Old Fashioned Education reviews needed please

[desertmum]

Hello,

Reading the frugal homeschooler's threads around here (all right, "lurking" would be a more appropriate term) I came across the website for an "Old Fashioned Education". It provided a wealth of information for a classical education newbie like me. I know some of the books seem a bit ancient but surely I could find alternatives? (I like SOW books). Anything to keep us within budget (as in shoestring budget that is). We are already doing MEP.

 

Has anyone in this forum tried working with this curriculum? Pros and cons?

Pretty please?

 

:bigear: :D

[MSNative]

I've used parts on and off through the years.

 

Pros - book suggestions, unit study work, alt. math work, extra resources. It is fantastic resource for supplementing any curriculum. She did a great job organizing all the links and making the site easy to use.

 

Love that she wrote out a curriculum plan for each grade level - huge amount of work available for free.

 

Cons - Science is weak, imo. Could just be the way that I thought we'd implement it. I never did because of that so take that with a big grain of salt.

 

Lots of printing. Reminds me of Robinson or A2. This is so petty, but I dislike the format of most free books. Printing, reading and storing a few each year is ok, but if I had to do an entire year with them, I'd go nuts. (Lots are available through good library systems. When we lived near a good system, it was easy to implement this. Once we moved, not so much.)

 

No hands on activities - could be a pro or a con depending on your kids.

Edited September 21, 2010 by MSNative

[Donna A.]

I pretty much ditto the pp's pros and cons, except for science. We're fine with science being simple fun and exposure through books, nature walks, and a few experiments here and there until 6th grade, then we get more focused.

 

WONDERFUL books that I haven't seen on any other booklist. :)

 

But -- and this is the biggest deterrent to me -- our once-awesome, very large library system at which we could get nearly any book ever printed has scaled back by the THOUSANDS and we can no longer get many of those older classics. (ILL takes forever to get, and then I only get to keep the book for a week.) And IF they have a newly reprinted copy in the system somewhere, I have to wait weeks and weeks (sometimes literally MONTHS) to get it because so many others are trying to get the same book. Thus, I'd have to resort to all that printing if we used something like OFE, Ambleside, or Robinson, and I have neither the time, interest, or printer quality for that. Which means I'd end up buying hard copies wherever I could find them, which may or may not save me money in the long run. :D

 

(Not that I'm opposed to purchasing and having all those wonderful books in our home library, mind you! I'd rather do that, in fact. But if my reason for considering OFE or Ambleside is to save money, it would pretty much defeat the purpose.)