Hi Annette, Why not give All About Spelling a try? It's a very thorough Orton-Gillingham researched program that helps with all the issues you mentioned, and it's perfect for the ages of the kids you're talking about. The whole shebang will cost about $250 but you don't have to buy it all at once. I...

Your child is still kind of young for this product, but it may be helpful for you: "Write Now" by Getty and Dubay It has a bunch of neat "testimonial" type letters written by doctors (before and after). It's helped us a lot. Other than that, our neat find is "Educational Fontware," which allows us t...

Chris, cool list! thanks for sharing! just for the benefit of those new to the forum..... part of what you are doing is helping your 9th grade use ECC at high school level in order to meet specific needs in his learning and with his special learning needs. Thought that might be helpful to know that...

Hi folks, I wrote out a list of literature titles for an older student week by week. You're welcome to it. I don't think anything here is on the book basket list, but I listed the 7/8 package books. We need to do one read aloud a week or Andrew gets things too mixed up. So here's my list, with the E...

Hi Debbie, Evaluating Writing is a nice book to have, but not necessary. It's more important that you have some kind of grading rubric that you use ... and you'll tweak that rubric as each child grows and matures in their writing. Do a search over at the Glencoe website. They have a lot of different...

I gave up making the cards after a few weeks, raised the white flag, and bought the pre-made set which comes in its own neat and tidy box, like a gift card box. Remember that old adage ... choose only one options ... cheap and fast won't be good, good and cheap won't be fast, fast and good won't be ...

Here's another 2 cents for doing ECC. Think of geography as the stage of history. Without a good understanding of all that geography encompasses, a lot of history is lost. Consider it this way, how many books have you read where the setting wasn't important in some way to the story? History is God's...

We're getting ready to start ECC the week after we get our oldest settled in his dorm room. I made a "Geography" binder for my son with 8 tabs -- one for the world, and one for each continent. I put the student pages behind each tab, ripped all the sheets out of the WG book and filed them behind eac...

When we were getting ready for Matt to start high school, I did a search for all the "Great Books" lists out there -- and there are a ton of them. I printed the lists out and set to work with a pen and paper and made one list that I thought was a good representation of the things we wanted our son t...

Hello everyone! I am still trying to decide how to do Language Arts with my son this year in 4th grade. He is dyslexic/dysgraphic and is coming along with writing and spelling, but it's been slow. For those of you that don't know dysgraphia is another word for a writing disability. Handwriting has ...

I will add the author Gene Stratton-Porter to the list since most people have never heard of her. Great writer. Sort of contemporary to Lucy Maude Montgomery (Green Gables). I have WAY too many favorite stories to list them all right now but I suggest you google Christine Miller's "1000 Good Books" ...

I'm not exactly sure how to word this question. This will be my first full year with MFW. I have 1st, but just started it about a month ago. In Aug or Sep, I will be starting ECC with my dd 9 and a student from another family who is about 12 (M), 6th grade age but doing 4th or 5th grade level work....

I have gone through all the school supplies - my goodness, how did we get so many crayons???). Amanda, Crayons are like books, which are like rabbits -- they multiply when you turn the lights out at night! But seriously, I think we end up with so many crayons because there's just something special ...

Prep? I wished you hadn't mentioned the word. Not that it has not been constantly on my mind the last few weeks. I am trying to prep in more ways than one. We are expecting baby boy #4 due mid-Sept.. I am having to prep for new baby and school, and I am feeling pretty overwhelmed. I have bins and b...

I don't think of fourth graders as being in the "advanced" category. The World Geography book is really for grades 6 to 8, but to think that a 4th grader could do that, no way, even if she is advanced for her age. Think about what most 9 or 10 year olds are doing. They aren't yet into puberty, so th...

Welcome, Kate, I could give you lists and lists of good ideas but the thing that I most want to convey to you is for you to enjoy the journey! This is a very special time, and your children are all very young, enjoy them. Remember to stop and smell the roses. Don't plow through "school" lessons just...

I know that newbies really sweat the small stuff as far as this goes, but I gotta say that in all the years HSing, we've averaged 220 days and many more hours than the law requires by simply keeping track of the learning we do each and every day. I don't count each and every minute, and I do tend to...

Do you have your children recite The Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not (if you don't mind sharing)? Nope, but we say it at Scouts. I've been thinking about it somewhat since reading an old article in Homeschool Digest though. Do you school morning or afternoon.....or both? Both. I have kids all o...

Thanks Julie & Crystal for "permission" to think outside the box on this whole thing. I'll give you some more background on this boy. He's 14 and a half now, puberty is moving, slowly, but moving. He was 12 before the blending of sounds into words finally "clicked" for him. Mostly, Andrew forgets th...

I wish I could ease your concerns. All I can do is explain where we're coming from. I loved core 400 with ds17. I had done Omnibus with him for high school up to that point and I really wanted that boy to major on the American aspect for a whole year. But, I have to add that I wanted core 400 from t...

Hi Jennifer, You've already been given some great ideas. Some kids really do need to move around in order to be able to listen effectively. I know it annoys me to no end, but I can tell you that at my house, one child can't seem to hear without doodling, another can't remember things if he isn't bui...

I found a great series of books -- the How Did It Get Here series. I bought a few of them, Biography of Bananas, Biography of Coffee, Biography of Wheat, etc. They're nicely done, the pages are glossy, color photos throughout, the text isn't babyish or boring, yet it's still easy to read. Instead of...

Thanks for the clarification everyone. I went back to the manual to check the weeks out more fully and see that we will begin a new continent (Africa) on Week 17 so I'm thinking that would be ideal for resuming lessons in January. So I'll just count backwards from that week to arrive at an ECC start...

Hi Michele, I probably shouldn't answer this question since I have not yet started using MFW. What I can offer you though is a comparison to another program through what we did for my oldest son and how we wrestled through deciding what to do for our second son. We too loved TWTM. It came out when w...

Just thought I'd let y'all know what I gave up on my idea to look over everything at CHAP and make my decision later on. Instead, I hit the "checkout" key last night and can't wait! Thanks for all your help deciding how this would work for us. I'm excited for the changes afoot in our home. (more on ...