Rambling about HOD

[shadah]

I am trying to talk myself out of it, but I keep coming back to it. We have done LHFHG,BLHFHG, and now Bigger. We will move to Preparing in the spring.

What I love about it:

The pacing- I struggle with how much is enough and how much is too much. With a plan in place I trade things out and still have a good pace.

The book choices- I have so far loved them. Many were already on my list.

What I don't love but have so far worked around:

The assignments- We do some of the notebooking, none of the activities, none of the Bible, and very little of the art. I do get ideas and adapt them. I tweak. I rearrange assignments to other books or subjects.

We do it at the lowest age range. I add foreign language, piano, and book basket.

If I wrote my own program it would look a great deal like HOD, but without the "fluff". Would I actually be better off? I find it easier to change someone else's plan than to write my own. I also don't follow my own plans very well. It's like I can't take them seriously. I think I am going to do Preparing and then re-evaluate.

Does anyone else struggle with this?

[3girls4me]

I'm not much help in terms of whether it will be easier to write your own, but I will say we have done LHFHG, looked extensively at Bigger and Preparing and we are doing CTC now. My take is that I won't use HOD for my younger kids until they reach CTC or perhaps Preparing. We are loving CTC. It doesn't feel like busywork for my daughter. She has said numerous times that she feels like she is learning more now than ever before because of how they present things. I am looking forward to at least 4 more years of HOD for her. Then we'll evaluate the new high school programs when we get there.

Maybe it's "fluff" because they are in the wrong guide? Just a thought. But for the record, I felt like some of the younger ones felt fluffy too, hence the only using HOD from CTC and up.

I hope you figure out what works best for you. If you are skipping that much of it? It truly might be better to create your own!

Good luck!

[mtomom]

I did so much tweaking of HOD that I did eventually leave.

However, I flailed around for a while after that. It was a lot easier to adjust HOD, even a great deal, than it was to come up with my own plans. I finally got my footing, but it was so much work that I went back to HOD. At that point my kids were used to my own plans, and resisted the lesser with HOD. So we were done with it.

 

Anyway, I "get" what you're experiencing! It may be worth the cost to have what you do use from it. It's a lot easier to tweak than create from scratch.

[Guest]

What I have found with HOD is that it works best when you use it as is. When you start tweaking it, it becomes a disaster. I did HOD a few years ago, used it as written, and was happy. Then, I started playing around with it and eventually left it for something else. This year, my schedule is so stinkin busy that I ordered it again a few weeks ago. At first, I said that I would still use some of what I had originally planned, which only proved to be a mess. Now I am using it, exactly as written, and it's awesome. For me, it doesn't work when I try and tweak it or add to it. My dd is doing Bigger and my ds is doing CtC and neither has what feels like busy work for them. As I've read, all the concepts are very tightly wound, so that if you start eliminating boxes, you really start missing some of the big picture, even when it doesn't seem like it. I like that we are getting some hands on/crafty things in our schedule, which I could never manage myself. I don't think it is worth doing if you cut things out of it. That's just my experience with it, anyway. :)

[shadah]

Maybe it's "fluff" because they are in the wrong guide? Just a thought. But for the record, I felt like some of the younger ones felt fluffy too, hence the only using HOD from CTC and up.

I hope you figure out what works best for you. If you are skipping that much of it? It truly might be better to create your own!

Good luck!

I have thought of moving her up to Preparing.She fits there on the chart. But most people use Preparing for 9-12 yos. My dd is 7. We are enjoying Bigger this year. It just doesn't feel "comfortable." I can't quite put my finger on it. I rearrange things more than I skip. We may do an art project or notebooking with foreign language instead of history. We do our church's Bible lessons and memory work. We practice cursive writing out hymns or Bible verses. I like the framework, but I often change the emphasis.

[shadah]

I did so much tweaking of HOD that I did eventually leave.

However, I flailed around for a while after that. It was a lot easier to adjust HOD, even a great deal, than it was to come up with my own plans. I finally got my footing, but it was so much work that I went back to HOD. At that point my kids were used to my own plans, and resisted the lesser with HOD. So we were done with it.

 

Anyway, I "get" what you're experiencing! It may be worth the cost to have what you do use from it. It's a lot easier to tweak than create from scratch.

Thank you. I showed your post to my husband. It helped us talk things through. We are trying to look at long-range plans. I have decided not to do HOD for high school. Ha ha. I have many years until high school though.

I am thinking about taking off a couple of months and doing my own thing with resources I can borrow from the library and friends or raiding our own bookshelf. I tried this last year and came back to HOD but dd is more independent now. This may work. I think I tried to do too many teacher-dependent things. If not, we will purchase Preparing and keep going.

[Holly]

You stuck with it longer than us!  We did BLHFHG and Bigger (but didn't finish that one).  I still use LHTH for preschool (two of my DC have used it so far), but I've given myself to drop anything I don't feel like doing.   :lol:  The pretending activities have never gone over with my DC.  I also still use the Emerging reader books and have been debating using the spelling lists.  

 

What didn't work for us was the fact that I couldn't combine more DC, the fact that my DC would spend more than an hour on each notebook page, and they disliked the art projects (my DC wanted more freedom with their art projects).  Another thing that bothered me was how much more each level was going to cost us! Looking ahead, I knew we wouldn't be able to afford it in the long run.   I absolutely loved the book choices, but it was too much to get through (I was adding the extended books so that I could combine my oldest two DC).  

 

After doing HOD for a few years, I got more confidence in planning out my own curriculum.  HOD really helped me get a good idea of how to organize yearly lesson plans.  Overall, while I'm glad we used it for this reason, it just isn't a good fit for us.  Currently I use SCM's free curriculum guide (we don't follow it completely) and their Planning a CM Education e-book.  If I had fewer DC or they didn't dawdle over their lessons so much (and I had a bigger budget), I wouldn't have switched.   

[wonderfilled]

We've done HOD for six years now (I've done every guide now with my sons).  I think the guides get better each year, so maybe you'll really like Preparing.  There's a lot to love about it. I know if it wasn't all written out for me, we would skip so many things that I really appreciate about HOD.