A lot of us are still lurking around the forum

Nikki is now 3y4m. A brief academic report:
He can decode a lot of phonics words but is still not sight-reading and we are working through Kindergarten level Maths with ease, hoping to get to Grade 1 after Easter. He knows several songs in solfege and is getting there on reading music. We are working on pen control and letter formation. He enjoys learning Russian.

His preschool teacher assessment last week graded him in the 30-50 month group for all the social/physical skills they check but that really doesn't say much because it is such a huge age bracket. He also doesn't do clever things at preschool because he is too busy running around and playing house (they say he needs to work on his 'mark making' skills which is only because they never make him sit down and do any drawing etc.) and were surprised when I said he likes to count things 

Nothing too spectacular (by the standards of this forum, at least) 

Unschooling sounds like a lot of fun, but I can't seriously imagine leaving my son's education to the chance that he might choose to do maths instead of play computer games... I think I'll leave it for the afternoons when we've finished the day's required lessons 

Hi Manda. I am hoping it is as much stubborn refusal as lack of memory, but he has yet to read a single word without sounding out the letters individually. We did a lot of flashcard reading when he was tiny, which he enjoyed but never showed me he could actually recognise the words. We started Reading Bear in September and he very quickly got the hang of sounding out words and has very little trouble reading by sounding out all the letters in the word and putting them together - even adding new letter combinations like sh and th he's picked up almost immediately. He just hasn't ever once read a whole word without sounding it out first, or made any show of recognising any of the words he has sounded out AND seen hundreds of times as flashcards, like cat. In a two-word sentence by the time he's sounded out the second word he's 'forgotten' (or is unwilling to try and remember) what the first word said, even in silly sentences or with his own name. He doesn't even recognise his name as a whole word - he just guesses from the capital N.

I hope that by changing it round so instead of just sounding out whole words we are making words by putting the individual sounds together that it will help him make some sort of connection to reading whole words, kind of like the opposite of breaking them down to sound them out. It can't hurt to try. It is just frustrating - I hope it is just his innate hatred of being tested (that I have seen in almost every aspect of EL since birth) and that when he wants to read whole words, then he will start doing so without my help. This *is* the child who told me that asking him to practice his maths facts was "making his brain tired"    and Maths is something he really loves and finds easy... unlike reading, which is rarely fun for more than a couple of minutes at a time, even when there are no difficult words and he gets to run laps of the hall between reading each one!

Manda, do you think this will help my son read words as a whole? He loves phonics and letter sounds but is stuck at sounding out words - he can say the word once he's sounded out the letters slowly, but seems to have no memory for sight reading - even if we are reading a two-word sentence he won't be able to sight-read the first word once he's sounded out the second...

Thanks for the links Wolfwind - I tried googling yesterday after you mentioned that all you needed to know could be found online without buying the books but the best I managed to find was a general overview of the method. This has saved me a lot of time

Thanks Bella. Its always nice to speak to someone who is from the UK (or using UK materials at least!) - we seem to be such a small minority!

I've been trying to introduce some Montessori beads for 'maths play' and they are mostly ignored. I bought a set which you have to hang the beads under the number - I think he only likes them for the challenge of putting them on the hook. Montessori maths is definitely progressing too slow for him, but some of the maths bits are ok when he doesn't want my help. Mostly, he likes the materials that need fine motor skills but isn't really that bothered by them. I have though I need to be a bit stricter

I also would love the geography materials and if not for the fact that they are very expensive and we live in a small flat with no spare storage space...

Did you use the Montessori reading scheme? I haven't really looked at it, but I thought maybe I should - we know lots of letter sounds and blends but not a single sight word... perhaps the Montessori word-matching activities are what we need to recognise the shape of words as well as the sounds of letters.

You are not alone - my 3 year old is half way through reading bear and does exactly the same - absolutely no sight reading. I had hoped by simply practising over and over he would start remembering whole words but he must have decoded cat hundreds of times and still only knows it if he sounds the individual letters. I had no luck with flashcard reading when he was tiny, either.

I am doing flashcard games (eg. find the word/match word and picture) with 4-5 cards out at a time and he guesses by initial sound - he can choose between cat and bat but if there is rat and rub he will only know the answer by sounding out the words.

Sorry I can't give you any answers but at least you know it is not entirely unusual.

Anyone who has any magic answers would be much appreciated

I've just discovered that our favourite science/engineering cartoon has been translated into English and thought I'd share. I personally think it is less annoying in Russian, but that is probably because I'm not used to watching it with an American voice-over! The episodes are only 5 minutes long, perfect for little ones with short attention spans. There are nearly 50 episodes in Russian but I have no idea how quickly the translated ones will appear, there are only 3 now.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/SPpuGszvxQI&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/SPpuGszvxQI&rel=1</a>

We are doing Russian, Chinese (I'd prefer Japanese but just can't find any child-friendly resources) and I hope to start Latin once he is confident reading English. I studied Russian for years myself, so apart from lapses in grammar it is not too hard for me to at least read and encourage conversation in Russian so I'm aiming for near-native fluency for us both there. I have almost no resources that I could recommend - I am in the process of writing my own EL-friendly "textbook" to keep us on track with learning new words/reading.

Chinese, I am most worried about. I have found lots of great resources, but trying to learn a tonal language to teach my son scares me somewhat. For now I am sticking with DVD exposure (Ni Hao Kai Lan is a big hit - like Dora for Chinese) and hoping he is learning some words from the Wink to Learn sets. I'm kind of hoping to get off the hook and start him at the local Chinese Saturday school when he turns 5...

Have you looked at Muzzy. They are quite old animations but lots of people say they're great - I am pretty sure you can get them in the Library and they do Chinese and French. Little Pim is another DVD course, which we have in Chinese but can also be bought in French - It seems to cover most of the basics for kids.

I want to keep our afternoon lessons focused on one topic such as cooking, art, craft, practical science (experiments or looking at habitats/bugs etc) and perhaps foreign-language dvds. That way I don't need to spend lots of time organizing/tidying messy activities when I want to focus on book-work, and since they are pretty much all fun/easy/take as long as you want activities there shouldn't be too many complaints about 'school' in the afternoon. I'm thinking of having Montessori-style lessons available at this time, too, as free choice self-teaching activities

I agree - I was an advanced reader and looking back I can think of several books that I wasn't emotionally ready for, despite being capable of reading them. One short story I read still haunts me when I think about it - a toddler gets locked in a trunk as part of a hide-and-seek game and is only found 400 years later as a skeleton... not great for primary school reading 

It is hard, looking through book lists like Ambleside and trying to work out what is appropriate for both reading and actual ages, and none of us has time to proof read every single book on the curriculum!

I completely forgot about Singapore maths  whoops!

I know what you mean about finding time to read up on things - I am trying to concentrate on typing with my son singing the numbers 1-20 over and over in my ear...

It is actually a relief to know that there is at least one other mum in the UK with a kid who is the same age as my son who plans to homeschool with an accelerated curriculum!

Hello from the UK

I know what you mean about finding an English curriculum - I guess there just isn't the same demand for homeschool curricula here It's frustrating because I don't want my son to learn vast amounts of American history or literature, but there aren't many alternatives for a complete curriculum. I get the impression that a lot of UK homeschoolers are actually un-schoolers and thus don't need a curriculum.

Now, as to figuring out a curriculum, I would avoid the Classical styles if you don't like rote learning. I'm not a fan myself Now I can't say I've read more than a vague overview for Classical, so someone else can tell you why rote memorization is actually a good thing (or whether I've got it all wrong) but that is the impression I got and why I'm not really looking any deeper.

Likewise Robinson Curriculum focuses only on reading, writing and arithmetic - even science is left until after completing high school maths. There are lots of good books on his reading list, but it is quite restrictive in what it teaches.

It sounds like you would like Charlotte Mason as a curriculum (I will be using this as a spine, so I may be biased) - this is a rigorous book-based curriculum designed to leave the afternoons free for nature walks and outdoor play. Have a look at Amblesideonline.org - they have some good overviews of what to expect from using CM and a free curriculum which has lots of freely-available books. Apparently a lot of Americans complain that there are too many English books and the English people complain it is too American  It is a good place to go to get a general idea - I do plan to substitute a lot of the US history/literature with UK history/children's classics. The Yesterday's Classics collection of books has a lot of (admittedly American-English) good old books covering English History. Did you know Dickens wrote a history for children?

I do think that science needs to be more practical, though, so am using Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding for more hands-on science. It is fantastically thorough and hands-on and I haven't really looked at anything else.

For maths, there is Saxon (a US-based but very thorough) or MEP (UK-based and FREE) as two complete curricula that I am familiar with. I know most people on here intend to go through maths at an accelerated pace and use Saxon to do so. MEP actually covers around 95% of the national curriculum material to a greater depth so you can be sure that you cover the 'important' bits Personally, I'm using Saxon now and hope to add in MEP in a few months (since MEP requires a bit more brain activity than Saxon at the moment) and will probably alternate days for the early levels of the curriculum (I don't really want to be doing middle-school work at age 4 which is where we would be heading otherwise). There is also Life of Fred, which is story-based but American, Miquon which is a great hands-on primary level course which goes to a lot of depth but not the breadth of the others, and IXL which is web-based and covers UK national curriculum. Rightstart was one of my favourite Maths curricula, actually, but it is expensive and has huge shipping costs.

I have just ordered Draw Write Now to use as an early art curriculum and am looking at Atelier (homeschoolart.com) for later.

Unfortunately, almost everything I have mentioned is American-based. This isn't such a problem for Maths, Science and Art, but Literature and Spelling are proving to be a pain. Even Reading Bear (which is fab) is causing problems because the short-o sounds completely different!

I hope I've given enough here to get you started

I think there are certain uses of technology that I would like to ban - calculators being a definite no-no (unless absolutely impossible to go without at high level maths) and word processing is one I have problems with, too - I want beautiful handwriting and correct spelling, not text speak and spellcheck. At the same time, learning to type and use a word processor is an essential skill in modern society and almost every office-based job requires good IT skills. Maybe as an extra-curricular with strict time limits...

Likewise, general surfing the internet is a massive time sapper, but there are so many good ways to use it for research etc. that again, I think it will have to be time-restricted access rather than completely banned (this would be good for me, too )

This thread has really made me sit and think about the quality of the literature I have available. I have been thinking about a CM-style education for a year or so now, but only now has it really 'clicked' for me what twaddle is. I understood that challenging literature is great, but for free reading I was happy to allow whatever my son chose to read. I have even picked up a couple of sets of books that are popular with young boys when they were really cheap - one of which was Horrid Henry. I know my brother loved them in primary school but now, thinking about the actual content of the books makes me cringe. The whole series is about a naughty boy doing naughty things, whilst mocking his well-behaved, high achieving brother. WHY would I want my son to read that?! 

I know the Enid Blyton books might be considered 'twaddle' on a literary level (I whizzed through one a day when I was eight or nine so they couldn't have been that challenging), but at least characters are polite - or learn to be - and the morals are good. That is the sort of 'easy reading' that I would allow on occasion. 

I'm now feeling more prepared to purge our house of twaddle! I might even go through my own books... 

I found these bead strings and immediately thought Rightstart! Not that I can afford that program

They are relatively cheap and I thought I'd share with you all as the larger set looks especially good to use with little ones. An alternative to the traditional multi-coloured wooden abacus you generally see in the shops

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Kids-Abacus-Bead-Strings-New-/320935638994?pt=UK_Toys_Creative_Educational_RL&var=&hash=item76c2909c3b

Yes, the reason I would probably keep on with Saxon 1-3 (apart from Nikki enjoying them) is because of all the other things they cover apart from basic maths facts which I want to make sure I don't overlook. I do like the way the material is introduced, I just think that much more could be covered in a lesson and the difficulty of material shown could move a lot faster!