heartofdakota.com

Hi everyone! I got my Beyond package this past week and did two days with my ds8. He says he loves it. I think it will be perfect for him too. We did all the boxes and he even wrote the spelling words and part of the poem each day! He said the spelling was too easy, and I assured him they will get harder. (We are doing List 2)
We are not doing DITHOR yet, as we have just established a habit of independent reading for 15 minutes each day, so I'm happy with that. Once we progress I'd like to add that in, as he is a good reader and enjoys it.
But he did not squawk at the writing so I am thrilled! Even as he was copying the poem he corrected some of his capital letters to be lower case.
Part of me thinks it's too easy, but I remember that HOD is skills-based and he needs to master each thing before moving on and the guides all build on each other. And when it flows nicely, it is a good fit. With my two oldest boys I tried to push them and they hadn't learned all the skills yet so it seemed like it didn't work.
I have a question about the math, but I'll put that in another post.
Thanks Ladies!
Kristen

I am glad Beyond is working well!
As for DITHOR, my daughter still isn't doing the "real deal." She, somewhat behind my back, read half of the Level 2 books this summer when I was distracted. So, I am going to go with my original plan of just letting her read them and then narrate. If we get more scheduled with it, we might do a project at the end, but life is pretty busy right now. We plan on taking 2-4 weeks in February and March "off" of full time HOD, and I plan on doing a full blown genre of DITHOR with her then. And then we will do some more over the summer when we start Preparing slowly. But doing full blown DITHOR isn't necessary at 7 or 8 or even 9. Our goal (which I got form Julie - my3sons) is to do each workbook once. And after doing the math, that means doing 5 genres a year for Preparing through MtMM and then two additional ones sometime between now and the end of MtMM/beginning of WG.

My son (age 9) is in Bigger and is still in the ERs so we have not yet done DITHOR....so kids on not HAVE to do DITHOR yet in Beyond, only if they are ready.