heartofdakota.com

Hello! I am new here. I am currently homeschooling 2 kiddos, one of which will be entering high school next fall! I am thinking of using Creation to Christ for my upcoming 5th and 9th graders. I love the book choices, and that it is with a CM approach. But, more importantly, the focus of giving glory to God and instilling Godly character.
So, my question for those of you who use HOD for your high schoolers, How do you make it credit worthy? I have looked at the sticky threads dealing with this topic, but I wanted to hear from actual users and how you beefed it up. Was it difficult to do so?
Do your high schoolers feel it babyish?

I am sorry if this is a frequent topic of conversation, but really want to know if I can make this work for my high schooler.

In Christ,
Maggie

You might have already seen this thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5400
Carrie gives some advice about using CTC for high school. I'm sure others with more experience (my highschooler goes to PS) will chime in with some great advice too! Welcome to HOD!

Welcome to the board, Maggie! mommyofmany already did a great job of hooking you up with the exact link I was going to try to find! There are many ladies using HOD for high school and enjoying it. This board is full of helpful ladies - keep asking away, and we'll figure it out together!

In Christ,
Julie

Thank you, ladies. I have seen that link. It was full of great ideas. Just hoping to get responses from real life users and how they make it work in their homes.

Maggie,

Welcome to the HOD Board! We're glad to have you here. As you ponder the best HOD option for your family, one thing that you'll want to keep in mind is that CTC is geared toward ages 9-11 in all areas (with extensions for ages 12-13 mainly in the area of history). Some of the other areas in the guide stretch up to include older kiddos as well so that is where it becomes helpful to go through the ideas shared in the sticky on beefing up CTC found at the top of the board.

Since placement in HOD is based more on skills and less on the history cycle that a family may be currently on, you'll definitely want to begin by checking out the placement chart linked at the end of this paragraph for each of your daughters as individuals to see where they fit best (all combining scenarios and history cycle thoughts aside). Link: http://www.heartofdakota.com/placing-your-child.php

If your high school daughter truly fits best in CTC skill-wise, then that is where she would be placed. However, if she fits better in one of our other guides, then she would be better placed there. We also do have a new guide, Missions to Modern Marvels, for ages 12-14 (with extensions mainly in the area of history for ages 15-16) coming up on the website in April. The guide will be out in August.

With these thoughts in mind, I just thought I'd let you know that when your daughter is outside of the target age-range of our guides, there is much more adjusting and beefing up to be done. If you don't mind doing that to award credit, then you could choose to use a guide beneath your older daughter's age range. If you prefer to have the subjects in the guide fit your older daughter well with less changes or additions, you'd want to lean toward Revival to Revolution or Missions to Modern Marvels instead for your older daughter.

Many of the ladies whose families are using our guides from CTC on up for high school are doing so for one of two reasons. One reason is because they wish to use HOD with their older students, and we did not have older guides available for their students yet. So, these families are willing to beef up an existing HOD guide to give their child the core learning through HOD, but they are also willing to branch out to make it credit worthy.

A second possible reason is because some families have students who needed to go back and solidify needed skills that were missing in their education, so the child fit better in CTC or RTR skill-wise according to the placement chart. In this case, less beefing up is needed, as it is important to meet the child where he/she is at and to help the child gain skills needed for successful learning.

Without knowing more about your children, I can't give you more accurate placement advice. However, once you have checked out our placement chart, we would love to hear back from you on where each of your daughters fit best as individuals (on especially the first page of the placement chart). After that we can answer your questions more fully. Each family is so different, and at HOD we hesistate to give a one-size fits all placement without knowing anything about your particular family. This is why you haven't been hearing back yet from the wonderfully helpful ladies on the board.

Blessings,
Carrie

Thank you,Carrie, for the reply. I guess I should have given more info in my initial post. My ds places in CtC, whereas my dd would place in Revival to Revolution. But we studied that time period last school year, and are currently studying US history from 1850- Modern times. We don't want to study that time period again so soon, and I can not afford to buy 2 programs,. My high school plan is to cover the first half of world history using CtC (with some beefing) for my upcoming 9th grader and as is for my upcoming 5th grade son. We have always studied history as a family, and like the idea of being on the same time period.
I have some ideas, thanks to the wonderful threads on this board, but would like some feedback from current users on how they have adapted it for their high schoolers. I understand each family is unique with different situations, learning styles, and needs. I would be using only the history/ bible portions for my high schooler and adding in high school level science, math, foreign language, ect.

Maggie,
Hello and welcome to the boards! I used CTC last year with my then 9th grader. It went very well and we enjoyed it very much. The reason I used it for high school was simply because we were new to HOD and thought it would be good to start at the beginning of the history cycle. I now realize that there is so much more to HOD guides than just the history time period! There are so many skills woven into each guide in the areas of language arts, life skills, and writing ( I am sure there are more). So if you were able to put your child in the guide that they place in best on the placement chart as Carrie suggested, this would be ideal.... but since you stated that

I can not afford to buy 2 programs,

It seems that using CTC for both children best fits your family. I would be glad to share what we used last year to beef it up and make it high school worthy. We loved everything and it was a great fit for us!
We did EVERYTHING in the CTC guide EXCEPT for the "Science Exploration" box. We added the extension readings and extra stuff( I will list in a minute) to up the level of history reading. Then we did high school level math, language arts, and science. This is what we did in list form and most of it (if not all) is compiled from Carries suggestions.

History- CTC guide plus extensions (including the extra narrations etc),
The Archaeology Book by David Downs
Our Young Folks Josephus by William Shepard
Unwrapping the Pharaohs
Plutarchs Lives for Boys and Girls by W.H. Weston
Caesars Galic Wars by Olvia Coolidge

Bible- Bible in CTC giude
Balancing the Sword- studying books of Job, Daniel, Philippians

Literature-CTC guide ( for written narrations, dictation, writing(Write with the Best 1), and poetry study)
Drawn into the Heart of Reading (using high school level books for each genre and workbook 6/7/8)
Rod and Staff level 7 (half of the book, reserving next half for 10th grade)

Math- Video Text Algebra

Electives- Shop coarse by Pacworks
Foreign Language
Also Bible fits here

Science- Pacworks Physics and Chemistry 1/2 for 9th grade and other 1/2 for 10th(this is actually worthy 2 credits)

We read the extra history reading in the order that I listed them. We enjoyed everything listed here and it worked very well for us! My son had not had a lot of writing experience (one of the areas I had slacked in), so we chose to do only WWTB 1. I think Carries says that it is best to have the child do both Write with the Best levels 1 and 2 for the year. Also, I assigned grades to his student notebook and his poetry reciting to add to his DITHOR and writing grades for an overall Literature grade at the end.

I hope this is helpful. If you have any questions ask away. Also I would be glad to tell you exactly what HOD materials we ordered for our 9th grader to do CTC in this way, if that would be helpful?