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Maria B.
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| Posted: May 23 2008 at 9:40am | IP Logged
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Cay, will you be offering the Shakespeare again next year?!
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Maria in VA
Proud Mom to 10 Great kids!
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domchurch3
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Location: Texas
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| Posted: May 23 2008 at 10:18pm | IP Logged
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Best: Core B and K read-alouds from Sonlight
Your Big Backyard Magazine and Berenstain Bear's Big Book of Science and Nature for Science.
A few Five In A Row books added to the mix.
Handwriting Without Tears. Seriously, we breezed through this without her having any trouble with reversals.
Worst: Phonics Pathways recommended by the Well-Trained Mind. Boring!!! It's the one thing in our homeschool day that we both have to offer up.
Sonlight's Grade 1 Language Arts Instructor's Guides. I was so overwhelmed, I had to toss it out almost immediately.
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Maryan
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Best: Moira Farrell's albums and stories (Real Learning list, Catholic Mosaic, and Mater Amabilis suggestions). The only book that we haven't loved so far is Cinderella (it's a boy thing I suspect).
Worst: Hmm... not being able to figure out a way to get more stories into our day. The serene picture of mama nursing while she reads stories with her boys snuggling on the couch didn't happen.... at all. It's anything but serene. At least one of the boys (20 mo.) needs to be napping for storytime to have any success. Then it's serene.
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Maryan
Mom to 6 boys & 1 girl: JP('01), B ('03), M('05), L('06), Ph ('08), M ('10), James born 5/1/12
A Lee in the Woudes
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Angie Mc
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Best: Following the liturgical year/Catholic Mosaic, our liturgical shelf (book shelf unit with corkboard hanging on wall above it,) MUS, Living Books, revisitng favorite picture books with JP, starfall.com (8yo,) the Teaching Company, music lessons, more movies/DVDs
Not quite: Somehow dropped tea time, not as many rabbit trails, less read-aloud as a whole family, the Latin II class for dd, more time in the van (need more ed. CDs and less sports channel  )
Thanks for sharing. I really want to keep things simple and am always eager to find new insights to accomplish simplicity...not so simple  .
Love,
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Angie Mc
Maimeo to Henry! Dave's wife, mom to Mrs. Devin+Michael Pope, Aiden 20,Ian 17,John Paul 11,Catherine (heaven 6/07)
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knowloveserve
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Best: Birding journaling, with great help from this website: http://identify.whatbird.com/mwg/_/0/attrs.aspx, weekly library trips, liturgical activities, esp. Jesse Tree. Tons and tons of reading.
Worst: Teach your child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Blech! Talk about a boring killjoy. We ditched it after 12 days.
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Ellie
The Bleeding Pelican
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Leslie
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Location: Virginia
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Best: Pulling our oldest out of Kindergarten and calling ourselves homeschoolers!
Worst: I have to agree with Teach your child to Read in 100 East Lessons. And, being overwhelmed with too many good ideas :D
Leslie
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Leslie
Mom to Kyler 6, Maddie 4, & Lucas 2
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mooreboyz
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We've added so many new things this year thanks to this forum that it's hard to choose the best.
This Forum wins the gold medal 
Other great things include:
1.Easy Grammar...my boys finally really learned and understood grammar. The learning prepositions first approach is wonderful and works!
2.Montessori Great Lessons...we did the first two and we had so much fun and learned a great deal.
3.Singapore Math...This was our first year using this and we all liked it. My boys do a lot of math in their heads and this program works with that.
4.Montessori type lessons
5.Lapbooking/notebooking
6.Piano lessons...our 11, 9, and 6 yr olds all took lessons this year and made huge strides.
7.Year long Biome discovery I created. Each month we took a different biome and learned about plants, animals, soil, history, people, etc. I used lots of living books and hands on learning. They learned tons. I plan to outline it for this forum sometime this summer.
Worst:
Really hard to think of anything that didn't work this year. If I had to choose something it would be handwriting without tears. While I really love the approach and use some of the lessons like Magic C to start the rounded letters, I just didn't find there to be enough practice for my guys. They have awful penmanship and this just didn't do it for us. They loved it because the lessons were short and they would get up early and race through page after page and declare they were "done" for the week. I ended up half way through the year letting them just have fun with the workbooks and I began copywork for the boys and got really tough on it (had hubby do the grading). This is the only way that they will take their time to write neatly. We're still struggling with it. I have seen my oldest who had awful writing at first start writing beautifully when he turned 10 just out of the blue. So, I'm hoping the others will follow suit.
Jackie
5 boys 1,3,6,9, 11
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Cay Gibson
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| Posted: July 25 2008 at 1:51pm | IP Logged
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Maria B. wrote:
| Cay, will you be offering the Shakespeare again next year?! |
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Maria,
I didn't purposely ignore your question. I really meant to be back to it. I've been asked offline as well if we would do Shakespeare again this year and I keep answering "I don't know."
Linda gives me way too much credit here.
But, since I've been asked by several people, I went ahead a posted on it here. I was really hoping that in typing it out I'd answer my own discernment but I really have too many eggs in my basket right now and I think it would be unwise of me to teach this year.
But then...I always get these ideas and want to see if they work IRL as well as they work on paper and that means I have to go out of my comfort zone and experiment with it. 
My 15 yr old and I will be reading through ... oh, never mind, that's another post in and of itself.
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Cay Gibson
"There are 49 states, then there is Louisiana." ~ Chef Emeril
wife to Mark '86
mom to 5
Cajun Cottage Under the Oaks
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Kristie 4
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| Posted: July 25 2008 at 10:42pm | IP Logged
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Jackie...did you write up anything about your biome study? (intrigued over here )
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Kristie in Canada
Mom to 3 boys and one spunky princess!!
A Walk in the Woods
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Maria B.
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| Posted: July 25 2008 at 11:01pm | IP Logged
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Cay, thanks so much for remembering my question! I completely understand. God bless you!
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Maria in VA
Proud Mom to 10 Great kids!
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4Real Forums : Living Learning
Topic: School year's best and worst
