couple of questions about half speed and independent work

[chiromom]

Hey Everyone,
My name is Amy and I have thee children,ds10,dd8,and dd5. After tons of researching, lurking I finally ordered Preparing for my 8 and 10 yr old and we received our Box today!!!!
Everything looks wonderful,and we are excited to finally see what our day will be like using HOD!! I'm hoping to start Monday. At first I was thinking of waiting til fall but we are going through a kind of natural routine transition right now, so my husband said now would be a good time to start. So instead of trying to see if I can make this fit into how we normally do things , I'm trying to approach this completely open so I've been reading the thread on schedules to get some ideas etc...

My question is does anyone incorporate workboxes with Preparing? How do you go about instructions for independent work, do your children read from the guidebook? Or do you write it out on a board or card for them, or just be there explaining ???(with the last option my kiddos would end up wanting me there the entire time... which would be digressing.)I'm trying to figure out an easy way for this. And what does half speed look like? Is it one page per day instead of the 2 page spread/ or could you do
2 days /wk Then lang., math, reading the other days so then a unit would take 2wks....That is more how we have been doing things, longer days Mon, Tues, more teaching and projects etc then more independent work the rest of week... This has served us well due to our work schedules but I am open to change
Any words of wisdom would be appreciated.
Thank you

'This is love for God to obey his commands: and his commands are not burdensome." 1John 5:3

[Molly]

Hi Amy, great to hear you are about to embark on the HOD journey. I pray it will be the blessing for you family, that it is to mine.

I can't help you in regard to half speed, but we have been doing Preparing for four weeks now, and my girls do use the manual when doing their independent work. The independent parts are written to the student. My oldest also uses it to keep a track of her extention history reading.

[MomtoJGJE]

For ind. work, just to make sure my dd doesn't miss anything, I write down the title of the boxes, plus any other things (like AWANA verses) she's supposed to be studying on a piece of paper, just a list. That way she's still responsible for getting the books and supplies needed and still has to read the instructions. She just reads out of the guide.

For half speed, you can really do it any way you want to. We are doing half speed with my 5yo and I have it split up where the writing and the reading is pretty even each day. With my Preparing child I go back and forth, depending on what's going on in our lives, between half speed left/right side, full speed, and just setting an amount of time we want to do school and whatever gets done gets done.... generally that's about 2/3 of the work when we do it that way, so it takes about 2 days to do 1.5 days worth of work.

And really that's my favorite way to do Preparing with her. We set about 2 hours aside and just work through the boxes in order, left side, then right side, and whatever we get done in that 2 hours is sufficient. She also has AWANA verses to learn and a geography class she's taking where she has to complete a worksheet each week, learn a map of countries every few weeks, and do an oral report on a different country once a month. So that makes her school take a little longer than it necessarily would.

[chiromom]

Thank you so much ! I have to admit I cant stop looking through these books and reading the Guide!!! This seems so doable , but in a way that will allow us to accomplish so much more!! I usually have to plan out an hour or 2 in order to get a project done so having them divided into steps is looking GENIUS!!
I was thinking about easing into it starting half speed but I like the idea of just going for 2 hrs and seeing how much we can do, just going for it!! And seeing how God guides us into a new routine...There was a lot of prayer involved in choosing this and I know He will smooth out the details also.. If it seems to take us too long at first then I will try half speed. Thursday and Fridays will be harder due to work schedules, but honestly these plans look like an answered prayer!!!
I am one very excited and grateful mom

[moedertje]

I am excited with you! We are in unit 15 for Preparing and it is very important to take the time in the first couple of unit to train your child to be independent and to understand their assignments. Once they understand it is much smoother sailing. We could not get into the groove because of interruptions in our schedule( family visits, vacations, surgery etc. etc.). So we took a break to avoid unnecessary frustration. After our winter vacation we started a fresh and ds is much more independent and gets his work done. I highlight the finer details in the guide for him. Once I came to grips with the fact that I could always get a new guide (and the shipping is super fast), if this one gets ruined it was easier for me to let him take charge!
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