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We have had a very difficult time this past year with school. My middle child seems to be placed appropriately in Beyond for second grade, but I have struggled with my oldest and placement for her from the beginning. I am almost to the point that I think she'd be better off in public school. I have not had her tested, but she does show signs of dyslexia.

We haven't been able to focus on much more this past year besides the basics and just reading good books. We have dealt a lot with elderly parents and speech for my daughter. At this point, my daughter has speech two days a week, and then I have been taking one of my parents to the doctor at least once a week since the beginning of the year (and last year was full of doctor's appointments too). We have been able to nail down more of a routine around the speech therapy and doctor's appointments, but I am at a loss as to how to make this work as I am teaching Beyond to my 7 yo (2nd grade) and Bigger to the 11 yo (5th grade).

My 11 yo loves Bigger even though I think I probably should have moved her forward sooner. We read the extensions together though. I looked at the placement chart again today. For reading, she places in either CTC or Res2Ref, but for writing and grammar, she places in Preparing.

We are wrapping up the first level of dictation in Bigger now. She rarely misses spelling or punctuation while doing dictation, but she does miss quite a few words when she writes on her own. We have finished English 2, so she has not started any diagramming. She is not fluent with writing cursive yet. She is a very detailed oral narrator, but we have not done any written narrations yet. As an example of her reading level, she did read Almost Home (5.8 reading level) from the Bigger extensions by herself, but I had read it to her a few months before. She wanted to read herself because she loved the book that much! As for her independence, I read the history and science lessons in Bigger to her, but then I put Post-It flags on the activity boxes for her to complete herself without me by her side (such as the science pages with the question, her guess and the procedure). We do the procedure together. She completes the dictionary words all on her own. BUT, she is my very creative and artsy child, so she spends A LOT of time on her drawings with history and science.

So based on the above, where should I place her if we switch gears and just move on up to correctly place her. I need for her to be successful, but at the same time we need to manage this new load of life that we are carrying with my parents as it doesn't seem that is going to give much, if any. I want her to be prepared for college. I believe I had read that there was one middle school guide to possibly skip later on if the child had made significant progress. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance!

Here are some of the differences I have noticed in Preparing vs CtC:

Written narrations Preparing: 3-5 sentences. There are questions in the history section that help the student think through the writing assignment. And the parent is encouraged to help them get their thoughts down on paper
Written narrations CtC: 5-8 sentences. There are questions in the history section to help the kids in writing the narration but they stop around Unit 20. After that, the kids need to think on their own how to write it.

Other writing Preparing: they do one weekly creative writing exercise each week based off of the poetry
Other writing CtC: write twice a week using Write with the Best. They start writing first drafts in this level and editing their papers.

Reading Preparing: kids read a lot of picture books and shorter stories for history and science. However, you are still reading half of the history to her.
Reading CtC: you are no longer reading any history to your child and the history and science readings are a harder and longer.

Grammar Preparing: use R&S 3. That would be a smooth transition from Bigger.
Grammar CtC: they use half of R&S4 and the other half is completed in RtR. If you think that your dd could easily go into R&S4, you can use this. If not, then you could complete all of R&S 3 with this level and all of R&S 4 in RtR.

Independence Preparing: there are boxes the kids will be completing on their own. You may need to do some handholding but she should be able to grow into it.
Independence CtC: a step up in independence but my kids are in CtC and If I don't give them some sort of checklist, they would still miss boxes. I also still help them with some of the history projects and their poetry paintings.

Cursive: Both have copy work to be done in cursive but if your dd struggles with this, just have her write in print until she is ready to write it in cursive.

I think you have a lot of freedom in your choice. If you wanted to do Preparing, you could definitely do that and it would ease her in more slowly and be a bit lot hand holding. It might get to the point that your dd is able to longer written narrations and that Preparing comes easily to her. At that point you could add in the extensions or have her start reading all of her history to herself. One thought would be that if Preparing gets easy and she is able to read all of the extensions on her own too, she might end up being able to skip CtC and most straight into RtR. There is still level of handholding with each level. And that is okay. But I have found that Preparing was a step up from Bigger. Then CtC was step up from Preparing. But the jump from CtC to RtR was less. There was more reading for history and science in RtR than there was in CtC but because my oldest was a strong reader at this point, she didn't have any trouble with it. By the time my oldest completed RevtoRev and MtMM, there wasn't a noticeable jump. Now, I will say that my younger two transitioned into CtC seamlessly and I didn't really notice the jump like I did with my oldest. I am not sure how they will transition into RtR but I anticipate it will be similar.

I say all this to say that no matter what you pick, your dd will learn and have a great year. There will probably come a time that you will want to skip a level but maybe not. I would never skip a level though just because of the time period and only skip it because you felt that the level was going to be too easy. But at this point, I wouldn't worry about it. If you think she should move to Preparing, move to Preparing. If you think CtC would be a better fit, move to CtC. Either way, you will probably do some level of hand holding. If you did decide to move to CtC, then you could always consider going half speed for a while until your dd was ready to move faster. But either way, you will have a great year.

One thing you might want to try now is to make Bigger more like Preparing. Have her do science a few days a unit independently. Have her do history a few days a unit independently. Pick the days they do oral narrations especially, so you already have the follow up scheduled. Maybe turn an oral narrations into a written one once a unit. See if she can be successfully doing that. If she can, skipping Preparing should be okay. I would do grammar daily unless you think she can skip Level 3. But otherwise, you should be fine doing CtC as written.

Thank you both very much for your responses! After reading your suggestions and also reviewing the first week of both Preparing and CTC, I am leaning towards Preparing. But I would still love your thoughts if you get a chance. I think she could actually do CTC, but I think the workload would be a step up for her. She is my artsy child, and she tends to put a lot of time and creativity into anything involving drawing. So though she can complete the activities, I don't see her being able to complete CTC at full-speed (at least not based on our current schedule).

Right now, we leave the house mid-morning twice a week for speech therapy for her. And we also tend to have a doctor's appointment scheduled at least once a week (between our own immediate family and both my parents). The doctor's appointments for my parents tend to take half our day. I do try to schedule those the same day as her speech therapy, but that isn't always possible.

We are trying to also play a little catch up with math this year as well, so we are currently doubling up on some math lessons each day. I know some people say that if you run extensions with a guide for the oldest child that it is typically easier to just move them up in guides, but I feel like the extensions are fairly portable and easy for her to read on her own on those doctor appointment days. So I am afraid that I am setting us up to fail if I push her ahead into CTC since I am also running Beyond with my middle child, and I feel she'll need more hand-holding with CTC. She struggles a lot with staying focused on her lessons as well, so that is another reason I think Preparing may be a better fit for us to spend more time working on her attention span.

So, if we use Preparing with extensions for 6th grade, is this challenging enough in all disciplines (besides the appropriate math and language arts) for a 6th grader?

And (though I know HOD does not recommend skipping guides), is there a guide you would consider skipping in a few years if I wanted to push her ahead to the high school guides for 9th-12th grades instead of using some of those middle school guides for high school? I know Preparing+ are 4-day/week guides, and right now we plan to school at least 5 days per week and possibly 6 days since these doctor's appointments and hospitalizations have put us behind.

CTC only takes 30 minutes more a day on average, compared to Preparing. So the workload isn't a huge step up. If you add in extensions and writing to Preparing, it is probably a way in terms of length of school day.
That is why the extensions in one level and the regular workload in one level up are about the same. Did you look at the first weeks of each of them?

Also how independent do you think she is realistically? CTC is definitely more independent. If she is able to handle that Independence, then CTC might be easier for you. But if she isn't ready for the Independence, then Preparing would be better.