest in languages again. So I am trying hard to not overwhelm them and to encourage their interest. Of course kids who are happy to memorize and interested in languages are in a different boat than us :)

Wow, thanks for that link! Hmm ... so maybe for us ignorance has been bliss :). We just jumped in with the lessons, which tell you to do the appropriate worksheet at the end of each section. I tonight for the first time realized there was a teacher's guide with suggested schedule (though I had downloaded a schedule for adding in Latina Lingua since I purchased that for my own use.) Their schedule does look rather intimidating, though the blog review is for the high school schedule and the elementary/middle school one is a little bit lighter. I think I might agree though that their schedule as written could be a bit heavy for a fifth grader -- I think if we were doing it as written my son's enjoyment of the subject would likely come to a quick end. (Who knows, maybe not?) We have just been doing a video and a corresponding worksheet, one per day. We watch the video together, do the worksheet independently, and then compare our answers. A few weeks ago I realized there were quizzes, so now we are doubling up on them every fourth day until we catch up. I have planned on adding in more vocab study/ memorization when things get more difficult, but I just checked out the quizlet link for the lessons which seems pretty good so maybe we will go ahead and add that in. So at the moment I am thinking I will probably keep with our basic schedule rather than the suggested one but will add in a little vocab/memory work each day. I am glad to have this new info, but since my son is only in 5th and we aren't needing "real" high school or other credits I think I am fine with using the material in a way that suits us and not worrying too much about following the suggested schedule, at least as long as our own schedule continues to work. (You can download the teacher's guide, worksheets, etc. for free from the website if you want to take a look yourself.) Thanks again for sharing that review!

We just finished Lesson/Week 9 and are still very happy. My kids do an enrichment program one day a week so we are only doing it four days a week and it hasn't been a problem at all for us. I imagine in the next few weeks the cumulative effect of all of the things we are learning will ramp up the difficulty; we shall see. My fifth grader did Junior Analytical grammar this fall and probably having done that is a big help (we hadn't done much serious grammar previously.) So maybe that is why the reviewer you mentioned thought it was heavy for a fifth grader? I know the Visual Latin website suggests it for fifth grade and older. My guess is that if your student is fairly solid on identifying parts of speech as well as very basic parts of sentences (subject, verb, indirect and direct objects, predicate adjectives and nominatives, and prepositional phrases) then it would not be too heavy. When we started it, I decided to try the monthly streaming option -- pay by the month, cancel anytime, for $8/month. So that is a fairly inexpensive way to try it out without a big financial investment if you are so inclined. Hope this helps!

My fifth grader and I are doing Visual Latin together. Only 6 weeks in, but so far we both really like it!

I have been happy with CLE language arts 6 after JAG.

Sounds like a good decision to bail on decimals for now. One of mine freaked in the middle, the other seemed to be tracking with it all but freaked at the end/test. Have you looked at CLE math? I've only used a little bit of it but it introduces new things slowly and has lots of spiral review. It is not as conceptual as MM but has some conceptual stuff in it. It has been good for a season here. I also like Math in Focus but don't think it has the review you are looking for. Best wishes whatever you decide!

I am wondering where you are in Math Mammoth? Both my kids so far have found the decimal section in Math Mammoth 5 to be way too much at one time. With my current 5th grader we skipped ahead to fractions which is going fine and will revisit decimals with another resource before the end of the year. This may not be your issue but thought I'd mention it in case it helps!

My daughter did some CLE prealgebra earlier this year and it was gentle and included daily review/practice of the concepts you mentioned. So might be worth checking out to see if it looks good to you.

I was going to suggest Beast Academy 5 as well. My sixth grader has done various things this year. She's done the first few chapters of Dolciani pre-algebra, and a couple of times during this I've pulled out Beast Academy 5 which seems to have more explanation and more depth on some of the topics. So I'm thinking of having my current 5th grader do most of it next year as a kind of prealgebra ... still kind of trying to figure out what prealgebra is all about.