bbcooker Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 If you homeschool a large family (we'll soon have 7 dc and probably more in yrs to come), is BFSU even reasonable to consider? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 I think it's a great choice. It's based off of what the author wished his junior college environmental science students knew before starting his class. If your children are headed for junior college, you can probably skip a separate high school curriculum. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matilda Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 I tried to make it work for my family and it didn't happen. The problem is that the topics in the lower levels are too easy for the older kids and the topics in the level 3 are too hard for the younger kids. And the topics are too diverse to make them match up between levels. I thought that I could beef up Level 1 enough to keep everyone together, but even after I spent a lot of time tracking down extra books and demonstrations or videos, it would only take my older kids 5 minutes to understand the topic and be ready to move on. I really felt it was a huge amount of prep time on my part for very little learning on their part. I also contemplated using the different levels with different kids, but then you have 3 different teacher-intensive science lessons every time you do science. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amyrobynne Posted March 8, 2013 Share Posted March 8, 2013 I have no problem combining my 1st and 3rd graders with volume 1. I'll have my 3rd son 4 years behind and my hope is that he can do volume 1 while the older boys are doing volume 2 and work in the same thread. I could maybe see folding a 4 year old in with the older boys and giving different supplemental books to each and expecting different levels of retention. But more than a 4 year range doing the same lesson would be pretty tricky. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TracyP Posted March 8, 2013 Share Posted March 8, 2013 Reasonable to consider, sure. Will I be going back to it any time soon, nope. :) I love the idea of BFSU, but it was too hard to implement here. Part of this is the reality that time is short and needs to be prioritized when you have a large family. A bigger issue for me is that it seems like overkill. I could easily (easily) spend 20 minutes preparing for a lesson and then we sit down for the lesson - 5 minutes and we are done. Like pp, a huge amount of prep time for very little learning. My kids have learned far more through nature study and reading library books on topics that interest them then they did from BFSU. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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