2nd half of 1st grade lang arts

[Dianthus]

Ds7 is about 6 lessons from completion of LOE Foundations D. For next semester, I could use WWE 1 and FLL1/2. I'm pretty sure I have both. He's a good reader and pretty good speller. I'm wondering if I should consider anything else. This option will be easy for both of us. I just wonder if he should be more challenged.

[Kiara.I]

One of the amazing things about homeschooling is realizing that not everything needs to be challenging... 😉

I'd say use what you have, let it be easy. That's okay!

[Dianthus]

21 minutes ago, Kiara.I said:

One of the amazing things about homeschooling is realizing that not everything needs to be challenging... 😉

I'd say use what you have, let it be easy. That's okay!

Yes, I think why make it harder (punish him) because he is smart, but I also think isn't that the advantage of homeschooling, that he isn't just bored with classroom pace and can be challenged and move at his pace. Easy does sound good too. I've been pretty stretched across my 3 school kids this year. LOE has been good for us but is more time consuming and takes more thought from me. I'm looking at IEW's primary offerings, but I think that is much more than I want.

I forgot, we are also doing MP's lit and science enrichment. Maybe that with FLL and WWE will be enough. The struggle with every child has been moving on from LOE. I do not like the huge textbook feel of LOE essentials or all the options/levels of teaching a lesson, so we have never used it. It is really difficult to go to other spelling programs which teach phonics differently and have different spelling rules. All that said, I still really like LOE Foundations and plan to use it again in 4 years with my baby.

Edited December 29, 2021 by Spirea

[Clemsondana]

Somewhere along the line I figured out that there needs to be a reason for what we do, including adding more challenge.  Sometimes the purpose is learning to struggle, but not all the time in every activity or class.  Sometimes the purpose is just to learn a specific set of content and there doesn't need to be any more to it than that.  Sometimes an advanced kid might move more quickly because they don't need repetition, for instance, but they don't actually do more challenging work.  Other times you might choose to do a deep dive to work on something challenging because kid needs to learn to deal with challenge or because you've chosen to teach some content that is just challenging by its nature.  But, we've also had situations where we looked at a set of content and said 'well, we've learned enough of that' and then we could put away that subject and spend our time on something else.  You get to decide what the purpose of the assignments is and then choose your work based on your priorities. 

[caffeineandbooks]

Agreeing with Clemsondana.  "Moving at his pace" can mean "completing the math lesson in 10 minutes instead of 60".  It doesn't have to mean "doing several lessons a day because there's still time left in the schedule".