I started my daughter in B when she was a young 5, she'd had some really basic lessons in adding but that was it. It was the right call, the pace worked perfectly for us. I second the recommendation to play more games... hypocritically since that's my weakest spot with RS. But it really does make a difference.

I was homeschooled from day one. My husband was homeschooled from 6th grade on. We're both engineers now and a commitment to homeschooling was one of the things that drew us together so there was never a question that we'd homeschool. It makes our lives so much easier though - husband's job requirements are a bit eclectic and we end up with a thousand or more mile move every few years. We're eyeing one of those moves right now, and I'm nervous because this will be our first "school-aged" move, but how much easier it's going to be because we homeschool! We can move somewhere with terrible schools and not sweat about it! My daughter gets to spend her afternoons playing with legos, doing art, reading or acting out games with her squad of dragons, and she's well advanced academically for her age. That's what I want for her, for as long as it's possible.

Thanks for the suggestions. The "My Body" book looks like just the thing for a starting point and I'm tempted by the DK encyclopedia too. Thanks!

I have most of my first grade materials all picked out - math, English, history/literature/everything, but since I'm doing Tapestry of Grace I have to add in science. I'm planning on mostly doing experiment kits but what I really see missing in my plan right now is a health and body study. My daughter loves knowing how things work together and I can see her memorizing every organ and how they work together. Also she has some hygiene issues that I'd like to work on in a bigger context. Does anyone have recommendations for really amazing curriculum? I don't want just a set of worksheets to do. I remember doing a program probably in 5th grade where I made a paper model of me and added each organ week by week: not sure if there's something like that for first grade.

I'm loving RightStart way more than I expected. Looking forward to adding in Beast Academy, tentatively, in six months or so.

This might be a dumb question. Can you proctor tests for your own kid and get scores that can be reported to the school district? I grew up in PA and my mom took us to the traveling homeschool test franchise (anyone who lived in PA in the 90s knows what I'm talking about) and I guess I always assumed you had to have some sort of certified proctors. I like the idea of doing a bench mark test in the fall and then one in the spring. Where can I go to find more information about what tests to give?

My daughter has just turned six and I guess we're wrapping up kindergarten. We've been working through Logic of English Foundations and are solidly in C right now. I'll probably get D in June when she finishes C and run through that. After that I'm not sure. We're an engineering/STEM family that also happens to be absolutely insane about the topic of writing. I spend about 30 hours a week on fiction writing and am trying to get published: my husband spends ten or so editing my work and discussing with me. She's been listening to us talk about the mechanics of writing since she was a baby and it's starting to show up. Her gross motor skills and "butt in chair" abilities are poor. Her imagination and interest are off the charts. She will, if I let her, wander around the room telling me about the exploits of her cast of characters (her stuffed pigs and dragons) for half an hour at a time. I know I'm a proud mom and all but she doesn't repeat herself, she has dialogue and sound effects and descriptions of landscapes etc that are pretty darn impressive. I've been looking at BraveWriter and would love to get my hands on it (do they demonstrate at curriculum fairs? I'm supposed to go to one in June). The problem is I feel like their other products aren't quite the right fit. The "Jot it Down" seems like it would be tedious after we've done LoE. The next level up, well, the books they recommend aren't age appropriate for her. But the philosophy of that level, "Partnership Writing" seems good. Is this a place where I could order just BraveWriter and implement her suggestions myself? Alternatively, are there options I might like as well or better? Is it a program that will annoy me because of my expertise in writing? I'm darn good at it but willing to admit I may not have a clue about how best to teach a child.

You're doing the right thing. You are. I hope you have a wonderful first day of freedom today. My just turned six year old is sitting beside me working on her phonics. We already did math, so she'll be finishing the hard academics in about an hour total today. Later we'll read a book or watch a documentary on China because that's what she wanted to learn about this week so I ditched my previous schedule and went to the library on Monday. In between she's going to play Legos or have an adventure with her dragons while I work. I can't imagine her being in school for 7 hours with no playtime, I just can't. Give her those six weeks to recover. Read lots of books together. Remember that as a homeschooler you don't have to start school on August 15th or whenever. You can start your school year whenever you want, so take time to get comfortable together, pick your curriculum, and start teaching her that learning is fun again.

Ooh, I want the answer to this, since starting LOE Foundations C we haven't done enough practice for me.

Get the phonogram flash cards. I find the handwriting reference chart really helpful (we are using cursive). I think the magnet tiles are just fine, and if you have a small whiteboard to reuse you can use that instead.

My husband and I are second-generation homeschoolers. It's so very different with my daughter than what I remember growing up. I remember the nosey grocery store ladies asking "Why aren't you in school?" to follow that up with "Is that legal?" My daughter proudly announces she's homeschooled and they smile and say, of course you are, look at how helpful you are I remember my mother being attacked by church acquaintances for what she was "doing to us" and us kids having to justify ourselves to our peers Now, when I mention homeschooling, the immediate response is a justification for why whoever I'm speaking to can't homeschool, like they all think homeschooling is the superior choice (and I don't go out of my way to present it like that!) The curriculum is amazing. We were "pick and choose" homeschoolers. I don't think my mother had much of a philosophy of homeschooling, if she did, it was Mary Pride not Charlotte Mason. It was "do Abeka/Bob Jones math until your kid's old enough for Saxon", "Pick between KONOS or some homebrew science" "Abeka or [i don't remember the other choice] for history" Now? I get to mix and match, guided by a well-articulated philosophy (classical), exactly what will work best and I have been seriously impressed. There were so many math choices when I had to pick something last year for my daughter's kindergarten year. Some was easy to rule out, but everything I rejected, I saw how it would work brilliantly with another kid. RightStart math - I'm an engineer (and add me to the list of work-from-home homeschool moms) - and I find this approach seriously brilliant. I thought you got a choice between "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" or using McGuffy readers. Only to discover that there are all these different amazing options out there. Put me in the optimist column. But... since I believe in being prepared? The biggest homeschool purchase we made last year was our lifetime HSLDA membership.

Doing RS c 2nd edition right now... like, while I'm typing :laugh: with my 6 year old daughter. I did like you and bought the ones I thought we'd need, substituting random stuff for other manipulative. Right now my must-buy would be: the abacus The balance scale, not that we used it that much but it really was fun and got some good concepts into her the place value cards. Definitely. The centimeter cubes - this is one I went back to buy. I use it sometimes when the colored tiles are called for but I don't actually need to visually distinguish The geared clock - or rather, I already had one, but we use it a lot. The fraction chart. Probably depends on the kid but my daughter instantly clicked with that one and it would be a pain to make your own. I think you *could* skip the geoboard and tangrams for lower levels but the geometry does ramp up so I'd just get them anyway. Sigh. The math cards and game book. Sigh. I really really didn't want to... and I don't play as much as we probably should because I just can't but I do manage 2-3 games a week. Note: I started with B and we are only up to lesson 37 in C. I will HIGHLY recommend Second Edition. Really really like it. Right Start is an awesome program for a mom who has the time to devote to it. My daughter's math knowledge is really solid, beyond what I was expecting at this age and I had sky-high expectations so...

My daughter is in RightStart C and we like it a lot, but we're likely to run out of second edition materials at the pace we're moving. I don't think she'll be ready to switch to Beast Academy when she's done with RS C so I'm wondering about combining the two: doing RS D and Beast Academy at the same time (different days/ weeks etc)? Maybe waiting until partway into RS D before starting BA? Note that she'd be ~6.5 when we're ready to start RS D and though six months from now things may be very different she's not fluently reading just yet. Husband and I are both engineers and she's already very mathematically gifted. I want to encourage that and BA looks nice and challenging but at the same time I don't want to end up frustrating both of us. Does anyone use both?

I found these replies helpful. My about-to-be-6 girl just started LOE C yesterday and we're probably going into D over the summer. I've been waffling about whether or not to use D but I think she needs more time before formal grammar and I really have no idea what we're going to do after LOE, I had an old copy of FLL but those lessons were just not working for us. I really love how LoE is reading, spelling, handwriting and light grammar all in one and want something similar after D. Any of you ladies looking that far forward?

Presbyterian, married to a Catholic here so I have some relevant experience. If they're going to attend Mass during the week I think you should make a point to attend with them once beforehand and be able to point out the things that are the same or different. I've done a lot of reading and studying what goes on at the mass over the last decade and shorthand is: there are certain responses I don't give and when they kneel I sit respectfully. Respect is the real key but they need to understand enough to know what is going on and what you guys disagree with. Goes without saying that they will not receive the eucharist there: that would be inappropriate from every point of view. Make sure they're comfortable with their own faith but respectful of what they learn. It is always respectful to sit silent during a time when others are reciting prayers you don't agree with. You can get a copy of a missal (the prayers and verses used in mass) and look it over, it can be hard to hear what the priest is saying sometimes and that will let you look through things. Be aware if you have familiarity with the Westminster Catechism as a Presbyterian, the Catholic Catechism is a very different beast. While the WC is fairly focused on a specific set of question, the Catholic catechism covers a lot more topics and is not as straightforward, so if you look things up there you may end up being even more confused. You can google Catholic stuff online but honestly it gets very frustrating because a lot of the specific differences you'll see between Reformed beliefs and Catholic tend to spark online fights and nothing really substantive. Don't let them feel pressured to do things they're uncomfortable with. My Catholic husband is uncomfortable praying to saints/Mary, we have no rosaries or statues in our house. There's not actually one true Catholic way to do anything.

Rather than doing much with programming languages at this age, I'd recommend concentrating on related skills. Get him a solid grounding in logic. My daughter's too young for computer science so I haven't looked into specific resources but I have a masters' in computer science so I've spent time thinking about what I'll do with her. Get him some hands on hardware time. It's one of the places where entry comp sci students are often clueless and that tends to limit them. Maybe find a Lego Mindstorms club he can join. If this turns into a serious interest for him, add in a few languages in high school but more importantly get him all the math he can handle and teach him physics. Lots of CS programs won't require physics but not having that will, again, limit his options. Languages: Java is a good one. JavaScript is not the same thing as Java. You can't go wrong with C++, there will be embedded systems using C++ or even C for decades.

I used the Zinn book in an introductory college course and got my first lesson, at 16, in "writing what the instructor wants to hear". Absolutely mind-blowing to a homeschool graduate that when a professor says she "respects a diversity of opinions" it means she will give you a C if you don't agree with her. Of course that was the professor who threatened to have me removed from her class if I reported the lesbian student who was sexually harassing me... ... anyway, so my opinion of Zinn is biased but I'd rather have my kid just read Marx in the original.

Sarah, I'm an engineer married to an engineer too. Last year when I was ready to start something formal with my daughter (we'd been doing math worksheets from Abeka and it didn't work) I went to our local homeschool convention. I'm fortunate to have a big one pretty close to me! I was able to get my hands on Saxon, Miquon, Math-u-See, Singapore, a couple oddballs, and RightStart. I hadn't really known about RightStart before the convention. My husband zeroed in on their booth because of the "math balance" they had on display - he thought it was awesome. I liked how it had fewer manipulatives than Math-u-See but more than some other programs. I came home, did a little more research, read samples from RightStart and a few others, and ended up going with RS B. We flew through that and are in C now. I'm not saying all that to promote RightStart actually though I love the program, but to urge you to get to a convention if it's at all possible. There's nothing like being able to look at everything! But you could get overwhelmed, so make a list ahead of time of what programs to look at and a list of questions for yourself to consider: how many manipulatives are there, what's the theory behind it, how much written work, what sort of practice does it offer.

I just started supplementing RightStart with Challenging Word Problems and I like it so far. I'm interested in what the changes are going to be? Does anyone know?

RightStart is letting my bright, wiggly, not-super-fine-motor-skills almost six year old daughter work the advanced math her brain is capable of without requiring her body to be ready to sit and do worksheets. I'm so glad we started RS B last summer. We did all of B in about 7 months and we're starting C, but going slower now and adding in some Singapore word problems and other things to try to bring her sitting and learning skills up a bit. We're going to stay in RS for at least the next year.

My husband and I are both engineers who were homeschooled using Saxon from grade 5 up to college so obviously we have a lot of confirmation bias. For both of us Saxon was occasionally a slog, we eventually got our moms to let us do every other problem, and I believe we both had a similar, er, incident somewhere in early high school involving a solutions manual that went from "checking our own work" to "sure I understand what's going on here" until a test proved that we didn't and we ended up repeating a couple dozen lessons. Which was an important lesson in and of itself! Now I've got a super mathy almost 6 year old girl and while I ruled out Saxon before the old 5/4 book I'd assumed we'd swap into Saxon ASAP. Only now I'm doing RightStart and looking to supplement with a little Singapore and I'm starting to wonder. Maybe we won't start Saxon until algebra. This way of teaching math is so much more awesome than I remember. But I do think Saxon builds a solid foundation. Even super mathy kids like I was need to learn to actually show the work. My biggest problem was always the little tiny mistakes, not the concepts. Saxon's repetition helps a lot there.

Definitely get the phonogram flashcards, they have helpful pronunciation tips and occasional rules on the back. The whiteboard is useful, especially when I got a whole rainbow of markers for my daughter to choose from. I also like the phonogram app for extra drill. I had started with another program so my daughter already knew the short sounds of vowels, etc, but I found going back and learning all the sounds at once was great, we had been running into cases where C said "s" not "k" and it was really throwing her. Going back to the start was key for us. I use the cursive handwriting reference chart all the time, because I don't remember how to make the letters :) . We don't use the tactile cards much and I think we could have made our own phonogram game cards if necessary. You will definitely need the teacher guide and student book both though.

Can you share what you've heard negative about Foundations D? We're about to finish B and I am planning on using C, not sure about D yet, hoping to make C last until after our local homeschool convention so I can take a look at my options.

I use Primer with my nearly 6 year old daughter. It's been a lot of fun. Recently (we're up to the Revolutionary War) it's gotten a bit too easy for her but I think that's just because she's gained skills. I'm looking forward to starting Year 1 pretty soon. It's been a very gentle introduction to a classical style. I especially liked the ancient history section. Some of the American history texts are... well, I'm still teaching her how awesome our country is, so books with multiple pages on slavery and Europeans exploiting the native Americans get a little old. When she's older, definitely, but right now she's such a black and white thinker. That said I do love their approach and I'm glad I went with Primer and not straight into Year 1.