Decisions, decisions

Handwriting
After doing some reading, I stumbled onto an e-book available to purchase at pennygardener.com titled Italics Beautiful Handwriting for Children. It moves at a different pace than the Italics Series I mentioned last week, but you can print whatever you need for your immediate family. It has both italic print and cursive. I'm leaning towards buying the e-book instead of the Italics series.

Phonics
There is a post on the Well Trained Mind forums titled "I HATE teaching phonics." I'm starting to agree, and I only have one child actually learning phonics! He knows the sounds but needs a lot of prompting the whole lesson. I tried Alpha-Phonics and the reading lessons from Charlotte Mason, but he doesn't seem to care. This is the one who can build a perfectly symetrical plane / transformer / etc. with his Legos and Knex blocks, but can't be bothered to look to see if its an "m" or an "n" before guessing.

So I noticed "Explore the Code" mentioned, and the fact that it has an online option. We tried the sample lessons, and DS seemed to do better and enjoyed it. I will have to make sure they don't reward guessing, but I think we will sign him up. For $25 (plus a $5 fee) I can join through the Homeschool Buyers Co-op from now to March of 2010. That sounds like a good deal to me! I won't have to beat my head on the wall, DS will learn AND he will think its a game instead of a chore. He can work on his own and I can take a break or spend time with the younger kids.

Joining th Co-op
Since using the Homeschool Buyers Co-op saves me $25, I joined. It was pretty painless, put in your email, they send the standard confirmation email and you click the link to verify. They assure your privacy (actually you don't give much information to start anyway). You can even print (free) or order ($7) a nice student ID card, which might come in handy in the future! Other deals at this time are 10% off Rosetta Stone and an eBook store, which I might check out.