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I am new to HOD and plan on teaching Preparing Hearts to my 8 year old, Beyond Little Hearts to my 6 year old and Little Hands to my 4 year old. I was wondering if anyone could give me suggestions on how you teach from multiple guides. Does everyone work on the same thing at the same time or do you work with each child individually? What works best?

Welcome! First, you would want to make sure that you have looked over HOD's placement chart to see which guides your children fit into best. Based on their ages and assuming skills are at age level, you might consider combining your 4 and 6 year olds in Little Hearts for His Glory. Then, for your 8 year old, Beyond would perhaps be a good starting year. These 2 guides should flow pretty well and should not overwhelm your day timewise. Your 8 year old may be ready for Bigger Hearts so if the placement chart agrees, that will be fine.

Starting with 2 guides will likely bring you and your family a very enjoyable first year with HOD! If you would like to describe more about your children and where they are at with reading, handwriting, and math skills, more families may chime in with other recommendations.

Welcome. I have 3 kids and we started using HOD last year and I taught from Preparing and Beyond last year to my kids. My oldest was 8 and she did Preparing. Then I had a 7 & 5 year old who completed Beyond.

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Above is a link to an older thread where I had asked some similar questions. My oldest was not (an still is not) a fast reader. I was at a point where I was struggling with getting my day done quickly. When I started HOD last year, I switch over from MFW because my year was not working at all! So we got 8 weeks into the previous curriculum and I switched abandoning the prior work and starting a new. In feeling already behind (as it was October at that point), the day after the books arrived was our first day of school. I didn't have or take time to look through the books and formulate a plan. It was a little crazy. This post started out because I was worried my oldest dd wouldn't be able to handle the reading that she was coming up at this point. I am happy to report she handled it just fine and with flying colors. But, in this posting, I talked about my schedule and my day and Julie did a wonderful job helping me through a working schedule. It worked beautifully. Attached is a link to an excel file as well where I wrote out the schedule and hung it on my wall.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/h54abxwmzuzpu ... edule.xlsx

I used this schedule up until a month before the end of our year. In the last month of the year though, we switched things up a little bit because my work schedule changed and I was working more in the afternoon than in the morning. So I started my day with my oldest in preparing. We did all of the teacher intensive stuff on the left side of the guide first. Then she did her independent stuff on the left side. At that point, when she was doing her independent stuff, I moved to doing the left side of the Beyond guide with my younger kids. After I finished their left side of the guide, I did the math teaching with my oldest. She then finished her student portion alone but near by. While she finished her student portion, I moved to doing the teaching portion of math with the middle child. When I finished his teaching, he sat and did his exercises at the table while I taught math to the youngest. Then it was about 11:00 or so. We played out side and then had lunch. At 1:00 or 1:30 we started again. I started with my oldest and did her teacher intensive stuff first. Then she finished up with independent stuff on the right side of the guide. Once she moved to independence, I did the same with my younger kids. We finished up their guide on the right side. We usually spent about 2-2.5 hours in the AM and then 2-2.5 hours in the PM depending on who had what to complete. I also work from home but occasionally have meetings I need to go to. So on those days the schedule gets out of whack. And last year, my younger kids needed a lot more help but this year they can do more stuff independently so that is helpful.