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mamabear2three

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Everything posted by mamabear2three

  1. I get the whole take it easy thing for younger grades, I am really trying to hold myself back and not push - maybe TOG is too much even if I do pick and choose carefully. But, how do you join the whole cm style approach, which I do agree with in many ways, with a child who asks to do more? She will ask to do math, or, can we do more reading? and will often get really excited when I get some kind of hands on activity out to do (like at Thanksgiving we made a wigwam on our table... boy that was messy but fun) and she asks questions about all kinds of things - soaks up any half decent lesson I throw at her (like the turtle in our yard - she asked a bunch of questions about it, which we wrote down and I found a kid friendly article online to read about turtles and after reading it to her she went through each question and answered them all - then got all excited to tell Daddy the extra thing we learned, that turtles like the color red!). we went through a magic school bus science kit on the human body and loved every activity we did. I just feel like there's not much content to LHFHG, just the same thing repeated. She is getting all the same basic "history" lessons in Sunday school and from our family devotions. I just am not sure where to turn from here.
  2. My oldest is just going into K - we've been doing "school" prek work for several years, she is probably not atypical of an oldest homeschool child, and I am probably not atypical of a former public school teacher... She is active and busy and has a VERY curious mind asking questions about everything. She started asking to learn to read last summer so we started K4 with FIAR. It turned out to be too much abstract planning for me to stretch it and fill enough time (I tried to make each book last 2 weeks instead of 1). I have shiller math kit 1 that I got free, and was using that - which we liked because of the manipulatives but DD would get frustrated at how it jumped all over the place and wanted to go deeper into each topic as we came to it, if she was interested - like telling time. So we switched to Math Mammoth, which the k review in the front of the first grade year she flew through and knew it all. HOD seems to be a flop - after tons of research and the dumb decision to buy new, I am bummed by the end of unit 5 (LHFHG)- it's hard to beef up, the science feels sad, and a lot of it feels like busy work that while it may have a point in the end, surely there are more interesting things we could be doing to learn! And, now that I started looking down the line instead of just at the K/1st year, I am realizing how prohibitively expensive it will become and that I really don't want the stress of trying to run several guides at once and keep the kids on separate topics. I went through 3 phonics programs before I found one that we liked and worked well. My mom tells me that I am just researching too much but I am realizing that part of the problem is my mental shift from public school teaching methods to classical teaching methods and I am trying to piece it together in my head without buying another book (TWTM) I feel like I am catching up too slowly to know what is going to work for us! I have been researching TOG and downloaded the sample weeks and went to the library to get books and plan out those first couple weeks to see what I thought of it, and I like it, it was not overwhelming to plan and seemed like it would work for us - but I liked the first unit of LHFHG too. I have a couple friends who highly recommend MFW but that would be yet another phonics change and another math change and I don't know whether to do first grade in the fall for our official K year or start whenever we finish LHFHG, if we finish that at all. I have two more littles coming after, so I know I want to do something that is multi-age learning, a literature based curriculum is important and lots of fun learning activities also important. I feel like science is as important as history, and I just don't know how to trust myself anymore!
  3. I guess I am just feeling frustrated today - like I spent all this money after hours of research and now what I thought was * perfect* is in fact not working for us anymore after just 5 units. I did the same thing with phonics - after hating 100 ez lessons, I did a bunch of research and picked an *awesome* program (alphabet Island) that I was sure my DD would LOVE (and she did love the first part - learning the letter sounds/how to write them) but she hated it after that. I ended up buying AAR1, which we have enjoyed, and I have now also bought phonics pathways because it's a complete program and cheaper than AAR. I did a bunch of research on K curriculum and bought LHFHG... I've been shifting to a more classical style (after being trained for public school teaching, so quite a shift) and as I get more into it, I am learning my priorities are going to shift away from what HOD can offer and I need to move to a multi-age learning program like TOG or MFW. I prefer the look of TOG because I can use it through HS and pick and choose will work for us for each unit (and I can stretch or compress each unit as necessary). My mom's opinion is that I need to stop researching and stick with HOD because I already bought it (she homeschooled me and my bro back when Abeka and Bob Jones were basically the only options, so not using a text book is foreign to her). my DH's opinion is that I should go with TOG and I am struggling to trust my opinion in anything after this morning's lesson!
  4. ok I have so far liked LHFHG but we are only finishing unit 5. I thought the science was supposed to be tied into the history/bible reading for the day and so far I've been able to make the connection but today we discussed how God provided quail and manna for the Israelites and the science lesson was to read a page on migratory patterns of birds?! In frustration I just finished the entire unit in one sitting - took us maybe 20 minutes to read all the bible/history, act out the bible story and "build" a calf and "smash" it - 3 days worth of lessons. We were aleady ahead on the read-alouds and she's finding the activities to help her learn the bible verses redundant and boring - she'd rather just repeat the verse and memorize them straight up without the "activity" to go with it. I'm annoyed. I spent good money on this curriculum... was this just a bad unit or is the science generally pathetic?
  5. has anyone used song school spanish? I was wondering if it was any good, in the meantime, we are using Salsa episodes http://www.gpb.org/salsa/term/episode#
  6. I was planning on cutting costs as needed by using the library, does no one do that? (or is there a flaw in that plan that I hadn't thought of?) Or by buying used books. But, I am also only running one guide (LHFHG) so I don't know how it will work long term in our house. I do have to say that at the moment I am enjoying it enough that I would be bummed if it got too complicated when my kids get older!
  7. There really is no good reason to need 4-5 months more, I just hate starting something in the middle of the school year...and not finishing it at the end, and in my head there's this arbitrary Sept. 1 start date. It's a throwback to my public school teaching days I'm sure, and exacerbated by Sunday School promotions every September. And who knows, I may get over it since I won't be able to get the next few guides to line up "correctly" with the school year either. You should have seen me agonize over starting LHFHG in March instead of waiting until the end of summer... I finally got over it, though, and I may get over this issue too... Ok so I guess the bottom line is, now that you have helped me think out my question more... what awesome resources do you use to stretch the guides with? Anything super fun that works well with them and can help keep you busy if you don't do the guides full speed?
  8. I'm currently in Little Hearts, and it is a perfect fit for my ODD (she just turned 5 and we are finishing unit 4 this week). We were doing Five in a Row until we had baby number 3 at the end of January. We took February off and I needed something with less prep than FIAR so we went ahead and started LHFHG. We both love it! But I also know that we can't just follow the school schedule without DD going nuts because she loves school and can only handle so much time off before she begs to do school again. I am still looking at it but it seems like with 4 days a week for LHFHG, Beyond and Bigger, I will need 4-5 months to fill in before we move to preparing. (like I said, I know I'm over thinking it, I just was trying to get some ideas in my bookmarks to start thinking about it)
  9. I know I am over thinking things but I am concerned that I will need to take a year off of HOD before I hit Preparing, and was wondering what others who did that chose to do for that extra year?
  10. Thanks for the input, maybe I am looking at this all wrong and it is an issue with fluency. When she comes to a word and wants to know what it says, I do typically tell her how to sound the word out, but now that I think about it, she's gotten to where she will pick up something, like the cereal box, and "read" it by reading only those words she knows fluently. I love the timers, thanks for the link Rachel! Should I try to get her to read all the level 1 words fluently before being "done" with level 1?
  11. well, I had thought about AAR 2 but it's so expensive, I was hoping to use something cheaper, which is why I thought about switching to AAS
  12. my DD(5) started asking to learn to read last summer, and by Christmas had learned all the letters/letter sounds in isolation and how to write each letter, using Alphabet Island (she loved the stories for each letter but the repetition drove me nuts). Then she hit a wall an couldn't figure out how to blend cvc words together so after trying BOB books, progressive phonics and reading eggs, I broke down and bought AAR level 1. She loved it and started flying through the lessons. We are now on lesson 33 and I feel like we're hitting a new wall - she doesn't like the readers - she wants to read "real" books. She is constantly asking me to help her read words that she hasn't learned the phonics rules for yet. She still does Reading Eggs nearly every day, but I feel like AAR is holding her back. She still has to sound out most words as she reads, which frustrates her, but I think the bigger frustration is that the stories are boring to her, they're not the kind of books and stories she wants to read, so she has no motivation to keep trying when in the end, all that effort is put out for such a dull story. I was going to move to AAS when we finished AAR1, but now I wonder if that's the right direction to go. I was planning on skipping ahead and allowing her to learn the rest of the phonics lessons in AAR1 and not worry as much about the readers, but if we do that we will reach the end of the book really quick and I am not sure where to go from there.
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