You're welcome! I was looking at that thread and book a couple weeks ago. 😄 (Fwiw I'm sending my current 6th grader to Cover Story instead this year; I'm not convinced her maturity is ready. Her biggest sister beta tested WWS 1 in 5th and used it through 6th. It really depends on the kid.)

Yes, 6th. Scroll down to post 4 here -

Cover Story? No book reports, but that's not a format that's ever needed in high school writing anyway. (My graduates never did a single book report.) It does cover many different forms of writing, from a haiku to sort stories, and it's entertaining. Based on my experience children who find creative writing difficult and/or a chore may not be good fits for it.

Adventures in the Sea and Sky from Winter Promise?

My youngest has been using Writing With Ease a grade behind and First Language Lessons (on grade), both from www.welltrainedmind.com. They've been a great fit for him. His hand and thus handwriting are behind his other skill levels so WWE builds his endurance and confidence, even if the questions are easy for him. FLL is mostly oral. They're both easy peasy to operate, just open the book and go.

An average 4th grader with no grammar experience can start with Rod & Staff 4. It starts at the beginning with nouns and builds up from there. The 3 book would have value too. Fix It is more low key and based on proofreading. I found it better for kids that pick up grammar fast and don't need much practice. (It's not going to give you "which one" and "how many" either.)

August version isn't TOO far off. Adventures in the Sea and Sky from Winter Promise will cover history, science, geography, lit, and some quality time spent with his 11th grade brother. He could wait a year or two, but big brother is really looking forward to doing parts of this with him as time permits and 12th grade will have even less extra time. (Big brother did this program in elementary too.) He'll do world history through the development of ships, aircraft, and space craft, with ocean science, weather, and astronomy aligned, along with literature and more. The rest of English is continuing what he was already doing. First Language Lessons, Writing With Ease, and Writing Road to Reading (spelling). These are working too well to even be interested in the WP coordinated LA. Math is mostly Singapore, occasionally Horizons, and Beast online. Spanish is just 15-20min of Duolingo. I don't push it. He just logged on one day and started doing it because everyone else was.

We had a good "Hey look, the school year is STARTING now child" discussion. 😂 She's a good kid! She's just wound differently than her four older siblings. She's a good worker, kind, stubborn as all get out and prone to a bad attitude. LOL She and I put together a big pile of real books for middle ages history and a vintage Landmark medieval times book. Then we dug out every living book we could find on chemistry. It's good to be the fifth kid and have a library in your living room. If she can demonstrate mastery of everything in Junior Analytical Grammar I'll give her Fix-It Grammar back. And we're going to take a quick spin through Writing Road to Reading for a spelling capstone. Cover Story writing pile of high quality literature (I'll start intentionally using more proper lit terms in our discussions, even though she thinks it'll just be stupid.) math is still to be determined She'll continue notebooking through Training Hearts Teaching Minds for religion. Spanish is just the apps for now and a couple times a week we'll read from Madrigal's Magic Key together. Basket Time with little brother rotating through poetry, art, science, etc She has piles of books all over the school shelf and she's happy as a clam about it.

OP, your initial comparison of SM and MM seem accurate to me. You can order some of the supplements for SM if you need extra practice though. I'm a big fan of not fixing something that isn't broken so I'd lean SM if it's still working well. I've used plenty of the MM subject books over the years. We were so -done- with it by the end of one of those that i never tried a whole grade. It really is clear and efficient and it works wonderfully for some families. 🤷‍♀️ (I only ever used the fractions books with the 6th grader mentioned above when she needed some extra practice.) You can do Beast online for $15 a month and cancel anytime if you want to give her a feel for it. It's a think smarter not work harder type of math, so it can be challenging even if they've already covered the concepts. My youngest is near the end of SM 4a and finding BA 3 online plenty challenging.

I'm pretty sure yours is why mine has two math books! 😂

I've been pouring over this same decision lately! It's my fifth kid and you'd think I'd have a handle on this by now; she's just wired so differently than her older siblings. She's finishing Horizons 6 and SM 6 (no supermom scheduling; just doing what comes next!) and playing on Beast 5 online. Beast is just because her little brother does it already and she thought it looked fun. She's a strong math student, rarely makes mistakes, prone to a bad attitude, and really does enjoy the "think smarter not harder" math when she gets over her own attitude. We ran two books because one would get too easy, too stupid, too something, and the attitude issue was preventing her from learning. So we'd switch cold turkey to the other one until it was too something too. It kept her moving forward steadily (and me from pulling out too much hair). I'm not convinced she's mature enough to leave this method behind yet, but 6 will be done and she has to go somewhere. 🤷‍♀️ I already have AoPS prealg and keep looking at it sideways. Maybe? Because she's the fifth kid the school closet has several options. I can already hear the groans over the boring hard first appearances over most of them. I don't think the Horizons prealg has quite enough practice for her on its own; it's pretty different from the elementary books. Then I shrug and work on her history instead. Oops. To actually contribute to your conundrum, you might search the word "straddler" in the logic stage section and look for a large thread titled something like the prealg fence straddler thread for more options than you probably knew existed. That thread is also full of stories so you can get a feel for which ones might work best for certain types of families and students. There's also a large thread "stuck" in the high school forum with algebra+ options.

Bookshelf. Each kid has their own shelf to maintain with all current books and supplies. Anything used rather infrequently lives in the school closet.

First Language Lessons, the old combined version, was used by all six of mine. It's painless and fun. My Marine could still quote some of those poems. 😄 Story of the World started as a bedtime story for my oldest and has gone through all of them. Our volume 1 is autographed by SWB, addressed to my third. ❤️ I found Horizons math with the third and the youngest four have all used it. #5 is finishing 6 and #6 is in the 4. Rod and Staff spelling almost made it, and might still. I found it with the oldest and used it with all of them after that. The baby is a whole different spelling creature and he couldn't pass a 1st grade spelling test yet. 🤷

I have one of those TOO. He's also starting third grade, though he's turning 9 in less than a month. He's ahead in pretty much everything but writing and spelling. He still has to focus so hard for his handwriting to just be legible; there's no way he'd also be able to think up the material in his head at the same time. I haven't asked him to write a sentence he's crafted unless I've first written it out on his page for him to copy. He can troubleshoot problems in paragraphs (order, sentences that don't belong, etc), but unless he has a massive growth spurt I can't see us getting to paragraphs at all this year. For what it's worth I put him in Writing With Ease a year behind. He rarely gets any of the questions wrong and he can narrate the short excerpts in painstaking detail, but the copywork from high quality children's literature has been great for building some endurance and confidence in those little hands. We enjoy the stories too, and he's added a few to his reading pile. It takes zero prep work or reading ahead of him. I just pull a worksheet out of the back and flip over to that day in the TM portion. (Totally adding that Games for Writing book from Lori's post to his pile for the year...)

Update for August. This summer! And this child. Can't decide if I should laugh or cry. 🤣