So far so good! The #1 adjective I'd use to describe Grammar Island is relaxing. Lots of white space. Fun to read. We curl up on the couch together, she reads it to me, and occasionally I ask questions, reinforce things. I bought Grammar Island and the Implementation Manual, which (in my opinion) is okay, and I'm glad I bought it, but not a must-have as long as you can find the pdf that tells you how to use the books and read through the online samples of the teacher version to see what kinds of questions to ask. She reads a little every day and just finished parts of speech. It's been about two weeks. The Implementation guide says to start Building Language at that time. My daughter is really strong with vocabulary, but I'm going to go ahead and check that one out. From there, we'll just see what works. Summer camp starts next week and she'll have less free time. I know I'm not interested in the readers, but I'm willing to slowly feel the others out. This isn't what I expected out of a grammar book at all. I'm not sure that she is magically going to go to school next year and start capitalizing sentences, but I'm concerned with filling holes and I think I fell into something that isn't going to fill holes quickly in the way I expected but will end up teaching grammar better than school ever would. I am very interested in getting to the writing portion of those books, but I see value in going this direction. Re: the cookbook writing--that wasn't really a creative idea. It just happened because she's interested in cooking. I think you could totally make a lego book and do the same thing. Good luck with the drawing!

I'm so thrilled to read all of your thoughts and suggestions! Thank you so much. Lace: I will look into the books you mention as/if we need them. I think we have a lot of common and would love to hear what you discover as you journey through this. IEF: I think I am going to cut out "your daughter's ability to express herself in written language does not belong to her future employers or her teachers" and paste it on my wall. That is very true--and I'm a writer and writing teacher myself, so you think this would be easy for me, right? The big challenge with my child is her lack of automatically with handwriting. How do you teach grade-level composition skills--and the enjoyment of writing--to a child who is physically uncomfortable with handwriting, who has already had such a negative experience with it, and who has to do such an extraordinary amount of work to overcome it? (By "extraordinary work" I mean we're encouraging printing and she does cursive tutoring and uses a typing program--Disney's Mickey's Typing Adventure for anyone who is interested.) People who do not have a dysgraphic child would probably throw up hearing that we're doing all that, but those with dysgraphic children know that they're really not okay until they can type, but you don't want to totally cut out handwriting at such an early age, so you juggle both. It's a lot for a kid. It reminds me of the days when she was an infant and wouldn't latch on and I would pump-nurse-bottle feed 24 HOURS A DAY. It's not supposed to be that way! I would like to share what we've done so far, the mistakes I've made, and where we're going. . Maybe the dialogue will be helpful with other children, especially 2E children who don't struggle with verbal language or creative thought but are held back by the physical act of writing. I know a lot of you guys are homeschoolers, so I hope I'm not intruding on that with this public schooler post. Homeschooling isn't optimal in our situation. I started by keeping a log. One thing that concerns me about all the work we do at home is that it is difficult for teachers and people at the school to see how hard she works to get to where she needs to be with writing. Right now I do not think they understand that there is composition on the other side of the handwriting gate and that she might not be limited on that side. But to get over there and try it out, she needs somebody to open the handwriting gate for her. At the end of the school year, her teacher sent her home with journaling prompts which were good and creative and would be fun for kids who were more able to physically write. Not so good for my kid. They also sent home a mechanics/skills books called Texas Write Source (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and an Assessment Preparation guide that had composition exercises in it (also Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), both second grade. I had her handwrite in the mechanics book (not so bad, at the sentence level). It wasn't fun, felt slow and boring, but was doable. The composition book was a disaster. We did one exercise. I planned to scribe. She did it, but the whole experience was very negative, I felt this was going to kill her love of writing, and most importantly, I would NEVER respond to a student's writing the way this book made me feel like I needed to respond to hers. That's where your daughter's ability to express herself in written language does not belong to her future employers or her teachers, it belongs to her" fits in... So I apologized. I put composition on the back burner and thought I would research it more while we focused on typing and...something. Then I found Michael Clay Thompon's Grammar Island--the iBook version. This is perfect. It's relaxing and pleasant and she really enjoys it. It's not drill and kill but there are enough exercises in it for her to test herself. It's drag and drop, so there's no pencil involved at all, which is much more relaxing. And it covers grammar fluidly, which makes it much easier for her to see the big picture quickly. That's huge. I think that's what she's been missing. Right now we're just working on Grammar Island, very casually and calmly and it is a pleasant experience--and she's doing very well. Then she decided she wanted to start cooking. She made up a recipe of her own, a crepe/omelet recipe. I scribed for her and she told me what I needed to write, and we wrote the recipe out. She forgot things, was inaccurate, etc, which made it very easy to transition into editing and ordering information. I think that is what we are going to continue to do this summer for composition, just write down recipes. I see it helping her develop a lot of important writing skills without all the pain. Anyway, just wanted to share. I never mind keeping up the conversation with those who are interested. Trying to help a 2E kid fill her holes is very challenging, and I certainly feel alone...but if we don't, nobody will. And that would be a shame.

I'm familiar with Athena's Academy. I think the SOTW prompts she gives are excellent. They do a great job of having the kids walk in the footsteps of another person or think differently about something, but they aren't designed to be essay prompts. If you want to use the SOTW prompts to teach writing, you might consider working on one thing at a time. For example, just look at word repetition and teach him to combine sentences and use a thesaurus and then move on to another skill.

We have a second grader in public school. I originally bought Math U See when she was young because my math knowledge is so poor, and I wanted better for her. When she is in school we don't use a bunch of extra stuff, except Beast Academy, which is awesome. Math U See in the early years aligns completely with what they are doing in school, except for it introduces time, measuring, money and graphing a little later than school does. It hasn't introduced Roman numerals at all--our school introduced them in first grade. It introduced number of days in a month and word problems related to them. Our school hasn't done that at all. The word problems are pretty much exactly the same. I don't know how Beast Academy aligns because the content is just different. I would say that it takes math a step further than school does. So it doesn't seem faster, just deeper. It is awesome and my kid loves it. How amazing is it to write math curriculum that kids love? I think mine would need additional math curriculum though. There isn't enough practice in the book. It is particularly good for providing extra challenge.

I have a daughter (2nd grade) in public school. She has a fairly high IQ and is a voracious reader (significantly above grade level). She is also dysgraphic. She has recently started using AT, and it is helping a lot--but she is very behind on writing and has significant emotional blocks. She also does not seem to catch onto mechanics easily and needs practice. I'm looking for writing and grammar curriculum to help her this summer. Details that may shed light: She makes 100s on spelling tests, but can't spell at all when she writes. She seems to understand punctuation and capitalization but doesn't do it when she writes (she does when she types). She truly seems to have trouble consistently identifying parts of speech and I would like to help her here. I think she does not learn quickly in this area and needs more practice than people (including herself) expect her to need. She has had bad experiences with writing in the past (dysgraphia) and feels stupid when she writes. She says she has trouble coming up with ideas. Because of the dysgraphia, she is behind on writing. Her ideas aren't fluid or connected on paper. I probably have higher expectations for her than I should have because she excels in related skills and need to know what is actually appropriate for her age (as opposed to for her reading level and vocabulary). Can anyone suggest curriculum that I can use this summer to help her learn to write better and to teach parts of speech, grammar, and punctuation? Now that she is starting to type, I'd love to catch her up or even get her where her writing is closer to her reading level, if possible. I'm afraid if I don't, she's going to lose access to the higher order thinking groups in order to drill core skills, which won't be good for her. Thanks!

Thanks, all of you!

My first grader is about halfway through the Alpha MathUSee book. I love the way it uses language and she's getting a better grasp on numeracy than I ever got! However, doing the same things every day is starting to get boring for her. I also know I need to supplement for time, money, and geometry. She likes the manipulatives and she likes games. I was thinking about introducing something else, just to mix it up. I am trying to decide between Right Start games only and the Right Start full curriculum. Does anyone out there use both or parts of both and have an opinion about this? I'm a bit worried about using conflicting visualization strategies (abacus vs cubes). Is that a problem? Are there any other math games out there that people suggest?