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What is the worst educational/HS item you've ever bought?


MamaHappy
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I was very disappointed in Winter Promise, too. I had forgotten about that one! Everytime I get their catalog, I am tempted to try it again, though!

 

I forgot about that one too. We used WP Animal Worlds. Even my animal-loving, "I want to be a vet," 7-year old begged to do ANYTHING else.

 

Sonlight Core 1 was also a bust here. We dropped it after 3-months.

 

Krista

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Horizons Health 1. Way, way below what I think should be first grade level. My DD is pretty advanced when it comes to human body type stuff, but still - this seems easy enough for a 3yo. On top of that, it's just silly. I understand that AOP is a Christian company, but this curriculum seems to be way more focused on religion than anything to do with health or safety. I had hoped there'd be something in there maybe I'd forget to cover, which is why I bought it, but it's all stuff we've talked about since she was a baby. Total waste of money. I don't think it could be less useful. Plus, it has one activity where you're supposed to cut and paste these pictures of 3 families that have changed over time, but there's one family that doesn't even have the same skin/hair color as any of the rest of them (as in, it doesn't match any of the other pictures, even though it's supposed to be one of the other families in one of its stages of development). :001_huh:

 

:iagree: I thought the same - I'd use this to cover any health topics I might have forgotten. Total waste of time.

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I so wanted to LOVE Winter Promise All American Set 1, but it was sooooo disjointed. It is all over the place and the kids and I were all confused.

 

Saxon - just the name gives us the shivers around here!

 

WWE - wanted to love this one too, I just can't seem to get it.

 

CLE - Social Studies and Science :thumbdown:

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I loved MFWK! That's funny!

 

Rightstart Math. OMG! I know people love it. I loathe it. I even went back last year and was looking at math programs, printed the sample out again and remembered just how awful it was. It gave me the heebie jeebies all over again.

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Jr. Analytical Grammar.

 

It started out confusing and just got worse from there. My textbook-adverse child was begging to go back to Rod & Staff.

 

I'm just saying that reading the title to this one was painful...can't imagine trying to do it...hope you didn't torture yourselves too long!!:iagree:

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BJU Math 4 Distance Learning

 

Soooo expensive and horrible, horrible, horrible (the class, not the curriculum)!

 

 

 

Oh, Shari, you're right. That was a horrible class. I hope they have redone it or will redo it soon. I hurt for the kids who must go through it. I'm astonished BJUP is still selling it. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with it, and I hope you told BJUP how you feel about it. (I certainly did.)

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Without a doubt Power Glide Elementary Spanish online. (Power Speak now, IIRC).

 

I tell everyone who will listen to me how much I hated Power Glide Elementary Spanish. If I owned the company, I would be EMBARRASSED to sell that to one single family! Never mind hawking it at every convention!

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I have to say, hands down, Saxon Math 3 was our biggest bust. When I think of the total misery for my dd it makes me want to cry. I can still recall her sitting at the table with her daddy frowning all the while they did the lessons. For a non mathy kid, the spiral method was just torture!

 

Another bust for us was Easy Grammar. Dd liked it because it was, well -- EASY!! Problem was, she did not retain what she had learned previously and so we had to move over to R&S English 5 for remedial lessons. (I should have gone there in the first place and stayed put!)

 

Latina Christiana was pretty bad too. We moved over to LFC and never looked back.

 

Blessings,

Lucinda

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I so wanted to LOVE Winter Promise All American Set 1, but it was sooooo disjointed. It is all over the place and the kids and I were all confused.

 

How could I have left out my $400+ WP fail? We tried American Story 1 with the intent of doing AS2 this year... AS1 was not looked forward to by anyone in our house. Overall we like most of the books and the idea. My boys just don't like having to do a paper craft every time for each map, and then another paper craft for the activity. They love doing art, too, so that isn't the issue.

 

What did it in for me was that it was not chronological and even some topics that *seemed* to go together within the history study (nevermind the American Native study lining up w/ history, b/c it never does) don't acutally. Take LaSalle, the French explorer for example. Totally different time frame than Cortes and Pizarro. But I am picky like that.

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Power-Glide Latin. It was just. so. very. very. bad. Since then, I've had the opportunity to get my hands on Power-Glide French. It was only very bad. With the price they charge, it makes the lack of content that much more egregious, IMO.

 

Other things that have been disappointing (but not horrid):

Math-U-See - I guess that, for the price, I expected a lot better production quality from it. The DVDs were very low-end and the books were printed on very cheap paper. I will say that the lectures were decent, but it wasn't enough to make up for the seeming "cheapness" of it.

 

SOTW, vol. 1 - I was more than disappointed that anyone would use bible stories and call them history, but I was glad I gave vol. 2-4 a chance because those were pretty good.

 

Phonics Pathways - That had to be the single most boring piece of curriculum I've ever seen. I was so glad when FLL came out.

 

Writing Strands - Ds summed it up well, "I feel like it's making me write like I'm stupid."

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Teach your child to read in 100EZ lessons

 

I've used this with my first three, and now I'm watching the magic unfolding again with my dd5. Very easy going with my dd5 (fourth one to teach the book to), especially since she knows the names and sounds of the letters from watching LeapFrog.

 

Love this book, and used together with Victory Drill, Alphaphonics, and Saxon Phonics.

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Saxon math - someone told me that R&S was way behind Saxon and that her family had to go to 7th grade Saxon after finishing up with R&S. (....:glare:) So I switched. I got ds the 6/5 book. So far below R&S it wasn't funny. So I tried 7/6. I had to go back to the R&S teachers manuals from earlier grades just to "un-confuse" him.

 

Not impressed.

 

Sticking with R&S math from now on. Then we'll go to an algebra program, consumer math, etc. But NOT Saxon!!!

Edited by UpNorth
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FLL - hated the script and it just seemed boring, not to mention that I just decided not to teach grammar in 1st grade

 

Several phonics programs including OPGTTR...same thing, just could not get into the scripted nature of it.

 

Latin Road to English Grammar - could never make heads or tails of it and didn't want to

 

Sonlight - schedules just do not work for me

 

Any curriculum that has long explanations, is difficult to follow (turn to this page, then do this, then turn to this page, etc), is overly scheduled or scripted just does not work for me. I want something I can open and go.

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Calvert K and Calvert 2. On their own they were just OK. For grade 2 it was a lot of material to cover in a day, and a lot of it was boring and TOO much information to retain. They had some text books that I did not care for, and much of their materials were printed and spiral bound. I felt that it could have been much cheaper for what we got.

The K curriculum was very boring to my daughter. She wanted to learn how to read the books instead of me reading them. There were times where she did just read it to me. We never made it to the books that she was supposed to read herself.

 

In both there was a lot of jumping around and shuffling of books and materials. When I was teaching 2 at a time it was bad! This is a curriculum where you can't just leave the child to do it themselves, until they are in 4th, I think. The math was way too easy IMO. At the end of K they were just beginning to teach single digit math... In 2nd math, it was teaching doubles plus 1 and at the end of second, it would start to get into multiplication of small numbers.

 

I couldn't imagine trying to teach 3 with Calvert!!

 

I am currently using Sonlight, and it is a good fit for them when it comes to the cores (so far). The LA kinda jumps around.

I use Horizons math and so far they all love it. My 4th grader is starting to not like the amount of work she has to do, but she still does it. haha

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  • 10 months later...

I enjoyed reading this old post too. And yes, one man's trash is another man's treasure! So true!

 

Only thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was RightStart Math. We tried it for 2-3 months last fall and I thought I was going die! It was so painful for me and my kids weren't a fan either. I really loved looking at the program and gave it rave reviews when we sold it, but it was not for us. I know other that it fits perfectly. Now I don't regret buying it as I would have never known and would still be wondering if it was the math program for us. :lol: Now I know! It was a huge waste of $400 for both my boys. Yes, I bought the kits with all the hands on stuff. Still have it thinking we may use it. Hasn't happened in the past year. It was a costly experiment!

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Teach your child to read in 100 EZ Lessons did not get past the first day with me nor dd5(she cried). It was soooooooo boring I am glad I did not spend money on it as I borrowed it from the library.

 

Saxon Math made dd12 "feel like it was a nuclear time bomb on paper".Her words. Every time I mention or she sees Saxon at the library her eye twitches and the same goes for Abeka.

 

Abeka- dd12 did not like it ( but not as much as Saxon Math) and avoided like it was the plague. Both these program made dd12 not want to do school work for months.

 

Analytical Grammar put dd12 in tears the first day, however she did say she learned from it but still HATES it !!! She likes Rod/Staff.

 

Thank goodness I received these books used/borrowed (besides AG) or I would have cried at the loss and waste of money on these products. I thought these books were going to be a big hit since my friends all rave about it but it was a major bust. The funny thing is that when I told my friend that dd12 hates Abeka that her son yelled ME TOO!! I think she was shocked to hear him say that :lol:.

Edited by dyana17
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SWR - Contrary to the author's opinion, there ARE kids who will not learn to read no matter how strictly you hold to her instructions.:glare: It wasn't a complete loss, as I did learn a lot for myself...I just wish I didn't push my ds through the program b/c it was a source of needless frustration.

 

HST+ - How on earth does this program WORK??? I've watched the videos. I've played around with it. I don't get it. Give me a pencil.

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Horizon Math-- Jumped around so much and honestly didn't feel like it was much better than a workbook I could've picked up from Target

 

Writing Strands

 

Spelling Workout

 

 

 

However, we loved 100EZ Lessons here. It worked extremely well for both of my kids, and I've recommended it to others who loved it as well. It definitely shows you that curriculum works differently from family to family. I'm glad we have so many choices out there!

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Love this thread! So far, our worst fits were:

 

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 EZ Lessons

 

Sequential Spelling (my son and I liked it at first, seeing the patterns, but he retained zilch)

 

and so far, Life of Fred Elementary (which kills me cuz I love math!) My kids enjoy it ok, but in all honesty we've enjoyed many of the living readers we've gotten at the library much more. (We work from Julie's fabulous list off the Living Math Forum email group).

 

And I'm still trying to figure out how to incorporate CTC Critical Thinking Through Science. I'm having a look at a friend's copy of Nebel soon, and may jump ship on this one.

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A Living History of Our World. I tried it because of the glowing reviews and could barely stomach the first chapter. Thankfully, we were able to return it.

 

Oh my goodness, please share more! I've been looking at this and it looks really great, I'm dying to know what you didn't like about it exactly! :)

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For us, A Child's History of America--didn't like the archaic and discriminatory comments throughout. Also found some things that were clearly not accurate.

 

As much as I liked LLATL Red, my love for it diminished with the next year and then by last year (yellow) we were substituting most of the content with other things.

 

My daughter got so messed up with Sonlight K's LA (the old edition)--I was very inexperienced and didn't know to stop until it had done some major damage and confused her thoroughly. It delayed her reading until the end of 1st and beginning of 2nd. We used Phonics Pathways to remediate her reading and then AAS to teach her to spell. She still struggles with reading and writing to this day.

 

ABeka. Not so much the product (even though it is so unhomeschooler friendly) but the company. I'm not going to say anything more about it but I could go on...

 

Horizon's Math K--I'm clearly not a good math person, but was embarrassed at my own lack of ability to teach a Kindergarten math program. Was not a good fit for me. And we have loved MUS ever since.

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Sing Spell Read and Write K-1 combo kit.

 

That was a very expensive mistake!!! My son could read much better than he could write, and it really held him back by requiring so much printing.

 

Poor squirt could have used a much more experienced hs'ing mom to know when to trash a program!

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A Living History of Our World. I tried it because of the glowing reviews and could barely stomach the first chapter. Thankfully, we were able to return it.

 

Oh my goodness, please share more! I've been looking at this and it looks really great, I'm dying to know what you didn't like about it exactly! :)

 

I felt it was poorly written, and had an extremely patronizing tone. My daughter complained she felt "the story was talking to me like a baby". It might be fine for kindergarten or first grade, but I have a second grader who has no younger siblings to do history with.

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