This is our second go-around with the Ancients for dd and the first go-around for ds. We're loving TOG Year 1.

I just wanted to resurrect this thread to say THANK YOU! I was going to be out all afternoon today with Dr.'s appointments for the kids so I thought I'd try your recipe. I marinated it overnight and started it up this morning. That is one amazing pot roast! This is going into regular rotation. Thanks for sharing it! :001_smile:

We do D'Nealian here. I don't use a formal program until we get to cursive. I just print out sentences by hand and have them copy it underneath. For cursive we are using Classically Cursive.

I find this board the easiest to navigate of any board I frequent, homeschooling or otherwise. If a board has too many subdivisions, everybody, just "hangs out" in one section anyway.

Definitely get the hardcovers! The illustrations really add something I think. I'm only using these to get my kids interested in the "classics". We'll read the "grown up" versions later in high school. The illustrations will draw the kids in and make the stories memorable.

A question for TOG veterans, I will try not to ramble, but no guarantees: This is our first year with TOG. We're on Week 3 of Year 1 to be precise. I bought the whole kit and kaboodle....except for Writing Aids. I didn't get Writing Aids because we already use Writing Strands as per SWB's recommendation in the 1st edition of WTM. I use WWE with my almost 6yo ds and plan on moving him into WS when we finish WWE. My dd has always liked WS, and I strongly believe in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". However, this week she was just itching to write about something Egyptian related. Writing Strands, this week, has her writing about...furniture. Do I try to look for opportunities to somehow meld WS assignments with TOG topics? Do I continue with WS as written but sometimes do a writing assignment from TOG? If I owned Writing Aids, would it become clearer what I should do? Does Writing Aids cover all the same material as Writing Strands? From what I've read before, Writing Aids is more of a teacher's manual than a laid out lesson plan? Is that right? I don't want to dump WS if it is the better program. I give SWB's recs quite a bit of weight. But... I'm looking for a way to simplify our Language Arts. My dd likes to write and I want to encourage that, not kill it through my meddling. Help? And if you took the time to wade through all that, thanks so much. :bigear:

I have never sold anything we've bought. I make copies so my younger children can make use of the same material one day. I don't copy everything though. I don't copy the cheaper workbooks or the ones in full color. And for some workbooks we write the answers out on paper. There are also some things I have copied because I am concerned they will go out of print before my youngest child gets to that level.

I don't really menu plan more than a few days ahead of time, and even then it's sort of a rough sketch. I find that if I plan in great detail we end up with uneaten leftovers. I can't predict exactly how much we'll all eat at a given meal. Many times I will reuse part of the leftovers to create a different meal. I guess you could call them disguised leftovers? So since I don't menu plan, I make sure I have lots of staples on hand all the time. We always have several types of pasta, white, brown and wild rice, and potatoes. That takes care of starches. I keep frozen and canned vegetables on hand all the time for sides. I bake all our bread so flour is always on hand. I keep the freezer stocked with meat. I buy ground beef, pork roasts, chuck roasts, salmon, boneless skinless chicken breasts, whole chickens, chicken leg quarters, ground turkey, bacon and bulk sausage when it's on sale. Every Sunday I pick 3-4 meats and put them in the fridge to thaw. I usually serve a hot lunch and dinner on weekdays. Quicker thawing things get cooked first, like the chicken breasts. Whole chickens get served on Thursdays a lot. If I need to thaw more meat for some reason, I usually take it out on Tuesday night. Salmon gets taken out a lot on Tuesdays since it will thaw overnight. If I know the day will be crazy I use the crockpot, otherwise I KNOW dinner will not get done. I used to be pretty scatter-brained about meals. I am told I am a good cook.....but I am terribly disorganized. I find this system works for me. The stocking of the pantry does take some getting used to. Our grocery bill sees lots of weird spikes depending on sales and such. Another tip...I keep a binder filled with nothing but "emergency" recipes. You know sometimes you cook a new recipe and think to yourself, "Wow that was easy AND good!"? If I think that, it goes in that binder. I have quite a collection now.

I just bought some this past Saturday at Wal-Mart. 1 inch "Economy" binders. The black ones, for some strange reason, were cheaper than all the other colors. I paid $1.27 per binder.

French Dip

My dd is not a natural speller. We tried Spelling Workout and Spelling Power and had lots of problems with little retention. We switched to R&S and I had my dd complete the series from the very beginning (I didn't want gaps.). Her spelling has improved tremendously and she enjoys the program. No more tears and better spelling. I have been tempted to look into Sequential Spelling myself. My dd isn't a perfect speller by any means, but she has improved a great deal and scores well on her R&S tests/quizzes. Since she enjoys it, I am hesitant to try something different. Oh, and she does her work independently. I don't use the TM except for test sentences/dictation and correcting her work.

I have pondered a lot of this myself. I haven't had to address this with my kids yet. However, I was in a youth group in a relatively large church (though not a mega church) when I was a teen. The spiritual aspect of the experience was all very, very negative. The fruit of that organization was terrible. Lots of kids leaving the faith as adults, etc. I went in pretty grounded myself, so I was not affected too terribly by the spiritual confusion there. So for me it served as a nice chaperoned social club. I got to volunteer in the community, hang out with friends, go to Christian conerts and amusement parks as a group. I had a lot of fun there. I learned NOTHING about the Bible. The sermons were a whole lot of law with very little Gospel. Legalism was a real problem there. The leadership was flawed to say the least. There also appeared to be very little connection/accountability to the senior pastor of the church. It was like they were there doing their own thing. By the grace of God, I stayed in the faith and left the youth group once I got fed up enough with the leadership. But I had a safe, fun and chaperoned adolescent experience. I was there when the doors were open. My teen social life revolved around that youth group. My parents knew where I was and who I was with.

:iagree: Same situation here. I grew up with my clothes being line dried when the weather permitted so I assumed I'd do the same when married, but my dh has horrendous allergies. My eldest dd has inherited the same problem. Dh's allergist recommended not line drying clothes to help keep his allergies under control. I tried hanging indoors for awhile, but we just don't have the space for the drying racks. I have one small, wall-mounted indoor drying rack for things that cannot be machine dried, but everything else goes in the dryer.

Show Me Thy Ways is going well with my 9 yo dd. She is doing it independently now. Her textbook gives her short readings for the day along with a discussion of the text. She has worksheets to complete after every few lessons like before. I used the Suffer Little Children series with her from the beginning and I am just starting with my almost 6yo ds. I start each lesson of Suffer Little Children by reading the passage highlighted for the day. If it is on the long side (like more than one chapter), I try to hit the highlights and move on to the discussion in the TM. It really holds your hand and shows you the important points to draw out from the reading. We discuss it together a bit and then I sum up with the "Points to Remember" section and we read the memory verse. For my ds's age, I use the memory verses as copywork sometimes. The 2nd and 3rd volumes have the workbooks. There is a worksheet for use after every 4th lesson. I copy those out and I bought a cheap Bible atlas for the mapwork. The questions are basically comprehension questions. I would go over any my dd couldn't remember from the lesson and show her where in the Bible she could find the answer. I used Suffer Little Children with my dd for 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade, and now that she has started 4th grade, we've begun Show Me Thy Ways. I started my ds a little early on SLC. He technically would be in Kindergarten this year because of cut-off dates, but he has a mid-September b-day, so he is doing a lot of 1st grade level stuff. I have utterly no idea what we are doing after Show Me Thy Ways. :001_smile: I will have to keep my eyes peeled. Hope that helps!

I absolutely love the Suffer Little Children series. There are 3 volumes that just go through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. There is a Bible passage to read aloud, then a summary of important points to go over with the kids, and a "Points to Remember" section that applies the lesson. There is also a memory verse for each day related to the lesson. It's designed to be done 4 days per week over a school year. The 2nd and 3rd volumes have related worksheets that having mapwork and matching/fill in type questions reviewing the lessons every 4 days. I can't say enough good things about it really.

I saw that same documentary. Full disclosure: I tend toward free-market philosophies as a general rule, but I did find this documentary intriguing. However, I don't trust the clowns (and I am referring to both the Republicans and the Democrats, not just the party in power....I mean that with all sincerity) we have in Washington at the moment to be able to pull this off. Is there any way we can get the Swiss to reorganize our health care system for us? Sort of like consultants?

WTM 1st Edition and not exactly a homeschooling book, but gives one good reasons to homeschool.... Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms by Diane Ravitch

I just want to add to all of this that for many two income families, ballet lessons and gymnastics classes are not even within the realm of possibility. These things are hardly necessary. Good enrichment if one has been blessed to afford it, but not worth turning the family upside down over.

History/Literature takes the biggest chunk out of our homeschooling budget. All of those individual readers costs money and we do not use the library. I'm not sure what we spend the most time on. I suppose if you count read-aloud time as being the same subject as Literature or History, then we spend the most time on History/Literature as well since it takes time to read things aloud. On the other hand it kind of depends on how one decides to lump subjects together. Many times Grammar, Spelling, Vocabulary and Composition are all lumped together as "English" or "Language Arts". If that is the case, Language Arts hands down is what we spend the most time on.

:iagree: I tried binders WTM-style when we first started but we have since gravitated towards spiral bound notebooks for most subjects. We use a binder for History and I am thinking of going back to a binder for just Writing. Everything else is either workbooks or spiral notebooks for comprehension questions from her daily assignments. The spiral notebooks take up less space and make more sense for us.

I've bought the tests for a few levels of Singapore. I've never actually gotten around to using them though. The Reviews in the Text and Workbooks seems to be plenty to figure out how the kiddos are progressing. I really like CWP and IP. We don't do every single problem, but they are a great part of the program. I have no experience with Extra Practice.

I use Singapore and Miquon together for my ds and Singapore and Life of Fred for my dd. When my dd was younger I used to try to match up topics in Singapore and Miquon, but what I found over time was there were some topics she needed more practice in than others. It was too much repetition to make her do the same thing basically in two math programs. So I started using Singapore as my spine. We always do Singapore, we do lessons in the order presented, and we finish the book. For Miquon, I add it in if I think it reinforces a key concept in a good way, or if extra practice is needed. If my dd (or now, ds), seems to "get" the concept pretty well, I skip the assignment that matches up from Miquon. As a result, we don't finish Miquon. We only do Miquon if reinforcement is needed, or if they just think it's fun. :001_smile: Now my dd has moved beyond Miquon. I still use Singapore as our main math program, but she really likes the presentation in LoF. I just let her do the lessons concurrently at the moment. She enjoys it, so why not?

Thank you for the link! Now I want to go read Brave New World again.

We really like R&S Spelling by Sound and Structure here. We switched from Spelling Power, though I still use the practice worksheets from Spelling Power if my dd misses a word. Her spelling has improved a great deal since the switch. I just started my 5yo ds on Spelling by Sound and Structure 2 since we just finished up his phonics program.

I had to read it in my public high school. Of course, I'm sure there were some kids in my class who didn't do their reading assignments... I wasn't tested really thoroughly on it as I recall.