Oak Meadow - The Hero's Journey

[alisoncooks]

Has anyone used this? I'm not sure if it's a MS or HS course, but it's caught my attention. I've never used Oak Meadow before so I'm unsure of what to expect. Here's the sample: https://www.oakmeadow.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/english-9-overview.pdf

The sample says there's no teacher's guide, but the store does have one listed. Is it needed?

[Amommymoose]

It's a high school class.  We're doing it next year although it's a step back for my rising junior.  There is a teacher's manual and looking at it--it definitely offers a lot of information.  I'm glad to have bought it.  Every week has a writing assignment but they also give a lot of their input on guiding the conversation.  I just finally started looking at it yesterday.

[EKS]

My experience with Oak Meadow is with their foreign language courses, but my suggestion is that even though the course book is written to the student, you need to be there every step of the way interacting with your student about the material.  We also used Oak Meadow for a while in late elementary. 

One thing they're good at is assigning projects that really get the student thinking about the material in a way that is meaningful to them.  This was even true in the foreign language courses.  Each semester they did a project about Latin or French speaking countries, and there was a lot of latitude with regard to subject matter.  My engineer son did Roman aqueducts for one of the projects, for example. My other son did one on the decolonization of Algeria and the other on the decolonization of Vietnam and this very conveniently aligned with work we were doing in another class on cultural geography.  

Anyway, that's a long way of saying that Oak Meadow has some very good aspects, but it's best implemented if you, the parent, are in full teacher mode.

Edited July 5, 2020 by EKS

[Kassia]

We used it when dd was in 8th grade as her first high school English class.  She liked it and said it really made her think.  I did have the teacher manual, which was useful for some things but not for others.  IIRC (dd just graduated high school so it's been a while), there was a lot of work and we may have modified a bit to cut back on some of the assignments.  I think they also assigned a book on writing that I didn't think was worth the cost if you have a student who already knows about writing or if you have another book on writing available. 

 

 

[alisoncooks]

Awesome, thanks all!  I've already got this coming year covered, but this will possibly be for the following year (10th).