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Hi! I'm using Little Hearts For His Glory for this coming school year for our Kindergartener and 1st Grader. I have Essential Math for our K student and want to buy Primary Mathematics 1A and 1B for our 1st grade student. My question is, do I need to buy all 5 books, the 1A and 1B workbooks, the 1A and 1B textbooks, and the answer key book? Thanks!

Here's how the math works with HOD.

For K math through 2A/2B (LHFHG, Beyond, and Bigger Hearts) there are hands-on activities in the guide that replace the textbook work. They are more fun, more interactive, and less work while still reinforcing the concepts well. So you have LHFHG and Essentials math which gives you hands-on to do with that child. With your child who will be doing 1A/1B you have the following options:

1) buy textbooks and workbooks and use the schedule in the back of the LHFHG guide
2) buy workbooks and buy the Beyond guide to use with the hands-on activities for math

Either way is fine, the hands-on activities are as I said before, more fun and interesting. Also if you do textbooks and workbooks my suggestion is to let the child write in the textbooks (making it a consumable). At that age, having them write their work on notebook paper is very tedious and complicated for them. My daughter is in Beyond but doing 2A/2B with textbooks and workbooks and she writes in the textbooks (she does occasionally need paper for more space to work out her problems but writes the answers in the textbook). Her work in the textbook is also much easier for me to grade if it's written right in there. My older kids use textbooks and workbooks and when grading their work I always have to look back to the textbook to see if they wrote the problem down right.

Personally I do not think the answer key is needed until 3A, that was when the volume of problems and the complexity of problems meant I could not always do them easily in my head. The answer key helps a lot at that point but before that you probably don't need it.

Thank you Melissa! That is SO helpful! I was confused because I read something from someone else that said the textbooks weren't used, but the appendix lists the textbooks. You've explained that perfectly. I hadn't considered buying BHFHG for the math portion. Too bad the guide and the math don't come in a package together.

HOD will honor a package price if you buy just the guide now, and then next year want to buy the whole "economy package" of Beyond to use it as your core guide. They will give you the same discount if you have bought them through them. It may be hard to predict, but if you think you'll be staying with HOD it's a good bet. And they do have very good resale value.

Oh wow! They are such a good company to work with! This is so good to know! Yes, I plan to use HOD next year as well. Our older kids have done 3 of the guides.☺