Maybe the Geology book is better written than the others, but unless they hired completely new writers and editors, I would doubt it. I read volumes 1 and 2 out loud about 3 years ago during second grade, and my girls really liked the story (of course I was editing as I read it......otherwise the sentence structure barely made sense). Then I gave up and refused to do any other volumes. One of my daughters randomly asked the other day if there were more volumes of the Sassafras kids that she could read on her own. I told her there were more but they were so badly written I wouldn't want her to attempt to read them on her own. It's a shame because the idea behind this series is great but the execution is horrible. Awful writing and no editing and science info awkwardly stuck in weird parts of the story.

I just finished reading the Zoology book to my 8 year olds as a read aloud. We didn't use any extra parts of the curriculum from the Sassafras publishers because it looked like alot of busy work to me but I did rely heavily on other books such as One Small Square and the Biome series by Rebecca Johnson as well as lots of trips to our local zoo, and it turned out to be a great science year. I really wanted to love this series but I don't. I am OK with the far out, wacky storylines...some of the ideas are great ( what kid wouldn't want to zip around the world on an invisible zipline with their own smartphone) but there are an unbelievable amount of grammar mistakes and awkward wording. I am used to editing outloud as I read to my kids to make it easier for them to understand certain things, and I don't mind doing that but this level of bad writing on every page really annoyed me. If you are planning to use it for "pleasure reading" I'm not sure how pleasurable that would be. On a positive note, we did learn alot about latitude and longitude. It was really a better geography resource rather than science. And when my kids get older I am going to let them take a red pen to the entire book and use it as an example of very poor writing that needs to be corrected. (For instance, I think I probably proofread this post more than anyone ever proofread the Sassafras book before it was published.)

Bumping for you because I will be using this next year as well. There may not be many people who have used it yet since it just came out. I am planning to use it in a block type schedule too after we finish Sotw 2 in early spring. I think there are 90 lessons...I figure 2 lessons a days we can do it in about 2 to 3 months...I hope! Good question though about how much work goes into getting the experiments together. I am curious too.

I just finished 1st grade with my girls and we scheduled by doing one "elective" at a time (it is probably more correct to say content subject vs. skill subject but I just call them electives because it is all the fun stuff!) We did language arts and math all year long but we took the other subjects and did them one at a time until we finished them. So we started sotw 1 in July and finished it in february then did a whole year of science in about 2 months and then a whole year of geography in about 2 months. The only other thing I kept doing all year long was a rotating composer study where we learned about a different composer each month...but that didn't take much time to cover (mostly listening to cd's in the car). For my girls, it seems that they handle fewer subjects at a time better...when I tried to do a monday, wednesday, friday type rotation with all the subjects at the same time we were all over the place. We are planning to use sassafras next year for science, too. Hope you enjoy it!

McRuffy LA is completely open and go. It tells you what to do each day. You won't need to do anything except open the teachers manual and read from the script. (Every once in a while you need to grab something from the resource pack but that is the only prep work). I do keep in mind what lesson number I want to be on by a particular time on the calendar (for instance I need to be on lesson 150 by the end of April to finish in time for our summer break in June). Is that what you mean by scheduling? Otherwise it is about as easy to teach as it gets! Hope that helps.

That sounds exactly like my situation. My girls are finishing sotw1. We will start sotw2 in the fall. I just bought science in the ancient world to use alongside sotw 2 because it seems the timeframes will line up pretty well...I never heard about the series until just now so we didn't use science in the beginning. From their website I dont think you necessarily need to do S. In the Beginning first...there are references in Science in the A.W. to chapters from the first book but it seems (as I have skimmed through it) to be references to pretty basic concepts that we either already studied in other science books or something I could easily google and explain to them (such as the concept of gas, liquid, solid). If we love this series, I expect we will do the rest chronologically...but I am not worried about missing the first one. Hope that helps!

Adventures in America by Elemental History. Very good for this age.

We finished sotw 1 this year too. We listened to the audio cd in the car quite a few times before we actually did the chapter during our class time so they had already heard the chapter several times before we "studied" it. Then we listened to a section while they colored a map or another related coloring page. I would stop the cd and ask them the questions...then ask them to summarize the story...we never wrote any of it. Every thing was oral. Then I would start the cd again and repeat for the next section. If there were only 2 or 3 sections, we finished that day. If there were 4 sections in that chapter I usually spread it out over 2 days. We watched youtube videos if I found a good one related to the topic. We did about one craft per chapter and read 2 or 3 extra books per chapter. All of these were read alouds done by me. I didn't expect them to read anything to me or write anything beyond the simplest things. History for us was fun. And we did not skip anything. We also have a giant....I mean giant timeline which includes everything imaginable from the beginning of time until now...color coded and laminated...yes I have an obsession with the timeline. So at the end of the year I read the review cards from sotw and had them try to find the matching card on the wall. They retained alot of information and thought it was a fun quiz game. I did not force them to memorize anything...certainly not dates although I can tell they are beginning to understand the idea of centuries which is all I really expect for now. Mine are both the same age (7). Don't feel discouraged. After listening to the cd one of my daughters could almost quote the chapter back to me word for word and the other daughter would often answer the questions with "Um I think I forgot to listen." when I would turn off the cd and ask the review questions. But she still learned alot of history this year. And my kids love those "You wouldn't want to be..." books too.

I just ordered science in the ancient world to use alongside sotw2 next year. It will go back a bit to some of the things from the time periods covered in sotw1 but that is ok. It goes all the way to da vinci so I think it will go well with sotw2.

I just checked out the MR website again to remind myself and it is definitely a complete curriculum. You said you like to piece together from lots of different resources so I think MR sounds perfect for you to fill in any gaps. We switched to Mcruffy because I specifically did NOT want to have to pull together anything...i wanted to use one open and go, very easy to use nothing else to add curriculum. But I think using MR all the way through sounds like a great idea!

I am still trying to figure out if Merida in the movie Brave is supposed to be Boudica. Lol. Come on, flaming red hair, scottish accent, fiesty, great with a bow and arrow. Clearly I like making connections too...even ones that aren't there!

I am sure either book would be fine. We have several encyclopedias like these that I picked up really cheap at our local used book store. These were actually the only recommended part of SOTW that we did not really use. We listened to the chapters of SOTW then summarized and answered questions and colored maps and other coloring pages. We read alot of extra books and did quite a few crafts but the encyclopedias were the least interesting to them. I stopped trying to incorporate them after 3 or 4 chapters...there will be plenty of years later for them to pull those off the shelf. So I guess my answer is not to sweat which version of an encyclopedia you use for this go around of history.

We also loved beginning mathmatical reasoning. I can tell that certain concepts in first grade are coming easily to them because of things we did in that book during prek a couple of years ago. I have twins so they were using it at the same time. Rather than try to colorcopy it (because the color is very important on each page of this kind of workbook) I bought a workbook window to slip the whole book into and then let each girl use a dry erase pen. Probably about the same price up front as buying two books but we also use the workbook window for some other workbooks too so it comes out more economical than buying 2. I seem to remember that bmr is on the high side if what I was willing to spend on a workbook.

We used adventures in america for kindergarten with my girls last year when they were 5 turning 6. It wasnt too much at all...really just depends on the kids. I am sure they dont remember everything we read but they did get a good grasp of overall early american history and still mention some of the things we did. Its interesting to hear that some people dont like it because we loved it. But I think it would work in 1st or 2nd grade if you did want to wait.

We are doing SOTW 1 right now with my first grade twins. I started out the year doing reading and math everyday, thinking we would rotate the other subjects each afternoon (history monday and wednesday, science tuesday and thursday, geography friday, etc.) Once we started doing it, it seemed like we were jumping around too much so I decided to do basics (reading and math) everyday and pick 1 elective to do until we finished it. We do about 3 chapters a week in SOTW since it's our only elective (and the girls usually ask to do it first because it's their favorite!) We started in July are on schedule to finish in late January with about 5 weeks worth of breaks in there. We listen to the chapters on audio disc in the car, then they re-listen to them as they color maps or coloring pages related to the topic, they summarize the story and answer the review questions out loud, we usually do one craft, read one or two extra books, maybe read encyclopedia pages on chapters they really like, maybe find a video on YouTube about the topic. So my answer is yes, it can be done in one semester (or almost one semester). Of course we don't do every activity or craft or read-aloud...but I wouldn't do all of them anyway even if we were spreading it out over a much longer time period. And we haven't skipped anything...even the chapter on the Americas just took one day...but we spent two weeks on Greek gods because they loved it so much.