We are new to CC this year but we use foundations just as memory work. We are also in essentials so we do iew and EEL at home. I also do Analytical Grammar on our off weeks. Our cycles happened to line up and we are in Ancient History although I've noticed the sentences are all over the place and not all in ancient history. CC set up the science sentences and history sentences so different from any typical homeschool curriculum it is really impossible to completely line anything up unless you create your own program. I wish they had the 4 year cycle and topical science for those of us who use it as a suppliment. CC people will tell you to just do memory work and skip science and history. I lean more towards TWTM than CC though so I don't see it as being enough.

It depends on the kid. We went by the recommendation to use it a year behind and my daughter flies through it. It does add a different view but I think using it on grade level would have been fine.

I like teaching the classics better but I felt like it was informantion I already knew. Deconstructing Penguins made me feel like there was a right analysis of a book and a wrong analysis and Teaching the Classics accepted all interpretations as different views. Someone on this board recommended "How to Read Like a Professor" . I am hoping this gives me more insite on dissecting a book and I can say so far the first chapter has helped me more than TTC or Deconstructing Penguins had.

This is how I am. I can learn the pieces but it takes a lot of work and I feel very confused during the process. Once I have the whole picture it all become clear and "clicks". If I have an outline before I begin to learn and I understand what the process is leading too then I don't feel so confussed since I understand where the piece of information fits into the entire process. Eta: As an adult understanding this about myself has been very helpful. If I don't understand something or feel confussed about it I will study it from all points or create an outline for myself in order to better understand it.

I was always against kindle or ebooks but I read both now. I love that I can access many of the public domain books via google books. I got Anna Karenina on google books and didn't realize how long it was until I had already started it. I don't think I would have started reading it if I had seen how large of a book it was. I still get a lot of books at the library to though. Reading can be an expensive habit :) ETA: Speaking of public domain books The Voyage of the Beagle is on google books for free. I just opened it and noticed it was edited by Charles Eliot. He was TS Eliots cousin, a unitarian, who started the elective system at Harvard which was the beginning of the end of the liberal arts education they used to offer. Not that it has any relevance on the book I just found it interesting...

I didn't post last week but I did finish my book. I read "Is Public Education Necessary" It chronicles education in the United States. I was originally hoping it would give me a glimpse into the way they educated the children ie recitation, memorization etc. While it didn't talk about that at all it gave me a really good background on how our education system was put into place and solidified my views that our way of educating before the current trend of schooling was put into place was more effective. It's interesting to see all of the agendas of the different groups to push public school into being. It goes into the Calvinist, Unitarian, Socialist and Protestant views and how all of their philosophies aligned for different reasons. It seems that indoctrinating our kids has been on the agenda from the beginning. What philosophy to indoctrinate them with has differed. Ultimately everyone understands that to be a successful society children need to be taught and educated but just how they need to be taught and what they need to be taught is much debated. I enjoyed the book and I have How to Tutor on my desk next. We were on spring break last week and I had planned on lots of reading time but it ended up being lots of playdates and not much reading time. I think I read more when we are in school than I did when we were out. In case anyone doesn't know amazon prime give you one free book a month. It's called kindle first and they are new books picked by their editors. The new selections start the first of the month and you have till the end of the month to get your book before it changes. Here are the April selections. I haven't picked my book yet I'm leaning towards The Eagle Tree.

Wanted to add. What we did for security was set it up in our router. Anyone in our house that has access to our router gets restricted internet. No websites on porn, drugs or drinking can get through. I love it because before an innocent search on google could bring up some bad websites. Dh said it doesn't work on apps though. Also the chromebook doesn't have issues with viruses. Dh is a computer guy so he has enough protection on our computers that we've never had issues but I know a lot of other people have issues with viruses on pcs.

About an hour for my 5th grader to do 3 pages. My 4th grader is usually done in 30-45 min with 3 pages. Next year I plan on doing 2 pages a day and a page of math review and beast academy. I'm hoping we will stay within our hour time slot.

Before my twins broke it, we used our chromebook all the time for school. In fact I am replacing it in sept. My girls both have the kindle fire and they like it to play games, watch netflix, read books but for school I prefer the chromebook. They did veritas press online on it, typing club, xtra math. They also used google docs to type up papers that I assigned them to write. I like that they can put it on their desk and watch something without having to hold it and the screen, while not super big, is big enough to watch documentaries. It does need wifi to be used but since we used ours for school purposes it stayed on the house where we have wifi. So my vote would be chromebook.

As other posters have stated Tolstoy used his writing to talk about political and moral issues. His later books went away from fiction and he pened his thoughts on his very different religious views. He was a Christian but he believed in anarchy and that the rich should divide their land among the poor. He was wealthy his whole life so his views on the poor are from an aristocrats point of view. He valued family and Anna Karenina was about his views on family. If you read War and Peace Natasha also suffered greatly for her betrayal of Andrew. I didn't like Anna although I was not expecting the ending. My mother left her marriage for a man she had an affair with so I think my personal experience made me hold Anna in even more contempt. As an aside Martin Luther King and Ghandi were both inspired by Tolstoys views and Ghandi was writing back and forth with Tolstoy before Tolstoy died.

I think it's a hard stage for homeschoolers and public schoolers. I've had 3 friend this month tell me about their middle school child, at a public school, being dropped by their "friends" and being bullied. Kids start to find their nitch and are trying to figure out who they are or what group they want to follow. By high school I think things settle down somewhat. We are involved in 2 homeschool groups but my kids hang out with my friends kids and my cousins kids. It's just who they end up being around the most.

They will read the amount you assign or don't assig there are lots of books spread out over multiple age ranges and there is no way you will read all of them no matter what era or age you are dealing with. You have to look at your child and decide what your goals are and pick the amount and level that works. Do you want to do a good books/great books approach? Are you looking for more of a living books/ Charlotte Mason approach? Just want to align your books with history? Cover things that you are already going over or cover stuff that is missed in the curriculum?

This. I don't understand CC'S anti curriculum stance. They don't want kids in foundations doing anything other than reading/phonics and Math. My kids have gained so much from Essentials but R&S and Analytical Grammar gave them the base they need. We had kids that didn't even know the 8 parts of speech and they aren't really getting much out of it.

We are in a great district. My kids attended the school k-2nd (oldest) and k-1st (younger dd). I pulled them out for a few reasons one of the biggest reasons was my younger dd was having a lot of issues in class. I also hated that they had so many "spirit" days. It was every Friday at their school. Crazy hair day, dress like a cowboy, bring your stuffed animal. I ended up at the store at 11pm half the time since I would forget and need to get stuff. I hated the AR program. Hated kid projects that are really parent project. Seriously, a kindergartener is not going to come up with an idea for or make a leprechaun trap and how does that add to their education. I also hated all the red tape associated with schools. Homeschooling has been such a benefit for our family. I can't imagine sending them back.

I think it's really going to vary person to person. If you go by time periods covered obviously Ancients covers the biggest range, middle ages next and year 3 and 4 much less but normally people don't go in depth with ancient histort like they will with US History. You cover more civilization but only broadly talk about them. Ie how they were founded, what they were known for, who conquered them. With US history you can spend a whole month or more just talking about 1 war. Imagine how long ancients or middle aged would take if you gave each war a month? It wouldn't be possible. What we've done for ancient and middle ages is assign writing assignments and books based on the history. It helps get more content in without adding work. I know some people are opposed to this method though. Veritas Press has a good booklist for each time period and so does beautiful feet. You can compare those. I assign 20 pages a day and we read one famous men story a week. However many books we get to we will do.

Jag give you 5 pre made sentences to parse and diagram. AG give you 10 sentences that are from a book or an essay. They are much harder. Also as previously stated JAG only covers the first season. We did JAG then AG. I feel like JAG was a really good intro to AG for us. I've read about kids struggling in AG and I've really put in minimal effort this year with it and my kids are doing great on the test.

Many people through history have seen education as the cure to societies problems. The church believed education created strong believers. Unitarians believed man was inherently good and if he was educated he would be free to act on his nature which was good. In fact many of our school changes were based in this idea. They wanted to free the students from the strict moral disciplines given to them by the church. Much of that change started in the 1800's. That was the era of Rousseau and the enlightenment. Personally I don't feel that the freedom accomplished what they believed it would and I don't agree that man is inherently good. I haven't read the essay though. I will have to read it.

We are in Essentials this year. It's our first year doing CC. I have mixed feelings about the entire program but I love the EEL. We did Jr Analytical Grammar last year (4th and 3rd grader) since we had finished the rod and staff books early. I feel like that gave us a really good intro to the program. We are using Analytical Grammar on our weeks off of CC which fits in great since Analytical Grammar is meant to be a 3 year program used for only 12 weeks. We haven't focused on the charts too much but my kids have learned so much grammar. They understand clauses, all the patterns, diagramming (which they hate but can do). Between the two programs they have gone beyond what I thought they would grasp this year. EEL gives them depth by fully taking apart one sentence a day and AG gives them practice parsing and diagram a multitude of sentences. IEW is a great program but you don't need CC to use it. The math portion is probably the only downside. There's too big of a gap between 4th and 6th graders to really accomplish any learning. CC stresses that the purpose is to work on math facts but most kids learn their math facts by 3rd or 4th grade. I wish there was some additional learning in math that they could work on.

I loved the pic but thought the same thing. Also I thought once it gets to about half the size people will start to trip on them and step on them. Really inside on a table might be a little more practical... I finished A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam. I really enjoyed this book and it was actually a nice break from the 1500's era books I've been reading. I don't know, sometimes I spend to much reading those books and I want to start writing thou and shall and using the language from the books lol. My brain gets stuck in the era. I was thinking the books from the 1500's don't really seem to differ in language from the books written in the 1800's very much. It seems to be books written after the 1900's that the language changes. Back to the book though... I read this so that I could understand the difference in between Classical Education and the Great Books movement. It really gives you the whole story of the Great Books movement that was created by Adlier and Hutchins at the University of Chicago. The movement died out and what started out as some get togethers with a reading list turned into a door to door sales pitch about how to impress your neighbor. Really sad that it turned into that because the beginnings of it seemed to be really neat. Ultimately though most people need some guidance with these books and no one ended up reading them after purchasing the Encyclopedia Britanica version. We are so far out of the Classical Era people can't read them in the original language or in our own. Interesting considering some of the books were at one point a huge part of schooling. Classical Education seemed to use a lot of text specifically for learning purposes not necessarily just to read a book, at least at the younger stage. It wasn't a plow through a book a week approach either. After reading this I have to really evaluate if I want to use Veritas Press Omnibus which is definitely a great books approach. I don't think that's bad but it is also not based on a 2000 year old teaching method either. I am wondering if going slowly through a few of the great books vs reading 20 a year is a better approach.

We are using it with Latin for Children A. It's almost the entire lesson online. It has vocabulary practice with the list from each lesson, a story using the vocab words, grammar practice with the specific words from the lesson and a chant that uses the memory work from the lesson. It goes in order with the book. So far all they have is LfC A, B and SSL.

If you looked at how a typical day ends up playing out here you could easily jump to this conclusion. The reality is I pulled my kids out of public school and our distracted, disorderly school day has accomplished so much more in my kids education than the public school system ever did, and we are in a very high rated district. I am also dealing with ADHD and if your kids are not behind academically the schools won't accommodate them. In the case of my daughter she has jumped ahead 2 grade levels since being home schooled vs where she was at in school. Don't underestimate the value of homeschooling. It's amazing what some one on one schooling can accomplish. Even if it's in a spurt here and a spurt there.

We decided to start CAP's Latin for Children A. I actually am starting in another week and plan on going through summer so that we can be in Latin for children B next year for 6th. I want to get to VP's Wheelocks or Lukeions by 8th grade so we are going to do Latin in the summer to get us where we want to be. Most people do recommend GSWL but I felt it would just add on another year of Latin and it would delay us. My decision was based on two things - (1) I don't know Latin so while I can guide them through the early years at some point we will need to outsource and that limits our upper level latin choices to the online programs avaliable and (2) I want them to be able to read ancient text before they leave high school and are out of my sphere of influence. You have to decide what your goals are and where you are going IMO and work backwards. I went through and wrote out the progression of quite a few programs and the average seemed to be 6 years to pass AP Latin.

We start at 8am and my girls rotate reading and doing veritas press self paced while I spend time with my 4yo twins. Then they do Vocabulary and spelling (independent) and I stay with the twins. We all do memory work together and then we all do art or science. I rotate my girls on math. One has to play with the twins while the other works with me on math then they switch. We have lunch, I put the twins down for a nap then we do writing and grammar. This is my routine and it doesn't always (read rarely) go smoothly or as planned but in general that's the way we schedule the day.

So when looking up books on Jesuit education I found a free book that compares Jesuit education to Protestant Education. It is short and I'm about 60 pages in. A few things I found super interesting. The Jesuit Schools were modeled after the University of Paris which I had read on this site but it just confirmed it. They also were trying to influence people who were being swayed by the protestant reformation. I forgot that that was going on during the time the Jesuit schools were being opened everywhere. Also most schools in the US were puritan and funded by the government. In the mid 1800's the government began opening public schools and most people switched to those. I found it interesting because I've heard people say in the colonial days the bible was read in public schools but that is not accurate. The bible was read in puritan schools which were the only schools avaliable. Once the public schools were opened the curriculum was completely secular. Anyway the book is in the public domain and called The Education System of the Jesuits and the Puritans Compared by N. Porter . ETA: it's obvious the author is Protestant from reading this but it's a very helpful book in aiding my understanding of the transformation of Classical Education so to me I can easily overlook his personal views and take the history pieces.

Here MFW is huge. I agree with the above. MFW has taken over the book driven world and they claim to be a Charlotte Mason and Classical combination so they are appealing to the big movement in todays homeschool market.