English Lessons Through Literature might work. We are working on it from last year. At this point, I ignore the grammar part, because I found something else that dd likes a lot better, but I read the poems and fables, do the picture studies with her, and the copywork. If all you want is the copywork, you can just buy the workbook pdf.

the brick and mortar schools ain't necessarily better. I had dinner with two friends last night. One has two kids in ps - middle school and jr. high. The other has two elementary kids in a private Christian school. They both complained about their kids getting picked on and/or being excluded, and having very few, if any friends. My dd has one friend who truly understands her, who unfortunately lives 40min away, but talking with my friends keeps me from thinking the grass might possibly be greener with more traditional schooling.

This forum is a terrible place for a book addict.

I can do math, but it is not one of my strengths. I am a fan of MEP. As pp have said, it is pretty much scripted and easy to use. I read over the lesson the night before to make sure I have what copymasters I need, and if there is an tweaking needed for classroom oriented activities. Otherwise, it is kind of open and go. I think there are enough challenging problems that a mathy kid would not be bored.

Simplycharlottemason.com has a small, free ebook that can give you some pointers on narration.

So excited to find these - just had to share. :001_smile: http://pheemcfaddell.com/stories/bard/BardPuppetPage.php

I feel for you, because we were in a very similar position last year. We stopped for a bit and just worked on math facts, but that didn't seem to be going anywhere. (She still has to think about them for longer than what is automatic). However, just stopping and doing NOTHING but math fact review stuff was not especially engaging for her, since she is better at picking up the concepts than the facts. (The math review was only a few minutes of flashcards, and Kate Snow's Addition Facts and Ellen McHenry's Professor Pig lessons, and the oodles of math games that are out there, so it wasn't super boring.) Maybe you can spend half your math time going over math facts, and the other half either working your way through the next lessons, or just picking out the geometry or telling time lessons, etc. for the other half so you can both feel like you are moving (slowly) forward.

Prep for Vol. 1 isn't bad; we just started Vol. 2, so I can't speak to that. It can be clunky, as you so aptly put it, but I think BFSU is mostly a matter of plugging your nose and diving in. That said, there's a BFSU group on facebook, and someone there is working with Mr. Nebel to put together a manual to go with BFSU to make it a little less unwieldy, but I don't know when that's coming out. I really like this curriculum because it is so orderly in its presentation and promotes scientific thinking and makes it easier for me to teach, but ultimately YOU are the teacher, not the curriculum. I think most of us (including myself) forget that at times.

If your kid was happy with MUS, then stay with it. SWB recommends it, and she usually has good suggestions (although I don't understand her affinity for Spelling Workout, but that's a whole other thing). I just wanted to share our experience with MUS. Dd flew through the workbook pages and got nearly everything correct, so I thought she was doing well, but she still struggles with addition facts. At that time she was able to use the algorithm for carrying the ten, but didn't understand the reasoning for it. I would highly recommend practicing the facts with games, flashcards, or whatever it takes to make sure your son knows them well. I think now I would do that with whatever curriculum I would use, but as a newbie, I did not understand that, and do not fault MUS for my lack of experience.

BFSU is lovely because the lessons build upon one another and is more or less sequential (one you get a handle on the threads thing).

We have enjoyed Beowulf's Grammar by Guest Hollow. The meat of the lessons is in comic book format. And there are lots of activities and varied worksheets to choose from to make things interesting.

This is what library world used to call "information literacy."

CC is not the only source of the message that you can't do it alone. When I was reading all the introductory books and all the blogs a few years ago, almost all of them tell you you can't do it on your own. You have to have a co-op or support group. I am probably doing it all wrong because we are on our own. I visited the local co-op and was unimpressed with the out of control classroom we observed. We live in a rural area and still do nap time, so I'm not going to drive an hour to the nearest city for other homeschool activities. Once nap time stops, I might think about doing homeschool activities, but right now, we are happy to be on our own. Though I have to say, this forum is a God-send and is crucial for my mental health.

If it makes you feel any better, we experience the same thing here, too.

arttango.com

It is awesome that your husband is so supportive! Yay for you! When I started homeschooling, it was nearly impossible to shake "this is what school should look like" and I am willing to bet that is where your feelings of "wasting the semester" are coming from. You have given your kids the gift of being able to learn at home and not be subjected to constant testing and all the other downsides of public school. It has taken me some time, but through experience and hanging out on these boards, my expectations of "what school should look like" have grown less clear-cut and a bit more fuzzy. There are lots of people who skip a formal history curriculum at these ages, and their kids turn out fine. It will take some time for you to figure out what is going to work best for you and your kids and that is definitely not "wasted time."

Mercy Watson is a hoot. James Marshall and Cynthia Rylant are great authors. The stories they have written are all very engaging. I love them. It is so sad James Marshall is no longer with us.

We've had the Magiscope for a month or two now and have been very pleased with it. There's no fussing with getting the angle on a mirror just right, as I remember from high school. When I was doing research I came upon this thread: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/477745-microscope-recommendations/

Another vote for Mystery Science. We use BFSU, but used one of the Mystery Science lessons as a supplement. I thought it was put together very well, the demonstration was excellent. It has a lot of fans here on the forum.

One tip I have taken from these boards which has helped us address feeling like a failure at math is to end the lesson with something fun and easy. We do a page from an Evan-Moor Skills Sharpener book. (Dd likes worksheets.) We are almost finished with the 2nd grade one for our third grader. She leaves math feeling confident because it did not take her long to complete one of those colorful pages.

I used to get headaches around midafternoon, which sometimes turned into migraines. I cut down on my wheat consumption by 95%, and I hardly get them anymore. Being GF is popular enough now that it isn't too difficult to accomplish. It can be inconvenient at times, but not impossible. I like my carbs, but I like not having headaches all the time a lot more. :-)

Just a note on my experience with 100 Easy Lessons. I used it in K to prove to myself that I could do the whole homeschooling thing, because getting dd to read that year was my only goal. Dd did extremely well with it and was capable of reading at about a 2nd grade level when she was finished. The downside was that I felt like I should be doing something else with her phonics-wise, but I had no clue what. It just kind of ends, with little guidance as to how to move forward with reading instruction. Depending on your philosophy and whatever else, it may be fine. Lots of people like it; it was recommended to me by a veteran homeschooler. Just wanted to point out YMMV.

Somebody somewhere on these forums mentioned http://www.letteroftheweek.com/Preparatory.html. It is pretty simple - you still need to do some prep in terms of ordering books from the library, but that's about it. There are links here and there to coloring sheets to print off. With what we've got going on right now, I order about five of the books listed, and perhaps some others based on the color or other theme of the week, and I go through them with our 2 and 4 yo at the same time. It usually takes me a week and a half or two to get through them. It is reinforcement for the 4yo and the 2yo is learning a surprising amount in terms of letter recognition. And it is super relaxed. I like it because all the planning is done by someone other than me. ;-)

As you can see from my signature, we use a mish-mash of things, too. What we do now does not look like what I envisioned two years ago, which is fine. I have found things that work better for us. I second the pp who have said, Expect things to change -- because they will. I hope you have great experience!

We began with MUS because it was recommended in WTM, as well as from a veteran homeschooler I know. It didn't work for us. Dd was able to do the pages quickly, getting very few problems wrong, but did not come out with understanding why she was carrying 10s in addition. I spent several months trying to shore up her addition facts because she was not solid on them. It took me awhile to settle on MEP, and we worked through it rather slowly, spending about 30 minutes per day. I now break it up into two 20 minute segments per day. Technically, we are about 1/2 a year "behind", but dd's grasp of mathematical concepts is a good deal stronger now, and she is able to apply those things to new problems. I would highly recommend taking a closer look at it.