I just wanted to chip in that this (particularly the portions I highlighted) was exactly what I needed to hear right now. I keep reading about X, Y, and Z awesome summer camps and A, B, and C fieldtrip opportunities and a gazillion classes and co-ops, and I feel bad that we don't have enough time and money to provide it all. Since reading this a week or so ago, it keeps flitting into my head every time I see some shiny new opportunity that makes me feel pulled to add one more thing to our lives. We don't have it all, but we have ENOUGH, and ENOUGH is just what we need.

I've had my kids try both RE and MS, and all three of my kids have liked Math Seeds way better than Reading Eggs. It may be that the animation is much higher quality (larger seems to matter, too--YDS kept complaining that RE looked so small on the computer screen) and the narrative/characters introducing concepts in MS are more engaging. After the trial, I didn't bother subscribing to RE because no one wanted to do it. For the older kids I had a six-month subscription to MS. They played it hardcore for the first few months and then tapered off, but they were still referring back to things they had learned for the next year, at least. YDS is 4 and I just got him a yearlong subscription. He was obsessed for a little while and then waned. Thankfully, the subscription has lots of time, and I'm sure he'll get more use out of it before it's done. The older two were so excited to see MathSeeds again that I felt bad that I wasn't getting them a subscription, but ODS finished the content during his original stint (part of the reason his interest waned--he could only repeat lessons or play games until they finally added a new map, which he quickly finished and was back in a holding pattern again). So the older two watch nostalgically and then run off to play Prodigy.

My son started at 6.5. I've never heard of the Suzuki guitar program, but he's working with Childbloom, which offers lessons for 5+ and has locations around the country. Having done Suzuki violin as a kid, I see a lot of similarity. Childbloom recommends half-hour lessons in a group of 2-4, with 3 being the ideal number. (And while I was skeptical of group lessons, it is more fun to go and see friends each week and it's fulfilling to learn early on how to play in an ensemble and adjust to other people's pacing.) They start by learning proper technique through playing pieces that are noted by string number and fret number, and then once their technique is solid they move to learning to read music a few notes at a time. It's a classical program, which DS likes a lot because you play the melody--not just random chords that don't really sound that much like the song you wanted to learn. That said, after learning to read music, they do learn standard chords, as well. We got a 1/4 size Cordoba Protege, which was recommended to us by Childbloom as being a reasonably-priced but well-made option.

I got exhausted trying to plan and schedule all the subjects I wanted to cover all at the same time (even if I did alternate what we did on what day, it was still overwhelming to juggle), so I have switched completely to six-week block scheduling. We generally do 4-6 subjects at a time, depending how much time they each require for planning and execution--BUT one of our "subjects" is a Mom-mandated rotating review session, so each day we cover one of the topics I don't want them to forget. We manage to review each pertinent subject area 1-2 times each week. It may not be perfect, but I'm really enjoying it!

This is essentially our model. Our general rule is that we work when Daddy works and take off when he's off. We school year-round, but from Sept-Dec and Jan-early May we have two days a week that we don't do regular work because we are in outside activities. In the summer, we school four days but keep them short. There's always time in the afternoon year-round for excursions, creativity, exercise, hobbies. Additionally, this year we've been limiting ourselves to 4-6 subjects at a time (depending how time-consuming they are) in six-week rotations; that really has worked to keep us fresh and engaged. It's hard to get burnt out when something new is always just beginning or right around the corner! This works for our personalities and lifestyle, but a majority of people I know do take off in the summer and really look forward to that. As with everything related to parenting and homeschooling, do what works for your family!

You can search their website for locations, and if you sign up then they email you in subsequent years to let you know when they're coming up. http://registration.scholasticbookfairs.com/events/warehouse/

Oh, the glory! I'd be in seventh heaven if someone gifted me with those...but if you have something that works for your family, you probably don't want to change course unless you're so cash-strapped that having something free instead of buying the next ELTL materials makes a significant difference in your budget.

FWIW, my DD LOVES the BA Guide books (and initially wanted to do the work along with ODS), but she's seen ODS do the practice work and now has NO desire to do it yet. Even though it looks fun and appealing at first glance, a kid may not realize how much effort is involved in doing the work. BA assumes that you catch on to the concepts pretty much immediately and quickly jumps to stretching the concept. ODS intuitively understood all the math taught in RS B-C before I got around to teaching the concepts, and was asking for "hard math." If you have a kid like that--a kid who flourishes on challenge and doesn't get easily frustrated or fall apart when things get difficult/when they don't get the right answer the first time--then BA is the right math program. If you have a kid who struggles with math or a kid who needs repetition/practice or a kid who doesn't tolerate frustration well, you probably want to either steer clear of BA or use it as a supplement to stretch your child's tolerance for challenge. You know your child best, so you'll be the best to decide whether she fits the description.

Have you thought about these: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00324132/ They're thick cardboard. DH is a librarian and got me some unwanted ones similar to this from his library, and they've worked well. They're not huge, so I've had to sub-categorize somewhat (short biographies, longer biographies). I label the bins, and the kids pull one out at a time. It's worked well for us for a few years now--and these are pretty inexpensive.

As far as "fun" goes, it really depends on your kid(s). What are they interested in? What sorts of things do they like to do? Here's some of what we have chosen as fun: - Cursive. Weird, but both kids wanted to learn. - Typing. Conveniently, they thought this would be really neat to know. - Several hours at the creek each week. This counts as educational, in my book, because they're watching the behavior of minnows, hunting for frogs or tadpoles, watching birds bathe, building dams, floating various things over rapids and under bridges, sitting in the rapids in various positions to see what happens, etc. - Cooking. They want to know the science behind it, but they'll be equally delighted to make things for eating. - Logic puzzles and games. These are especially awesome for car rides, if you don't have a puker. - Sports skills. While I learned all of this in school, they need me to teach them the basics of volleyball, basketball, hockey, badminton, frisbee-throwing... It's great for nice weather, and it keeps everyone active and healthy. - Various educational computer games and apps. Prodigy, Lightbot, Tynker, Stack the States, and Stack the Countries are a few recent hits we've enjoyed during daily Technology Time. - Art. Free time is great for trying new techniques and new media. My kids love air-dry clay, from which they make coil pots, pinch pots, and sculptures. Oil pastels are fun and different, and collage can turn out pretty cool. Scour the web for inspiration. - Writing. Especially if I turn them loose on the computer where they can have fun inserting clipart in their story or crafting Paint illustrations, they can spend a couple of hours writing terrible tomes about kid heroes. (Bonus: Give your child a blank book to write in, and they can work on handwriting and spelling at the same time! Even on the computer, however, they notice which words and phrases have the wiggly underlines and thus work on spelling and sentence structure while they're having fun.)

I recently sat down and made a list of the various chapter book series my kids have read, and then I made a chart so I could see the reading level range of each series. If you're a visual person, it makes for a quick reference. If you're not visual, you can read my assessments of the different series in the list. I put it here on my blog. (Scroll down if you want to skip my yammering.) FWIW, I like to always have a series they enjoy, even if I'm also having them read good stand-alones, because then I've got a backup if they get through something faster than I anticipate or don't like something I've suggested. Series are nice safety nets.

Are there any materials out there at a kid's level (upper elementary, maybe?) as far as understanding the science of cooking/baking? My kids are asking questions about why we add the different ingredients and how they can make their own recipes (and why they never seem to work). I'm not sure if there's a chemistry resource that directly addresses this or if I have to try to find my own thing. What I'm seeing when I search is either basic experiments (baking soda & vinegar-type) or complex tomes intended for adults. I'm hoping the hive can help save me some legwork here. TIA!

Have you looked at code.org? They have lots of games and apps that they recommend (both free and paid), and they give descriptions and age guidelines.

Unfortunately, so far they haven't established a way to override problem types. When I researched this, I found that they simply recommend giving your child assignments to keep them from doing what the program would naturally have them do. That works okay as long as you are willing to take the time to sit and make up assignments...but since I don't want to give 20 of the same problem type in a row and they make you start from square one each time you create an assignment, it takes a lot of time. I finally gave up and told them to grit their teeth and get through the crazy step-by-step stuff they were having them do. It seemed to take an eternity, but eventually it will finally move on. If you're trying not to do the quests for him (not sure if he gets pleasure from those--though if he already did those on your account, you can go to Flora or Bok or one of those characters and do a bunch of the quests for them), then my kids said that Firefly Forest has a bunch of low-level things you can fight quickly.

Many of the games they describe sound much like what's in the RS book, the only benefit being a few extra card varieties and the attraction of the colors. Now to agonize over whether the colors are enough to hook me... Edited because it posted before I was finished typing.

I was recently pondering what series my kids read through as they progressed from beginning chapter books to about 4th grade level, and I ended up making this list (with descriptions) and chart showing the reading levels of the books, if it's helpful.

I'm so excited for summer! I love that it just FEELS different, even though our schooling is basically the same, because of the different opportunities. Last summer ODS started guitar lessons, and he loves it and has really excelled. I recently found out that the teachers from his guitar school run a week-long, all-day summer camp at which the kids practice playing in ability-based groups, learn to improvise together, learn about songwriting, record some songs, and hear a daily concert. I'm super excited for him to try it out, since he spends time daily writing his own songs and desperately wishes to record CDs and play with others. He can't decide if he's excited or terrified. I wanted to put DD in a fun dance and jumproping week-long camp, but it happens to be a week we're on vacation. She loves VBS-type programs, though, and she's finally old enough to do the really big one in town (have to be 6), so she'll be thrilled about that. A local church offers some popular, topical, half-day camps for preschool and early elementary (bugs, cooking, fairy tales), and we may try one of those for any of our kids who are intrigued. Both older kids will take at least one session of swimming lessons again (maybe more, if the instructors actually instruct this year), and we'll meet cousins at the pool weekly and hopefully go to the beach and the pool with friends, as well. YDS has NO interest in swimming lessons, having survived one day of it last year, so I'll keep working on him on my own. Our major vacation again this year is a trek up to DH's grandparents' cottage on Lake Michigan. It's a long trip, but the cottage was built by his great-grandpa and is likely going to be sold soon because Grandpa died a few years ago and Grandma is now 92 and in a home (and no one in the family can afford the annual taxes and the upkeep it needs). Of course, DH expected it to be sold every year since he was about 10, so maybe we'll be surprised and get to enjoy it a few more years yet. Other than that, we'll try to spend lots of time biking and hiking and splashing in the creeks and climbing trees at parks (because our yard is small and has only dinky trees) amidst our perpetual rotation through topics.

ODS is my math-intuitive kid, and he found RS to be slow, also. I condensed lessons in B (often did a couple days at a time, skipping the review and only doing a handful of problems on the worksheets to demonstrate mastery). I had purchased C, but that had virtually no new content for him (other than geometry). We then moved on to Beast 3--though I firmly believe I could easily have moved him on to Beast after RS-B because he had a solid foundation and good intuition. DD does not handle challenge well, so I moved her to Singapore rather than Beast. I started at Singapore 2A, but she was easily able to zip through the whole level, having only begun a bit of RS-C. (Now we're slowly working on SM3, but she's not loving math lately so I've only been requiring a page a week so she doesn't forget everything.) Just like in RS, I just have her do enough problems to demonstrate mastery before moving on. We have a lot of un-worked pages...but maybe I can use them for YDS! :laugh: On a side note, does your daughter play Prodigy? DS finds the game to be delightful because it combines traditional strategy elements of gaming with math problems that continually get harder; he's doing Prodigy problems aimed a couple grade levels higher than he is in BA. So BA allows him to go deeply into topics, while Prodigy allows him to enjoy some breadth and introduce topics he won't hit for a while yet in Beast.

I really liked the free, design-your-own printable worksheets from Worksheet Works. The font was similar to what I learned (which I think was rather pretty), and I liked that you could change the font size (we started big and got smaller as they grew more competent), decide which guide-lines to include, and even select whether you want dotted lines to trace or empty letters to fill. I also liked that I could do exactly as much practice as we needed, printing an extra page of something or teaching a few letters at a time as we needed, rather than being limited to what the book provided. And my kids liked the fact that I tried to pick words to practice that applied to them. I looked at the tables of contents of a few cursive programs online and used that to determine the order I introduced letters.

I did RS-2ed A-C for my oldest before switching to BA. I loved A and thought B was the best thing ever, but C seemed really light (basically only geometry as new content, hardly any teaching of subtraction and waaaay too much addition review) and he sped through in a couple months--and only working a couple times a week at that. He was asking for more challenge, so we moved into BA3. I've got to say, even though he loves it and I think it's awesome--fun and challenging and great skill development--I don't think it's for everyone. For example, my daughter freezes up easily doing math for some reason, and I think the challenge level in BA would absolutely kill her joy. She enjoys listening to the guides when we read them, but she's not interested in doing the practice books, and I'm not pushing it. I may have her do some pages simply for the critical thinking later on, but she would not learn well from BA. DD did RS-2ed A-first part of C. At that point she was grumbling about all the games and just wanted to do a worksheet and be done, so I decided to switch her. I moved into Singapore 2A based on some recommendations on here, and it went very smoothly. If anything, SM2 was a little on the easy side--she probably could have jumped to SM3 conceptually if I weren't so worried about her stress level. I only purchased the practice books; they have a decent balance of problem types at an average difficulty level, and we've had no problem with me walking her through a problem or two and then her taking off on her own. If I need to, I haul out our RS manipulatives to help demonstrate concepts first. I'd only get the additional books if I felt we needed more challenge or more word problem practice or more review. The font size, the number of problems per page, the arrangement of problems, the illustrations, the variety of activities and games...all of it seems very well-planned and works well for DD's personality.

Not sure if this will help you any, but I was feeling overwhelmed with trying to plan out and cover so many subjects and we were burnt out on pretty much everything, so I switched to 6-week block scheduling with four subjects at a time. The week before our next block, I make a list of topics (general things like "logic puzzles" and "writing skills" and more specific things like particular topics in science or history) and have my kids pick two things that look interesting to them. (If they've mentioned something they're interested in, I make sure to include that on the list.) For anything we're not covering, I do a review rotation (one day it'll be a math game, the next day we'll analyze a sentence, then we'll review Latin stems, etc.), and I pick one topic I think we ought to work on. Knowing that we're only doing these things for six weeks keeps them fresh, the kids are more engaged because they once again have a significant say in what we're learning, and with less to plan I am more able to throw myself into it and do those fun things I ran out of energy for when we were trying to do it all. While we don't cover every subject in every block, since we school year-round I am confident we'll cover each subject adequately.

We found Clifford and Little Critter books to be a good match once they were reading relatively fluently. Those aren't high literature, but at least they're not painfully awful reader-type stories. IIRC, both of them range from early first to late 2nd, so you may have to pick and choose which ones will work in the early stages. Before that we leaned heavily on Mo Willems for being readable while still having a meaningful storyline that didn't make parents and kids alike want to bang their heads against the walls.

If he's past the Elephant and Piggie (which aren't really boy, but are pretty universally appealing--all 3 kids and even DH and I liked them!--and good first readers), my kids thought Fly Guy books were pretty cool. The plot lines of those strike me as more "boy" though my daughter liked them, too. They divide them ridiculously into chapters, each of which is about 5 sentences spread over 3 pages. Maybe that would be a draw to him; my older kids didn't have anyone they knew reading chapter books, so it didn't matter to them. I'm still having issue with the leveled reader business. I was trying to find some good books for my youngest to work on, but all the "beginning" level books seem to assume a lot of sight word knowledge rather than being truly phonics/decodable--and the licensed-character readers were particularly bad about this. I had this problem with my older two, so I was all proactive and made a list of the good options at the library...and then we moved across the country. :-(

Is it awful that I wasn't thinking about this AT ALL until I saw this thread and had the abrupt realization that I will have a 2nd grader next year? This spring we're doing six-week topical blocks with about 4 subjects per block; I felt like I was trying to do too much and thus was doing nothing well. :glare: So far I think it's going well--a lot more relaxed, a lot more interest-led. So I'm not sure how long we'll continue this way. Here are the things I have rolling around in the back of my head as far as vague future plans, though: Math: Finish BA3 this year; move on to BA4 in summer or fall Language Arts: Do some HTTS in the fall to refresh, possibly part or all of a IEW topical book along with freewriting, keep reviewing with MCT's PI book, reading as needed and for pleasure. Science: Largely interest-led, though I do suggest topics and lean on BFSU to guide our thinking. Social Studies: Follow the election, feed his passion for geography...Intentional history-studying is currently on hiatus because they're more interested in other things. Maybe it'll be revived in the fall, but for now I'm fine if we just address topics as they come up. Typing. I think he needs to learn how to type, given how much he likes composing stories on the computer. Latin. I'm considering either GSWL or some sort of roots study because they share my love of words and etymology. Extracurricular: Guitar for sure. He'll probably keep going with choir, too. I'm pondering some rec gymnastics again or a sport, simply because he could use some work on coordination. This summer we'll do more swimming lessons (or a team?), possibly a camp or two (they're just starting to post these), some beach and pool time every week, and whatever topics interest us at the time.

We did some vinyl in our last (beloved) house that I liked quite a bit. One was in wood-like strips and easily matched the oak on the stairs; one was sheet vinyl that looked like tile and was frequently mistaken for it. We chose it because it was warmer on the feet, didn't have the hardness of tile (more comfortable to play on, less likely for things to break when they drop), but could easily be cleaned after spills. (One area we did vinyl was the basement, and they said the vinyl we chose there would handle being flooded, too--just in case.) We then had a big area rug with a cushy pad underneath (though we had to remind kids not to mess with/pick at the pad!) over by the couch for cozy reading/floor play and the hard surface for our craft table and train tracks, etc. The only drawback is that one of the types of vinyl scratched more easily than I'd like...though the other one was awesome and still looked new five years later when we had to move. Whatever you do, if you go with anything not-carpet be sure it has a matte finish and preferably slightly textured (but not super-deep grooves for things to get lodged). In our current house, we have shiny laminate and smooth tile in most of the house. Both surfaces show every drip--even the streaks of being washed or the footprints from being walked over. It drives me nuts because they NEVER look clean.