Oak Meadow questions

[RainbowSprinkles]

I think I will use Oak Meadow in grades 1-3. (My dd is in grade 4 and I'm happy with the choices I made for her.) So this would be for my ds6, he will be 7 in August.

 

I plan on supplementing the language arts with OPGTR, which we already use. Everything else looks great to me (as far as I can tell from their sample), but I don't have it in front of me yet...

 

So here are my questions:

 

1. Does 1st grade include form drawing?

 

2. Are lessons scheduled in blocks (like traditional Waldorf)?

 

3. Do you know of any bloggers who write about Oak Meadow in the younger years? Please share! :)

 

4. I don't like the spiral main lesson books on their webpage. Are there other options?

 

5. Are the main lessons books meant to be used for everything or are is it one for each subject?

 

6. Is it worth it to get their Health curriculum?

 

Thank you for reading and helping!! :)

[Just Robyn]

I left my OM 1 syllabus in the car and dh just drove off with it. Flipping through I saw no form drawing. I have the ALGF DVD and like it.

 

There are semesters, but it's not like in waldorf. LA is done all year long, as is math, etc. However, the science topic will change from one semester to the next, for example.

 

I don't know of any bloggers talking about OM 1, 2, or 3. I'm sure they're out there!

 

You can go to paper, scissors, stone for lesson books. There are other stores too; that's the one that popped in my head.

 

IMO, the book they offer for Health is :ack2:. It's not written by them. I don't really understand why they sell it. It doesn't seem similar at all to their other materials. I would think they could come up with something else if they tried even a little.

[RainbowSprinkles]

Thanks!

[tinkhs]

There's form drawing in Oak Meadow 1. It is not a block format and is later in the year.

[NanceXToo]

Hi,

 

I've only used Oak Meadow for 4th grade and 5th grade so far with my daughter. I will be using it again this fall for 6th grade with her, and will simultaneously be starting my son with Oak Meadow Kindergarten.

 

I have been blogging regularly about Oak Meadow but like I said, that wouldn't start til 4th grade so may not be what you are looking for. If you're interested though you can take a peek (link in sig- although currently it seems there's a problem with LiveJournal and no pictures are showing up anywhere in my blog at the moment, I have a message in to tech support to find out why and hopefully that will be resolved soon!)

 

I don't know much yet about what 1st grade includes (as to form drawing etc) and I'm not even sure what "scheduled in blocks" means lol-

 

I wanted to offer some suggestions about the main lesson books though- for OM4 we did use spiral books- I just bought artist sketch pads at Walmart and used those. At that level, I used a different main lesson book for each subject. But in Kindergarten, we will just be using one book per quarter and using that one book for all subjects.

 

If you don't want to use a spiral bound book, you could always just use a 3 hole punch and a binder for your pages, and use those plastic sheet protectors for projects where, say, you're gluing leaves onto a page or something and want to keep it covered/protected.

 

This past year for 5th grade we switched to using a binder and lined paper for writing, but I could still three hole punch blank paper that I wanted to insert for those activities that required blank paper/more of a "main lesson book" feel, so it made a nice transition year and a nice combination.

 

Like someone else said, the health curriculum (Growing, Growing Strong) is not put out by Oak Meadow and has a different feel than the rest of OM stuff does. When I first saw it, I didn't like it or "get" it- it seemed to be geared toward a teacher in a classroom, not a homeschooling parent. But after looking through it again, I decided there really are a lot of good ideas in it that I can definitely utilize in our homeschool, so I decided to pick and choose which projects, activities, etc would work for us and use those, and ignore the rest, and I'll be using those activities this coming fall starting with my son for Kindergarten.