Seeking advice from anyone with experience. I have a 10yo and we are going through FLL4 and WWE2. We LOVE FLL 4, and are thriving. PS afforded ds no experience with copywork, narration or dictation. So I decided to start him on WWE2. We are still learning/struggling a bit how to synthesize information for the narrations. Picking out the main ideas out of passages is still a bit of a challenge, but there has been a lot of improvement there. The copywork and the dictation, however, have become quite easy. Ds is pretty good with the mechanics of writing. Okay speller, and has picked up quite a few capitalization and punctuation rules from his work on FLL4. So the Copywork and Dictation are not too challenging. -- Should I do all of WWE2 anyway, so he gets more summarizing practice? I know the passages (both readings and dictations) become considerably longer as it progresses. -- Should I skip a few weeks ahead every now and then, and then get him started on WWE3? -- Should I just give him the week 36 evaluation now? Your thoughts? :bigear:

How do you know which program to choose? Why do you choose SWI- A and not TWSS? That is what has always confused me about IEW.

Is there a version of the Illiad for kids (5th grade)?

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Hi, smrtmama I am curious to know what you would choose as your writing program. I do not have a degree in writing, but it is one of my strongest skills. I have no clue how to begin to teach it to my dc, though. I truly do not know how I developed it myself. I can only attribute it to my fully bilingual upbringing and my natural love of grammar. (I chose linguistics for my graduate degree).

We use TOG, so we sort of do History all week long. But we only "meet" about it maybe 2 times per week, to do mapping and talk about what we've learned. Science, we use God's Design, so we only do it 3 times per week. Some weeks we miss a day, and so we just make up for it the following week. It works for us. I'm more interested in focusing on their 3 R's.

Hello! This is our first year homeschooling. This question relates specifically to my 10yo 5th grader. As a former PS student, he had no formal education in grammar or writing. Absolutely no experience with dictation, copywork, narrations, etc. We live in Texas, home of the TAKS test. Language instruction is mostly aimed at teaching kiddos reading comprehension, selecting the "best" answer among a set of confusingly similar choices, and the proper shading of impossibly small ovals.:rolleyes: So we have chosen FLL to introduce him to formal grammar. We are using FLL 4 and he is loving it. He is a visual-spatial, and loves to diagram. He had never done any narration, copywork, dictation or summarizing, so I started him on WWE 2. We are working along in WWE quite nicely. Ds struggles with identifying the main ideas, so I think the work we are doing in WWE is valuable and needed. My question (I do have one) is that I keep feeling/thinking that he should already be writing, at his age/level. Do you agree? Shouldn't he know how to put a paragraph together? And shouldn't I be making him do some of that? :confused: The problem is that he lacks knowledge/practice in basic skills needed for basic writing. What have you out there done in a situation like this? When does WWE get to a point where the student is taught how to compose his own writing? Or do you think I should supplement with another program where he can get a gentle introduction to writing? Help!! :bigear:

WWE seeks to get the student to connect the act of thinking of language to the act of writing down the thought. With all its flaws, this piece of writing is the first time your son has seen the value of connecting those two. I think it's great! Does it have a lot to improve in the way of mechanics? Yes. But the big deal is that he wrote something because he wanted to!!! Hip, hip, hooray! I like the idea of turning it into a comic book. You can praise him for his fabulous first draft, and suggest that you do a project together of getting it 'published'. When finished, you can make a few copies and distribute them among family and friends. When he has to re-write it, you can sit with him and explain the mechanics. "Okay, this is your draft, and I know it's hard to keep all the sentence rules when you're in the middle of creating the story. Now let's take the first sentence that is going to go in this box. All sentences begin with ....? " So you are repeating the WWE concepts but in the context of Super Echidna. :D Are you using FLL also? FLL4 is working great with my own writing-challenged 10yo.

Maybe a silly question. And I'm not talking about Thanksgiving, or Christmas. But what do you do with holidays (President's Day, MLK Jr. Day, Veteran's Day). You know all those days that regular school kids have off. Do you let your kids have off too? Most curricula are designed with 5 day weeks in mind. How do you handle that? :001_huh: You can probably tell I'm inclined to check things off, and the thought of skipping a lesson makes me cringe, a little. :D

"Ickle me, pickle me, tickle me too, went for a ride in a flying shoe" oh, can I come to your FLL lessons? :)

I know there is a ton of repetition, you repeat the poems, repeat the definitions, repeat this, repeat that. At first it made ME squirm. But I decided not to question it until it backfired. Well, it hasn't backfired yet. The kids have not complained about it, and they have memorized their definitions perfectly. And as they continue to add new parts of speech, the repetition really pays off. (we do not repeat definitions 3 times if the kids were able to recite them from memory to begin with. But if the next lesson asks them to recite the definition, we do it again.) And yes, oddly enough, mine LOVE chanting helping verbs, memorizing poems. Memory work is so underrated in this 'just Google it' world, IMHO.

Are you planning to use it to teach spelling, or will you use something separate? Has anyone used it to teach spelling?

You might consider MEP math for her, too. It is similar to Singapore, and the lesson plans even include stopping and singing a song, or doing movements. It's meant to give the kids a break to decompress their brains, you know. It's worked really well for my visual-spatial who is now in 5th grade. It's hands on math. But you don't have to buy fancy manipulatives. We just used our stuffed animals, or legos, or little clay figures we spent 6 hours carving the day before. (Where do they get this freakish attention span to do that kind of arty stuff? But don't ask them what you just said!)

We too own the whole series. We just started h'sing this year, so we are in the first part of Life Science (plants). The books are not the kind that will make your dc open their eyes wide with wonderment. ;-) That may be partly because (wonderful as they are) plants are not the most exciting subjects of study for kids. ha, ha In their heads, science is about stuff that bubbles, gurgles, wires that spew sparks and such. But the lessons are short, to the point, and so very doable. Anything more involved would not get done in my house and I only have 2dc. There is a hands-on activity for every lesson, which you can choose to do or not. Some of them we just skip. Every week, I supplement their science intake by checking out of the library, Living books in the same/similar topic. I've used some educational youtube videos for them to watch. We watch Bill Nye videos, anything we can find so the dc will hear the science terms and concepts from many different sources. In fact, the teacher books have a wonderful list of additional resources in the back. We've planted beans and corn and written observations. And we've had field trips to the local nursery to classify plants. They know we're the ones who come in with notebook in hand, and always leave having not spent a dime. ha, ha All in all, it's been fun.

Has anyone here used Phonics Pathways to teach reading and spelling. I have a 7yo and a 10yo. The older uses phonics rules for reading and can decode words with ease and fluency, but that comes to him intuitively. You know how some dc just internalize those rules without ever having to STUDY them. My 7yo.... not so much. She is very bright, and she'll take off when she learns the rules, but she does have to LEARN them. Also, have you used it to teach spelling? How has that worked? I found the book at my local Barnes and Noble, and loved what little I was able to leaf through.... :bigear:

I am using FLL 1/2 with my 7yo and we are loving it also. This is their first year at home, coming from PS, so they had no formal grammar prior. I am using FLL4 with my 10yo 5th grader, also home from PS with no formal grammar prior. I am loving FLL4 too. My son is learning all his parts of speech. I am in awe of how they memorize all the definitions for nouns, pronouns, verbs. It is eye-opening, and yet so familiar. This is the way it was when I was in school. My son loves the diagramming he is learning in FLL4. Is that normal? LOL I plan on moving to R&S 5 with my oldest next year, but I am going to do FLL3 with my youngest.

Yes, it is their sin nature, and I agree with the previous replier about what our job is. This is how it works out for us in everyday practice. Children will do what they see/hear you do. If you keep your process of sanctification private (in your head), they do not know what's going on in there. So I decided to think and talk to God throughout the day out loud, and involve them in that activity. If you believe that God is 100% sovereign over every aspect of your daily life then show it. The kids and I pray for a parking spot at the grocery store and we thank God when we find one. (I demonstrate I believe in his provision, and I demonstrate thankfulness). One day we found a mini video camera forgotten outside Costco, and we all went back to the store to turn it in, but not just because it was the right thing to do. We talked about what options we had, and making a conscious choice that would please God, even if it would have been soooo coool to have one for FREE!. How "finders keepers" is not in the Bible. LOL If we see children screaming at their mommies in the store we talk about the commandment to honor your parents. If after a long day, I snap at one of them, I apologize to them and tell them how the Holy Spirit inside me told me what I had done was wrong. When they want to watch a certain movie, or read a certain book, we talk about the Bible telling us that we need to feed our Spirit with good things and we decide based on whether it is good or garbage. And so on, we try to frame everything we do based on what we know about His Word. So if they consistently see you applying the Bible directly to what you do in everything, they correctly assume this is the way we should all live. That is basically what 'pray without ceasing' means. We study the Bible too, but this way "Bible" is not just a school subject (the way it was for me growing up). And this regular conversation with God is not hard to implement at all. That is how we live out Deut. 6 "talk of them when you sit in your house, when we walk by the way...". My children know where we (parents) make good choices, and just as important, they know where we struggle to make good choices. They know we know we are not perfect and there to judge them; we're simply a little futher along on our journey toward HIM. :)

How do I decide which IEW course to do? I have a 10yo and a 7 yo. I would like to do IEW with my older next year, after we have a year of copywork and dictation under our belts.

I pulled mine out of PS (1st and 4th grade) last April, and wouldn't dream of going back. The school did not give us any grief over it whatsoever. Stick to what HSLDS, and THSC tell you. Do not answer any questions by phone. Do not respond in person or verbally when asked. Everything MUST be done in writing. But I just mailed my letter to the principal, and once he received the letter (one per child) that was it. No ifs, ands or buts. They did express that they were sad to see my dc go, but nothing further. Where in Texas are you? We're in San Antonio.

Hmmm... I think I misunderstood. I need to buy the workbook, not the student pages. That is where all the narrations are.:tongue_smilie:

My dd7 is using WWE 1 workbook, and although she doesn't color the pictures, she does love the illustrations. But even she has trouble making letters quite that large. I think you're right. At the rate I'm going, I don't think I'll ever get around to picking my own excerpts either. And plus, I can reuse the pdf pages I buy for my older with my younger when she gets there.

But you still have the student pages, to read from? Then you have them copy onto regular paper, yes? Or do you prepare your own narration/copywork/dictation material?

The issue of the GIGANTIC line-spacing aside. Do we love WWE Student Pages? I've been toying with the idea of making my own narrations/copywork/dictations for my ds. But so far it has not happened. I bought the workbook for WWE 1 for my daughter, and that is SO EASY. I wouldn't buy the workbooks going forward, though, since I have the text. But now that the WWE student pages are available as pdf downloads, I am really tempted to get those for my older student. So, do YOU love your WWE student pages? Is it worth buying, or should I just make my own? :bigear:

I am using FLL 4 and started WWE 2 with my ds 10. He came from PS, so no previous real grammar or writing instruction. We are also using TOG Y1. The writing assignments seem really interesting. Do you do both in your HS, how do you combine them? Do you use Writing Aids? Thanks!!!