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Hi everyone

My son 6 1/2 will be finishing up LHFHG K here soon. Looking at the placement chart for BLHFHG, I'm wondering if anyone can chime in on where my boy should be placed. We have gone slow on the TRL... We've always done 2 or more pages per day, but we repeated a lot of lessons. Now we are in lesson 10 and he has hit a stride. He's still slow at it but he's getting a lot better at decoding words and I think the rest of the book will go faster. We will continue phonics over the summer.

Handwriting... He wasn't writing ANYTHING when we started so we've truly come a long way. He is able to write his upper and lower case letters... Does better with lined paper but often needs reminded about what the capital letters look like. He is good at copying words.

Reading comprehension- this is a toughy. He seems very bored by the story time books and still doesn't answer questions too well for me.

Math- he's really good at.

I guess I'm just wondering with where he is, if he fits well in Beyond? I know the placement chart says "Finishing phonics, an emerging reader, or an independent reader." We're about halfway through phonics as I mentioned. I also have concerns about reading comprehension. I wondered if doing right side LHFHG with first grade options and something else for left side and different story time would be better?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Grace was like that. She wasn't ready for the writing involved in Beyond, couldn't stand the Burgess books, and couldn't read.

I went ahead and started her with Beyond. She loved the Story time books that I picked from the genres, and because she loved it she did well with all the questions and activities.

I don't do phonics, but with the spelling words and other reading involved, she quickly was able to read and we started the Emerging Readers about halfway through the Beyond guide. You could keep going with phonics until he gets to that level. The Emerging Readers are also scheduled in the Bigger guide.

I also chose to do the first grade handwriting with her, just doubling up for the first half of the guide. So she would write her spelling/LA and her handwriting book for the first half of the guide, and copywork with spelling/LA second half of the guide.

She finished up Bigger last week and is doing great. She was more than ready to move on from LHFHG, but needed the slight tweaking to the sections she wasn't quite ready for.

You said he is fine with copying words, so I think Beyond would be do-able. Beyond lets you continue with phonics, as they don't need to be able to read anything independently until Preparing. So, as long as you are ready to do the Ers by Bigger, you are okay. Since he isn't at the older end of the guide, one option would be going down to 4 days a week for Beyond and Bigger. Then you would get to Preparing when he is about 9, in about 2.5 years. If you aren't doing a co-op, you could use the 5th day for field trips and to focus on reading and writing.

The comprehension and narration with the Burgess books is challenging and even if he can't do it well I don't think that should keep you from moving on to Beyond. As already mentioned, I think the read-alouds there are more engaging and interesting, and a lot of growth happens just by them getting older, so I bet he will learn and grow in that area before you even know it. My oldest was really bad at answering questions, narrating, or anything until just recently but we kept plugging ahead because I couldn't think of an alternative. I would always nudge or help her, or finally answer if she really couldn't come up with anything. Sometimes I would go back to the reading and read part again to help her see where the answer might come from.

You will want to ease him into the copywork, but that is the purpose of it. Have him do as much of the poetry copywork as he can do a really good job of in about 5-10 minutes. Quite often this means about 1 line each day. Gradually through the Beyond guide you are supposed to move from 3-lined paper to smaller writing and eventually just one line to write on. Don't stress, you have a whole year to do this! Longer if you do the 4 days a week option. If he can copy, then he's ready and he can do it. If he needs a reminder of how to make the letters you can certainly help him out, or have a chart with the letters on it for him to look at. One thing I heard someone recommend, and I did for my 2nd DD which I think really helped, is I copied and enlarged the poem from the guide, I think it was much easier for her to copy it blown up 2-3X than the small type in the guide. Or you write the line(s) he's supposed to do on a whiteboard for him to copy from.

I hope these ideas help. It sounds like he will be able to do Beyond no problem.