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Hello!

I am immersing myself in the catalog and HOD webpage to think through next year for us. My ds (will be 9) and dd (will be 7) will be moving up to Bigger next year. My son will be ready to start DITHOR 2/3. I was wondering if the similarity between the DITHOR and the Storytime assignments get repetitious? If he starts DITHOR with a biography, we will also be reading a biography in our Storytime box. Is it recommended to stagger genres or start him on DITHOR earlier than he starts the BIGGER guide so he isn't doing similar biography assignments back to back in both boxes? Perhaps this is not an issue at all, but I thought I would ask you veterans. Thanks!

Sara

It is up to you if wanted to do the same genre for DITHOR as storytime. I actually have never done the same genre. For me, I used to let my oldest pick the order of the books she completed for DITHOR. Now, I will soon have 3 kids in DITHOR and so I am picking the order of their books. I don't necessarily think it would be repetitive either. It would just be a larger emphasis. One nice thing about staggering the genres so that they didn't match up is that your kids would give you the opportunity to talk about that genre one more time during the year. And you could compare and contrast a bit of the two genres you are studying. But I have found this to be a non-issue. My oldest (even my son) are both fairly good at identifying the different genres fairly well. But that is because we have talked about it over multiple years. And I feel like they are have really learned a lot, both through story time and through DITHOR, that has really targeted various elements of the stories. The activities in story time are fairly different from the activities in DITHOR. So in that sense, that is really good and helpful for it to not feel like a repeat.

Thank you, Daneale!