It's the benzyl peroxide. It happened in our home with Proactive.

I taught grammar for years with A Beka workbooks, and my students DID understand grammar and did retain it. Last year I was teaching 11th graders in a school that doesn't incorporate much grammar, much to my chagrin. A couple of the kids had gone to another school in elementary and been taught A Beka in 5th grade. They still remembered their grammar! Anytime I hear someone claiming grammar drill or workbooks don't work, I suspect they are just poor grammar teachers.

The manual is helpful if you aren't familiar with ABB methods, but you could definitelu get by with just the Handbook for Reading. I would suggest just looking at the student workbook to see where you're going so you'll know which "special sounds" to teach. If your child is already reading, you can probably go quickly through the first several lessons. A Beka 1st grade includes lots of review of their K phonics because they do not assume a child has had intensive phonics previously.

We used Home Art Studio for the first time today and loved it. IMO, it's an excellent deal for the money.

The only thing I see missing is handwriting. Everything looks great. I've looked at the U Read Thru History site and really liked it. Maybe in a couple months you could post some thoughts about it? ; ) I haven't found any reviews or feedback from anyone who's used it yet.

I have recently purged our home of the junk books, except for a couple board books for the babies to chew on as the PP said. I have also made some rules for selecting library books as my girls would prefer a whole stack of Dora books. I allow them each one of the junky books per trip but will read it aloud to them once only. The quality books may be read many times. Eventually I will completely outlaw the Dora and Barbie books, but my kids are little and I just feel mean negating ALL their choices. If you do purge and want to cheaply fill your shelves with good books, try Goodwill. I have gotten some great finds like Milo Winter's Aesop for $.49. I've picked up probably a couple hundred dollars worth of books at Goodwill this summer for about $25.

I worked in a UMS school which has a similar set up, three school days and two at home. I agree about the con of not having control over the curriculum. When my oldest reached school age, we closely looked at the school's elementary program and had philosophical disagreements, so I decided to stop teaching and homeschool. We thought about just enrolling for the classes for which we had no concerns, but the load would have been a strain on the whole family. Ultimately, I would think the HLS and CC commitments will put time constraints on the other subjects you do yourself and possibly drain the joy out of homeschooling. Of course, it's all a matter of what you really desire for your child to learn and why you chose to homeschool. My pick would be to drop the CC.

I got the Canto recorders for my kids and myself. (My babies love blowing in them and call them doot-doo-doos.) I told my six y.o. that if we complete our first lesson book and want to continue on, we can get good quality recorders. I would suggest just starting out with the cheap ones to see how it goes. I think the Cantos are pretty good for the price!

Obviously, we never know what "kind" of baby we'll get before he/she arrives, but in my case the first was very demanding (a constant nurser, difficult sleeper), but the other three have been easier. Also, having experience under your belt as a mom can make a big difference the second time around. If God gives you another baby and has called you to homeschool He will certainly give you the strength and the wisdom to know where to cut back/how to adjust. Best wishes!

Our church was using some videos with a character named Buck Denver. I don't know if it would work for school, though.

Yes! The whole family will benefit from the addition. I think adding the second child brings the most worry because, silly as it is, we wonder if we can love them both and treat them both fairly. But we do have the capacity to love and care for 2 and more. I know an elderly couple who let fear make the decision for them not to have another child, and they tell me they still regret it.

If I had another baby, I would plan to wear it in a wrap or sling quite a bit in the early months. I had twins when we first began homeschooling preschool, and I usually had one or both babies in my lap, often nursing, while we did schoolwork. With an older baby, you and your older child could sit on the floor to do history, say, while the baby was next to you on a blanket with toys. I suspect that my twins' language development has been helped by being close by all the reading and schooling.

Thank you. Your comments have all been helpful.

I'll be using Vol. 1 with my first grader who loves audio books. I also have 18 mo.old twins and a 3.5 year old, so I'm wondering if sitting DD down with the coloring page and the CD player while I make lunch or chase littles will work. How do you use the CDs? Do children seem to retain as much listening to them as they do listening to mom read?

Oops! I missed the portable part. But, since your son is getting serious about music, you may be interested in a Clavinova for home. They are great when you're on a budget because you get better sound quality than from a cheap acoustic.

I spent about.$400 for first grade which includes Kingfisher's history encyclopedia and some living books (and some stuff I got and hated and won't use but hope to sell). If I put my DD in the Christian school I taught in the last few years, we'd have spent $625 just for application and registration fees, and this was truly one of the cheapest schools in our part of Texas. A classical school in our city is $9K for elementary, so $600 for a quality education is really a steal! Personally, I do like to buy used stuff to save money. There is also the thrill of finding a deal in Goodwill that I don't want to give up.

When I covered Crime and Punishment in my tenth grade pre-AP class, I told my students they could probably use that novel for any open-ended essay on the AP exam. It is that rich! Interestingly, my TX English-teacher certification exam required almost no background in the content. Social studies was almost all content, oddly, and was the most fun test I ever took.

I don't think it's that bad considering a lot of other companies' packages are mostly consumable. With PHP's package, you'd use the phonics in second grade, too; the science books and fine arts items would probably become family favorites.

If you look at the subject.bundles, you can choose Saxon or Singapore.

Yamaha Clavinova.

We are in agreement.

As I recall, part of Pudewa's testimony to the OK legislature was that as a businessman, he was put in a tough spot: label his program as CC compliant and lose business, not label it and lose business from the other side. Either way, it's still the same old IEW. (It's used in a number of schools, so that's probably where the need to label it really matters.) I'd post a link to the transcript but my phone isn't smart enough to do that.

This looks awesome!

Exactly. A lot of what gets passed around on Facebook as "Common Core" is really just horrible textbooks that were already horrible before CC. I am opposed to CC, but a lot of the fear has been blown out of proportion. It is the textbook companies who are choosing ridiculous methods to teach the CC that are what terrify some people the most. I taught in a UMS school that had some CC-aligned math books, but our teacher were not teaching any wacky methods like some of the examples that float around. ETA: Colleges won't be impressed with the results of some of these curricula. DH and I used to teach in a small Baptist college. The math department had to implement a math placement test for every single freshman because there were so many students who could place into advanced classes but didn't know their arithmetic facts and, therefore, made computational errors. If they scored poorly on the entrance exam, they had to take a remedial class along with their regular more conceptual course, all because they'd been allowed to use calculators instead of memorizing. Similarly, we required the freshmen to take an English placement exam as well, regardless of transcript or SAT score. Through all the proposals to "fix" education, the homeschoolers and private-schoolers who never strayed from traditional and/or classical methods have continued to outperform their ps counterparts. It will be the same with CC.

Andrew Pudewa of IEW has spoken against CC to the Oklahoma legislature. I believe IEW's website addresses the issue of CC by stating that they already exceed the very vague CC composition standards. Many curricula already just so happen to meet or exceed CC and have not made any changes.