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I'm leaning towards Preparing too, but I JUST GOTTA get my hands on it! LOL

I'm one of those gals who has to touch it, read it, study it before I can make any decision. Which makes curriculum shopping HARD! lol

I'm going to use Preparing with my 10 yob/5th grader.

I haven't decided yet whether to use R&S English 3 or 4. I have both books and just really started looking at them a few days ago.

For math, we have MCP. We've used BJU for the past few years & feel like we're ready for a change.

The only other things I have planned are piano and/or guitar lessons & Kajukenbo (Christian martial arts).

I will be doing it a bit differently from the others, and using Bigger...with my (then) 10.5 yo ds and my 8.5 yo dd. I chose this program, because dd is using Beyond...now, and I really wanted to be able to do school with them together next year. DS will be using the extension pack to supplement his Science and History readings. We will use R & S English 3 for ds, although we may not start at the beginning, we'll have to see how much he already knows. We may end up moving into R & S English 4, if needed, mid-year. For Math, we've been using Saxon 54, but are switching to Singapore level 3A for the next school year. Again, we may end up moving up a level; we need to take the placement test again when he finishes his current Math program. The plan is to move through it at a good pace, and get him through level 4A by the end of next school year. We're starting mid-summer, so we should be able to do this... He will finish his Math in about 2 weeks, and I do plan to move him right into whatever level he places in then, instead of waiting until the official beginning of our new school year. I'll do the same thing with R & S, because he will be done with his current English/Grammar program in about 4-6 weeks. We will also be implementing Igniting Your Writing with ds if I feel he needs more of a challenge/more practice in that area.

Many are using Preparing...for their fifth graders, and I probably would have if I was going to do separate programs. But, I am very pleased with how everything looks, and I think it will be quite enough of a challenge for him, even though the recommended age level is younger than he is.

I hope that was helpful!

I am using Bigger with my 10.5 year old now 5th in a few days 6th grader this year on a 4 day a week basis. Then for 7th grade I will be using preparing. We will be adding things to beef it up a bit just like we did with Bigger. We did it this way because we needed the American History before we did the survey of world.