Elemental phonics level one(15$ on Amazon) basically taught my daughter to read. I put my daughter in a Pre-K private school and she came out of it knowing less then she went in with. I pulled her out of it 1 month before the end and started her in TGTB la and she didn't even know letter sounds so I paused that and did elemental phonics level 1 until she really understood letter sounds and how to blend them. Now she reads better then her older brother

I have always loved the look of BraveWriter and then when I use it I get so much anxiety from the lack of structure! It makes me shiver a little bit. ;) I have had 5 kids who have gone through IEW and gone on to Christian private school with incredible writing skills (and not all lean towards writing). Read alouds, good books, and IEW has been the secret sauce for us. Anyway, just my $.02. I think any of your choices sounds really good! You are a great mama!!

BRAVE WRITER online writing class. Currently doing one with my 4th grader. And it’s SO helpful! It’s for both her and I and helping teach me how to teach her to write!! It’s expensive but SO worth it to learn strategies how to teach them to write.

Memoria Press has the best enrichment program for K-2 and people don't really talk about it. Picture books, that align with science, history, science, music, fine arts, poetry, crafts. Everything I wanted FIAR to be, except it was all planned out and fully integrated.

I just learned about a curriculum that is similar to 5 in a Row. It’s called Go Global. It’s usually more expensive but I found it used and am really excited about it! I want to look into the art curriculum you use to see if they’ll pair well and then could include my range of kid ages too. Aaand I want to try Brave Writer too 😅

Thank you for sharing about the animation course!

Loved your planning video!! I get so many curriculum ideas from your channel! You may want to check out Rabbit Trails Through Literature for your littles. It looks very similar to Five In A Row, but with a little more guidance on videos to watch, supplemental science and social studies books to check out from the library, and other activities! It's also in color and looks super pretty.

The one that is a copy of IEW sounds interesting…I’ll have to check that out. Thanks for sharing!

We are doing FIAR as well and love it. There is soooo much you can do for science and history. I have my oldest read the chapter books (like Thomas Edison) and then have my younger guy do some of the picture books that go along with the chapter book. For example, if my oldest is reading Thomas Edison and that chapter goes over the mail railway system, then my youngest will read Mailing May from the younger guide but we will do all the activities together for the most part. There might be some things my oldest does that my youngest doesn’t. But for the most part I can keep their science and history together and it’s way easier. Of course this takes some planning ahead of time to do to know what books to do together. But I plan ahead anyway. And if you don’t like the activity in the guide, then there are tons of Pinterest boards for each book.

Thank you for sharing!

I also jot everything down while I'm thinking and then go back and organize it later.

We just found Treasure Hunt Reading. I previously did Logic of English with my oldest son and while we loved it, it is sort of time consuming. He was my only kid in school at the time so that was fine. But I wanted to find something that taught the same concepts but less time consuming and Treasure Hunt Reading is almost exactly that. And it’s totally FREE! I was just thinking maybe Isla (not sure how you spell her name) and Emmet (if he needs a more engaging lesson) would maybe like that. My youngest literally asks for it every day. One day he did 4 lessons in the same day. There is a really short video from the creator for each lesson. She teaches it while you do it at the same time. And there are three journeys to go on. The first one is letters and sounds and while my son knows all of his sounds (including like all 4 sounds of u for example), and he is reading a tiny bit, I’m still having him go through this journey because it teaches how to do the handwriting so well and it also starts on some reading. But you can choose the journey. You can watch the videos to see where your daughter is at. Anyway, just thought I’d share.

Just found your videos because I was looking for reviews for Lightning Literature! This year I have a 10th, 8th, 6th, and 4th (all boys). Thought I'd share that we've had the same struggles as you over the years with writing instruction. We've tried so many different programs. This year we finally found one that is working and it's Essentials in Writing. It is great for teaching incremental writing and I've finally seen my older boys actually learn the process for writing. I do really like TGTB language arts for the younger years, but for my older kids next year, I think we'll do a combo of Lightning Literature and Essentials in Writing.

Honestly, I would start would level 5 TGTB for the writing need. It scaffolds very well for beginners starting to learn more about writing. We started with 6, and went back to 5 to get that introduction and more writing scaffolding and hand holding. As well as has more examples. Level 6 assumes you’ve already had that.

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts! I immediately went to look at Lightening Literature Storm after you mentioned it and liked it so much, I bought it! I really think it will be the challenge my sixth grader needs! Thank you again for mentioning it!

Love your thought process! I literally love the idea of just brain dumping onto paper and then eliminating/adding on to and then researching. Such a simple thing, right?! I do all of these things- just in my head, lol. It would be nice to brain dump it somewhere else. I don't know why I never thought of it!

I would look into CLE -Christian Light Education for your younger two especially. My kids loved it for language arts and you cannot beat the price! For your older daughter you might consider Writing and Rhetoric. She might not need to start with book 1 & 2. Maybe start with book 3 or 4. We used it for my 10 year old son this year. He is doing so well with it and it really builds up solid skills.

I love your videos :) my kids are 7th grade, kinder, and Pre-K. so we're definitely in similar stages. My son wanted to learn Portuguese and I wasn't seeing much so we settled on visual Latin from compass classroom for 7th and 8th which we love and hopefully sets him up better to learn Spanish later in high school. I'll have to look at the writing you mentioned, we use IEW right now, I was also looking at writing strands from masterbooks too.

Are the upper level Apologia math courses able to be done independently? I have one that loves color and games in her math and she really gets and understands math. I just need her to start moving towards more independence.