My husband and I are seeking to implement your homeschooling ideas (classical education) with our children who are currently 9, 6, 4, and 1. Since I tend to function best with structure and also do not feel confident enough to pull this together on my own, I would like to find a curriculum to use. Is there a comprehensive curriculum that would line up well with your way of homeschooling? I’m looking for something that is not just a general guideline of what to study, but something with a schedule for each day. It would be okay if I needed to do some tweaking, but it would be ideal to keep that to a minimum. I have used Sonlight briefly, but I feel that there are too many books that I would have to skip over for it to work well. The closest thing I have found so far is Heart of Dakota, but I’m wondering if there is another curriculum that might be better. Do you have any suggestions for me? Also, if I could find a language arts curriculum that would take care of all the aspects you recommend (copywork, English language notebook, dictation, etc.), I might feel comfortable branching out on my own in the areas of history, science, and read-alouds and read books based on our interests. I’m not good at all at adding written work and activities into our reading, so the language arts curriculum would really need to take care of every aspect that would be necessary for us. Thank you very much! Elisabeth
I was trying to pull things together myself, too. Heart of Dakota has been such a blessing to our family! I highly recommend it. I feel it does line up with many of the recommendations in Teaching the Trivium.
I used HOD for 3 years, and they were great years. Heart of Dakota does have everything you mentioned built right in. It may be a perfect fit for you! Don’t hesitate to try it. I thought it was very well laid out, keeping Christ at the center of the whole school day. It also is quite inexpensive for what you receive!
A curriculum that I am looking into using is Beautiful Feet Books. It is a Christian literature based curriculum geared at multiple grade levels, and you can choose subjects to study such as specific times in history, geography, science, and music composers. It looks like there is copy work involved, and other C. Mason styled assignments. The part I like about it is it says to do 2 to 4 lessons per week. Read: It’s flexible! So, on those busy weeks where a child is sick, or family comes for a visit, we will follow the 2 days per week recommendation and focus on getting all of the 3R’s in, and when it is snowing or raining for weeks on end, we will follow the 4 days per week recommendation along with the 3R’s. I’m excited to give it a go. Now to let my kids pick a subject to study…
As far as language arts goes, I have heard of a company called Queen Homeschool Supplies that has a language arts program that sounds similar to what you are desiring. Also, you may like the language arts that My Father World Recommends called Primary Language Lessons by Emma Serl and Intermediate Language Lessons by Emma Serl. They include narration and picture study, as well as poems. You can find them on Amazon.com. Most of the work in them is to be done orally with a parent, so it is very enjoyable for the child, but thorough.
I hope you find a good curriculum fit for your family.
One of the advantages of Homeschooling in a Classical Style is the train the parents in the skills that we want to teach to our children. If we buy the curriculum readymade, how we will train our brain to extract information, organize it and produce something new?
The biggest advantage I saw in Teaching The Trivium is that it give me the principles, then, I must work and think how to apply them, this process is very important, I wish nobody skip it.
I am on my fifth year with My Father’s World and love it. I chose for K what I would use and my husband wisely told me to get something with the planning done as I had three with one on the way. I am now homeschooling one in 5th, 2nd, 1st, K-4 and K-1 as my kids always count the littles as part of our school. I do NOT do formal Math before 10 and it has been a huge help in saving my sanity. My ten year old grasped addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with relative ease. She does not know all her facts yet, but does pretty well overall. My Father’s World incorporates the Bible very well and we have loved the recommended read alouds – about five a year. They have a very extensive bibliography divided up by weeks for books to use on your own. Extras that are nice, but not mandatory. In the first two or three years we used that alot – of course our library system could get 95 % of the books and now ours has very few.
With My Father’s World I feel that godly mentors have chosen a curriculum much better than anything I would have time to develop on my own while feeding, clothing and just rearing five children, taking care of my husband and moving all over as a military wife.
Hello!
I am the “Elisabeth” who asked this question. Thank you all so very much for your kind and thoughtful responses! I am taking the time to ponder and investigate each one.
If anyone else has a response, I would greatly appreciate more feedback even if it is similar to a response already given.
I am truly grateful to all of you who took your time to answer my question. : )
In Christ Alone,
Elisabeth
I am looking for something too. Love the way that Sonlight is laide out but not so sure that it follows the classical (4 year) method so much. We are looking into Veritas Press – http://www.VeritasPress.com. Maybethat will help you.
I have looked at Veritas Press a little in the past and it looks good, but it seems to me that it could be hard to teach several different ages at once with their materials. I’ll look at their catalog again, though! Thanks!! 🙂
We use Classical Conversations. My kids 9 &4 love it! We meet in a group setting on a weekly basis and it continues in 3 cycles. It does cost to join but its very easy to implement if you are jut using the “foundations” part of it. Once the child gets to a older level then I really suggest joining their “Essentials” and “Challenge program. We are in foundations currently their grammar part of it. The book comes with a weekly plan for the kids to memorize which includes a history sentence, latin, science, math, language arts, geography and fine arts. The two subjects you need to supplement are math and language arts. There is a website but I have to say it is not too user friendly.
http://www.classicalconversations.com
Hope this will help!
We use Tapestry of Grace. It has four levels – lower grammar, upper grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. We all study the same history period at one time and it has great background information for the teacher. I’ve learned so much along with our children (I have 8, including 1 in utero).
It also has a built-in Language Arts program called Writing Aids that gets your children writing about what they have learned. I mainly use that for the older years. In the earlier years (Grades 1-4) we use First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind. I love it because it has short (15 min) lessons and it covers grammar, copywork, narration, poetry memorisation, and dictation. The first two years have a non-consumable teacher’s handbook.
My website has a bit more info, if you’re interested. Hope this helps.
In Him
Meredith