My daughter was 7 I believe when we read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It is one of her favorite books. We've read it twice. We read half of Matilda with an audio book and never finished it. We recently read the BFG (she is 9) and she loved it. I would have been okay with her reading the BFG at 7 or 8.

Kim and Duncan I am 9. Can you put my fan art up on your video.

I spelled the bigger words out.... so that's how she knew which order. She is 9.....

Thank you :) I will do Writing With Ease style writing using books she will enjoy. I appreciate everyone's input! Reading is for sure the priority. A lot of it is confidence.

3rd grader, No real history background because when i tried before she hated it. Like, to the point of tears. Slow reader. I want to work on getting her faster. Loves science, doesn't love math but is good at it. Reading: Happy Phonics and McGraw-Hills, Read and Learn with Classic Stories (Someone posted a way of using HP with a reader, and I loved it. I already have these readers. She will read and tap when she doesn't know a word, and then we will work on those sounds/spellings with Happy Phonics) Science Apologia Zoology 2 with the lapbook CD & some anatomy on the side through real books because she likes that. Math Beast Academy grade 3 + Math Mammoth grade 3 I am going to let her flip flop. I was also thinking about getting a Math through baking book that I thought would be a nice breather on fridays. History SOTW Vol 1. I played her the audio version and she claimed to love it. She is an audio learner. (Which i think is why she is good at math, so much of it is done verbally.) So I thought i'd get the audio + paper back and the activity book. Art and music are just whatever tickles our fancy that week. And I have her doing P.E. this year. 1 day a week as a classical P.E. type, and 2 days a week where she is practicing volley ball skills. We are going to be doing couch potato to 5K starting tomorrow because we want to do a bubble bash 5K in October.

We did Apologia Zoology birds last year and plan on doing underwater creatures this year. We liked it a lot. The experiments are fun and use household stuff which makes it easy. My daughter loved it. I plan on sticking with Apologia.

I am thinking about moving to Washington state. Can any one link me to the laws on a site I don't have to sign up for? Washington parents, what has your experience been like?

My daughter is ready for 3A Beast Academy. Part of me really wants to do both MM and BA since MM went so well last year. She doesn't like MM, but I personally am really impressed with how things are explained. I feel like it helped ME do basic math easier and quicker just reading the lessons to her. I think it is a great program, she on the other hand just wants to do BA. I am torn. I'm thinking about just getting 3A MM and 3A BA and seeing how it goes juggling, and then purchasing the rest of BA as we go along. Do you think it is over kill? She did really well with MM aside from being bored. But I was thinking If I cut the # of problems by half she won't dislike it so much. Last year she did ALL the problems. Opinions??

Are there any all in one type curriculum where science is the base? My daughter is reluctant to do anything other then science, although she is good at math. Is there a curriculum out there that is built around science? Edit to add: She is 8 and a slow reader, but we are finally making progress in reading. So yay!

So i've decided to just embrace the fact that we will likely be doing school through the summer every year to keep us caught up and also to delve more into things she likes a lot. So, here is what I have planned. She hasn't really done history. I tried an online history with her this year, but it didn't go well (for me) so i dropped it. I want to try Story of The World. I never realized how inexpensive it was, or else I would have tried it a long time ago. Also, i want her to play Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego. It helped me tremendously as a kid, I won a school geography bee simply from playing this game lol. She responds so well to "game" learning. She rejected geography hardcore after using A Child's Geography, Explore His Earth. So i hope the game will reintroduce the topic to her in a more exciting engaging way so that we can start doing more hands on things with it during the next school year. So that will cover history/geography for a while. For math, she loves Life of Fred, so I was thinking since she is really good at math, we can just go through these books and keep it casual for the summer. I also have an animal math book around here somewhere that I lost shortly after buying >.< That i think she will enjoy doing for some easy breezy math and next year start Beast Academy which she is really looking forward to. For grammar, I have been doing free online sheets, but I just saw the book Fix it, and it looks great, so I thought we'd get the first book. For science I am getting her Sassafras Science Adventures Vol 1 and Vol 2 (zoology and anatomy respectfully.) As well as Blood and Guts. She loves science to death, and I suspect these will only last through the summer. We also have EdTechLens The Rainforest Journey. I think we will do the Rainforest Journey during the school year maybe. She keeps requesting Apologia Anatomy for the school year, so we might do both, or just Anatomy, I don't know. We will see where her interest lie closer to the school year. Reading is still a struggle. So we are still just sloshing along with her reading to me and me helping her. She gets spelling (cause its a lot like math if you think about it...) and is quickly picking up parts of speech, but the actual reading part is hard for her.

She has just taught herself division with 1s and 2s using the game. I told her on the first gate, "How many times can 1 go into 2?" and bam... she has 1s and 2s... It has yet to show her threes...

Thank you ladies! Today went very smoothly. ♥ I let her go long enough to prove she had it down, and then moved on. Multiplication is going to come easy for her. One of the things we did today was skip counting by 3s, (something we have done 1 other time for fun) and she would do one, then I would do one, and then she would do one... she missed once, and caught herself. So, i'm just going to trust her brain. lol I can't project my own 3rd grade math fears on to her and I can't repeat the things that happened to my brother and husband through the public school setting because of those fears. Homeschooling -is- largely in part about believing and trusting in your childs abilities so that they can work at their own speed. The plan is, just let her soar, and support her when/if it stops being easy. In fact, today... letting her skip around some, when we were done she immediately got onto the kindle, and downloaded the 3rd grade version of a math game she likes and is playing it. ♥ ♥ Thanks guys. :)

I just saw that they sell Beast academy in parts. I thought it was all sold together. It doesn't look too expensive at all... So maybe I will just let her blast through MM and order 3A Beast Academy... She already wants to do Anatomy over the summer... If she likes Beast Academy, maybe she will want to do that through the summer as well. I can let her work on MM, read life of fred, and we have this other math book she really wants to do (which i said we'd do in between workbook 2A and 2B for MM) It is beneath her skill, but will hopefully reinvigorate her math drive since it is all zoo related. I really am confident she knows 2A already... so maybe I'll use it more for review.

So as of right this minute, the only things in the book she doesn't know is the multiplication. With the clocks, she found it unbearable, so rather then go through the subject straight through, i had her do one page of it, and a page of something further in the book. Maybe with B2 (which i have looked through quit a bit and know she knows 80% of, and can pick the other up way easy because it is just an extension of things already covered >.<) I'll flip back and forth between the stuff she knows, and the multiplication. I see for A3 she needs to know how to write in the multiplication table in 12 minutes... which is crazy, i can't even do that. lol But she is a verbal learner, and I can see her picking it up quickly. So maybe we will work on that a lot as well. If we were to just go straight through the book Starting January 1rst, she would get done by the end of February unless the multiplication really stumps her... Had I done math every day with her, she'd have finished the A2 and B2 already. I've promised her that if she can get this done we will do something different for 3rd grade. We have read the first lesson of Beast Academy, and she seems into it. I just don't know if i am hurting her in the moment. I have a brother who was not challenged enough and he dropped out. My husband was not challenged enough and ended up getting his GED instead (he just graduated college valedictorian... His grandfather is a master engineer which includes a masters degree in math.) So she has these brilliant genes, and I don't want to hold her back BUT I also went my 3rd grade year missing out on math and it hurt me a lot... so I am scared of her not having a strong foundation too. Agh being a parent is hard... For the record I did give her the placement test... she just learned it quickly and continues to learn it quickly. Even with long gaps... in fact i'd say with gaps she comes back stronger. xD

Yes I meant beast academy. Lol monster university is a movie. Lol

What would you recommend? 2nd grader is bored with her math. Calls it baby work and gets sick of doing it because she already knows it and gets tired of proving it... I was thinking monster university next year. I have heard it is more challenging. We looked at teaching text book 3rd grade sample lesson 51, and she said it was too easy too. Seems to cover the same thing as math mammoth for 2nd grade although the presentation was nice! What do you think? Her dad and grandpa are naturally good at math and I've known for a while she is too. I can't afford new curriculum until taxes. I could go back to kahn for a while. ..

We are doing zoology this year. My daughter will be 8 in November. She really enjoys the science we are doing, which is Apalogia Zoology 1. On her own she is investigating anatomy aps. These really are too difficult for her, but she really loves watching the videos and rotating the diagrams and clicking on the different parts and listening to the pronunciations. She and her dad are messing around on one taking a quiz. lol She doesn't know much, but she is engaged. What can I get for her that is more on a beginner level but she won't call baby work? She has specifically asked for animal anatomy but is happy enough with human anatomy. For her birthday I am going to get her a squishy human body and a dog anatomy model which she has been asking for forever as well as as a microscope and slides (some of the slides are dog intestine and such) which i think is fun. I was thinking about getting her a body encyclopedia, but i'm not sure which one. She loves field guide like books... (whether it is Pokemon, bugs, birds, mythological creatures... etc.) if anyone knows of a young persons anatomy book broken up in that way. What can I get for her to explore on her own and learn a bit? She has asked to continue science through the summer, and wants to do apologia anatomy at that time.

My almost 8 year old can barely read and I am starting to panic. It doesn't feel like it is getting any better. We have done quit a bit of phonics. She sounds out every single letter for every single word. It takes an excruciatingly long time to read anything. It doesn't matter if she is interested in the material or not. I have tried to keep practice down to just a little each day because of how long it take it takes and how much she is rejecting it. Today i thought I'd try getting her to read one of her Breyer books. It is totally with in her reading level but 2 pages took us 15 minutes with me reading every other sentence. She has zero confidence. Words she knows she doesn't think she knows. She will often read it incorrectly and then say it correctly. Or worse, she will read it correctly quietly to herself, and then say it completely wrong out loud. She puts r's where there are no r's. It is her most interchangeable letter but happens more often with n's. She also still gets her d's and b's confused. It seems like she does fine when the words are isolated like in a workbook or video game, but in book form, she struggles so much. These readers, http://marriottmd.com/sam/index.html have been our most successful resource. She struggles a little, but i feel like she is getting better with them and can actually read them somewhat fluently. We are on book 32. I think most of that comes from memorization though. Does anyone have any ideas for us at all? I can't tell if she just doesn't want to do it or if she really can't read. BOTH scenarios worry me!

I'm fine with it. I don't even mind a banner ad, or a side banner ad while logged on. I am pretty use to ads being the thing. ;)

That is so awesome! I would love love love to hear about how she got started in all of this. It sounds like a lot of what she does is by invitation. How did she get invited in the first place? She is so cute in that picture!

Mine was a Xena icon. But i changed it to my own Kitty. I'll probably change it again, but for now at least i am not blank. :p

3 friends, drive to six flags.

So my daughter and I just started today! She is 7. We got the book a couple of days ago and read page 1 then. Today we did pages 2-5 I plan on doing one lesson a week, give or take on the week. To go along with the lesson I made her 2 work sheets covering just one of the topics. We also looked each of the animals mentioned in these pages up in a field guide just to see how similar they were (drove it home for her) we used this to compare the two names and pointed out that both puffins we looked at (her choice) had the same genus name. I found this worksheet online, and changed it to fit the material better. (added animals, removed animals, changed it from mammal to phylum chordata.) The second "work sheet" was simply copies of several different anatomy diagrams of different animals. I had her look for spines and color them red if they had one. She had a blast. I could tell she was interested, and will remember a good chunk of it. She realized the cats spine goes all the way through its tail and apologized sincerely for a time she tried to bend the cats tail (which i didn't even know about. lol) Who else is just starting? Who has done it with a child this young already? We plan on finishing Lesson 1 and then moving to the insects next.

I am a writer, and I guess because of that I have encouraged story telling in my house. As a result my daughter has always loved telling stories. When she was as young as 4 I would tell her to tell me a story, and I would write it down for her (Wish i still had those!) well... today she decided to write her own book. She has done this a little in the past... but then SHE came up with the idea... "Mom, I love doing this. Can I please do this instead of copy work?" Well, she is still copying. LOL The words she doesn't know, I write for her. But on top of it, she is proving that she is not only learning to FINALLY write hr letters right... but that through reading she has learned to spell too! She is writing the words she has successfully read in the past or can pretty much sound out on her own with amazing (to me) accuracy. I really think for us, it is in her best interest to drop handwriting, and let her do this instead. On top of it, I wrote her a letter this morning, and she wrote me back. She had more success reading the letter I wrote her personally then she has with other things (though don't get me wrong, she is doing leaps better with other things too. This kid is blowing me away recently!) Anyway... then she wrote me back with NO help with spelling and she only misspelled one word. She has requested to start every school day with a letter. ♥ Has anyone else done writing this way??

Here is my daughters back to school self portrait. :) Your kids are adorable. The 3rd one is so sassy xD Your daughters hair looks like it came out great! The little one is adorable and your oldest boy looks like he is a lot of fun. :D It is seriously cute that they all agreed to the hats!!