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I'm wondering how much writing your children do for R&S 2 while using Bigger Hearts. I am pretty sure we are going to skip Beyond and go into Bigger Hearts next year with our son who will be an eight year old third grader. I am having a hard time with the decision because I hate for him to miss anything and I know he would enjoy Beyond. But, he does place into Bigger Hearts according to the placement chart and I think this will be the best path for him through all the rest of the guides. Anyways, he is now reading well, doing daily copywork and oral narrations. I think he will do very well with Bigger Hearts but I am wondering how much of R&S we should do orally and how much should be written. He will be doing R&S Spelling in addition to the dictation in Bigger Hearts and I want him to do all of the writing in Bigger Hearts.

My son is also 8 and we are just finishing up Bigger. I have done almost all of the R&S English orally. If I am going to have him do some writing, it is usually on our dry erase board. This has been great for him, as too much writing in a day overwhelms him. R&S really lends itself well to being done orally, and they still learn a lot from it. HTH

There is a bit of writing in R & S. At the beginning of the year, when DS was 7.5, I did most of it orally with him and had him do the exercises on the whiteboard. As the year has gone on, he is much better with writing and he now usually does his written exercises on notebook paper. Sometimes, if the amount of written work is repetitive or too much at once, I cut it down and only have him write 3 sentences (or whatever) instead of 6, etc. I really LOVE R & S and the way it builds on each grammar concept throughout the book. The other day, my DS wrote an AWESOME descriptive paragraph all on his own -- something he could not have done at the beginning of the year!

We do about 2/3 of it orally or with me writing his answers on the markerboard, and then he writes the other 1/3. Usually, I don't have him write more than 4 sentences a time. In case this may be at all beneficial, here's a link where I tried to describe how we do this in detail:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4659&p=34269#p34269

In Christ,
Julie