Okay - has everyone set their curriculum now?

[HollyDay]

Every year I think I have it figured out. Every year, I need to make changes. So, I am hoping I am not alone in this! this is what I have changed so far:

 

7th:

writing - switched from CW HOmer to Jump In

grammar - added Language Lessons for Secondary Child to Winston Advanced

Science - switched from BJU 7 to Apologia Genera

 

4th:

writing - switched from CW Aesop to Ignite Your Writing

math- switched from TT 5 to BJU 4

grammar - added Language Lessons for Elementary Child to GWG4

 

I think it is working now!!!

[Michelle T]

I have a 12 year old DS. I've given up on the Keys to... math books once it became obvious that DS couldn't even remember how to do division. I'm waiting for MCP Mathematics 4 to arrive. I briefly gave IEW a try, not for us. I'm now cobbling together something for writing, still in the process there.

 

The rest seems to be okay.

Michelle T

[melopher]

You're not alone, I'm right there with you. I'm hoping that these changes actually work.

 

My biggest change was with Grammar/Writing. I'd thought BJU would be perfect, and it flopped. So my 7th, 4th, and 2nd are switching to GWG. My 4th is joining my 7th in IEW, and my 2nd will start PLL.

 

The other thing I've had to change is math for my 2nd. I'm slowing down RS and adding MUS. It's working great so far!

 

For my PreK I dumped WP I'm Ready to Learn and am in the middle of trying Little Hands to Heaven. Mostly just doing lapbooks and misc. stuff I've got around.

 

Whew! I'm still juggling our schedule structure, it needs some adjustment, but everything else is good so far.

[8filltheheart]

Last yr I bought a lot of new curricula selections based on recommendations on this forum. It was the most disasterous beginning we ever experienced!

 

This yr I went with my gut instincts instead and things are going great!

 

FWIW.....CW was my biggest disaster last yr.

[HollyDay]

BJU is not a good fit for everybody. We did their grammar very successfully for several years with one dc, but it was a flop for the other. So, I do understand that frustration.

 

Yes, CW worked well last year, but it is a disaster this year. Mom07, you are wise to go with your instincts. I love this board and all the info I get. But, then I have to take into consideration my family and learning styles, etc.

[Matryoshka]

Our biggest change is spelling - I have completely given up trying to have them all do it at once, even the twins.

 

The youngest is sticking with what she's doing, one twin is going to use a higher level of Sequential Spelling, and the other is going to try Spelling Wisdom. We'll see how that goes!

 

I'm also going to try adding Challenge Math and Your Business Math to our supplements of the Singapore core, and the youngest has demanded a Words Roots book for herself (how can you say no to that?).

[Mommyfaithe]

This year I decided to drop all my EXTRAS and extraneouses...ONE math program (except for Life of Fred with dd...because she finds it hilarious and fun,) ONE phonics, ONE History ...JUST one book per subject for each child and combining as many kids and subjects as I can. We all do Bible, lit read-aluds, music, and art together. My younger 3 do history and science together.

 

So far, besides being exhausting...because homeschooling IS exhausting, everything is working out ok.

 

I did drop CLE math for my 5th grader and went back to BJU. CLE was WAY over her head. Maybe next year she can use the grade 5...maybe we will just stick w/ BJU since she is not tortured by it. We'll see.

 

~~Faithe

[Amy+2]

bouncing back and forth between ToG and SoTW. Leaning towards just ToG. Like them both for many different reasons. Also have Galloping the Globe and Cantering the Country-both of which I would LOVE to use, just can't find the time. Finally sold all the KONOS though, huge relief to not have to look at that on my shelf.

 

Debating sticking with Shiller & Singapore combo for oldest. Both started with old faithful A Beka-oldest is tired of worksheets...just bought Teaching Textbooks, too. Plenty to choose from in that department.

 

Bought Writing Tales and received it 2 days ago. Own Primary Language Lessons, Intermediate Language Lessons and Easy Grammar. Debating FLL4 when it comes out. Thinking of forgetting all of the aforementioned and just buying McRuffy Language Arts -complete and compact. Do they have a 4th grade level yet??

 

Sold Spelling Power. Own Phonetic Zoo- he does not like it-boring- and neither do I-weird approach. May have to buy back Spelling Power.:glare:

 

Using All About Spelling for my younger and it is going GREAT! So far, it's the only thing I WON'T be switching...oh, won't give up the Explorer's Bible either.

 

Both want a Foreign Language but I keep balking...of course one wants Mandarin or French and the other wants Spanish. Go figure.

 

There's more...I could go on and on and on...

 

I need therapy for curriculum abuse.

 

I am THAT person in your homeschool group. You know her, the one that either owns it(curriculum), owned it and sold it, and/or owned it sold it and bought it once again. I am so sick of being that person. Is there a cure for this??? I think all of my first born traits diminished with pregnancy...can that happen?? Won't they come back?? I mean, it's been 6 years since then!! I used to be SOOO organized and planned everything with great programs and beautiful charts, graphs and spreadsheets, my grocery list was even pretty...ah...those were the days. Now, 9 times out of 10 I forget or lose my grocery list. Left it at the library last time. :001_rolleyes:

 

I often wonder how great it would be to be Trivium for a day!!;)

Girlfriend has got it going on!!!

[classicallyrelaxedmomof3]

We are coming to the end of our year. So I am actually only now planning for next year. We usually start some time in January.

 

My youngest is severely dyslexic so we are in the process of figuring that out. I knew it, in the back of my head...I mean he is almost 12 and reading at a K level, but now we have the "official" diagnosis. Time to get my head out of the sand!

 

So for new year...

 

My 16 yr old.....????

 

My 11 yr old...Science Explorer Series (Animals, Astronomy, and the two chemistry ones).....????

[Melissa B]

Our biggest "this isn't working" changes this year have been to latin. For dd10 we dropped Latin Prep for SYRWTL Latin and added in Lingua Latina. This seems to be a very good combination for her. For dd8, I have set aside Lively Latin until November. She did the first few chapters last year. I do think it is the right program for her, I just need to get a better handle on what I am trying to get from the program. Right now it seems too all-over-the-place for me. I don't think this is a problem with the program so much as me not reading through the whole thing and getting down on paper my goals for each chapter. I need a solid plan of where we are going in each subject and I haven't done that with Lively Latin. I am going to purchase LL2 and read through the student and teacher books for both levels and establish my plan before we continue. Right now she is doing Song School Latin with dd4 and both are enjoying it.

 

 

I've also made a small change to dd8's language arts. We dropped FLL3 for Good English (a free online book.) While I loved FLL1/2, I have found FLL3 to be somehow too cumbersome. I am surprised by this, but Good English is working fine and is more in line with where I am going with grammar.

 

Other than that, the kids have asked for more science and art, as they do every year, so I am still working on that. :)

[Tree House Academy]

Ha ha ha!

 

Well, thus far:

 

Kindergarten:

 

Added ETC, ETC online, Bob Books, and Come Read with Me lessons just to make it a school day. Calvert is way behind where my son is, but I don't want to skip and miss all the reading enrichments, Science, and Social Studies. It is working...for now.

 

Ditching Calvert math for Singapore 1A as soon as it gets here.

 

4th Grade:

 

Ditched Calvert phonics - what a waste.

Ditched Spelling Power - replaced with Mega Words

Added Handwriting

Ditched Calvert Math - waiting on Singapore 3A to arrive. :)

Edited September 29, 2008 by Tree House Academy

[Denainms]

We are finally in the groove :001_smile: I dropped 2nd grade CLE LA, and Math for R & S English and Math, dropped All About Spelling(dh hated the tiles!) for R & S Spelling. We kept CLE Reading and MFW Adventures and things are good now, no complaints from the kids or me :D

[fsunolefan]

So far we are liking most of our curriculum. The only big change was dropping Spelling Workout B for Sequential Spelling.

Scheduling is still a work in progress. We are pretty flexible right now, but I need to start tightening it up a bit.

[Quiver0f10]

I switched my 9 yo from Abeka math to MUS and my 8th, 7th and 5th graders from LiCT to LFC.

[Stacy in NJ]

I've tweeked a couple of things, but, for the most part, we're dancing with the ones which brought us.

 

No real changes since we began our school year in August.

[angela&4boys]

We attempted a more in depth CM philosophy for about 6 weeks via more independent readings with daily written and oral narrations. We did this with Living Books Curriculum. It is a beautiful program, but not for us!

 

After the 5-week mark, we were really longing for our former year where we used Biblioplan (finishing Ancients in a few weeks) with SOTW (adding MOH this year) and Apologia together. I wish I had listened to my gut, but fell prey to a case of grass-is-greener syndrome. [kicking self]

 

We are back to our tried and true way of orally narrating their literature readings daily and written narrations for history and science once a week. We do this via notebooking from Jeanie Fulbright's site and our Notebooking Pages.com cd. Between this, reading-aloud as a family, and our science expirements the JOY has returned!:lol:

 

We are very pleased with Math U See, Queen's Language Lessons Series, and Dr. Fry's Spelling. I did add a grammar notebook and Writing Strands (alternating weekly with Language Lessons) to beef up LA for my 11yo.

Edited September 26, 2008 by angela&4boys

[Scuff]

For now ;)

 

We've completely changed math, and added K for DD a year before I was planning. But we're settled for the time being!

[Donna T.]

Yes, I've had to make some big changes. Both of my boys started out with My Father's World and I've switched both to Sonlight. It was a really, really hard decision for me but it's what they needed and they are doing great. We are previous SLers, so we got right into the groove of things immediately. Actually, today was my six year old's first "official" day of SL only. I started out with MFW and then kept adding more and more SL until we just didn't want to do MFW at all anymore. He has been doing my oldest son's SL Core for the past couple of weeks, but I started him on his own core today.

 

I also am using less and less Intermediate Language Lessons with my oldest and he is working through his second Queen's Homeschool Supply Language Lessons book. He likes it so much and wants to do it, so I don't think we need ILL at all. I'm probably dropping it next week.

 

Fortunately, those things that started out as "big hits" - Writing Strands and Spelling Power for my oldest - still are! I love WS and my son is doing great with that. He really likes SP and finds it a great relief after Rod & Staff Spelling.

 

 

Pressing on,

Donna T.

[Bee]

I'm changing things that we just don't like.Oldest dd doesn't like the way they explain things in R&S 7th grade LA and we both find the lessons repetitious.And me, well I just don't really like the 7th grade math textbook.Except that it's a textbook.I'm bored,dd is bored and we do it because we have to every day.

So I 'm switching her back to Bob Jones for LA.Dd would prefer Language Lessons for the Secondary Child but she's willing to go with what I want and I want it because it covers some topics that I want dd to work on this year.And I'm adding LOF fractions,decimals and percents and Key to Percents and skipping those chapters in R&S math because dd hasn't learned percents yet and I think she'll find the textbook confusing.LOF will,I hope, be a little more interesting for this child who abhors math.

I'd love to use Mosdos Press for literature but it's just such alot of money to spend on a textbook.Though I do think they are some of the loveliest textbooks I've ever seen.And this from someone who really doesn't like textbooks much.

I'm not changing anything for youngest dd.She dislikes her R&S math but that is just too bad.It drills the math facts well and that is what she needs.

[JeannineW]

We needed to add readers so I ended up switching to Sonlight for the whole core and stopping SOTW. We were enjoying it but I decided I wanted to try the Sonlight approach of integrating the history, geography, read alouds and readers. The first week went well.

[Annabel Lee]

We're keeping most of what we started with, although it took me months of pouring over books and lots of research to decide! Luckily, my entire "plan" changed before I placed any orders. I was going to go w/ Abeka + Shurley language arts, Veritas History/Bible, Abeka & Calvert Sci. for my K5'er, Saxon or Abeka Math, Classically Cursive and lots of other supplements... Then I read TWTM. Everything changed. Now we're doing what's in my sig. line, but I've added Atelier art, and will be adding guitar, drum, and tae kwon do lessons as soon as I finish looking into which place/person I want them to take lessons from and get them signed up. We did drop the art lessons they were taking from a local art instructor b/c she moved away. :(

[Sparkle]

I'm very happy so far with how our schooling is going. The only change I've made is with my K dd. She's having a hard time with phonics so I added in good ol' Dick and Jane readers. I think sight reading may work better for her for now at least.

[Sixmeadows]

and we tried all sorts of things before getting an oficial diagnosis. Can I suggest the two biggest helps for us?

 

- oral repeated readings. We use McGuffey readers; they work well for this.

-Barton reading and spelling - I watched a bunch of her free seminars that are on her website, they were helpful. I debated on the price of the program but we needed to do something(ds is 11). I have not been disappointed.

 

Cheri

[siloam]

Yep. But we hsed all summer and have only added a few things, like Lively Latin.

 

The biggest problem I am working on solving right now is that my 2nd dd, Pumpkin can't do narrations correctly. I mean last year she was doing them beautifully then like a switch one day she started narrating to me like it was a play. :001_huh: I have tried repeatedly to get her back to summarizing, but she just shortens how many direct quotes she uses. :rolleyes: I finally just dropped it for the time being.

 

I have WWE in the mail, hoping that well help me walk her through the narration process again from the beginning and get her back on track.

 

Other than that all is good!

 

Heather

[KrissiK]

I've got 2 kindergarten boys (4.5 and 5.5 years old) and we got the A Beka kindergarten kit and they love kindergarten. Of course we do a lot of science experiments, too, and a weekly trip to the library. But, A Beka has been a good fit for my boys and I'm happy with it.

[AuntPol]

We've done 5 weeks and no changes yet but I have not started Spanish yet.

[Pata]

We have changed the way we combine Singapore and Miquon and we have changed the way we are using FLL. We have also add nature, artist and composer studies. Other than that things are going well and I don't think we will have to make any other adjustments.

[chiguirre]

We're finishing up Singapore 1B and will go back to R&S 2 in about a week. It's not really a change, we did use R&S 1 last year and will use Singapore again over the summer.

 

I've been bouncing around with math for dd, but I think we've finally gotten back in the groove with R&S 1. She was a bit overwhelmed by starting addition drills, but today she said it was easy, which means she feels comfortable with it.

 

Science turned out to be an outside class that popped up at the last minute in August. I put my original plans on the back burner till next spring.

 

History isn't really working smoothly yet, but I want to try for at least another month without a hurricane and power outage. If it still doesn't work, I'm going to just read through the Golden Book of World History and call it good.

[Blue Hen]

LOL!!! We are in our 9th year and I still ended up changing things after we began. But isn't that one of the beauties of Homeschooling! You don't have to get approval to change, you just do so.

 

The changes this year are just with my 7th grader. I started the year off with him in Key to Algebra with the plans to do the first 4 books and then move him over to NEM 1. His frustration with math really got to me this year. I LOVE math, and to me math is the subject I'd love to teach all day long, everyday. Send me your kids frustrated by math and I can teach them was always my slogan, all the way back to my high school days. Then this kid came along......

 

I switched him over to Mary Dolciani's Pre-Algebra book and he is loving it! The material is the same as in NEM (except the word problems will be easier) but he loves the layout, and he is readily doing two lessons a day, and thinks it is easy stuff! Ahhhh, relief. Maybe I can go back to saying once again, send my your kids frustrated with math and I will teach them.

 

Writing --- We switched over to Put It in Writing from Classical Composition and well, I'm not enjoying it. We have something new ordered and once here I can see us switching that too.

 

Carole

Edited September 28, 2008 by Blue Hen

[CactusPair]

I'm working out the kinks, stuff's going in, stuff's going out. I thought I had everything set, but nope!:D

 

that's ok, we're learning and enjoying the days.:001_smile:

[woolybear]

As frustrating and stressful having to make changes midstream is, I am grateful to be able to. It is one of the definite benefits of homeschooling--being able to adjust to really meet our kids needs.

 

And yes, we're making a lot of changes here and I'm still thinking this through.

[tricia]

I'm the same way. Every year is different. You can read what we are doing this year on my homeschool blog.

 

tricia

http://www.mommyx12.blogspot.com

http://www.bestinthenest.blogspot.com --homeschool blog

[sagira]

I think I have. It just took a bit of tweaking, but overall I'm impressed with my planning. I've demoted Theology to a very short time quick discussions and now read Bible stories outside of school hours. And I've added Geography in its place. I'm glad, as ds loves Geography so far (2 weeks in). He drew a map of his room today :)

 

Still working on lightening up, not getting stressed.. but I'm sure it only means I need more sleep (don't look at the time I'm posting this) ;)

[Closeacademy]

I think we are close to being set. What I have changed:

 

3rd

 

spelling was SWR with charts & worksheets

grammar was Ruth Heller picture books with worksheets

 

Now we are just using writing prompts and mad libs.

 

Math added in Math in My World between Singapore Math levels.

 

And really that is all that I have changed.:001_smile:

[Paisley Hedgehog]

nm

[BizyPenguin]

I'm tweaking now, 12 weeks into the year ....

 

For ds 5th and 3rd:

1. Dropping TOG w/ Write Source books & BJU Writing; going to Writing Strands 3

 

:001_smile: Here's hoping these work!

 

Just wondering why BJ writing didn't work for you. We love it here.

[BizyPenguin]

I almost tweaked myself right out of Winter Promise's American Crossing 1 program, but we're about to give it another go starting today...and we're going to try to follow the IG pretty close. I've always been excited about trying this curriculum, so I'm hopnig it will work out.

[Lizzie in Ma]

Biggest hits are Life of Fred and BJU Life Science with the dvds. Still love MOH, we are in the third book now.

I feel a little bad for my younger one, for the first time, she is getting the short end of the stick fun-wise but we'll get back to it now that we have middle school going in a groove. :)