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Hello all,
Although my ds - age 15 is well into his freshman year with RTR, we are still undecided about the remainder of high school . He has some particular areas he would like to cover and I'm exploring the possibilities for him. Would it be possible to do the HOD history from Rev to Rev and Modern Times in one year or one and a half years?

Well, the upper manuals are all written as 4 day programs. If you usually do 5 days of school, you would go through the programs faster.

Hi Netpea
Ideally he would like to do only the history portions, independent history and timeline at a quicker pace. He would continue with his other subjects at a regular pace.

Do you normally school 4 days a week and take summers off? If you do, then you could just do history related things on the 5th day and during the summer and I would imagine you could get through two years worth pretty quickly.

My older daughter is just finishing CTC and she did it very quickly since she is older and we want her to move on. Because of her age and our goals she did not do the history projects or the science experiments. She could do at least a couple of days worth of history in one day, sometimes more since she is a great reader. I will definitely have my other ones coming up do everything, since I know that all of the things in the guide are important and work together, but we found HOD late and I want her to get some out of it!!!

How are your days going now? Do you have extra time? If not, I would suggest using the guide more as is with any extensions that are provided. There are always summers and evenings just to read about any other areas that interest your son. I would protect your days by continuing with what is working. I have put two boys through high school with other products out there. I am much more excited to start high school with my daughter next year with HOD. However, you are the mom. You will know what is best for your family.

Gwenny wrote:My older daughter is just finishing CTC and she did it very quickly since she is older and we want her to move on. Because of her age and our goals she did not do the history projects or the science experiments. She could do at least a couple of days worth of history in one day, sometimes more since she is a great reader. I will definitely have my other ones coming up do everything, since I know that all of the things in the guide are important and work together, but we found HOD late and I want her to get some out of it!!!

I'm reading this and realizing that this is exactly what is happening here. He does two to three to four days of history in one day with extensions. We do not do the storytime. He does a history project once a month and a completely different science, which is very manageable. Most of his time is spent on a literature and writing class he is taking outside the home where the workload is quite large. Did your daughter complete all the notebook pages? And did she do the extensions?

I'm curious to hear the replies, too, and I'm excited to see so many fellow RTR users here.

Yes, she's doing all of the notebooking and all of the extensions. It's just the project and science experiment that she skips.

Thank you!

Ladies,

I must admit that I cringe when I read a thread title such as this, as it is difficult for me to imagine piece-mealing a guide in the way that you would have to do in order to cover two histories in one year.

I can understand that those of you who are sharing thoughts on this thread have children who are outside of the target age range of which our guides are typically designed, which places you in a unique category. You each were so gracious in the way you shared your thoughts on this thread, and I really appreciate that! However, for our other board readers, I do want to clarify that it is truly far from the way I intended for the guides to be used to skip certain areas of the guide all year, or randomely complete some parts, or to combine multiple days of history readings and assignments into one day. This is because combining several day's work into one day is definitely a move toward the "cramming it in" philosophy of learning, which is a move away from the style of learning in which I write the guides. A more Charlotte Mason focus on fewer things of a higher quality done more slowly over time is our desire.

While you are the parent and are able to decide on the best education for your kiddos, I will caution that if you begin dropping too many things from the HOD guides and begin combining and condensing things as well, you will quickly come to a point where you are truly not really doing HOD any more. Instead, you'll find you are simply choosing from our guides like a buffet and losing the threads which run through each day and tie the various subjects together. By using a guide in this way, your child is also losing the balance that we so carefully plan within each day.

With this in mind, I would encourage anyone pondering using HOD as a "buffet" to rethink the way you are considering using HOD. I can understand using a 4 day a week guide, schooling 5 days a week instead, to hustle the pace in which the guide is completed. This still allows the guide to be used in its original form, doing a day within a day, but also allows the guide to be completed more quickly. This is the first way we would advocate hustling through a guide, if needed. We have done this ourselves.

If you have a high school student using a guide that is technically not targeted specifically for high school students, I can also understand having to enhance or substitute in the area of science. I can understand using different various language arts components (to a point) and understand choosing a different math (as long as it does not add too much time to the day). However, beyond that... tweaking begins to upset the balance and the flow of the HOD guide. While, of course I may think this partly because I am the author, the other part of the equation to consider is that tweaking often results in the guide losing much of its skill-related teaching and cohesiveness whenever deleting and adding begins. It seems to me that once the tweaking begins, it is only a short time before the guide hardly resembles an HOD guide anymore. Often the families for whom HOD just "doesn't seem to work" are those who have tweaked HOD to the point that it is truly not HOD anymore! I share this because I know I have done this myself... tweaking curriculums with my oldest son until they no longer resemble the program that I started with!

If you are to the point where you wish to do two HOD guides with one child in a year, then it is likely you may need to look at a different curriculum to meet your needs, as I would never advise that HOD be used in that capacity. I share that thought with much reluctance, as I would of course hope to have you continue using HOD. However, I also want HOD to be used successfully in the way in which it was intended, as each component of the guide has its purpose, place, and timing in the guide.

Hopefully, you will find when you come to this forum that there is continuity in the advice you receive from me. This is because after over twenty years as a teacher (both in the public and the homeschool setting), I pretty much know what my philosophy is in each subject area, and this philosophy directs the design of our guides and how each subject is planned to be taught. Since I am not continually flipping and changing my belief system from year-to-year, but rather fine-tuning instead, my advice will not continually be changing wildly from year-to-year either.

This does not mean that each family will not receive personalized advice on placement or personal help in making the guide work for their family. It just means that I still believe in the philosophy and design behind each of our guides from Drawn into the Heart of Reading on up through the guide I'm writing now, and I still know the purpose behind each box in each guide (and the skills and learning that will be omitted when things are skipped)! This is why I just cannot advocate skipping, omitting, substituting, combining, and condensing your way through a guide. At HOD, I write the guides so that one guide is designed to truly prepare a child well for the next guide in line. However that will no longer be true, if families skip, omit, substitute and change their way through HOD.

You will know best what will fit your family, and I wish you the best in finding that fit. If you do choose to go the HOD route, I would love to help and encourage you to use the guides as closely to the way they were written as possible in order for you to get the full benefits of each area of the guide. If HOD is not a fit for you, you will know this too. I wish you the Lord's peace on your search.

Blessings,
Carrie

Carrie wrote:

If you have a high school student using a guide that is technically not targeted specifically for high school students, I can also understand having to enhance or substitute in the area of science. I can understand using different various language arts components (to a point) and understand choosing a different math (as long as it does not add too much time to the day). However, beyond that... tweaking begins to upset the balance and the flow of the HOD guide.

Blessings,
Carrie

This is exactly how we are doing it, Carrie, and it's perfect! We substitute high school science and use ACE English (instead of Rod & Staff), only because that is what we've been using for years prior to finding HOD, and it works well (so don't want to "fix what isn't broken"). We also use Saxon Math, for high school, but otherwise we use HOD as is and LOVE LOVE LOVE it!!

(On the 5th day of the week, we do read extra from high school literature, do high school Health--required by our state, and our foreign language (French) and extra Bible. Because this is the "free day" from the HOD manual, it makes it easy to have everything high school level and still use HOD to the fullest!!)

Heather,

Thanks so much for bringing up the free 5th day each week in the upper guides. This is a great point that I omitted to mention, so thanks for mentioning it. HOD does desire for you to have plenty of time each week to pursue your family's interests and passions, so we keep the younger guides up through Bigger Hearts short and sweet and the upper guides to a 4-day plan. This allows families to either have the whole afternoon free each day (in the younger guides) or a whole "school" day free each week (in the upper guides) to do those things that are important to you!

So, if you have a high school student, you can use the 5th day to its fullest to schedule things that are either needed or desired. We are looking at possibly keeping the guides we write for high school to a 4 day plan for this very reason.

Blessings,
Carrie

Carrie,
I totally understand what you are saying and totally agree with you. Even with my youngers in LHFHG and Bigger I constantly tell myself, when I come to a little project or activity that I don't particularly feel like doing, "just do it, Carrie and Julie always say that everything is there for a reason and is building some skill".
I don't think I was clear in what we are doing. My daughter does a full day everyday, sometimes 2, but she does each day as a whole and then another day as a whole. She's able to do that because she is so much older and is a fast reader and writer. She does it 5 days a week and sometimes Saturday. I do let her skip the history project and the science experiment because they are really really young for her. She LOVES the water color paintings in the poetry part. She's never done anything art and wouldn't say she had any talent at all, but she has blossomed in that because of how you teach them. If you had just said to paint this and left it at that, no way would she have done it. I think she surprised herself.

We have all of RTR at home waiting. She'll be done with CTC next week, then we are traveling for 2 weeks and then she gets to start. She is so glad.

In all of my years of homeschooling (19 to be exact) I have never been more consistent with schooling or been more excited to do school. HOD changed everything. In fact, I just finished LHFHG at 7:30 tonight because we didn't get to today and my son didn't want to go to bed until we did it! He showered, came down in his jammies and asked, "do we still have time to finish my school!"

Thanks Carrie. Sorry to worry you with this thread!

Carrie wrote: I can understand that those of you who are sharing thoughts on this thread have children who are outside of the target age range of which our guides are typically designed, which places you in a unique category. ....
If you are to the point where you wish to do two HOD guides in a year, then it is likely you may need to look at a different curriculum to meet your needs, as I would never advise that HOD be used in that capacity. I share that thought with much reluctance, as I would of course hope to have you continue using HOD. However, I also want HOD to be used successfully in the way in which it was intended, as each component of the guide has its purpose, place, and timing in the guide.

Carrie,
Thank you for posting. How gracious of you to offer your insight, which I value immensely. I want to let you know you are such a blessing to me and to all of us on this board. I think one of the challenges of posting and trying to be concise through email is that the context is lost and much of the ease of conversation. You need to hear this - HOD is a fantastic product. The time, love and knowledge you've put into the guides is truly a marvel. But for our family to use HOD we needed to do things differently, because our lifestyle is different. Next year, it may be different than this year. This year is different than last year. If I start changing curriculum every time things change for our family, it's going to be a bit chaotic. You are right. The way we use RTR is not the way I know you intended, but this is what I want you to know we are still blessed immeasurably by the material. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a whole foods nutritionist who stressed how important it was to leave the greens whole until just before you cooked them. And I asked if I couldn't prep them in the morning and put them in a ziplock bag to make dinner prep quicker. She hesitated and said, "it's not ideal, but if that's what you need to do to eat more greens, then, yes." So, maybe what we are doing with the history is not ideal at present, but it is working well for us! And I have a feeling if you could take a peek into our homeschool, you would be so delighted to see HOD in action. Yes, we could use another product. But after much prayer and discernment we felt that HOD was still a good fit for us. On a practical side, we are not currently doing two histories. I simply wanted to toss it on the table as an idea and roll it around a bit and see how it looked. My son age-wise and placement chart-wise could be in a higher guide. I was pondering having him move quickly through the history and in essence "skipping" a guide, so he could move more on to his skill and age level.

Our family has its own unique structure, as all families do. I work outside the home. My husband works. My 15 yo son is in a tutorial program a couple of days a week and only completely home for 2 of the days that I am available to assist him. He takes science and literature and Latin through this tutorial, because he is outside of the range of the guide we are using. And because I needed him to have that experience. And we do - do everything in the guide (including grammar and dication), except science, the history project and the RTR storytime. He does do his history notebooking in 2 day chunks and occasionally in 3 or 4 day chunks when he has gotten behind, but that's how we make it work. He's only started doing this, because he's trying to stay on track for high school credit. None of my other children (who all use HOD) work in that way. It's not the modus operandi. And we do - cover the Bible in bigger chunks, but my 15 yo is much older than the Bible workbook targets and its how we make that experience more meaningful for him. It's not perfect. It's not ideal, but the Lord gave me a good shaking a few years ago and told me not to beat myself up because we couldn't do things perfectly. So many homeschoolers jump ship, because they "think" that they're not doing it "perfect" enough. Every homeschool year for our family just gets better and better and no 2 are every the same. We're striving for joy here, not perfection. I used to be a box-checker, now I'm a life-liver. The journey continues and I simply strive to do the best I can with the Lord's leading. I'm so grateful to have HOD as a partner in my child's education. I think we make a great team! Thank you immensely for all you and Julie and your families do.