A Beka, MCT, and FLL

[AdamsFamily]

So... I usually double-up curriculums. I am paranoid that somewhere along the way my kids are going to miss something, so I tend to give them too much.

 

Last year, my dds worked through their respective levels of A Beka and FLL, although my 2nd grader did A Beka 2 LA and FLL 3. I had planned for them both to just move up - 3rd grader go into A Beka 3 and FLL 4, 5th grader just into A Beka 5 (B). Then I discovered MCT. I have already purchased the Island level (I buy almost everything used and sell what we have finished, so I am not out a lot of money) and I love it! My older dd is a visual-spatial learner, and I now wish I had found this curriculum a couple of years ago. My younger dd may be gifted -she is able to handle higher level material and craves knowledge, hence the reason I investigated MCT.

 

I am thinking of taking my younger dd through the Island MCT, while allowing my older dd to listen in, too. I still want my younger dd to complete FLL 4, b/c w/out the optional lessons, that's only ~85 lessons for one school year. I also really want to keep up with A Beka's LA program (maybe w/out the readers - I would rather substitute whole classical novels). I like the test-taking skills that A Beka's tests give.

 

Is all this too much? It is so hard to find the perfect curriculum when there are so many good ones to choose from! I am also aware that there are different philosophies and teaching methods used in each one. For example, I had to remind my older dd that A Beka's diagramming only consisted of the subject and verb line. She had practiced much more complicated diagrams in FLL4, so she would over analyze the sentences in A beka. MCT's material refers to suffixes and prefixes as "stems".

 

I don't want to stress out my kids nor myself, so any advice would be appreciated!