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I think I may have messed up! I ordered the DITHOR for my Preparing son, as well as the teacher guide, but that is it! I have no books to go along with it. Do we use our own?? Can I just skip this altogether, since the Beginning wisely and dictation are included, is DITHOR a must?? He is on the young side, 9 in April, and he will be doing his Bible reading as well History and Science reading too. I'm leaning towards skipping it. Thoughts??
Thank you so much (oh, I am totally new to HOD, and still learning as I go, and this is our 2nd day of taking it slow with hs.)
Stawna

You can absolutely use your own books. HOD sells a sample book list for $5, I pull our books from the list rather than ordering book packs as we have so many books in our home library. I don't know what to advise you on skipping it or not. Some one else will have advise for you I am sure.

Determine your son's reading level and look on HOD website for suggested books for that level of DITHOR. Does your library have those books? DS will go through about 1/2 of the genres for Preparing (9 genres total will take two years) so pick the genres you have books for now and later supplement or substitute books for the other genres. Once you get TM you will understand this wonderful program. I have used DITHOR since it was the only product HOD had in 2002 or so. My dds used it and fell in love with reading and this made hs successful! We would not have chosen some of the genre and thus would have missed out on finding what dds really enjoyed. Some genre they did not enjoy reading but found books that sparked their love of reading. Many jr high days were spent bleary eyed as they had been up until 3 am in their room reading. Both dds were in ps title 1 until 2000 for reading problems so I feel the Lord blessed our steps to finding HOD and the love of reading. I often stated that the Lord gave us the Bible to read so He will give us the ability to read His Word. Tammy

I know, it does sound awesome, but I am also worried that it may be too much for ds along with everything else?? Or maybe I just need to jump right in and find some books for him, I dont know.
Thank you for your replies!

Oh my, ok, I guess I do have the book list. So I have somewhere to start! Still not sure if it will be too overwhelming for ds though.
Chilllininandover- what does TM mean?

Stawna~

I'm not her (obviously!), but TM means Teacher's Manual, I'm guessing. I was scared to add DITHOR to our Preparing year too~my gals are around the same age as your son. It's REALLY easy and doesn't add too much time...I recommend it, however, since it's your first year homeschooling, I think it would be okay to wait a month or two before adding this. That might give you time to really understand the TM better and how DITHOR is put together and organized. I hope it's going well! ~Holly

Just wanted to agree that you could wait 4-6 weeks before adding in DITHOR. That's what I did last year with ds. It gave us time to get use to everything else that was so new to us. We were new to HOD. Once we got everything else down, we added in DITHOR.

That is just what I might do, wait a few weeks, or even months, until we get settled. Then I can figure out if it will still be too much for ds. I just found a whole series of books (the Puppy Patrol series) that we had stored away and ds said he would like to do that for the adventure genre. Perfect! Thank you ladies for your help. I am still getting the hang of HOD.