Thinking of switching mid-year & need input

[MY3monkeys]

Thanks a bunch.

[Nealewill]

I'm leaning more and more towards keeping them in separate levels which leads me towards HOD. The more I think about it the more I think the kids need individual levels to work on their personal areas of weakness or interest. After all a 6th grade girl struggling in ELA has much different needs than a 3rd grade boy who hates writing and loves science. I'm just not sure you can meet everyone's needs in one package.

And I love that with HOD, you can easily teach to multiple children using different levels and that it is very doable. Which levels were you thinking about?

[MY3monkeys]

I'm thinking about Bigger Hearts for my 3rd grader. I'm undecided between Creation to Christ and Resurrection to Reformation for my 6th grader. She struggles with narration so bad it's crazy and she needs a lot of help with her composition skills. We've worked so much on her grammar type stuff that composition had to take a back seat so this year's focus is supposed to be on composition skills as a means to apply what she's learned in grammar and mechanics. Reading comprehension is also a weak point for her. She's already done the CtoC topics when we did Mystery of History in the past so she might get too much repetition from it but i'm not sure. RtoR would be all new info to her which might motivate her more. I need to look at each one closer and see which might fit her better. I also need to double check our state regs and make sure i'm following them ok with whatever we choose.

[Nealewill]

I think I just replied to your other post - what if you did Preparing and then skipped CtC? That way you more gently introduced her to style of HOD. And then instead of her studying the same thing over again, you could skip it go to RTR?

[MY3monkeys]

I'm afraid of going too gentle. Next year is a required testing year and she will need to be able to provide the district with a passing test score. In the past going too gentle has bit us badly with test scores. I will look closer at that one though and see if it might work.

[Nealewill]

I understand. I think CTC would probably be a better fit than RTR. Not sure of everything you studied but RTR is just a lot more reading than CTC.

And I know what you mean about being too gentle. I don't like being too gentle either. With Preparing though - you could definitely easily tailor it to your DD's level. You would keep your own math, you would test her to see where she would fall with spelling or keep your own spelling. With grammar, you just place her in the correct grammar book that she would be in and then cover 1 grammar lesson per day. You could add in the writing program Ignite Your Writing (it is listed with the DITHOR and grammar info on the website). It looks like there are 24 lessons. So you could schedule one lesson per week in addition to or omit the writing for Preparing. This would give her more formal writing than what Preparing does. And with DITHOR - you would get her the level 4/5 student book and pick out a book list that is to her reading level. By modifying these areas you would beef up the 3Rs to be her grade level. The history books I didn't really think were "young" but were a good starting point for someone who is learning to be independent and read everything on their own. As the year progresses with Preparing, the reading gets more and more. But for science, I think that looks young. and it that would probably be a bit easy. However, you could order in the science package for CTC and then order the teacher's manual for CTC and do that science with that level instead.

But if you think she would enjoy the topics all over again with CTC, then I would probably do CTC. It is always easier to follow one guide instead of following 2.