Higher Up and Further In

Dana – if you are concerned about book shipping, have you thought about AO? I initially didn’t think that we wanted to go that route, until I drove myself crazy trying to devise my own plan (combining parts of all the various CM style curriculum guides out there) to make the greatest use of books available for Kindle so we wouldn’t have to buy and ship so much (especially books that we might only use once). I found that AO already uses many ebooks, and the paper books for Years 1-3 that I had to purchase were very easily carried over in a suitcase (with space for lots of other books to spare). I also found they had already divided up their history rotation a little more to my liking as well, so less tweaking for me too. I’ve been really happy with the book selections too as we’ve gotten into them this year. Obviously…you need to do what works best for you, but reconsidering AO has turned out to be a blessing for me in terms of both planning and shipping concerns.

Just a thought from another CMer on this side of the world. =)

Jen

Hi Dana,

Yes, there is a lot of British history in AO, and less of non-Western cultures. I am OK with the British history. Part of the rationale for that is that understanding British history helps to understand American history, since that is where the colonists came from, and I’m finding it really interesting to read about personally. There are some non-Western cultures covered in the geography selections, I will probably add more to that via family read-alouds. I’m also planning to reserve all the of Holling books used for geography to do as family read-alouds next time we are in the States to make space for some more of that non-Western culture stuff as well. I would probably add more geography/culture stuff to anything we did though, so that wasn’t a huge concern for me either.

As for the history – I like that it is still a 6-year rotation, but I felt like the historical time periods were spread more evenly throughout the 6 years. When I was still trying to base my plan off of the SCM plan, I wanted to condense the 3 years of ancients and the other 3 modules over more time anyhow, which is essentially what AO does anyhow. So, that appealed to me.

For science, I am planning to follow the living books + nature study approach as outlined at AO for the most part. I did substitute a book called “Wild Animals from Africa” for the Burgess Bird Book this year to get something a little more locally applicable.

For math we are using Math U See at the moment, which is working well enough for us. I keep toying with switching to MEP though, and if shipping space was a huge concern I would just do it (I sea freighted 3 years worth of those). I might try it with my up-and-coming K-er in the fall anyhow.

I need to go feed my people lunch, but feel free to shoot me an email if you want to chat more about how we’re making it work for us. So far, I’m really pleased with how things are going though!

Jen

Hi Dana!

As much as I like the SCM materials, we are doing almost totally AO this year (just a couple of changes) and it is working really well for us.  Delta (9) is doing Year 2, and Echo (7) is doing Year 1.  

So much of the early years (I’ve just looked around for the early years so far) is available for ereaders, and mp3s for audiobooks that it is great for those that are elsewhere/travelling/not having much money for resources.

If you can afford it, when Yesterday’s Classics has a sale, I’d buy it.  Although many of the books are available for free, the YC is formatted so well, with pictures and TOC, that it is worth while.  It has a lot of AO books in their mix too.

I didn’t see this in the other posts, however I may have missed it.  CMH’s yahoo group also has checklists for each term of each year.  They are found in the files.  I have found them very helpful.

They are not available online anymore.  If you email me I can send you the ones I downloaded before they were pulled off.  tar in ya 2 at yahoo . com (no spaces anywhere)

Caedmyn, I hope you dont mind but I have just sent you an email requesting the Upper years HUFI info. I hope this is OK since the offer was directed at mommyshortlegs, but would sure appreciate it if it isn’t a bother to you.

I have some of the schedules, Jenny Jones, if you want to shoot me an email at the email address a few posts up.