I'd love to hear what you end up choosing for your iPod. I've never used music during labor (and may not this time--who knows?) but dh and I are working through our options so we have lots of them when the time comes.

Thanks for everyone's ideas!

My grandparents were young grandparents--somewhere in their 30s--and they were such a wonderful part of my life and my cousins' lives. They were at every school event, including the first day of school. We went on multi-generational vacations. They had the time and energy to be incredibly involved. They're slowing down now, but even so are coming to visit me next week and play with my toddler while I do school. It's wonderful! I wish I'd had my first younger so I'd have a better shot at being a young grandmother. :)

I used it with one ds, who is extremely language-oriented and who recalls large passages of what he reads verbatim. It didn't work. :confused: I have no idea why, and if I had it to do over again, I would still try it because it seems like the perfect thing for him! At least I have others who can give it a whirl after him. I do have a friend who used it successfully with her son after flashcards, etc., didn't work. So I think you have lots of reason to expect it will work.

Thank you!!!

I have a schedule that is quasi-MOTH, I suppose. It's a table with me and each of the kids listed across the top. I used 1/2 hour increments as a starting place and put in times for breakfast, morning routines, lunch, quiet time, house pickup, dinner, etc. Then I knew where I was trying to fit the schooling in and if I needed to make adjustments I would. Next, I listed the subjects that my school-age dc absolutely needed me sitting next to them with undivided attention and staggered them. I gave the other one a break (if they'd been working for awhile) or something they could do independently (not a lot for us this year, but Spanish or typing at the computer works). I then looked over the schedule to see if children who tend to squabble were free at the same time and looked for ways to change that! Deciding what subjects we do and which days was a philosophical issue that dh and I had already decided. I guess it's a WTM-LCC-Charlotte Mason combo. :D If I couldn't fit things into my time slots, I had to decide if I needed more school time or if I needed to alter my expectations.

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We go out to breakfast with dh and the grandparents. We rarely, rarely go out to eat so this is a real treat. Then we go to Target and buy school supplies, whatever the kids want, even if they already have crayons at home :D, and stock up on $0.25 glue sticks. We get home mid-morning and sort out the loot. Then, the kids make pictures for the front of their portfolios (we keep all the year's work in a 4" binder and then cull the best and comb bind that at the end of the year). We give each child a Welcome letter that hits some of the highlights of what they'll be learning that year along with our perception of their strengths and areas where we know they are poised to grow. Eventually, we do a little bit of school.

I found the underlining for stress very helpful for pronunciation. When I made flashcards for the vocabulary (I was doing the program myself :001_smile:), I used a highlighter to make the stress underline so it seemed less part of the word itself, if that makes sense.

:iagree: I used it with oldest ds for 1st grade and was pleased. The state sheets became a bit redundant toward the end, but I changed things up using the notebooking pages from www.NotebookingPages.com. I've moved to TOG now that my family is larger, but I'll probably pull things from Adventures for the younger ones when I'm doing heavier stuff with the olders.

I used MFW Adventures with my first grader. I think it went very well. There was some writing we skipped or reduced because his writing skills weren't up to his reading/comprehending skills, but I don't think it detracted from what he learned. The state sheets got a little old at the end (same kind of thing over and over and over), but I changed it up a bit with state pages from NotebookingPages.com. Overall, it was a good fit.

I've always received an e-mail telling me my order had shipped.

We go weekly, but when I'm not feeling well or when there's a new baby, I'll ask dh to stop in on his way home, return the basket of books I put in the van, and check out everything we have on the hold shelf. Online ordering is the best!!! And once the baby is a few months old, (s)he is the easiest one to take to the library...cooing happily in the Ergo, never running in the aisles, making the librarians smile; it's toddlers I find hard to take to the library.

I did MFW K with each of my two oldest just before they turned 5. As a pp said, the Bible and science were wonderful, and they're the reason I plan to do MFW K with my youngers as well. We didn't do phonics as written. The handwriting pages were great for my little pencil-phobes, and oldest ds needed the cutting practice from the little letter books. It's a keeper at our house.

I use HST Plus also. I don't use the lesson plan feature, but I like the Weekly Planner. I have all of our subjects slotted in order for the week; after I "submit" those plans to a specific week I fill in what we'll be doing. I print a report of each week for each child when we're done and slip it into his portfolio so I have a record of what they've done all year. There was a free basic version when I bought mine, and I think that's still available. They also have excellent customer service!

Thank you for sharing how you do this. Very helpful!

I want to know, too. :)

This was very helpful! Read, think, communicate is a great way to look at it. Thank you!

I'm trying to place the D- and R-level discussions into the "Read, Think, Write" framework TOG emphasizes. I know a lot of schedules save the discussion time for the end of the week (how else would you get through all that reading? :D), but it seems like the Socratic discussion would be an important part of the "thinking" step. If so, when do you do the writing, and by writing are you referring to a TOG writing assignment or to answering the AQs and TQs or to something else? Do you write on Week 31's topic during Week 32? Do you discuss earlier in week? Or am I missing the point entirely and the student is supposed to read, think, and write before coming to the discussion? Just trying to wrap my head around this as I look to the future. TIA

We do both every day M-Th, one Singapore exercise and 1-2 pages of MUS. My kids are young so that might change when they get older and the math takes longer. Right now it takes 20-30 minutes to do that.

Thanks for the sharing that. After a few times I realized I must be missing something! :D

I'm not using the student pages so I am glad we have the timeline. (It's huge. I've taped mine onto a cardboard sewing cutting board so I can fold it up! The kids do like sticking the big labels on it.) I would think that if I had the student pages, though, I'd find the timeline redundant. I bought the CD because my kids love learning by song; however, I wouldn't buy it again for the purposes of augmenting our BSGfAA study. There are two songs recommended per lesson, but I can only seem to find one of them on the disks each time. It is a cappella singing (done by the author's children, I think). My kids like listening to it for fun, but I could have skipped it. My kids like the maps for the same reason they like the timeline, i.e., getting to stick the label on it. I think a Bible atlas would do just as well. We're in our sixth week and the kids really like it. Enjoy!

This is what we're doing this year, and it's perfect for us because of the same reasons. I've found the kids do better with a little structure most days so an 8-week empty summer isn't too helpful at this stage. (Although from reading other posts, I wonder if that will change as they get older and become involved with typical "summer" things that other kids do?) We're finishing week 5 right now and it's wonderful to know I just need to push for one more week before another breather! For me, being off Thanksgiving week and then again at Christmas led to long periods of burnout with too much time to recover. This evens things out for me. :D

I'm using GLA for myself right now because I have no Latin either, and I really enjoy the approach. It focuses on one declension and one conjugation (along with things like adjectives, direct objects, etc.) so that you really understand how Latin works. Because the concepts of declining, case agreement, gender, etc., are being made clear within a limited scope, I feel like I'm really grasping the basics. I just completed the first chapter of Lingua Latina by Orberg and it made perfect sense, even though it uses nouns from other declensions. GLA has great derivative work and uses English-to-Latin review chapters to cement what's been taught. It also has excellent teacher's notes to hold your hand. The grammar lesson, in my opinion, does need to be read, digested, and then taught by Mom, but in every chapter there are 2-3 translations worksheets, a pre-quiz and a chapter quiz for the student to do independently. My tentative plan is for the dc to do GLA I & II 4th-6th. For 7th and 8th I'm leaning toward Lingua Latina and then thinking about moving to a complete Latin I type curriculum in high school (Wheelock's or Latin for the New Millennium perhaps?). Just my $0.02. :)

The last laser printer I bought used a "drum" along with (instead of?) the toner. When the drum died, it cost more to buy a new drum than a new laser printer. They don't all use drums so whatever you buy, don't buy one that uses a drum. Hopefully they've stopped even making them!