really need advice in writing!

Yes, that helps. I am going to read your book and try to compare and contrast to see what makes the most sense to me and my husband, taking our children into consideration. I just have not had a strong feeling that any of the explanations of these methods are “IT” for us. We have just been halfway doing things here and there with copywork, narration and dictation. I even went to the extreme of traditional workbooks for part of this year and am just not satisfied with anything at the moment.

Listening to Susan Wise Bauer’s lectures on writing has been helpful to me. There are so many things that are similar to the CM method within the Classical method. The 3 stages of learning make sense to me also, but I’m just not so sure that my children will move into those stages at the times they are “supposed to”.  I can now see the importance of these methods, but I have to decide how I want to do this without loosing my mind 😉 Self confidence would be a good beginning, I guess 🙂 

You’re going to have to excuse my middle-aged mind here–I’m not sure I know what book list you are posting about here?

Not a lot differently; I think history can be treated much the same–just use historical figures for characters and historical events for plot developments.  You can still use judgment-based questions.  Science reading might very well be different; I’m usually pretty happy there if I just get a good explanation of the passage.  There might be times you’d be reading about a scientist (character) or listing the sequences in a chemical reaction (events in order) or something like that.  There’s not a lot of judgment to be made in describing sequences in a chemical reaction 🙂  for example.  I do tend to assign most of these essay-skill-developing ideas to fiction and history/biography.  The physics textbook just isn’t as amenable, lol.

Well, once my kids got fairly good at written narrations, I had them do one a day, and so then I’d stick in a narration mission maybe once or twice a week?  I kept them on colored index cards, and when I looked over the day’s lessons, I’d paperclip an index card to the book so they’d know to do it for that reading.  Does that make sense?  Now that the older ones are pretty competent at essays, I just assign regular essays, maybe two a week.  I have to confess I usually didn’t give them a choice.  🙂  If my kids thought they had a choice in writing, they’d start thinking they could choose not to write–it’s not their favorite thing.  So I’d look at the reading and think it would lend itself well to one of the types, and just put that one with that reading.  I did try to vary them so they didn’t get the same ones all the time.