Help-Wanting to Start with older children

Hi, Kooshymom –

I hope you don’t mind my moving your question here to the Getting Started section. I’m hoping more people will be able to see it here and read it 🙂

Here’s a little article on making the transition that might give you some ideas.

I’m thinking that if your 7th grader isn’t yet used to verbally narrating, then you might focus on that and back off the writing for a little bit. Once he gets proficient at oral narration, it should be an easy step to writing down his thoughts.

Hi….I just wanted to say that we were late CM starters too! My son didn’t start until 7th grade either. The easiest way I found to make the transition from whatever methods you may have been using before is to just start by reading good “WHOLE” living books for just about every subject! We started out by just reading alot out loud from living science books, history, biographies about composers or artists, literature of all kinds, and then we took off from there with narration, and added in poetry a little later, copywork, etc…The library is our favorite hang out!! So, yes it can be done, and NO it’s not too late! I tried to incorporate unit studies last year some too, BUT it didn’t work out too well with my son, but it did with my now 2nd grade daughter!(we have five altogether, but the youngest are 5, 4, and 3) She loved studying a particular subject for a period of time and keeping a notebook filled with all the info. she was learning on that particular subject…but this year we have simply kept one large binder with geography, poetry, art appreciation, music appreciation, written narration, math, grammar etc…..and cover various subjects and do nature journaling as well. CM is great with big families! GOOD LUCK!!:)