Thank you for the recommendations, I will look into those :001_smile:. German recommendations anyone? The reason I am looking for 4 year programs is in case my children want to take either AP tests, or back in the day I took an SAT subject test for French....I don't know if those are still done or not. I don't want to start a two year program, have my children decide they want to go on to do an AP test for a foreign language and have to scramble to finish up two more years of a foreign language. I'm a big believer in not changing horses mid-stream. Oh and as for starting a foreign language early. I've thought of offering it up to her in 7th or 8th grade, but I'd like her to get more Latin under her belt first.

I haven't read all of the responses yet, but I just wanted to add to the discussion (if it hasn't been brought up already) that the differences between Protestants and Catholics can be delineated clearly during the time of the Reformation. Of course, modern Protestant denominations can vary widely in their beliefs, but if you want a clear distinction between the two you should read the writings of the Protestant Reformers for the Protestant side and the Council of Trent (?) for the Catholic side. As for backing up what each side believes with Scripture, etc.... This get hairy, because as I understand it (and I'm a Protestant, so please forgive me if I miss a nuance of the Catholic side of the story) we Protestants hold to Sola Scriptura. This means that we theoretically get all of our beliefs from Scripture alone. We Protestants see in Scripture that we are "saved through faith, and that not of ourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast." Rough quote. We believe our "righteousness is as filthy rags", that "no one does good, no not one". So, we believe in order to be reconciled to God, Christ, the "second Adam" died for us and His perfect righteousness is imputed to us. So the five Solas of the Reformation are Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, Solo Christo, Soli Deo Gloria. We believe in Scripture alone. That we are saved by faith alone, because of grace alone, through Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. Now we Christians sometimes define "Christian" as being one who is saved. So, if a particular Protestant believes that a Catholic person doesn't meet the criteria for belief to be saved, they may say that Catholic is not a "Christian". To a Protestant, we can do no "good" to save ourselves, so anyone who says they can do "good" raises red flags. Now as I understand it, Catholics also believe they are saved through Christ alone, but they believe that Christ's death gives them the opportunity to be "infused" with His righteousness, enabling them to do good. To complicate matters further, Catholics do not hold to Sola Scriptura, but rather believe the Church is sort of like an ongoing source of revelation. Now this can sound like a word game sometimes to some people. I definitely see where there are real and very important differences. I am Protestant, and I am Protestant for a reason. However, I cannot know another man (or woman's) heart. Only God can. I hesitate to place one who claims Christ and Him crucified to be outside Christianity. I may disagree strongly on the Catholic belief in the Magisterium of the Church, but I also disagree with many fellow Protestants strongly on other equally central issues, yet I would never dream of calling them "non-Christians" because of it. I understand totally the concern some Protestants have over whether or not a Catholic individual believes they are "working" their way to God, but the Catholic friends that I have firmly believe in their own sinfulness and inability to please God without Christ and His work. I hope my rambling made some sense. I'm recovering from a bad cold and I cannot guarantee coherency at this point.

I've been homeschooling our dd and ds from the beginning, and have two more kids to add into the mix in the coming years. I was public schooled, but my dh was homeschooled so our family is sort of 2nd generation homeschoolers. My dh was the first real-live homeschooler I had ever met. (We met in college.) I wasn't sold on homeschooling at first, and he didn't press the issue, but I came around when I did a little research on our local school districts at the time. We homeschool primarily for religious reasons, but many academic reasons as well. I read WTM before our dd was ready for school and I clicked with its philosophy of education instantly. I've lurked on these boards for a long time and posted a few questions on the old boards years ago. I've just recently begun posting on the new boards though. These boards have been a tremendous resource to me. There is no better place than these boards IMO to research curriculum options. These boards are overflowing with intelligent, thoughtful, helpful parents. I appreciate the honesty of these boards. Between WTM, the WTM boards and my mother-in-law, I have been blessed with a wealth of knowledge and experience to learn from. The resources we use are in my sig. Our big news is that we start TOG Year 1 in June. I can hardly wait!

I'm doing some advance research for high school and was wondering if anyone could recommend some traditional foreign language programs. I'm not looking for something like Rosetta Stone. I've read in some places that Rosetta Stone is incomplete since it does not teach all verb conjugations? I would prefer a textbook based program anyway. I'm also looking for something that could be used for 4 years of high school. I've noticed a lot of programs only have two levels available. My dd thinks she would like to take Spanish one day, but French and German recommendations would be welcome too in case she changes her mind. TIA

Considering they have confirmed cases of the swine flu in Kansas and California, and likely cases in New York and New Zealand, I'm guessing the possibility of containing things to Mexico is long, long gone. At this point we are all theoretically vulnerable no matter how far we are from the Mexican border. Setting aside illegal immigrant traffic or even Mexican citizens legitimately crossing the border for other reasons, we have US citizens and citizens of other countries travelling to Mexico for business and pleasure all the time (quite legally too). Since health officials in Mexico have been slow to figure out this was a particularly dangerous flu situation, there have been people travelling to and from Mexico in the interim who may have been exposed to this virus unknowingly. Even if we had the tighter border that many wish we did from a politcal standpoint, we would all still be vulnerable today. Unless folks wish to stop US citizens from crossing the border into Mexico as well.

Back when I took the SAT, I remember we had to write in "longhand" something along the lines of "I certify that I am the person taking this test and no one has taken any part of this test but me." I'm paraphrasing of course. That was 16 years ago though. Things change. I do remember lots of people asking the proctor what "longhand" was. If one didn't want to teach cursive one could get the exact wording of that phrase and use it as copywork in their SAT prep.

Writing With Ease: Growing Confident Writers

This concerns me a bit. I just bought TOG Year 1 and I got the printed version because I was confused about the DE version. I am not afraid of digital versions of things. I actually like the idea of being able to read the teacher materials on my PC since my computer desk is where I do all my grading, planning, etc. My concern is with their copy protection. I have no desire to resell TOG. I want to have a usable curriculum for my next three kids after my dd is done with it. I'm looking at another 17 years of homeschooling and I don't like the idea of ending up with a useless CD frisbee at the end of it. I have too many CD-ROMs that no longer work with Vista that I am concerned about TOG continuing to function in the future for my other kids. Am I to understand that the DE version of TOG can only be installed on one PC one time? So if my PC bit the dust I would have to contact customer service in order to get it for another PC? What if TOG were to go out of business in the interim? Would I just be out of luck unless I went to the trouble and added expense of printing it out? I'm sitting here with a 6 year old PC on it's last leg. I assume I'll go through a couple more PCs before we are done with homeschooling.

The cutoff here is 5 years old by September 1st for K. But I have also heard lots of people will hold their children back another year if they turn 5 over the summer to give them another year to mature. This would have a child starting Kindergarten when they turn 6. That would mean your son would either be going into 7th or 8th grade for the 2009/2010 school year depending on whether he started his first year of school at 5 or 6 years old. The cutoff dates in the US are more about how young they will take a student than about when they are required to start. Compulsory attendance ages vary by state, but essentially parents are allowed to wait a year for Kindergarten for a "late bloomer". And yes, in the US our "first year" is K, and our last year is 12th.

Rod and Staff sells a US coloring book. It has a picture of each state to color in. Major cities and capitals are labeled and the primary resources/industries of each state are labeled as well. It's only $2.95. Unfortunately my dd hates to color so it was a flop here. I'm hoping it works better with the other children.

We used Sonlight for 3 years. We start ToG in a few weeks. We live one block from the library. But we live in a rural community with a teeny tiny library. My dh decided early on we would be buying all of the books for our homeschool. My dh is always all about efficiency. He sees time as money. Even with the library a block away there is time involved in gathering up the kids, physically going there, getting books through interlibrary loan, keeping track of when things are due back, planning around when books are available if someone already has the book checked out, substituting if the book is not available through ILL, etc. He figured it wasn't worth the cost savings. We have 4 children, so all those books will get reused and will theoretically have resale value if we ever wanted to sell them. I was building my own library before I got married though so I don't think we'll be selling anything. With the figure you cited of $379, for our family that's the equivalent of 7 meals eaten out at a casual dining restaurant spread out over a year. I cook more now than I did when my oldest was preschool... I did look into getting things from the library when we first started out and I did a few trial runs of taking out books I thought we'd use and seeing what was available. Over half of what I wanted wasn't even available through Interlibrary loan, let alone at the library itself. And that was back when we lived in a town of 8,000 people. We are much more rural now. My dh looked at what I was doing and said no way...he ordered me to just buy the books. He didn't want the headache of going to the library every other weekend, and he didn't want time taken out of the school day to go to the library either. I would imagine if one had a better library it might be possible to do a literature based curriculum through borrowing. But a long time ago I talked with a lady who had a better library than we did who, when she heard we used SL, told me she tried SL years ago but couldn't keep up with all the library garbage. She gave up on SL as a result.

I use Homeschool Tracker Plus. I love that I can make lesson plans that I will be able to just reuse with my other kids. It's a lot of work to enter in the assignments from each subject to begin with, but then the planning is done and I have it all ready for the next child. There was also a learning curve involved. HST+ is WAY more useful to me now that I have figured out how to make Lesson Plans in the Teacher section. I used to enter the assignments in manually in the Student section since I started with the free version of the software. The Lesson Plan feature is what makes the program for me. I just wish I had started using it earlier. Ooo I also like that I can keep track of all our books in HST. Entering them into the computer involves just typing in an ISBN number. HST+ downloads the rest from the internet. I also use HST to keep track of grades. I don't keep grades for every assignment, but I do like to keep track of the grades for quizzes and tests. HST tracks and averages them for me for each semester. And of course HST helps me keep track of how many days of school we have actually done for the year. I like to keep to 180 days. I still like paper for some things. I get the free forms from donnayoung.org to do pre-planning when I'm making purchases and I will sometimes write up my lesson plans on paper before entering them into HST.

I don't have any high school age children yet, but I scored well on my SAT verbals back in the day. Latin was the biggest help to me. I tried studying word lists, I read lots of good literature on my own, but when it came right down to it at test time I ended up making educated guesses based on Latin roots for many questions. My own positive experience with Latin is what led me to teach Latin to my own children.

I love their stoneware. I use the 13 x 9 pan the most, but I also think the loaf pans make the best bread. I think those two pieces of stoneware (and the pizza stone) would be the ones I'd miss the most if I didn't have them.

I think one can fall into a trap by trying to align homeschool with public school standards "just in case". Most people are homeschooling because there is something about the public schools they don't like from an educational standpoint. If you try too hard to create "school at home" you will just end up mirroring all the bad stuff you weren't satisfied with in the public school in the first place. You have to decide what YOU and YOUR family think is important to teach with respect to history/social studies. Also, imho most "social studies" type topics are easily learned. Aren't most social studies books filled with "Your Fire Department and You", "Your Town", sorts of topics? I think those can be easily explained without curriculum. You live in "Your Community" after all. Ancient Rome on the other hand is not something one can just "pick up". Once you get to later grades a curriculum could be useful for teaching Government, but I doubt 2nd grade "Standards" include learning about governmental structure in any great detail. We've always done a refresher on basic government every time Election Day rolls around.

Yes, the games are themed around aliens. Specifically "Vroot" and " Vroom" are the names of the two aliens that guide you through the games.

We school year-round, 5 days per week. Our school year rolls over in June. We do 180 days of school per year and just take time off when we need it. Kids (or mom) gets sick; we take a week off. The house is looking kinda messy; a week off to clean. Grandparents coming for a visit; another week off. We also take off for holidays. I use Homeschool Tracker and keep track of our school days. We just spread out our breaks over the year but keep to a 180 day school year.

I can't comment directly on CHOW since I have never read it, but here's a suggestion if you decide not to use it... I used SL Core 2 which has CHOW scheduled in. I didn't want to buy CHOW because of some negative reviews I had read. I already had SOTW so I just looked at each topic in SL's CHOW reading and substituted an appropriate chapter from SOTW. We really like SOTW here :).

We are members of the PCA. I edited this to clarify a bit. I think the person who referenced "CRE" meant CREC. The CREC is the Confederation of Reformed and Evangelical Churches. This is an organization associated with Douglas Wilson. Doug Wilson is NOT a member of the PCA. The CREC is NOT part of the PCA. The CREC is associated with the Federal Vision movement which has been rejected by the PCA. You can Google Federal Vision for more info if you're feeling curious, but it's a long rabbit trail. IIRC the PCA has determined that the Federal Vision movement does not adhere to the Westminster Standards. A book on the FV movement I've been wanting to read is Covenant, Justification and Pastoral Ministry by R. Scott Clark. A good source for understanding predestination and free will is Chosen by God by RC Sproul. I'm sure RC Sproul's website has free resources as well. www.ligonier.org And RC Sproul IS a minister in the PCA.

Aldi is cheaper. Everything you listed is available at Aldi. My DH prefers Aldi's quality to Walmart's. However, we do not buy meat at either Aldi or Walmart. Except for Aldi's frozen salmon....I like their salmon.

I've found evolution can come up quite a bit, whether from the few secular science books we have to watching PBS children's programming. We just discuss it when it comes up. Worldview training never ends. It goes on in and out of school time. I plan on using more formal Creationist/ID texts when we get to middle school.

I use the TMs because they make checking assignments and grading tests easier. The answers to all the daily assignments and the test booklets are in the TMs. There is an introduction to each unit in the Science TM that I read before each new unit. I like that the Spelling TM has test sentences to read off for spelling tests and quizzes. I have a lot of trouble coming up with sentences on my own. I don't think I use the TMs for anything other than that though.

I don't use R&S for everything. I try to use R&S for as much as I can though because of the prices. I read early on in our homeschooling journey that R&S had a solid, rigorous English curriculum, so we use R&S for grammar. I supplement their writing instruction with Writing Strands because I don't like R&S writing assignments as much as WS's. My dd had trouble with the format of Spelling Power so I decided to try R&S Spelling because of the price, and she has improved a great deal, so we stick with it. I tried R&S Science when I got sticker shock looking at Sonlight's Science. We are also YE Creationist in viewpoint so SL didn't really fit the bill. My dd has enjoyed it. She retains the material and is always running to me with her book showing me some new thing she learned. My engineer DH looked over R&S's science and gave it his stamp of approval, so we stick with it. I do not use their social studies because philosophically I fall in with the WTM four year history cycle and R&S doesn't do that. I also have a bit of the "living books" thing going on in my outlook so I shy away from their Reading curriculum as well. I'd use their Handwriting except that my children used VP Phonics Museum when learning how to read and they do D'Nealian. I also use the Artpacs they sell (which I believe are also carried by CLE). I've looked at their math but much prefer Singapore. If I could summarize my purchasing plan, I try to save money on the "guts" of our curriculum (grammar, math, writing, science) so that we can build our library with more books for literature, history, art, etc. I still try to find good, solid programs for those things, but I lean toward things that are non-consumable (4 kids, you know). R&S fits the bill for good, solid instruction, low cost, and reuse.

I'm still working out my actual lesson plans, but the bulk of the planning is done and our purchases are (hopefully) done. DD: Show Me Thy Ways TOG Year 1 (We are so excited about this. My dd has already read her brother's books for TOG (as soon as they came in the mail) so she's had a preview. R&S LA R&S Spelling R&S Science Singapore Math/ LoF Fractions Writing Strands Latina Christiana Wordly Wise Classically Cursive DS: Suffer Little Children TOG Year 1 Singapore Math/Miquon R&S Spelling Start Up Science

I used Start Up Science with my dd a few years back, and I've just begun using it with my ds. It's a series of 4 workbooks designed to be used over the course of 1 year I believe. Each workbook has 29 lessons. The 1st book covers "life science". Topics like different kinds of animals, parts of plants, etc. Book 2 covers magnetism, electricity and light. Book 3 covers different kinds of materials and sound. Book 4 covers seasons and the solar system. Each lesson is one workbook page. The lessons are very short. My kids have both enjoyed them. Lots of interesting science information. My ds talks about his science lessons all the time. The workbook pages are colorful. There is some writing involved, but if there is a fill-in-the-blank type question, they give you a word list with spellings. The other types of questions are matching and coloring. There are a few hands-on type activities as well, like sprouting seeds and charting growth, a couple of cooking activities, watching a candle melt (liquid/solid lesson), studying evaporation, etc. The hands-on stuff is really, really simple. If I think a particular lesson involves too much writing we just do it orally and I fill in the blanks for them. I like these books a lot...and you can't beat the price. HTH Edited to add: The books say they are for 7-9 year olds, but I have used them earlier than that.