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Carrie,

As I have already mentioned, I am fervently praying for you as you design and write the high school guides. I don't know how far my oldest will go within the guides, but I have a few other children behind him. I have been praying for you to rest in His perfect plan and to walk confidently through this task, knowing you have been called to touch countless lives through this ministry.

I was just re-reading these messages and had a little idea for the box designs...just thought I would mention it. I don't think the graphics are necessary at this point, but some type of visual is important. An idea would be to group the subjects or credits together as "classes" so that it is clear what is being worked towards. For instance, yu would have a large box for english, labeled *English* and maybe double lined boxed or a bold line to outline the larger box. Inside there would be several smaller boxes for literature, grammar, etc. You could do this for all of the various "classes" being taken...history, science, electives, etc.

I also want to say that I like the idea of just 1 science per year. I think the only thing that is tough is that there isn't a lot of "choices" going on that can be important for this age group, since they are growing into adulthood and forming their identity and career choices in these last years of school for many children. I'm not sure how electives are being worked out, but maybe that can be the outlet for choosing?

Just a few thoughts that came to mind.

There are no words to describe the thankfulness I have in my heart for you Carrie. I feel like you are my co-teacher as I educate my children and I am so grateful that their hearts are being molded and shaped for Jesus!

With love,
Mercy

Just remembered something else I wanted to add...

I think bullet points are great. If you need to have a "basic instructions" page to refer students to for repetitive instructions, that might work too. I don't think it is weird at all if the formate changes from day to day from paragraph to bullets when needed.

Thanks for allowing us to voice our ideas and suggestions.

Mercy

I just read through this entire thread in one sitting - oh my! I don't recommend it - breaking up the reading of this and taking it in bite-sized amounts would have been so much better (a Charlotte Mason-type thing to do - she is ALWAYS right, isn't she?!?). Mike, Carrie, and I have spoken countless times about many of these topics, and it has been interesting to see how this thread that began as a simple request for opinions on a daily or weekly format of plans has unfolded. First, I must say as a loving sister to Carrie, I know of no other author who opens up dialogue like this on his/her message board with such an open and gracious mind - so kuddos to you for attempting it dear sister. In fact, come to think of it, I know of no other author who is even this much a part of his/her message board ever. I myself could not do it, as I would probably be either in a puddle of tears or a total state of panic by the time I finished reading all of the different desires expressed here (which doesn't make them bad, BTW, just overwhelming). However, thankfully, God created siblings to be different from one another - so (I think) - Carrie is holding up rather well through all of this. There are certainly many encouraging posts within this thread too, and that is really what makes this board special - the way ladies interact with one another in a Godly way - so thank you so much for that!

There are countless good ideas in this thread. Quite a few Mike, Carrie, and I have been batting around too, and some new ones to ponder as well. One positive to reading through the whole thread at once is that some general themes seemed to emerge. For example, I think it is safe to say that in answer to Carrie's original question, it is overwhelmingly obvious that a daily plan format would be desired. I agree, though I admit I went back and forth for awhile, pondering this or that, wanting a little of both, but then coming to the conclusion that the daily plan format is what makes my dc successfully independent, as well as what makes me know without a doubt what must be accomplished one day at a time (which is, after all, all that we are promised, as someone so eloquently pointed out in this thread already.) I also will say that for those of us that have used HOD for awhile, it seems to make good sense to reap the benefits of training our dc to work well within this format by continuing to use it through high school. I know my ds, Wyatt, would agree.

It also seems that the keeping of the "T", "S", and "I" labeling is overwhelmingly desired. I again would agree. I have been so thankful not to have to discuss with my ds (or I fear instead of 'discuss' it could be 'argue about' ) what each of our responsibilities within his school day entail. For my very independent ds, I am thrilled to have the "T" and "S" boxes to hold on to - they give me grounds for being the part of his school day I am! For my very not-so-independent ds, I am thrilled to have the "I" and "S" boxes to hold on to - they give me grounds for expecting him to be the part of his school day he is! The graphics, well - seems like those can go if space is short, though personally I like the way they "happy up" the look of the page - but that is definitely not a 'have to.' It seems like we all like the key ideas, in some format - especially those that are specific and change each day (which of course are the ones that take Carrie forever to write - imagine trying to write a succinct summary about huge amounts of heavy reading in a lot of different subject areas every single day - yikes.) But, we do love them, Carrie!

Science. Well, nobody ever seems to totally agree on that one. I think we would probably all agree we'd forgo the 3 options of science if writing the 3 options would prohibit Carrie from writing the guide(s) in a timely fashion. Those with only little ones, I know may not feel the upcoming pressure of high school as much as those with older dc, and may not care as much specifically when the next guides are written. But, either way, if Carrie by some incredible feat can actually pull off writing a guide a year for high school, there will within 4 years be 4 options of science anyway with the 4 guides having been (Lord willing) written. Maybe at that point, different packaging could be considered (i.e. separate science schedules could be purchased somehow). Thinking of science in general, it seems like we'd like to know Carrie's favorite pick of science for each guide, or in other words, her ideal 4 years' layout in order for science for the 4 guides, and then if we want to switch it up, or deviate from it, we can. Living books for science? CM plans for science? Well, yes. We probably would all love that. If it's possible without adding a ton of time to the day - by all means, bring it on. If not though, we probably all would agree we'd rather not be doing science all day and into the night to achieve both the criteria to receive a credit and the living books approach. If possible, Carrie's idea of having the science curriculum being as living as possible seems a happy medium.

A checkoff for us as teachers, or some way for us to see/sign off on our part seems desired. I agree. Though I don't think it's a 'have to' if space is needed more for something else. Right now, the boys initial their boxes with their first initial (because they are different from each other's), and I check each box off as I go through each one in our meeting times. I use a different colored pen the second time through a guide. This works, though it's not so pretty. However, I too like the checkoff idea for them and for me.

Language Arts box being divided somehow - seems to be another general consensus - provided there is room, and we can still have our beloved at a glance 2 page only daily format. I agree. A mixture of bulleted directions and paragraph format directions? Seems like we'd be fine with a mixture of both, and probably Carrie will be able to tell what there is room for overall and how that space is best utilized once it is all laid out on a 2 page format.

A few personal comments from me now for anyone who is still reading ... Electives? Wow - I would love for some to be planned. Thanks for that help, Carrie! Credits? Scary. Thanks for taking care of that too, Carrie! 4 day week with 5th day for other stuff? LOVE it. This is a new concept for high school, and I LOVE it, so will my sons. An overall weekly grid? Sure, throw it in if time, but if not - make sure you do the daily plans!

For me, having a guide that includes plans for every single subject required in high school (even electives) would be an incredible blessing. Just knowing I could teach the HOD guide as is and have everything covered takes a huge burden off my shoulders. Personally, I don't need a lot of options. Right now, I just want the one path that is all planned out. I want the 4 guides done. Then, when the 4 guides are written, for those that are coming to HOD with some high school credits already, or with dc who are gifted in 'x' area, sciences can be swapped out, the order of history could be changed around if need be, lit/comp can be changed around as need be, and things can be packaged differently/separately/in various formats - but for now... pleeeeeeaaaaaase, just write the one year and finish it.

I can vouch for Carrie's life being just as she described it. I live 2 miles down the road. There is only so much time, and it is at a premium. It is through God, and God alone, that this next guide will be able to be written in a year or even two. It is an incredible undertaking. Thank you for pressing on, Mike and Carrie! Thank you for this board! Thank for giving us all a voice here, and please, don't be overwhelmed or feel like this is impossible to do. What we all love about you is your ability to choose wisely what is most important! We don't want everything and the kitchen sink in each guide when it's all said and done, though we all have our unique special needs and wants - in the end, I think we all just want to be able to homeschool through high school without feeling totally overwhelmed and without it taking alllllllllllll day and night to do. Keep Christ at the center. Pray, and God will help you know His will and what is most important to include! Thanks - and yes, we will pray too.

Love in Christ,
Julie

Carrie,
As you move into the high school planning stage, I just want you to know that I am thankful that God has guided you this far...and I am confident that He and His grace are sufficient to finish what He has started through you. I praise and thank Him for the gift He has given our family through you and your family.

Since you asked preference, I would easily say that I have come to trust your decisions - from books to layout. We have loved the layout so far, as well as all of the books and resources. Yet, no matter what the layout looks like in the end, I am confident that it will be how He leads and it will be His best for all whom He leads to use HOD. My prayer for you and your family is that you will continue to have His clear leading and hear His voice above all others. May He make His will known, giving you His perfect peace in the process and may He multiply your time so that you get more time to enjoy your own family - and not just schooling them! May the Lord protect you and your family, as you research, write and rewrite the next curriculum.

Thanks be to God for calling, enabling and instructing you...and thank you for listening so closely to Him...and thank you for sacrificing so much for the sake of so many of us.

Julie,
I ditto EXACTLY everything you just said ! I can't even begin to wrap my brain around how Carrie does it all! I am, however, so deeply grateful that the Lord has led her to this calling and that He gives her the strength to continue in it! My 10th grade 16 yo son has been praying that Carrie will be able to complete another guide by next school year. Believe me when I tell you that the last two years of school with HOD have done amazing things for this child!! Since he is in 10th grade we have beefed up the Rev. to Rev guide and now the MTMM guide with Carrie's recommendations to make them highschool credit worthy. So I have no problem not doing the science as written and adding in my own electives. We use Fridays as our main elective day, it works great. I guess what I am trying to say is that for some of us, our older kiddos are not going to be able to use some of the guides completely as written. Using other curriculums this can be very frustrating. But the beauty of HOD and the amazing thing about Carrie, is that she is more than happy to share with any of us how to beef up a guide or give us a different reccomendation for science if that is what is needed. So even though it might not be written out for us, she takes the time to read and listen and give us each advice pertinent to our own situations. I can tell you that you do not find that many other places. So even if the Highschool guides have one science written into them and we have to add our own electives, this is one family that will not care, we are just blessed to have the format of the guide as a tool to teach our kiddos independence and to make this mom's job a lot easier! I will have the opportunity to use the guides as written with my two youngest sons, I am excited about that!!

A side note about my 16 yo son. He happened to be on a Boy Scout backpacking trip a few weeks ago, and had the opportunity to talk to a newer scouts mom while the group was hiking. He was happy to find out that this scout was homeschooled. The mom asked him what curriculum he used. He talked to her for over an hour about HOD and how school was not his favorite thing to do, but that he had really grown to like using the HOD guides and he loved almost every book he has read so far. (This same child has been known to roll his eyes at the mention of curriculum among a group of homeschool mamas) A few days after this event, this mom told me about her conversation with Ryan and how impressed she was with his knowledge of his curriculum and why it's written like it is. She asked me if I had any catalogs, so I gave her one, not thinking much of it. The following week she told me that she and her husband had decided to go ahead and order HOD for their son and not wait until next school year to start it, but to make the switch at Christmas break. I went home and told my son and he just grinned and told me, "Hey, I know good stuff when I see it! Mrs. Austin who writes the HOD stuff knows boys, because even the boring stuff is not boring!" All that to say, Carrie, you have adoring fans among the kids who use HOD as well as the parents!!

Julie, what a wonderful summary you provided of all of the info in the thread! I'm sure that reading this whole thread in one sitting was overwhelming, but you did an amazing job summarizing it. I can tell you've done a summary narration or two before. I agree completely with what you said, and though we are all like kids at Christmas asking for everything, in the end not everything is possible or best for us, and God will continue to lead Carrie down the right path. I am confident of this because He who began the good work in her will continue it, and we will faithfully continue to bring her endeavors before His throne.

Sarah, I loved your story of Ryan sharing about his love of HOD! What a wonderful testimony to this curriculum. Carrie, it is so true you have so many adoring fans out here not just we grateful Moms, but even more children who daily are thankful for the wonderful books and activities you chose. Keep up the great work!

I liked the summary too, and I loved Patty's thoughts:

"...in the end not everything is possible or best for us, and God will continue to lead Carrie down the right path. I am confident of this because He who began the good work in her will continue it, and we will faithfully continue to bring her endeavors before His throne."

I have been reading and reading this post, taking it all in and am so blessed that Carrie and Mike have been so kind to hear the voice of those who are using HOD curriculum! Thank you so much for allowing the Lord to use your family as a blessing to myself and all the other Mom's who have written on this post how blessed they are with HOD!
My prayer is that the Lord will guide you as He has before, in choosing what will work best for the Highschool guides, how to keep a perfect balance in all the activities that your family has on behalf of the curriculum and family life. May His grace and counsel be with you! This verse came to me on your behalf
Proverbs 19:21 Many plans are in a man's heart, But the counsel of the LORD will stand.

So, with all that said, I must also put in my vote for the DAILY PLAN, with key ideas!!!! The daily plan in the boxes are a great way to know that I have done it all, as I can quickly glance and check it all off. The key idea has been a great blessing to me, as I am not a natural teacher, even in the younger guides it has helped me see the main idea and taught me to give the main idea in other situations as well. In the older guides it will help me keep up with the material my kiddos are reading as they become more indepent, even if they have been pre-read by me. It will be a quick refresher!

I keep thinking of the HOD way of having a guide that is open and go, with the busy homeschool Mom in mind! We are all busy, whether you have 1 your homeschooling or 10 (May the Lord bless you ladies who have more than 3, with extra time management skills )... All our schedules are filled with some activity or the other!
So even through highschool it will be such a blessing to have everything at hand (perhaps we can keep the 2 page spread)! as to not miss any subjects or having our kiddo's who have such an incredible amount of work needing to focus on planning. I think as they get to do more independent activities from Preparing on, that they are beginning with time management and scheduling, incl. the chores that our kiddo's do.

One prayer I had, before I ever started homeschooling was to find a program that would cover it all from A-Z with a strong biblical background! I have been tremendously blessed from LHTH till now, at how thorough HOD has worked out, with the bible studies woven through the subjects wherever possible and with the academics being incredibly strong. I feel that my kiddo's have learned so many skills I would have never even known about! It blesses me that Carrie and Mike have so opened their lives in service to the homeschooling community! I have no doubt that the Lord will continue to lead you and help you with all the details of writing highschool curriculum and not leaving us to ourselves to figure it out PTL

I don't remember if it has been mentioned somewhere in this thread, whether there will be a grid or some kind of form to place all the credits and the description for those credits on, and whatever else we will need, that I don't even know about yet. (I moved to the U.S.A. after college). Perhaps in the back of the manual keeping in mind that some families have more children and may need to copy the page!

One other suggestion that I liked was to perhaps have the option to choose your package for science from any of the highschool years. Although this would work best for those of us who will get to highschool after all the guides have been written! I agree with Julie, doing science all day and night to both get the credit and get the CM style would not be the preferred choice for our family! I agree with the happy medium to keep it as CM as possible!

I do like uniformity for the boxes, but for the activities that have a key idea that repeats itself, perhaps in higschool, they could just have an asterisks pointing to a page in front or could just be left off. Those of us who have used HOD from the start will hopefully totally understand that by than.

Last but not least! At this point the graphics in the boxes, cute as they are could make room for all the other instruction we will need.

Once again a great thank you to Carrie for hearing our comments and so generously replying to us!

We love the AUSTINS!!!!

davisfam7 wrote:A side note about my 16 yo son. He happened to be on a Boy Scout backpacking trip a few weeks ago, and had the opportunity to talk to a newer scouts mom while the group was hiking. He was happy to find out that this scout was homeschooled. The mom asked him what curriculum he used. He talked to her for over an hour about HOD and how school was not his favorite thing to do, but that he had really grown to like using the HOD guides and he loved almost every book he has read so far. (This same child has been known to roll his eyes at the mention of curriculum among a group of homeschool mamas) A few days after this event, this mom told me about her conversation with Ryan and how impressed she was with his knowledge of his curriculum and why it's written like it is. She asked me if I had any catalogs, so I gave her one, not thinking much of it. The following week she told me that she and her husband had decided to go ahead and order HOD for their son and not wait until next school year to start it, but to make the switch at Christmas break. I went home and told my son and he just grinned and told me, "Hey, I know good stuff when I see it! Mrs. Austin who writes the HOD stuff knows boys, because even the boring stuff is not boring!" All that to say, Carrie, you have adoring fans among the kids who use HOD as well as the parents!!

This is an incredible testimony being that it has come from a 16 year old boy. Carrie, I can only imagine the joy at hearing of some of the fruits that have sprung from the work God has for you. I continue to pray that the Lord will show you and guide you in the same way has He so obviously has through all the previous guides.

Ladies,

I just wanted to pop-in as we close out this thread to share a few closing thoughts of my own. There are such a huge variety of ideas in this thread that I must admit it was a bit mind-boggling to try to take it all in! I really loved the chance to dialogue about the guides, and you were all so gracious to take a turn sharing your thoughts. I will have much to ponder, and I will have to return to this thread in the coming years. What a blessing to be able to join together to discuss something we are all passionate about discussing!

I do feel a peace from the dialogue in the thread that as a group we enjoy the daily plan format. This was one of my main questions in beginning the thread, and I think I got my answer. So, we'll plan to proceed with the daily plan format into high school.

I also feel that the 'T', 'S', and 'I' boxes are important, and we'll definitely keep those. We'll also keep the key ideas in areas where they enhance the plans.

I am leaning more toward only one option for science being scheduled in the guide each year, as it will be more manageable for me to write and will also allow us to put the schedule for it right in the daily plan. When the 4 guides for high school are complete, we could allow for mixing and matching in the science area. As always, if you prefer a difference science from what we schedule that is always an option.

We will try to separate out the language arts into two boxes if space allows. This would make this area seem less overwhelming especially at the high school level.

We'll also work to stay with a 4 day plan to allow students to have time to pursue their own interests each week.

Our thinking is to work toward including history, science, literature, composition, grammar, math, Bible, and 2-3 additional required or elective semester type courses each year in our guide. Our hope is that by simply teaching through the 4 HOD guides for high school that your student would then have accumulated by graduation all needed credits and required courses for high school graduation and college entrance. Any coursework the parent chooses to add would then be an optional extra, with the exception of P.E. Our hope is that this would relieve the parent of the burden of planning for all of the extras (outside of history, literature, math, and science each year), which can be very intimidating! We also will plan to detail how to award credit for each subject and with enough time we will also include course descriptions for each course.

These are challenging goals but ones that we feel will make it more feasible for parents to continue homeschooling through high school. Our main focus for the high school guides will be to help equip parents to answer the Lord's call on their lives to homeschool their children through graduation and to provide parents with Christ-centered choices that will help their children face the world we live in today.

Our plan, Lord willing, is to continue to release a guide each year through high school. We are very motivated to stay ahead of our second oldest son, who will be a freshman next school year. We want him to be able to follow the HOD path throughout all of his school years, so he will need the geography guide next year.

I am excited to say that the Lord is already showing us more clarity in many areas for high school, and I am feeling much more peaceful about the geography guide's design.

We are so grateful for your prayers, your support, and your encouragement. Each of you has such an important task at hand, and we are so glad to share the journey with you.

Blessings,
Carrie

Hello Carrie,
I'm so very late in getting in to read this post, but wanted to take a quick minute to chime in my many, many Thanks! for all your hard work and effort in providing such a blessing to the homeschooling community and to my family in particular. I am very grateful that you are even considering writing high school manuals at this point. I remember when I first prayed for the Lord to lead me to an "all in one" curriculum to use with both my children, and He led me to Heart of Dakota. My search for curriculum stopped right then and there. I feel so blessed to have HOD to use with my children!
As for the high school guides you are pondering right now, I totally agree with how Julie summed things up. My vote also is to keep the daily plans (you've spoiled us now!), add what you feasibly can (one science) and trust that if this is what God has for you to do, that HE will enable you to do it. We'll be praying for you.
Praying His perfect peace and enabling upon you as you prepare for this daunting task ahead.
Blessings,