Get The Sentence Family from St. Michael School. It's FUN and you could easily finish it in 6 weeks. And it is written for 4th grade.

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I have your same reservations. What I did was buy All Things Fun and Fascinating by Lori Vergstrom (it's an IEW product). It's only $29 at cbd and you really get all the good parts of IEW, it seems to me. It's not particularly teacher-intensive or student-intensive (unless you treat it that way, I guess). It's gentle, but high quality. Down the road, I may fork over all that money and watch the videos, but for now that one book is stellar! No videos needed, no teacher guide. And I will definitely explore some of their other book options in future years (we are 4th/5th grade right now) rather than buy the SWIs. It's too expensive. I can't bring myself to do it, and now with their other $29 and $49 book options out, I don't think I have to. Yea!

Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Handwriting without Tears doesn't actually put the Grade on the actual book, so even though it might mention a recommended grade on the website, you could use any book you think would work for your dc. I believe the "5th grade" book is Can-Do Cursive and you would probably want to look at the sample pages to see if that would work or if you should get a different level. I also want to recommend, if you haven't done so already, that you have your kids learn to type. There are some great typing programs out there for kids. We used a Spongebob one, but I know there are some fun free ones on-line, too, somewhere. For some kids, the physical act of writing is just rather torturous to them, and typing is much better. They should still have to do some minimal handwriting practice every day, IMO, but for writing assignments and things, they should be permitted to type if they would prefer that. As I'm re-reading your post, you might want to try Handwriting without tears for your younger one, too. Be sure to read their philosophy on how to teach it, too. It's enlightening and makes a lot of sense! Plus their wet-dry-try technique is fun for the kids as they learn. HTH!

I would definitely pick Castle Diary over Door in the Wall. In fact, there is a full-color illustrated version of Castle Diary that I would highly recommend. Text by Richard Platt, illustrations by Chris Riddell. By Candlewick Press. It's wonderful, and the visuals are so helpful and fun! There is a Great Illustrated Classics version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. (It says Howard Pyle on the cover, but it has been adapted to about a 4th grade reading level by Joshua E. Hanft.) It's great! We love Illustrated Classics at our house. The illustrations are black and white, but plentiful. Robin Hood: I would imagine there is a Great Illustrated Classic version of Robin Hood, but I don't own it. I DO own and recommend a graphic novel Robin Hood by Aaron Shepard (published by Stone Arch). I also like the Dorling Kindersley Classics book called Robin Hood by Neil Philip (full color illustrations). I KNOW the graphic novel would be an easy enough read. I think the DK book also would be, as would be any illustrated classic version of Robin Hood. I'm not familiar with the other books you mentioned. HTH!

MIT open courseware has some basic computer classes (as well as not so basic)

Christian Liberty Press has A Child's Story of America, which is very nice, if a bit... hmmm... romanticized (and then the end about very modern times is very political but you could skip that part). But for the age of your oldest, would be very nice read aloud together. It starts with Columbus and the Vikings and goes to present-day.

Christian Liberty Press has some good quality, inexpensive resources. They are also having a great sale right now. You could buy an entire PreK kit for $87 or Kinder kit for $132, or you could pick and choose which books to use for much less. I know that as a newbie, it can be helpful to have a grade-level kit.

My dd (10) must read 30 minutes a day from a book of her choosing off of a shelf of books of my choosing. They are grade-level books which include illustrated classics (Great Illustrated Classics, which are basically the classic literature adapted to a 4th or so grade reading level), and other good children's books like Charlotte's Web, The Secret of Nimh, Encyclopedia Brown, etc. I also throw in grade level books that I remember loving as a child, like The Great Brain series and Cherry Ames Nurse series. On her own time, I do not restrict her reading, other than appropriate-ness, in a similar manner to how I restrict what movies she's allowed to watch (nothing above PG at this point). HTH!

I love Mosdos Press Literature. The Student text is really the only necessary part, but if your dc enjoys workbooks, they have one that accompanies the text. There is a teacher guide, but I don't think it's necessary.

I used both SOTW and CHOW, and I have to say that I think they are both pretty advanced for grade 1. SOTW is wonderful, but it contains so much information, that I just think you have to race through it too fast to cover it all in a year and forget retension, especially at such a young age. I had switched to CHOW because it seemed like a slower pace, but my dd couldn't understand some of the archaic language and wording. We ended up ditching both, and we now use Usborne's First Encyclopedia of History as a spine to give me chronological unit topics, and I get picture books or graphic history novels or use History Dudes or Horrible Histories to cover those unit topics. For instance, this-coming school year, we will cover Ming China, Russian Rulers, Samurai Japan, and Colonial America. We're sort of in the 1600s-ish right now.

Well, you could buy a bunch of shaped, colorful notepads and Classic Accents from the Teacher Store, each a different one to represent a different genre. And as you read whatever you read, have your dc choose which genre and therefore which cute shape and write the title on the shape. Does that make sense? We do something similar for literary elements. We write the setting on a globe notepad and the conflict on a red flag and the beginning, middle, and end on a train engine, car, and caboose. The author is on a pencil notepad, theme or main idea is on a light bulb, etc. Do you see what I mean? Something like that, only for the genres.

Biblical greek 4 kids looks really good! We used Papaloizos Greek this year started in Spring so only learned the alphabet and a few words), supplemented by Hey Andrew since Papaloizos is modern greek and we want Biblical, but it doesn't matter too much in the alphabet-learning stage. We will be switching to Biblical Greek 4 Kids in the fall. They only have one book out so far, with alphabet, blends, and short words I believe, but more are coming soon.

Language Smarts by Critical Thinking Company is very colorful and fun! (for grammar) I don't think I've seen colorful and fun spelling books anywhere. Maybe A Reason for Spelling?

My dd (10) finds writing by hand to be torture, for the most part. I require one handwriting assignment (Reason for Handwriting) and that's mostly it as far as by hand. She types most anything else that needs to be written, although we do a lot outloud. We used Spongebob Squarepants Typing (says it is for grades 1-3 but that would have to be some amazingly talented children!). I did have to advance her through some of the levels at times because she would stall and not advance due to speed. But she has all her letters and numbers and such down now, with the correct fingers, and she still types faster than she writes. She types her daily copywork. She types her occasional composition assignment. (All Things Fun and Fascinating by IEW is great for 4th grade!). Hope this helps!

I can tell you why I chose the Standards edition, instead of the US edition. Standards is full-color in the textbooks through all levels. My dd needs full-color. US edition stops being full-color by level 3.

The Sentence Family is a really fun curriculum for 4th grade. St. Michael School publishes it. While we were doing it, grammar was my dd's favorite subject!

My dd (and all the neighbor children) love our tetherball game! School Specialty carries it, and locally you could possibly pick it up from Toys R Us, Academy or Target.

My visual/spatial dd really enjoyed The Sentence Family (St. Michael School publisher) for grammar. While we were doing it, grammar was her favorite subject! For tactile, I have seen some Montessori resources that sound awesome! although I think you have to make them yourself? All the parts of speech have a symbol and a color (these you could buy), and like for adjective, you put different things in a box, like soft fabric for "soft" and hard things for "hard" and smooth things for "smooth" and stuff like that. Haven't tried it myself as my dd is not particularly tactile. We also just hit upon diagramming as THE key to her understanding of sentence structure. I am using Mary Daly's Whole Book of Diagrams with her. It gives that big picture view that visual/spatials need, plus it's visual. Plus she can draw the diagram, so I guess that's kind of tactile? Best of luck!

This is what worked for my 9 year old: Spend a week or two on each part of speech. During that week, read the Grammar Tale (published by Scholastic. Get them from Scholastic, Amazon, or possibly your local teacher store. "The Noun Hound" "The Planet without Pronouns" etc.), read the Parts of Speech Tale (also by Scholastic), watch the Schoolhouse Rock video for that part of speech, read the book by Brian Cleary (What is a verb? What is an adjective? etc. I believe Scholastic also publishes those.) Buy the cheap charts for each part of speech from the teacher store... the ones that have picture examples of them. Like 20 pictures of nouns. etc. Super Duper Publications makes "fun decks" for every part of speech that have pictures of them. Edupress has photo cards of prepositions, action words, etc. Give your child visual images to put in her head for every part of speech. If you do worksheets, color code them. Decide on what color nouns will be, for instance, and forever more, use that color to underline or circle or fill in the blank for nouns (we use colored pencils when doing grammar worksheets). Pick a different color for every part of speech. By the way, my dd hated R&S Grammar and said it was invented to torture children. So, although I liked it and thought it was thorough, it just didn't work for her at all. Honor your child's learning style. They know when something doesn't work for them.

For history, we LOVE the comic book style history. Timberdoodle.com has a lot, and Capstone Press makes a ton. I got Capstone's catalog to see what they have, and then just order them from Amazon, because it's way cheaper. They publish graphic nonfiction for tons of biographies, US History, World History, Inventions, all kinds of stuff. They also have science comic books starring Max Axiom. chestercomix.com also has some good comic books. They are all elementary age-appropriate, too, UNLIKE the Cartoon History of the Universe stuff, which is pretty irreverent and completely inappropriate for elementary kids. Oh, History Dudes is also great! They have a book on Vikings and a book on Ancient Egypt. My dd draws a picture of something she read about that day in history and writes a caption, and we hang it up on the timeline we have on our wall.

We like Minimus for Latin. Has cartoon-style story. We tried Prima Latina, and that only worked when we totally departed from the program, and I had her make full-color flashcard illustrations for every word and its meaning. Very cumbersome. Minimus is more fun!