writing program confusion

Boy, we sound alike! I used WWtB w/my currently 8th gr. daughter. She didn’t like it. Then we switched to Jump In which was better. And she’s also going to private school next year for high school:)  

Jump In is pretty independent for the kids. I don’t do much except read her papers and offer any suggestions for improvement. She does all the skill-building before the paper writing independently…it’s written to the student. I had mistakenly thought it was a 1-yr. program. She’s been at it about 1 1/2 yrs. and now we’re doubling up because I’d like her to finish it before going to school(we dropped our Algebra since we decided to have her re-take as a freshman…so it doubling up for writing isn’t too bad).  

It would work fine for a 6th grader, too. My 5th grader just started it a week or so ago(he’ll be 12 in July) and is having no trouble working independently at it(hasn’t gotten to a paper yet). 

Now, if you wanted to complete it in one year I think it might be doable if you have a plan upfront. I just let my daughter go at it, and as I look back at many of the independent assignments some are pretty short and could have been doubled up.  Also, on the writing projects you have a varied amount of time to finish. It might say, “Day 1-3 do…..” If you always required the lesser amount of days you could go through the book more quickly. I let me daughter do it too independently and she’d take the max # of days…if a paper was to take 5-10 days she’d take 10 even though she very well could have done it in five:)

Hope that makes sense. If it were me, I might buy it for my youngest and then see if I thought I could get it down to 36-weeks and still cover well the topics I wanted to. Hope that helps some! Blessings, Gina