Hello! New Here with a few questions!!

[Amy in Ohio]

Hi, all! I am SO excited to be a part of this board! I have homeschooled my 2 boys-ages 8 and 6- for 3 years. I am also embarrassed to say that in those three years I have been a curriculum junkie (you name it I tried it -or at least bought it':roll:' ) and searched endlessly for what I thought did not exist until I came upon Heart of Dakota. After weeks and weeks of praying, finally, over our Christmas 'break' I purchased Beyond. It was a tough decision between that and Bigger-which was actually what I had planned to start with until reading some posts on this board. I am getting ready to purchase DITHOR for my oldest, who is an independent reader, and thinking of buying Cheerful Cursive. We use Abeka for math, but curious about Singapore for my youngest. Any opinions appreciated. My biggest question though is, how to go about the reading for my oldest?? Should I purchase a book package and go from there? ...and if so, how do I decide which package? There seem to be so many choices and I'm not sure how this part works as far as using the DITHOR. Any help here would be greatly appreciated. Most of all, I just wanted to say how blessed I feel to be a part of this board! Can't wait to get to know all of you!

[blessedmomof4]

Hi there! No thoughts on the reading, but I am a "convert" to Singapore since starting Bigger Hearts this year. Carrie's math activities really make it work for us, my daughter only needs the workbooks, and the lessons are short and sweet, saving us tons of time over the math we used to use. Just a note, when coming from a different math program, use the placement tests on Singapore Math's website-they move pretty quickly, so the grade levels may not reflect your child's ability-my 3rd grader is using Singapore Grade 2 and my 4th Grader is using Grade 3. (For the grade 3, Carrie wrote a schedule for using both the texts and workbooks that makes it simple for me to be organized, and keeps it manageable for my daughter-I believe Beyond has activities for Singapore Grade 1 workbooks and a schedule for Grade 2 textbooks and workbooks.)

[Candice]

Amy,

Welcome! I don't have any info regarding your questions as we are only using Little Hands at this point. But, oh boy can I relate to the curriculum purchases! I think I have enough material to last for the next 5 years! And even more emberassing is that my daughter is only 4 years old! I think I am going to consider starting a support group for curriculum junkies, just kidding.

Glad you are here,
Candice

[Carrie]

Welcome to the boards! We're glad to have you here. As to your questions, I can point you to a couple previous threads that may help. In the thread that follows, I explain why we selected Singapore to use in our programs. That may help you think through your own math experiences a little to find what works for you:
http://www.heartofdakota.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=112

In this next thread there is some discussion about scheduling and using "Drawn into the Heart of Reading": http://www.heartofdakota.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=99

As far as what to purchase for DITHR, you'll need the Teacher's Guide and the Level 2/3 Student Book. You may choose whether or not to purchase the Sample Book Ideas list (which gives suggestions for each type of literature and each level of the program) or whether to purchase a Book Pack.

For book selections, it is best to choose a little below your child's reading level until they become a strong independent reader. Once they get older and are strong in their reading skills, I move toward choosing difficult classics that I want to discuss in-depth with my kiddos for our DITHR time.

Here is a link to the two Book Packs that we have available currently. You can click on the individual titles to get better descriptions of each book.
http://www.heartofdakota.com/drawn-into-optional.php

The last choice you have to make for DITHR is whether to purchase a reproducible project book or not. If your children are artsy-craftsy at all it is a good purchase at $6.95. If your kiddos do not like that kind of thing, you can do without it. We do refer to the Book Projects to Send Home by page number in the Teacher's Guide as one of three project options at the end of each unit in DITHR.

Let me know if I've confused you, and I'll try to unmuddy the waters

Blessings,
Carrie

[my3sons]

Hi Amy! It is so nice to meet you!

I have 3 sons, and my oldest two are about your boys' ages (8 and almost 5). We're using Level 2/3 of DITHOR and loving it! The HOD bookshop is full a so many awesome books, I know it's hard to pick which ones to do.

The Level 2 books for DITHOR range in reading levels between third grade and fourth grade. The Level 3 books for DITHOR range in reading levels between third grade/fifth month and fifth grade. They both have great book choices, and a nice suggested pacing for reading with DITHOR too.

When you are looking at the book packs, I guess I would choose the level that either matches where your child is reading or is a slightly lower reading level than where you estimate he's at, rather than choosing the higher level. My thinking here is that DITHOR's discussions, workbook activities, kickoff, wrap-ups, parts of the story study, and character trait study, are meaty enough when first beginning DITHOR that you don't want to start off with books that may stretch your child too much. There is plenty of time for that, believe me!!!

I will say that I've purchased most of the Bookshop books now, and my goal is to cover all of them at some point, somehow. I'm still following the pacing schedule of DITHOR and using the book pack, but I'm doing the other Bookshop books in one of these 3 ways...
1. reading them aloud at night
2. buying audio books for them
3. putting them on what we call our "choose from" independent reading shelf (which basically means he chooses one book off the shelf to read at his own pace for at least 10 minutes a day - usually he's reading it at quiet time and night time too, but I ask a minimum of 10 min. for this during our homeschool day)

That way I don't feel like he "missed" any of these great books, but I can still enjoy a happy pace of reading and doing DITHOR with him.

As far as the Singapore math, I second what the other posters said about the great hands-on activities in the guide. My sons have absolutely loved these (in all of the HOD programs)! I've learned the hard way that Math does NOT need to take forever to do for it to "stick" with a child.

Singapore is typically thought to be a year advanced, which is why it is so nice HOD offers several levels of it in the plans already. When you look at the workbooks, they deceptively seem easy. Not true... they're just shorter in duration of assignment than typical math programs. If my son can correctly do 10 triple addition math problems, does he really need to do 30 of them? I've learned this is a waste of my time and his time. (I LOVE math, so I unfortunately thought we needed to do millions of problems at first before we started HOD - thank the Lord we are NOT doing that anymore!!!)

So, those are just a few thoughts I had when reading your post. I feel a kinship with you since we both have boys about the same ages - they keep us hopping, don't they?!? Well, it is very nice to meet you... and tomorrow is Friday... Hip! Hip! Hooray! We DID it - another great week of homeschooling... heading into another very necessary weekend of relaxing!