It sounds like you're giving her what she needs: a structured writing program and plenty of time to write. If you want to challenge her, you could skip ahead in one program to the point where she is being challenged. In the long run, spending a shorter amount of time on a more advanced program that gently stretches her may be better than spending more time working through two writing programs that are both kind of easy for her. One thing you could add in is a poetry writing program. If she can express herself poetically, those skills will eventually carry over and add sparkle to her essays and stories.

I personally think that making room for for the content subjects is important but I also believe it doesn't have to be done in big blocks of time to be effective either. Rethinking how you do history and science Reading five minutes a day from a well written children's biography about George Washington and then spending a couple of minutes talking about the reading and then pointing out Virginia (or Great Britain or the Delaware River) on a globe is an effective lesson in history and geography for a seven year old. If you do that every day for a week, you have spent the same amount of time as on a once-a-week 60 minute long history lesson with the reading and narration and mapwork and activity and adding to a timeline and whatever else makes up that lesson in the history program that you are using. I also notice that my kids remember more about a topic when we spend a little time on it every day for a week than if I try to do all of the little things in one longer block of time.

I think that you would be fine skipping Narrative 2. Both Chriea (Book 4) and Refutation and Confirmation (Book 5) focus on essay writing. If your child is a confident writer, you could probably skip all the way to Book 5.

For our charter school, we have to turn in math, language arts, and writing samples in addition to an attendance log and a PE log. No grades. For myself, even though I don't have to keep records of work for my state, at the end of each year I pull out a few samples and staple them together for each child and shove them in a box. I also keep a record of the curriculum we used and milestones each child achieved. Each year, I do the San Diego Quick Assessment to get a gauge on each kid's reading level progress and save that, too. I keep things like their journals to show their writing progress. Also, I have an Instagram account just for pictures of our homeschool projects and field trips, and as a mini diary of our days. I keep these records mainly for myself and I figure that they are good to have in case some day an "official" person comes knocking at my door to ask what we've been doing all these years.

Check out Christopher Hart's drawing books. He has books for all levels and styles of drawing. Most are step by step, but he explains the process, too. So it is more than a copy this type of book. His figure drawing books help unravel the mystery of how to draw people and have them look real. Our library carries a lot of his books. Artistic Pursuits Middle Grades Book One has lessons for drawing and open ended projects to practice a technique at a time. It is definitely not a copy this type of book. My best advice for drawing came from my grandpa when I was drawing a woodland scene in front of me with triangle shaped trees. He told me to draw what I see and he pointed out the shape of the trees and the pine needles. I started practicing drawing what I saw from a reference and turned into a pretty good sketcher without any other formal training.

Typically, our days at home looks like this: 8:30 I read a Bible story, we say the Lord's Prayer or Apostle's Creed (our memory work for this half of the year). Then I read a picture book that has to do with our science or history or literature topics. Or I read a fairy tale or folk tale. I read a chapter from our history book and the kids narrate. Everyone has silly putty or a handwriting page or a blank paper to draw on. This takes 30-40 minutes. 9:15 My son does a few pages in Writing and Rhetoric or writes in his journal and does a spelling or grammar exercise while the younger kids play then he goes to his room to do his independent reading. My daughter reads to me while he is in his room. She sometimes practices letters. Everyone has a break when they are done. I send them outside for a short recess. 10:15 Everyone gets a snack and we do math at the table. I do my son's math lesson while my daughter does ST Math on the computer. When he's ready to work independently, I do my daughter's math lesson After math my son does typing and duolingo. Then he finishes up any reading he didn't do earlier. When everyone is done, I send them outside while I make lunch. 12:00 is lunch. After lunch we bring our science books or art materials outside for a science lesson or art project if the weather is OK. Otherwise we work inside After that we either walk to the park or library or run errands. On Fridays everyone pitches in to clean up the house. Sometimes a friend comes by to play. Otherwise the kids have free time to play Legos, draw, read, or play outside. 4:30 If they aren't outside playing with the neighbors, the kids tidy up their things and then they can play Minecraft or watch a show while I make dinner. When I have knives and hot pans, I like for them to be occupied with their screens. That just makes sense to me. :lol: After dinner, I read more stories or my husband takes them outside to shoot hoops or go on a bike ride.

You do make a chart for them. I used a poster board from the Dollar Tree and cut it in half so I could make two 8s that were the right size. Draw the sideways 8 for them and the vertical line down the middle in black marker so they have lines to follow. Fill up most of the paper. I used one chart for a week before throwing it away. Post the paper on the wall or window so that when your kids hold their arm out, their arm is parallel to the ground. They should also be centered straight in front of the paper. (Tip: put the paper on a sliding glass window so they don't accidentally draw on the wall! Glass is much easier to clean!) At first, have them trace the 8 by starting in the middle and going Northwest first then looping down and around the other side to complete the 8. Once they get the hang of the 8 add in the lowercase a Basically, they will do the 8 three times then when they get to the middle, they will bring their pencil straight up the vertical line, then down, then they will loop around the left loop of the 8 to finish the a. when they get back to the middle, they will do the 8 three times and then they will go up and down the vertical line again and loop around the right side of the 8 to finish the b. For the c, they will skip the vertical line and just loop around the left side. Some of the key things to remember are to practice the 8 until they are comfortable with it then add in one letter at a time until it is automatic enough to add in to the next one. Never pick up the pencil or crayon unless dotting an i or j or crossing a t or f. When they do the exercise in its entirety the pattern is three 8s, a, three 8s, b, three 8s, c, and so on. It will take a while until they build up the endurance to do the whole alphabet. After they do know the alphabet, you can have them spell their names or their spelling words to mix it up a little.

We use graph paper. I tell my son to put one number or symbol per square. The biggest sized grid I could find was 4 squares per inch, and that is working fine for him. It took a little while to get the hang of it, but once he did, it helped a lot. It actually worked so well that I'm thinking of switching all of his other writing over to graph paper. I may even copy his workbook pages onto graph paper, which is saying a lot because I hate making copies! PS I'm going to have to check out the Mod Math app more in depth. It looks very useful!

I'm planning on doing a year long study of "World Cultures and Geography" when we hit that point in history, but I'd let my oldest son continue his history cycle with independent reading. That should be enough to provide context for my younger children's study of modern world history later in their education, but it would still be fun for them to learn about. I am thinking of using Give Your Child the World as a guide for choosing books from the library.

It is a very well written book with engaging stories rather than a dry textbook account. The vocabulary and writing style are excellent. Some of the themes involve courage, heroism, and hard work. My biggest complaint is that there is hardly a woman in the book. I will probably us it as a read aloud the next time we get to American History and weave in books from the Outrageous Women series to fill in the gender gap.

It sounds like your son is ready to move on to the history of the Middle Ages. History Odyssey has a very generous "try before you buy" sample for each of their curriculum. You could "try" the Middle Ages curriculum while you wait on funding, etc. I think that you would just need a copy of the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia to get started, and your library system probably has a copy. It is also a secular company, so if you like it, your charter will buy it for you. You can also get a copy of the Well Trained Mind from your library and skip to the history section and start implementing some of the suggestions there. Good luck!

Seriously, drop everything and do the Diane Craft writing 8 exercise (also called the lazy 8 and figure 8). It seems like a wonky method when you first look at it, but it really, really works. My son still had to think about how to make letters as he wrote them and then go back and fix them, just like your daughter is doing. I ended up deciding to stop looking for the perfect handwriting program to try out the writing 8, since no handwriting program or method was working. In a few weeks, he no longer had to remember how to make any of his letters, he just automatically made them. It really helped with the speed of his writing. Callirobics and Brain Gym are also supposed to be good for struggling writers, but I don't have personal experience with either. You can also look at Lexercise if you think the handwriting issues are related to dyslexia. Also, do some research on dysgraphia so you can decide if your daughter needs to be evaluated by an OT.

It Couldn't Just Happen by Lawrence O Richards

We try to hit all of the subjects every day, even if it is briefly. However, I try to balance longer lessons and shorter lessons in the more hands-on subjects. If I have a longer history lesson planned, we will do a shorter science lesson. Usually, I just read a few pages from a science text or living book and we discuss it. If I have a science lab planned, we do a shorter history lesson, which is usually just read a section and narrate. When we do a long art project, we do shorter science and history lessons.

Just because everything is important doesn't mean that it all has to be done every day. It's OK to do grammar one day and style the next. You can also focus on grammar this quarter and style the next. While they are studying style, they can be applying what they learned in grammar. It's OK to do composition two days a week and science two days a week so you can give each subject the time it needs. Keep the journal as a daily exercise, because they love it, but you can move it to the end of the day or as the last thing of the day or even before a break. That way they are free to create without you worrying about wrapping it up to get to grammar and style so you still have time for history and science and everything else. You may want to look up loop scheduling as an alternative way to schedule all of the little subjects that you want to make sure get covered.

I have the Teachers Edition for Standards 6A, just because I have charter school funds for curriculum. The Teacher Edition isn't quite like the HIG. There are way less mental math exercises and no hands on activities. It still has discussion points for the textbook and an answer key. It also has a few printables in the appendix to aid in teaching, but nothing too special. If I had to spend my own money, I probably wouldn't buy a new TE.

If money was tight, I'd find a way to buy: Singapore Math, Writing and Rhetoric, Story of the World, and a selection of good literature. For everything else, I'd be comfortable with giving my library card a workout and using free online resources.

Oh, my son is a spatial dysgraphic and he had the same resistance to graph paper. It seems to me that since the age that spatial dsygraphia becomes evident is about the same time that growth spurts and hormones and other puberty issues begin happening. Given the age, any change to accommodate dysgraphia is just really hard on top of everything else. When I finally taught him to use graph paper for math, it made a big difference. I finally convinced him to give it a try by pointing out that the types of math problems he was doing in Singapore 5A and B, I didn't do until 7th grade. I explained that 7th grade was the first year we had to buy graph paper for math class (I left out the part that we only used it for graphing). For math, you need tools and those tools include a ruler, protractor, compass, and graph paper. That's just how math is. I also told him how in college, a lot of my engineering and science major friends only used graph paper across the board. It was simply a tool for their subjects and they didn't see the need to buy a different type of paper for their English classes. Doane paper is really interesting because it has a slight grid over lined paper. It's kind of cool looking, and your daughter might respond better to it than graph paper. I find that with Singapore, if we can just get to the next topic, everything smooths right out. The other thing I do with math, when it gets too sensitive is to hand over the teacher's guide and let my son do his own correcting. I give him a red, erasable pencil and tell him that if he gets one wrong, he has to use the pencil to make the corrections he needs to make to get to the correct answer. Then he sees when he gets the wrong answer because of misalignment. And, go figure, he usually thanks me when I let him correct his own work. He likes that way better than me pointing out, so nicely, that the 8 was supposed to be under the 6 not the 4.

Keep your own journal alongside your kids. Encourage your kids to use as many senses as they can when they are in nature (except taste, usually!). We take along a small field guide specific to our area and I have the Audubon bird app on my phone. My oldest has a choice of writing a few sentences about something in nature or drawing and labeling a picture of something he needs. He's not a fan of the journaling part of nature study, but he is observant and will look up animals and plants in a nature guide and tell us about what he learned. My 5 year old likes to do leaf rubbings, trace rocks and sticks, and draw trees. She enjoys matching colors in her journal to what she sees. If we identify a bird, she likes to draw its picture copied from our field guide. My 3 year old has a notebook, too, but he usually asks me to draw a puppy for him to color in. Sometimes I let the kids take a picture of something they see to draw when they get back home. Start close to home. There's a lot to see in your backyard or at a local park. Find one place and visit it often. We have a grove of trees at the park near our house that we visit at least once a week

You may want to look at look at Center for Lit's Teaching the Classics and Reading Roadmaps for how to teach a book and literature selections. So many study guides are largely reading comprehension and vocabulary. There are a few study guides (Walking to Wisdom) by Classical Academic Press, however, that require deeper thinking, but they have just a few titles available. Moving Beyond the Page has unit study type guides that integrate language arts and other subjects. Blackbird and Co. Lit guides also seem like a good option. I like the book previews on ChristianBook.com because they show quite a bit of the book or guide that you are purchasing.

In addition to the two hours of curriculum work here are some other ideas of increasing school time without adding workbooky type activities: Increasing the free reading time to an hour is reasonable for an 11 year old, as long as you have a variety of books on hand for him to read. You can divide the time between fiction and nonfiction or approved books and free choice reading, that could also include magazines and comics. An hour of basketball or other is also reasonable. You can add on an "elective hour" where he spends time working on a skill, such as art, model building, playing chess, cooking, physics labs, computer coding, foreign language, etc... That would bring your son's educational time up to 5 hours. As far as the computer time, we have designated "screen time" at our house where the kids can play their video games or watch TV. Outside of that time (4:30-6:00) everyone knows not to ask. (We started this rule when our then 10 year old was waking up way early to play video games before breakfast. It was a bit of a struggle to find a time that works and implement the policy but having the kids' screen time coincide with my dinner/chore time was really helpful to me, too) Also, screen time cannot begin until the clutter of the day has been put away, so around 4:00 everyone starts running around cleaning the floor and the table tops.

Many of the allusions in the Magician's Nephew are to the first few chapters of Genesis in the Bible--the creation of the world and the entry of evil into the world. You can also look for allusions to Greek mythology and European fairy tales and fables which were also prominent throughout the series. Some of the creatures in Narnia are from mythology. Good luck!

Do you have the home instructor's guide? I've been teaching bar models for three years now and because the method is different than how I learned to solve word problems, I still need the HIG. I feel like I know what I'm doing at this point, but it is comforting to double check the HIG, especially for new types of word problems.

Classical Academic Press has a new program called The Well Ordered Language that looks way more interesting than any other grammar program that I have seen.

It sounds like most art classes aren't going to cut it for your daughter. In high school, you may want to find your daughter an apprenticeship. This is a good interview from the Mason Jar podcast to listen to on that topic. Until then, You probably will want to build her library of art technique books and maybe get her involved in a local art society.