I thought I'd introduce myself as I am new to HOD, but not new to homeschooling. I have homeschooled my crew of four girls since my eldest was in preschool nine years ago. I have a seventh grader, fifth grader, first grader and preschooler. I am coming to HOD from another curriculum, which I have used for four years, and though I love it, we are not seeing the fruit from it that I had hoped. Several real-life friends and blogging friends use HOD, and I began to take a close look at it about a month ago. This has been an extremely difficult year for us. Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that we all just want to be done with this year.

I've spent hours upon hours pouring and praying over the placement chart and considering the unique issues and makeup of my crew. I have decided upon the following, with my thinking listed after each. If anyone has any similar situations and has encouragement, or sees a potential problem that I might not be thinking of, please let me know. I'm looking at using four guides next year - which I'm slightly terrified at the thought of - but really think it is necessary for our situation.
Youngest DD - 4 years 5 months - I plan to use LHFHG at half speed. This year I used an eclectic mix of things I found free on the internet for her. She can identify all of the capital letters and most of the lower case ones. She knows all the consonant sounds and the short vowel sounds. She has a bit of a time with math concepts, but all my kids (and myself quite frankly) are not math minded. So it doesn't worry me. She is a lefty, so I have a bit of a concern about her tendency to mirror write. She can do it perfectly without thinking. I'm planning to use a special left-handed writing book with her. We will use this four days a week.
Next DD - Just turned 7 and in 1st grade - I have had conflicting thoughts about this little one. She had some speech issues and went through speech therapy during her K year, and we set aside reading until she was to say all the phonetic sounds she needed to learn to read. She has finally begun to take off with her reading (has read most of the emerging readers list now) but I know that she is going to need vision therapy. (We went through it before with her older sister so I know all the tell tale symptoms.) However, we cannot afford it right now. We will continue with the math and grammar that we are using, as it seems a good fit for her, for now. I plan to do HOD four days a week, so I know that this will take more than a normal school year to finish, and I'm fine with that. In fact, I may even begin it at half pace and speed it up a little later on after we've found our groove.
I'll address my next two DD's together, so that I can explain my thoughts more clearly. I have a DD who just turned 11 and is in 5th grade, and my eldest DD is 3 months away from 13 (



Because of our hard year, I am considering ending our school year this week (except for the two classes we do with other people) and taking a few weeks off. Our homeschool convention is in a week and a half. I will get the guides there and spend a week studying them and then think to start everyone at a half pace for a few weeks to ease into a new way of doing school, and then begin full pace after a month or so. We will have some weeks off over the summer, due to vacations, church camp, swim lessons, and DH and my 15th anniversary outing, so we probably won't get very far until our normal August start time anyway. I won't start my littlest at all until the fall.
Sorry this got long, but I really needed to explain my thoughts in order to solicit advice. I'm looking forward to sharing this journey with you all.
Blessings.