I am planning on using Art Tango next year, thanks to Farrar's suggestion on another thread. My oldest has been through ps, and the projects look like the sort of projects he did. I love that it has everything laid out and is age appropriate.

:iagree: It's hard to believe, but it's true. The end of the year assessment is exactly one sentence long.

Ultimately, I suppose it depends on how much of a priority spelling is for you. We skip the tiles. So far we are almost finished with Level 2, which dd, like a lot of kids, has been flying through. What I do right now is present the initial lesson to her, along with the spelling list. That takes about 15 minutes. The next day, I dictate the list to her, along with two phrases and one sentence. That *might* take ten minutes. If she spells the list perfectly two days in a row, we move on to the next lesson. Generally, I think AAS lessons are just the right length.

Thanks for the heads up!

AAS has been enormously helpful for my dd who is a terrible speller, although a strong reader. We gave up on the tiles near the start of AAS 2. As pp have said, we just do everything on the white board. She mostly retains what she has learned, even when writing for other subjects. She retained absolutely nothing after getting through Spelling Workout A.

I second The Kids' Nature Book: 365 Indoor/Outdoor Activities and Experiences. It is the basis for our nature studies.

I was thinking about you today when I was listening to Pam Barnhill's Your Morning Basket. She interviewed a mom who has six kids 9yo and under. What she does with them is morning time for about 15 minutes at a time, and does that periodically throughout the day. It was an eye-opener for me -- my littles can be ok on their own for 20, maybe 30 minutes before things start getting loud and messy, but I can see perhaps that might not happen as often if they knew they would have my attention at set points in the day. It's an approach I haven't come across before. If you can find time to listen, it might give you a new perspective as it did for me.

What I find disturbing is when people put all sorts of labels on things without taking the time to try to understand the context. For me, I am more sensitive when this happens to people who lived in the past, because I am weird like that. They're dead and are unable to defend themselves. But it happens everywhere in politics in the United States. If you put a label on a person, then it's as though you don't have to listen to them if they're not of your tribe.

Yes. I remember having a discussion with a friend 25 years ago. He was trying to convince me that every single person who lived in the 19th century was a racist and everything every single person said, thought, did, wrote and drew was racist. Everything from not the period we were living in was racist. It was crazy.

I was inspired to homeschool because of WTM. So for 1st grade, we did WWE 1. As I started planning for 2nd grade, I started thinking I should be doing something more with writing instead of ignoring it until kids are 10. So I got into the whole writing workshop premise, a la Lucy Calkins. Her books are all about classroom teaching and mostly for kids in K and 1, not 2nd. I had a really hard time applying what she said, and I had a hard time applying rubrics to dd writing and guiding her. I didn't like it at all. So, I got WriteShop and dd hated it. So, we are back to copywork through ELTL. I have given up on original or creative writing entirely at this point and am trusting that copywork accomplishes something in the long run.

Scholastic's stuff is in keeping with what I consider reasonable expectations for grade levels. I'm assuming it would also be aligned with Common Core. Shurley English has a writing component that has 1st graders writing essays. Personally, I think their standards are ludicrous and the writing samples boring, but it is a curriculum that seems to fit your criteria, though I don't know how it lines up with Common Core.

I don't know if I would call it open and go....I find it really helps to read over the lesson beforehand. That said, there is generally not a lot of prep you need to do aside from that. I have read the TM off my laptop, so I don't think you HAVE to print them out, though some people might find that helpful. I don't know if there is a placement test. I just had dd do every four worksheets (pgs. 4, 8, 12, etc) without the teaching bit until she got to a point where she was having difficulty with the problems. At first she rated them easy, and as we got farther on she said they were just right and after doing 3 pages after she said that, they started getting hard for her. I went back two weeks and starting using the TM from that point.

:grouphug: You have tried almost everything I've seen suggested. Don't you hate that that whole filling up the love tank on the littles first doesn't work for you like everyone says it should? There are points in time where I've said "The kitchen is open!" for 30 minutes and then I give them a 15 minute heads up and then, "The kitchen is CLOSED!" for the next 1.5 hours. Snacks can kill a homeschool day. But mostly I've resigned myself to that is just how it is right now and it will get better eventually.

I map out the whole year on a spreadsheet. Weeks of school to the left, subjects across the top. I do not preplan math or spelling, because I expect to have bumps in those subjects and I am more concerned about mastery than anything else there, so I don't care as much about where we end up, though the hope is that we move along at a reasonable pace. The subjects that do get mapped out are History, since we use SOTW and there are 42 Chapters, so I figure out what weeks we will double up on chapters. I also map out what read alouds will go roughly with our History. I put in what Health units I want to cover for each quarter. Science and Memory work goes there, too. This is not a hard and fast plan, just something for me to look at when I do weekly planning and every quarter to see where we are, and if we need to speed up a little. I do my weekly lesson plans on a paper spreadsheet I made.

What worked: AAS - Yay! Dd is retaining how to break up syllables and rules and can even apply what she's learned to other writing assignments, even though we discovered last year that she is most definitely not a "natural speller." ELTL2 - Dd, who is still resistant to the act of writing, takes to the copywork here better than WWE. I think it might be because the space to copy is directly below the sample instead of having the sample all at the top of the page. I also really appreciate the pace at which grammar topics are introduced - not too much at one time, but faster than some others we have tried. I like that this curriculum incorporates poetry and picture study as well, because I have been horrible at doing picture study during morning time. Drawing for Better Penmanship - Dd really likes this for cursive practice. BFSU - It took me about a year and a half to get a handle on presenting lessons, but I am managing to get a lesson done per week and we might almost finish Vol. 1 so we can go on to a more relaxed schedule next year for Vol. 2. The Jury Is Still Out... MEP - After quitting MUS and floundering with facts for a bit, we have found the place in Year 2 where the lessons are just right for her. We are spending 40-60 minutes a day on math now - I've gotten to where I stop after 30 minutes and come back to finish later. She is not complaining about it too much, and she is making progress. We just haven't been doing it long enough yet for me to make an informed judgement. What Did Not Work MUS - Dd would whip through a worksheet in 5-10 minutes, get nearly everything right and not understand the concepts behind what she was doing. Lucy Calkins - I totally bought into her writing workshop thing and just could not implement it and she did not have materials that spoke directly to where my child was at. WriteShop - This looked more doable to me, but dd hated it. Doing the Job SSL 2 - We are going through this more slowly, with the hopes that she will have better retention, but it is not happening as often as it probably should. SOTW 2 - Getting through the book okay, but is it me, or are the projects not as appealing as in SOTW 1? Joy of Handwriting Cursive - Dd has learned how to write in cursive. One thing I did last year, but for some reason I did not do this year but wish I had, was to write down a weekly review of how she was doing, where she had progressed, and what things were a challenge for her. I definitely intend to do that for next year.

We are studying Mozart's Magic Flute, too! I found this book at the library. Perhaps it would be helpful in picking out an opera. There is a section in the back that describes the plots of a bunch of operas. I haven't listened to it, but Pavarotti has an opera CD for kids that may also be helpful in giving you some direction.

I had the same sorts of issues that you did with MUS, and we are going with MEP. It is spiral compared to MUS. It has lesson plans written out, though not exactly scripted. It is not quite open and go, as I find I need to read them over the night before. It might not be as easy as what you are looking for, but it is a lot less expensive than Right Start.

Geronimo Stilton?

If you have the cards and the TM, you really don't need anything else. My dd isn't interested in the tiles. I do all examples on the whiteboard. Dd does all her spelling on the whiteboard, too. Somehow that is more acceptable to her than writing on paper, which she is often resistant to, depending on her mood.

I don't know what Sequential Spelling is like, but dd breezed through Spelling Workout without understanding a thing. She's a strong reader, but a terrible speller. AAS has been extremely helpful for her. The only thing is, we can't ever take a significant break from it, or she loses almost everything she's learned. Lots of people on the forum do not start spelling with a child until they have finished a phonics program.

I have purchased things from Lulu, but only because the curriculum site sent me there. I don't go there to look for anything. I will search currclick and TPT if I am looking for something to supplement a topic we are working on.

Similar to HomeAgain, we do a four day week of full-on school, and on Fridays we have a lighter day with longer math games, spelling games, and other projects.

I have dealt with Civil Service and that is all it is. They have their requirements, all you have to do is figure out how what you do fits within those requirements. It's all about how it looks on paper.

EZ got the job done at our house, and I had dd read easy readers from the library in conjunction with doing the lessons (almost daily) and she ended up with the ability to read at a late 2nd grade - early 3rd grade level, but her comfort level was with Henry and Mudge books. My daughter learned to read with this program in K, but I didn't like it because I had no clue what to do formally with her after that, so I just let her read and tried to nudge her towards slightly more difficult books. I will be using something else with her siblings.

Fwiw, we haven't used AAR, but have used AAS and don't use the tiles at all, because dd doesn't care for them. Instead of using the tiles, I just write out the examples on the white board. Perhaps AAR can work without tiles as well.