Does anyone do this? If so…how, and in what year would you start a 7th, 3rd, and 1st grader who just covered “Ancient History” aka Creation to the Greeks in MFW? We also have a PreK, 2 yr old and 1 yr old and 1 due in Oct that would be constant hang arounds.
I did AO for 3 years with 2 children. AO really suggests that you put each child in their own correct year. Mine are 3 years apart, so we had 2 AO years always going at one time. It was doable, but again I only had 2 🙂 The 7th grader would read most of his/her stuff on their own, with some exceptions. For the most part though you would need to read quite a bit for the 3rd and everything for the 1st grader. I tried to combine mine in AO, it just was a LOT of work to rework their plans. Maybe someone here has found an easier way to do it.
I finally came over to SCM a year ago and couldn’t be happier. I am so thankful for this site and their plans. It has been wonderful to being doing everything together again. (We started our homeschooling together and then seperated when we found AO, when we switched to the CM way) I still keep some of the AO stuff going in our homeschool.
I tried AO, too, but found two problems for our family – many of the books were just too far above the interest level of my dd and I wanted to use American history alongside of World history, not British. So we switched to Higher Up and Further In, which is a great resource in so many ways! However….
When it came time to add in my ds, no matter how I worked it, everyone would have been studying their own thing. Part of our reason for homeschooling was to study together and this wasn’t going to accomplish that goal. Besides, it was more than I could accomplish in a week and I was often left feeling defeated.
After much prayer, the Lord was clearly directing me to simplify and SCM’s curriculum guide was an answer to that prayer. We do add in more natural history readings ala AO and HIFI, but we use the rest of the SCM framework as our guide. I can more simply add in when I need to than I was able to weed out.
We had a similar story–I had 3 children, we were all spinning off in different directions, I couldn’t come up with a practical way to combine them back in, I felt we were losing some of the qualities that made homeschool so special . . . now we are here. It just works better for us.
You may find it easier to use the guide here and take it “one book at a time”. We have done that and sometimes we like a books so well we go and find things by the same author, head out on rabbit trails, move on if we dislike thet book…etc. As Sonya says, loving the book is key to getting the best work out of kids. We struggles with some AO books and I felt trapped, and guilty, when I left. SCM is much easier to customize.
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