I like the book idea, too. When my oldest hits 18 we plan to start taking his childhood bookcase and giving him the same books in leatherbound so he can have a nice collection of his most beloved stories. Easton Press even has Divergent, so I think we'll be covered well. :)

$600 - 3 adult sized people, one small sized one. It includes toiletries but not alcohol. Also usually includes meat bought in bulk (separated at home, trimmed, and cut into right pieces before freezing), 3 gallons of milk, about 6lbs of cheese (various pieces), whatever fruits and veggies are in season through Bountiful Baskets, 2 dozen eggs, about 10 loaves of bread (6 for lunches, 4 for dinners), bulk box of pasta, and instant oatmeal - two different styles because my children can't decide which is better, steel cut or rolled. Buying instant saves me the headache in the morning. We rotate buying these each month: toilet paper, laundry soap, rice, propane for the grill.

I had the idea of a blanket, too, but more like a playsilk. They're lightweight, breathable, warm when needed and cool when not. I've seen beautiful ones that look like starry nights or rainbow stripes.

A basket of teas, maybe? It's getting to be that season where a hot cuppa is very welcome on their breaks.

Similar situation, but have a 5yo. My goal is very tentatively balanced with what a standard 5yo needs. I want to make sure he's engaged in whatever we do, first and foremost. If he's not engaged, not fully mindful of the work, then we have no business doing it at this time. He's little. It's okay for me to call it a day after 3 minutes if necessary. We have a printed mantra we read aloud at the beginning of the day that I totally stole from someone else, lol: May my hands work with care, my heart work with love, and my mind work with attention. I will gently ask which he's having trouble with when he is not working fully. If it's love for the lesson that's lacking, I try to fix it. He's little, it's okay. It's perfectly fine to give him whatever he needs to maintain an interest level in his work. We skip around, using 2nd grade for this lesson and 4th for that, and preschool for another, and general K-5 for something else..the goal is to keep him motivated, not to hinder, he wants to know about X? Why not? Here's a quick lesson, kid, and some things you can do on your own. We play with mathematical concepts and grammar and everything in between. That said, a good part of the day is devoted to play. Free play, pretend play, building play...play is important. Routine and learning how to work for small periods is important, but so is having a relaxed mind and exploring on his own. He's not a vessel for me to fill up with knowledge. He's a mini-scientist, learning about the world first hand. Play should be a large part of the day until about age 8, and then a good part of the day after that until adulthood.

I'm not going to tell you not to switch. But I will tell you that unless you know what you want, what your kids need, you're not going to be happy. Sit down, make a list of attributes of the perfect math curriculum for your kids. How long should it be? What should it cover each year? Fast or slow? Mastery or spiral? Manipulative based or not? A script for the teacher or written to the student? What is going to work for YOU? You're going to keep curriculum hopping until you answer those questions satisfactorily and close your eyes to what doesn't fit. Hopping isn't necessarily a bad thing. We used Saxon for a year (well, sort of. Gave up the bulk of it towards the middle and followed their scope/sequence but with our own plan), then went to MUS for the next 6 years, then moved more into various maths that combined hands on and logic (Patty Paper Geometry, Hands On Equations, AoPS Intro to Algebra), before he moved to public school math and dual credit. So yes, we hopped, but I went into it looking for what he needed *that* year, one year at a time. Was he confident? Was he still needing his hand held? Was he ready to be more creative with math? The overall big picture plan moved him into where he needed to be.

I have to confess, I've had the same thoughts. I always thought it was good for starting out or learning about classical, but I never saw why people stayed the whole way through. It never had the same draw for me that it has for others.

We cut snacks way down...and we made them the cheapest food possible. I split a 50lb bag of popcorn with a friend. $25/2 + $3 for a container = year long cheap, easy snacks. Have you ever read the Tightwad Gazette? It's outdated by about 20 years now, but my goodness, there is so much good in there! How to cut corners you didn't even think about, how to be creative in your community...we get Bountiful Baskets twice a month. Dh has a love/hate relationship with it. LOL He loves all the fresh fruits and veggies. He hates the two days after when we're squirreling as much as possible in the freezer. Nothing gets wasted. I have about 6lbs of blueberries that I froze so I could make muffins this winter. We were up to our ears in them at the height of the season, but we prefer to eat them when they're cold. Spotted bananas get sliced and frozen. Mangoes, peaches, nectarines...anything that will go bad by the next day will be frozen. Limp celery, carrots..both finely chopped and bagged. I break them out for stews, soups, and sauces. I don't think you'll be able to cut your grocery budget in half overnight. I don't. It's a lot of changes and if you're already exhausting all options, it's going to be hard. But I do think being more mindful of where every bit goes can help anyone.

ETA this is for one child, none of which was bought for the older one. They are so very different in their learning approach it makes it hard to reuse, plus we had nothing for early elementary. Our current year uses: Math: Cuisenaire manipulatives - $5 for a personal set of nearly everything they make (rods, geoboard, pattern pieces, tangrams, spinners, dice, blocks, geo shapes... and book to go with) Life of Fred A, B, C - $30 (bought used) Extension pages to go with LOF - free living math books - $2 MEP - free Science: Microscope kit - $15 Sketchbook - $1 Mystery Science - free Various supplies - so far $1 Language arts: set of magnetic letters - $6 spelling book - $.05 handwriting book - $.05 letter practice book - free Grammarland - free copybook - free Reading Detective (Beginning) - free Books for memorization/copywork/dication - nursery rhymes and A Child's Garden of Verses - free Art: Wee Folk Art - free various supplies - $2 so far Artist & composer studies - free Spanish: Duolingo - free Logic: Balance Benders (Beginning) - free chess - free Various costs: ink for the semester's prints - $20 school supplies (glue, pencils, colored pencils, crayons, paper etc) - free Planner - HomeschoolSkedtrack - free Total cost - $82.10. The LOF books were an indulgence bought over time because I never found them at our used book store, but all the rest I'm rather comfortable with. We don't do history yet, but I already have a plan for that when we get to it.

We use binders. In fact, this year I took the ones my oldest had used for 3 years, redid the dividers on the insides, and set them up for the little one. I didn't even have to swap out the strips on the spines that have the subjects. LOL We only use two this year: language arts and math/labs. Science has its own spiral journal for observation work, but the labs go in with math for lack of a better place. Copywork/dictation has its own book. Art doesn't get a permanent home because he's too little.

I have a background in linguistics. For what my opinion's worth, Duolingo is one of the best products on the market. Rosetta Stone was thrown in the trash here. It was buggy and cumbersome. Berlitz was....okay. Duolingo provides a solid 2 year instruction before moving on to using real-life resources (newspapers, books, movies..). We have supplemented with a Spanish textbook for grammar simply because that's not a language I'm intimately familiar with. I can get by, and correct basic grammar work, but I like that extra resource.

You didn't say how old your daughter is. We loved the activities, but did them on the upper end of the age range and allowed for flexibility. We also only used the lit guides, not social studies or science. Too much of anything can be overkill. If you like the style of MBTP, but want something more fluid, you might want to look at World of Adventure for next year. Everything is integrated and the day is planned out for you. You still get the creative projects and the literature, but it's more gentle I think.

Check out the Your ____ Year Old series by Louise Bates Ames. The discipline in them is outdated, but the development part of the books is often spot on.

Read the article, or one like it. The article was not in a good format for me, either. It is repugnant. I am sad that the soldati are actually being punished for interfering in something that is morally wrong and refusing to turn a blind eye. There is no protocol, either, for stopping a civilian shooter on a civilian train, though those were lauded. It is wrong, and I'm hoping the media attention will do it good.

Eh, I'm not a fan of the amount of snacks many kids get. Snack after sports, during playgroup, during story hour at the library...we've become a society that eats all.the.time. and doesn't do meals well. The no-snack thing wouldn't bother me. I don't see a problem with most of the changes, depending on the length of the club for bathroom break. But if it's not something you're comfortable with, maybe sitting out a year would be better?

I have already said how we're doing it this year in the other thread, but to go further, one of the best things I learned was not to rely on a textbook if I don't have to. A textbook is very limiting in most subjects. It creates the work for just one year, but leaves you looking the rest of the time. I own them, but I prefer to build using them as resources. This year, two of the freebies I found were science texts. One being an actual second grade textbook, the other the workbook to go with the first grade textbook in the same series. After looking them both over I realized they followed the same scope & sequence, the second grade one going just a little deeper than the first. Well, then. Okay. Each week I mark whatever lesson corresponds to what we're doing in the 2nd grade book. I look it over, highlight words, and then build a lesson using all the resources we have. When we started out, the only thing I had was a Saxon 5/4 kit. LOL and that didn't work for us at all. It was torturous. The rest of the subjects I broke down by what I wanted to cover that year...then that month...then that week...creating my own scope and sequence and praying our podunk library had something. If not, well, we were going to create our own lesson, weren't we? Saxon fell to the wayside when I simply looked at the sequence and created our own math until I could save up for something different. I make my own gap curriculum. I make unit studies that bring in primary sources, I make grammar pages, I make math...I've lived in some wacky places where I can't rely on internet (including a few weeks out in the woods) I like to be able to pick up and go, cheaply. I can't always print, nor do I want to, but I have Notability on my Ipad and a stylus, and both suffice for even the littlest to use. We notebook, but not every day. Notebooks are reserved for one lesson a week, after a lesson is learned thoroughly. In the meantime we use whiteboards or chalkboards, easy to erase mistakes and try again. I keep in mind the whole child when I design a lesson - feeding his brain, eyes, ears, hands...giving him many opportunities to apply the material as he learns. We take advantage of all the FREE our area has to offer. Free museum days, free use of art supplies, free field trips....I combine our days so that we don't use more than one tank of gas every two weeks. It costs nothing to use our legs, so we take a lot of walks and do nature study. If I buy, it is a reusable resource. Something we can continue to go back to at different points in our lives. A kindergarten book does me no good. A book I buy for a kindergartener that enchants a teen is worth it. I bought a copy of Anno's Math Games for $1. The book has been read so many times it's not even funny. To me, homeschooling for cheap/free is an opportunity to be creative. :D Who doesn't want that?

The only textbooks my son has are the ones we bought for his dual enrollment classes. He doesn't have books to bring home for the rest. They're handouts or class copies only.

Khan Academy? Their lessons usually explain the why behind it all.

Nope. Ours is pretty simple: Ground meat 1 onion, yellow or white jalapenos, hatch, or other green chilies the market has 5-6 tomatoes 3 cups of beans, usually kidney. 1 cup of the bean water garlic, cumin, chili powder, and a bit of cayenne. touch of cocoa powder for depth smoked paprika or spoonful of adobo sauce to round it all out.

We're enjoying MEP. Some of the activities make my husband do a double-take, lol, because they're not how he is used to seeing math presented. But I love how it's both challenging and gentle at the same time.

There's a short synopsis in DPAN's Waiting On The World To Change. The names listed in it should give you a good idea of a timeline of research.

Add more peppers to your diet. When I have something with a bit of heat, I tend to feel sated faster than if I eat plain fare. And the flavor compound helps. We up our diet of homemade Chinese, Mexican, Tex-mex, even spiced nuts...things that will fill us up or at least meet our need for that belly warmth. Find your good fats, too. Use them more. We have a running joke here because when I want dessert I'm really saying I want fat. It's not enough to have a sweet. My dh is fine with a handful of candy corn. I'll eat the candy corn, the candy cane, the poached pear, the cookie...and so on down the line until I get a spoonful of peanut butter or bit of soft cheese and honey in a date. I have to have the fat. If I don't, I can eat all the sweets I like and not feel like I got enough. And if I'm going to eat it, good fat is better than bad. Up your olive oil or your coconut oil, whatever helps you round the meal some.

Something from thinkgeek.com :D

Just chiming in (though your kids' real life application is totally more of a test than a written test is!) :) You may want to look up the 3-part lesson. Step 1 - present the material. "This is _____" Step 2 - ask for the material. "Which of these is _____?" (discerning between 2 or 3 words/items) Step 3 - ask about the material. "Tell me about ______." (focusing on that one again) You're presenting the information in bites, circling back to it, and requiring more of the student each time you come back.

One more thing - avoid the cutting-down-to-justify-choice trap. There is a mom here who sends out little cartoons and makes statements about how terrible public school is while putting homeschooling on a pedestal. Things like "Contrary to popular mythology, the average homeschooler has no problem socializing with other children, as long as he remembers to use shorter words and smaller vocabulary." It's icky. And, more to the point, you never know where life will take you. Remember that you can celebrate education and personalized service without cutting down someone else's situation.