Oh, yes, I wanted to ask how I can find someone who can do evals? I'm reading a few links from the Hoagies site but not seeing anyone in my area. I'm sure there must be but this doesn't quite seem like the sort of thing to just google, or is it?

Thank you all so much! I have so much to start looking at. Really, really appreciate it. Yes my sig is old, my daughter is 8 now. She's still advanced but she has trouble doing the work. Can't sit down and write the paragraphs that are in her head, takes forever on math even though she has the know-how. We also have a not-quite-year-old daughter as well and I know that's not helping. I get distracted with the baby, or with my job, and next thing I know it's 11 and DD8 is still staring at the same page she's been on all morning.

I usually lurk but I'm looking for advice from people with similar educational philosophies as me. My 8 year old daughter is incredibly bright, creative, funny, and impulsive. I've always known she's distractible, but we've been able work with it til now. We're trying to do 3rd grade work and she can mentally do any of it but she can't focus, she can't sit. Math lessons take an hour, unless I work with her every minute. The careless mistakes are adding up. She can narrate stories for hours, but getting a whole paragraph out of her on paper is pulling teeth. In group activities she's the kid who has to throw up her hand and say something, but half the time it's "um, um, um, I forget". I love her and don't want to change her but my techniques for helping her concentrate, keeping her on task, and redirecting her aren't working any more. My husband and I aren't particularly enthusiastic about medication so I'd rather have that be a last result. Can you point me to resources about how to help her? Books on ADHD? Do I need to change out her curriculum? She's been doing an online typing program this week and doing so well with it, do I need to do more computer-based school instead of book-based? She will read for hours but I'm not sure she's retaining knowledge. She's suffering now because what she needs to be doing mentally and what she's capable of actually producing don't match. Both my husband and I are extremely intelligent and also distractible / have followthrough issues. I'm 95% convinced my husband has/had ADHD (we were both homeschooled so we never ran into formal diagnoses) and I am either high functioning Asperbergers or just really weird nerd girl, I don't need labels for us but I do want to make sure I don't excuse my daughter's issues by thinking it's completely normal. Thanks for your time.

Library is a fantastic answer except that we live in rural Nevada and I have more books than my library does....

I love science... theoretically. We're a very STEM family. But I just can't get lessons done and haven't been able to since she was little. "Crafty" hands on science is not going to happen. We did half of Nancy Larson year 1 last year. Daughter loved it, I burned out. We do RightStart/Beast Academy for math, Logic of English Essentials for English, read SOTW and other books for history, and are going to be adding in Writing and Rhetoric soon. I also work from home 40 hours a week and I'm (finally, after years of trying) pregnant which is its own stress. Science is one thing too many, especially if it's Mom heavy. Daughter is reading very, very well. She had a bad tendency to skip big words but I call her on that. I want something sciencey that engages her mind and teaches her about the world around her, since she's incredibly inquisitive. She loves to sit and read big Usbourne and similar books but she does really well with a spine that ties things together. Is there something out there that will be a self-directed, reading-based, not stupid science for us? Surely? Christian family, personally creationist but in general prefer secular science books. Oh and on a similar note if anyone has an amazing intro sex ed kind of book to recommend, I'm getting all the questions now about babies. She's too old for a lot of the cute little "where does my baby sister come from" books but a bit too young for more detailed work.

This is really, really hard. I never expected to have an only child but so be it :( We love homeschooling and she's not really super extroverted - with her parents, I don't see how she could be -- but it's a challenge. We do park day once a week and she does various activities like swim classes in the evening. The church we're attending has no Sunday School, which is a bummer since that was my go-to on socialization beforehand. I have a 16 year old babysitter I try to have in once a month or so for my daughter's sake as well as my own. And we send her for vacations to various large groups of cousins to spend a week or so. That always seems to help. Honestly though the benefits are definitely worth it. Her personality is unique and sparkling. Her interests are not particularly "girly" and she likes to do things like spend two hours reading comic books or building Legos, or just talking to me. We homeschool for philosophical, religious, and academic reasons so sending her for socialization isn't even on our radar. sympathize about the guilt, because I feel it too, but we are doing what's best for our children, I know it.

I'm in the same boat, we'll be finishing "Dragon Phonics" as the not-quite-7yo calls it, in a week. I love that she's reading so fluently, but her handwriting and spelling (outside of lessons) are atrocious. (My fault for letting her get away with printing instead of forcing her to do cursive). I bought the new Essentials and I really like the look of it. Thinking of using it but taking it super slow - two weeks to do a lesson - and adding in extra handwriting practice. Plus lots and lots of reading. Other than that I really don't know. We tried FLL once and it was, er, not for us. Copywork might be a good idea. I really want to get her practicing her cursive though and her perfectionism is a huge issue there. I'm just not sure.

My daughter wasn't much interested in our attempts to learn to read at 4. We managed CVC words, basic sounds... It wasn't until she wanted to start writing down her stories and asking how things were spelled, at around 5.5, that she really was ready to buckle down on reading. (Also clued me in that we needed a more systematic curriculum with spelling and grammar integrated from the start). Of course I write for 2-6 hours a day and she sees that so she was trying to emulate me, but that was the progression for us.

I would believe this, my mother's taste tended to classic English literature and contemporary books with a large helping of thrillers. My dad read science fiction and while I do love Jane Austen (and everything by Agatha Christie but those were an accident and only on Mom's shelf because someone had given them to her and she hadn't given them away yet) I primarily consume SF and fantasy novels. My husband and I primarily read on our tablets, I wonder what influence that might have on our daughter? However we do talk about books a lot around her so she should pick up on our tastes that way.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare? Like, um, Titus Andronicus? Methinks your husband has not read Shakespeare in a few decades... I was a voracious reader kid, read everything, still a reader. My husband was a late/reluctant reader and until he discovered Louis L'Amour around 10 or 12 rarely read for fun. Lots of people would consider those books "garbage" (we disagree) but they hooked him into reading and now I'm one of the few women I know with a husband who reads. This is the age where you want to emphasize that reading is fun. And it's not just my nostalgia for Trixie Belden that makes me say so.

I'm reading Mary Pope Osbourne's "Tales From the Odyssey" with my six year old daughter. The chapters are short, she's doing great with the words, but the content is a little scary for her (to my surprise, honestly). Might not be advanced enough for your boys but we are enjoying them so far.

Does your husband take time off his job when she visits? Be careful about the message you're sending your kids! "Oh, daddy has to work because his job is important but school isn't important. What Mommy does with us doesn't matter / isn't real". It's wonderful that she wants to visit and make relationships with your children but make sure your children see that she respects you and what you do. The flexibility we have with homeschooling is wonderful but at the end of the day it's still a big responsibility. If you show your kids by your actions that school is not important, then why should they take it seriously? Does she respect your homeschooling, or does she think the kids should be in a "real" school? (Oh and be super careful about what she says to your kids if that's the case, I remember plenty of behind-mom's-back comments from my own grandparents growing up because some of them didn't approve of her homeschooling us.)

Use C. I'm just finishing it up (second edition BTW, maybe first ed had isues?) It's been great. I really like the gentle intro we've had at the end to multiplication, division, and fractions. My daughter clearly gets that those are all related operations. She's 6.5 so we started C right about the age your son is. We're going to start D (my Cyber Monday deal copy just arrived!) and in six months or so when I think she's developmentally ready, add in BA. I am debating adding some sort of math fluency drill since her addition/subtraction facts are not super fast. She gets the right answer, thanks to RS methods, but she doesn't necessarily have them memorized just yet.

My (6 year old) daughter has had "her" own computer since she was 4, and an ipad that is functionally hers (we make a big point that it's Mommy's and I let her use it, but yeah) for the last year. Just a consequence of being the only child in a super high tech family. I limit her screen time but it's still more than a lot of people would allow. Several hours a week she's allowed to use the ipad to amuse herself while I am on conference calls. I have it locked down so she only has access to apps I permit but those include both fun apps and educational ones and I don't make her pick one over the other. Her reading has just started to explode. Mostly she'd been fun-reading books that are below her skill level and I'm fine with that but I keep going in to wake her up and find her lying in bed reading. Yesterday she asked if it was "ok" to try to read Winnie-the-Pooh (above her skill level) on her ipad instead of playing a game while we were waiting for an appointment. Uh, yeah, that's totally fine with me. Confession, I haven't done nearly as much reading TO her as I think I should. Still lots but not the hours a day that my guilty conscience says. It was a struggle to make her try to read until she got confident with her phonics and now I can't keep her away. I really think it's the kid. Some are just book kids, some aren't. Worrying about screen time is probably overrated. Then again, I do limit movies to a couple a month and no tv at all. I've always been of the opinion that tv time is far worse than interactive screen time...

I have to include my 6 year old in NaNoWriMo (she wanted to do it last year too!) because my husband and I participate every year. This is my 14th year at it actually. My daughter likes making up long involved stories and telling them verbally, then illustrating them, so we take some time to work together. I teach her how to write an outline of what she's going to tell, come up with characters and what they look like, and then we get a nice blank book with a fun cover and she works on her story while I write. I'm hoping to encourage her to write a sentence on each page this year which will be a step up from last year. The NaNoWriMo site has a lot of resources but I'm not sure what age it's aimed at. Speaking as a big NaNoWriMo fan, for your daughter I would advise having her set a reasonable word count goal every day and stick to it. 200 words? 50? You will know best. Encourage her to plot her story before NaNoWriMo starts because that makes things so much easier. Let her decide how to write it - in a nice notebook, or on the computer. Oh and resist any urge you have to correct her work as she goes. IF she wants to edit the story, wait til she's done. NaNoWriMo is about getting stories written, not about getting them written right :)

I started my daughter (just turned 5 at the time) on RS B 2nd edition because I felt she knew a lot of what was in A, based on the scope and sequence. Worked great for us. Take time to play the games, repeat the first ten lessons a few times if you need to, but we didn't miss anything. My daughter's 6.5 now and we're in the final third of RS C. We'll be sticking with D, and at some point I'll probably supplement with BA. That looks good but conceptually it's a little beyond her right now. RS is letting her do more advanced concepts than I think she'd be comfortable with in other programs. I love the way it teaches things. We don't play the games quite enough and there was a week where I just had to stop and have her do addition worksheets to get some of her skills up, but overall the program works great for us.

Thanks for the suggestions! Apparently I read the info on the AAR website wrong (or assumed that when it said to start AAS at the beginning it meant the same for AAR). I will have to take a look again. The various readers suggestions are all very helpful. I've been looking them over and I ought to be able to make one of them work, now I just have to pick which!

I'm halfway through LoE Foundations D with my first grader. We've been loving the LoE books. She's a very rules-based kid, so it's working where previous reading programs did not. I've been trying to figure out what we're going to do next. I like LoE Essentials for teaching spelling/grammar etc but right now what she needs to work on most is reading fluency and comprehension. I'm willing to take six months (or more) off of formal spelling and grammar to work on her other skills. She's been loving that in Foundations D we use "real" books like Little Bear. I love that everything is integrated (rather than having spelling, handwriting, literature, reading comprehension, and grammar all be separate). Fiction strongly preferred - she's shown a willingness to read way more for a story than for nonfiction. I'd appreciate some suggestions what to do next. We're Christian but I tend to dislike super-Christian curriculum or anything that forces cute little "this is how girls behave if they want people to love them" message stories. Looked at Learning Language Arts through Literature but I honestly couldn't tell if 2nd Grade would be too easy for her or not. She's only at first grade reading fluency when she reads aloud, but her other skills (spelling, grammar, constructing stories) are fairly advanced thanks to LoE. So she really needs the practice with reading and analyzing good stories, but it needs to be something we can both love. Reading Lessons through Literature I worry I'd find a bit dated. (I'm a writer. I have to, er, edit some of the stuff I read aloud to her on the fly because the sentence structure makes me crazy). Cost is not an issue. Compatibility with what we've already learned IS an issue. The other reason I was hesitant about LLAL was that I looked at their sample lessons and their spelling rules didn't match what we've been learning in LoE. So either Spalding-style spelling, or spelling method agnostic preferred. I am not getting anything where we have to go back to the beginning (AAS/AAR) or that has more games and cute stuff (the IEW program for k-2nd). It seems I work best with fairly scripted programs. Something I can open and go with would be best. Also our local library is awful and the book request program is slow so I have to buy everything from Amazon, which isn't a huge problem but means out of print books are harder to find. Thanks in advance!

We spent last week playing "Store" a lot. We made a cash box out of paper, used coins, and had her set prices for things. One day it was a "random objects found on Mommy's desk" store, one day it was a fish store and she made paper fish and sold them to me. I would give her a dollar, or a couple of quarters, and she had to make change. She had the best time with that. My daughter will play a lot of the RightStart math games and a lot of people love those but my attention span is... kind of weak there. We do like playing War with addition or subtraction flashcards though.

I had piano lessons for almost ten years growing up. First 5 or so with a Suzuki method teacher. It was a disaster, honestly almost a complete waste of time. Perhaps for another kid it would have worked but as an incredibly visual learner with little kinesthetic or audio-learning component, it was horrible I think I spent those five years learning about three dozen pieces and no theory. I might master one piece but few of the skills translated to the next piece so I was essentially always starting over "from scratch". After that we switched to a traditional piano teacher and I started actually playing, unfortunately by then I had learned to hate piano. I'm planning to put my own daughter in piano in a year or two and will definitely not be using Suzuki.

I've worked through LoE Foundations A-C and we've just started D with my daughter. Started her when she was 5 and could have used the program earlier if I'd found it. A was super easy for her and we often did two lessons a day. Toward the end of C, we'd sometimes break up lessons across two days. Which was my plan for D but I've found she seems to prefer working through the whole lesson even wen it takes us 45 minutes. You can skip the games and activities if you want. The frills were a bit much for me sometimes. We didn't do the games as often as they said but it was helpful especially early. I got the Ipad app and that's been great, really helps her practice the phonograms. For a while I wasn't sure how well it was working. Oh, she got through the lessons but she wasn't really eager to try reading other things. Well in the last month, she's started reading along in the hymnal in church. She'll pick up books and magazines and read to me from them, slowly but thoroughly. And last night we watched something subtitled, pausing for her to read them, and she had a great time. She's a very rules focused kid. Being able to say "C softens to S because of the E" and the other rules we've learned is very helpful for us both. One note about LoE is that until you get near the end of C, most "easy readers" on library shelves are going to be frustrating because they rely on sight words that LoE doesn't teach. But then when you get there - wham, you can read anything. Like I said, hymnal at church, foreign television, whatever.

This sounds really fun and we're studying Egypt but don't have SOTW. Is there a web link or something about it?

Can someone reassure me that I'm *not* ruining my daughter's childhood, depriving her of her birthright, etc, by implementing a fairly rigorous schedule? All the moms I've been hanging with are so laid back - and I can't work that way. Most of them have barely started teaching their six year olds to read. My daughter and I are doing second grade math, Orton-Gillingham based phonics, formal science, and pretty in depth history. I just spent yesterday looking over my plans for my first quarter of Tapestry of Grace - two weeks in and we love it. There are all these hands on projects that I just am not going to do. Maybe DD would love them, but I can't make myself do it. Reading the literature and the reference books, that I can and will do! But these other moms talk about doing this nature study thing or that hands-on project and I just think it's not me. I don't think I'm killing her love of learning. She seems to be having a great time. I just need to hear from other moms who were rigorous from day one that it's still working years later.

This is such a helpful thread... we just moved and for the first time I'm socializing with all these other homeschool moms and the most "rigorous" of them are the Charlotte Mason types. I had to google the curriculum half of them were using and I admit to kind of rolling my eyes over the description... I didn't even know "Waldorf" was a learning style. Meanwhile my first grader is doing math, science, reading, world history, memorization, literature (this week we're reading children's versions of Gilgamesh! This is so amazingly awesomely cool!) ... she's the only 6 year old in our playgroup who reads. I'm getting a bit worried that I'm overworking her. But no - everything gets done in two hours or so, we spend plenty of time playing, she's not overwhelmed. We're just naturally a more academic family than the ones I'm hanging out with.

I am SO excited to be moving to the Reno/Sparks area at the start of July. It's exactly the sort of place I want to live, and I love how easy the homeschool laws are, after growing up in PA and starting out homeschooling in VA, the "write a letter, you're done" regulations sound amazing. Is there anyone on this board from that area that can point me at good resources, awesome things to do, etc? We're hoping to rent a house in Fernley for a year because I seriously need some time in a small town, and then find a permanent location. Homeschool opportunities will factor into where we end up! Anything I should know?