heartofdakota.com

Hi everyone! I am starting HOD this year and will be attempting 3 levels at once. I have a 5 yo ds who will be doing LHFHG, a 7 yo dd who will be in Beyond, and an 8 yo ds and 10 yo dd who will be doing preparing together. Whew! I am tired just thinking about it! But....thanks to all the great discussions regarding teaching multiple levels and the amazing support I have seen given, I am feeling fairly confident and optimistic about jumping in (which we will be doing at the beginning of Sept).

Anyway, my question is this, in LHFHG and Beyond, the curriculum is in a 5 day per wk format and in Preparing, it is a 4 day week. I am a little confused about that and wondered if anyone knew why that might be? If any of you are doing the 2 different curriculums, could you offer any suggestions on how to mesh the 2 schedules together? I obviously want all the kids to be on the same weekly schedule and also have the same beginning and end to the school year. Thanks for any advice/suggestions and I am excited to be starting in a few weeks and hopefully getting to know some of my fellow HOD'ers better!

Blessings,
Michal

Mom to: Mia-10, Eli-8, Eden-7 & Jadon-5

bump

I can answer the "why" part. Beginning with Preparing the guides are written for a 4-day week to better allow time for co-ops and other extra-curricular activities that families tend to participate in as their children become older. I do think your school year would end the same, as I am pretty sure there are the same number of weeks in all the guides. I am not much help in ideas of how to keep the weekly scheduling the same. Hopefully someone else will jump in.

Welcome to HOD! Glad you're here!

I am not sure that I will help your dilemma, but I'll just share a little about what and how we're doing it, and maybe it will help a little! I have a 10 yr. old doing CTC, two kids (8 and 6) doing Beyond together, and two littles (4 and 2) doing LHTH together. Beyond and LHTH are five days a week. CTC is scheduled 4 days a week. We are doing Saxon Math with our oldest and he needs to do this five days per week. He is also doing DITHR and I've scheduled one of those three days on day five as well. So it's a light day for him, but gives him the opportunity to do "fun stuff" (like practice playing guitar), spend time just playing or helping out with the two little ones here and there. It also leaves us room for artsy type things that he may want to do, but doesn't have time for during the week. Or if he needs time to do a project or experiment on Day 4, we know he can always do it on Day 5, if we run low on time. There are perks to this! Because his day is shorter on Day 5, we typically get done much sooner with our schoolday. We do LHTH right away in the morning and then do Beyond next. While I'm working with the younger kids, my oldest is finishing up his few items for the day. So we end at like 10:30 or so!! I've never gotten done (with five kids) that early before!

If you're concerned that your child will need stuff to do on the fifth day, you could also spread out some things to keep for day 5, lessening the load through the week. Just some ideas! Blessings as you begin your year with HOD! We just started last week for the first time using this curriculum. It has totally changed our schooldays. My children love, yes I said love, their days, now!! Fun and joy in learning have been brought into our days!

I hope this can help you in some way!

In Christ,

Lisa

Thank you for the responses. I love hearing about all the great ideas that people have to make this curriculum work for their families! There is so much ingenuity and uniqueness that's very cool to be a part of!

So I re-read my post and realized I must have been more tired than I thought because I neglected to mention a very important part of my question. Because of commitments we have as a family and the way our schedule is, I have to keep school to a 4 day week. (Can't school on Weds) So my question is really how do I tweak the schedule for my younger 2 to make it a 4 day week without it being too much for them and still have summer off? I'm afraid that if I just did 4 days a week and ran 1 day short per week all year we would have to school through the summer and we really don't want to do that yet.

Sorry if this is too wordy. In a nutshell, how do I make LHFHG and BLHFHG work for a 4 day week instead of a 5 day week?

Thanks!

If you did 4 day weeks full speed for everyone you would have about 34 days leftover of Beyond and LHFHG.... (assuming my math is right with my thinking.... who knows at this point)

You could occasionally do a day of school with the little ones on the weekend and that would help you not go as far into the summer... even if you alternated every other saturday with the younger guides doing an extra day you'd cut that down to 17 days left, which would only be about 3 weeks. And you could also catch up some with weeks you don't have other things to do on Wednesday.

Another option would be to just do 4 day weeks with them and then start over after the break with where you leave off.