Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Choosing homeschooling curriculum and WJ-III grade

I am considering choosing new homeschool curriculum. I'm still on the fence about school. We have been homeschooling for three years. One of my problems with homeschooling is finding curriculum that is engaging and interesting to both girls, ages 6 and 8.

Our older daughter's WJ-III had grade equivalents. However, our younger dd's WJ-III testing did not have grade equivalents. Do I have to contact the tester again to get those grade equivalents? Or can I figure this out myself using the achievement scores?

The MBTP curriculum I bought for age 6-8, supposedly for gifted children, is not sufficiently engaging for our six year old. I really want to get it right this time. I would prefer to calculate it myself instead of contacting the tester, since she did it for free for both kids and I don't want to drive her crazy.

Thank you.

Have you considered making up your own curriculum? I promise, it's easier than it sounds.

Get a book like "What your Xth Grader Needs to Know" http://www.amazon.com/What-Your-Fir...mp;s=books&qid=1277182767&sr=8-1

or use the World Book list: http://store.worldbook.com/typical_course_of_study.html

You might also be able to find a course of study for your local area or state if you look for it online.

All you have to do then is find materials at your library (or on your bookshelf) that follow one (or all) of these general paths. But since *you* are selecting the material, you can make things as challenging as your kids need them to be.

I know this works fine because we did it. I was an emergency homeschooler when we pulled our 6yo out of 1st grade nearly 3 years ago now, and since I had no time to research curricula or do a lot of shopping, this is what we did. It actually worked amazingly well, especially for a gifted young kid who was desperate to learn.

It allows for fitting the needs of your children very specifically. In subjects our DS adored, I cranked up the challenge level. He did a version of junior high geometry that got him over his post-school "I hate math" phaase. In subjects that he wasn't that into at the time--like American history--he read books that were geared to his age level. He got the basics covered quickly on stuff that didn't interest him and he was at or beyond age-level in every subject.

We just fit a weekly library trip into our schedule (which you may do already) to get lots of books, and I made sure to look over the list of stuff a 1st grader was supposed to know once every couple months to be sure we weren't veering way off course.

But really, it was fun and easy and it allowed us to be a lot more child-led. We did a lot of reading aloud and discussion.

No pressure. But it can be done if you want to dump the prepared curriculum and go a bit more off-road.

We pull ours together too. I cannot imagine ever finding a boxed curriculum that would work well with the children who are in the higher LOG. There is the asynchrony that you usually have to deal with, and with the boxed curricula you end up buying things at the same grade level. There's also the issue of them learning so quickly that you could be purchasing two years' worth of curricula in one year. That could be quite costly with some of the curricula out there.

We started schooling our then-5-y/o last fall. He had no schooling prior to this, but was already reading well and was very into science. He hadn't been taught any formal math, so we started him with a *fairly challenging) kindergarten curriculum in January of this year. He finished it in three months. It was supposed to last a year.

We then moved up a year and started with MEP Year 1. Unless he decides to accelerate himself and finishes sooner, he will be finishing Year 1 sometime in August. That's two years of math in eight months of school ---and he doesn't even like math, at all!

My point is that if your daughters are anything like that in any of their subjects, you really might do much better, and save money in the process, by pulling together your own materials. If you're okay with neo-classical, then there are curricula like The Well-Trained Mind you could look to for guidance. There are the Thomas Jefferson Education folks, too. Ambleside Online is spectacular for its literary richness. Or, as previously suggested, just find a general list of what they should know by a particular age and pull something together from that. All of these can be looked at for free online, or the first two have books you can read.

I would suggest spending more time on the things that the girls are really interested in so that they can develop their particular interests a bit more deeply. In general, I do think it's pretty easy to pull it all together once you find your style and poke around on the Internet a bit. There is so much free curricula and free help these days where homeschooling is concerned. (I'm sure you know that if you've been doing it for three years! ;))

HTH

Do HS kids take an IOWA test or similiar to let you know if they learned everything they should for their grade? How does this work if they are at several grade levels among different subjects?

Thank you for your suggestions. I still dream of some sort of boxed curriculum. I am not a good planner so I wish I could find something that plans everything for me.

But I certainly see your point. I had some very good experiences with weaving things together. I just need a jumping off place, kwim? When our younger dd was a baby, she grew incredibly fast - she weighed sixteen pounds by the time she was two months old. I was always buying the wrong size of disposable diapers, or having the backup clothes in her diaper bag be too tiny.

It feels the same way with her homeschool work. I will buy something for her level, and before I even have time to get it out of the package and plan something, she's gone beyond it.

It varies with each state. We do not do this in oiur state. We found a tester for WJ-III achievement, but not through the school.

Have you read The Well Trained Mind? It might give you some general sense of where kids would be and most libraries carry it. I found I have to work above the levels recommended but the approach works well for advanced learners. I did not find MBTP to be on par for gifted children.

I have had some success with a boxed curriculum with history/lit. by using Sonlight above level and in a secular manner, but I only use the core, not science, or LA. I only think it is successful because it is literature based and I have avid readers. Otherwise you might want to stick with programs that allow you to do a placement test. I tend to order lots of catalogs and then put their lists together with the WTM and pick what would work well, this is my approach to younger level science and it's been quite successful.

Ditto Melissa's recommendation with the Well Trained Mind. Since you've been HSing for so long, you probably know all about it, but still, I just have to share! We started HSing my DYS in January, and this book literally sits next to my Bible on my nightstand. Following this model is so popular that most of the gifted children in our HS charter also follow it.

Like Melissa said, you have to adapt it (and any program) for the specific needs and interests of your children, but it's easy to do. I follow the general philosophy, and then handpick my own materials. We do use Story of the World (which will lead you down all sorts of paths with the extra reading!!), but I find WTM's language/math recommendations too basic. For more substantive materials, I love Rightstart Math and materials through Critical Thinking Resources (Mindbenders, Word Roots, Reading Detective, LanguageSmarts, etc.)

With science, we love R.E.A.L. science, which you can easily do at home. It is designed for 1-4th graders, so it would be perfect for both of your children. Story of the World is also labeled grade 1-4 and truly does work for any child in that range. (We're also starting Apologia Science, but that's only because our co-op is going to do labs through it.)

Btw, we tend to like the immersion approach much more than the spiraling, which is too redundant for many PG learners. I find that this opens up a lot more opportunities for what we want to study.

If you'd like to swap ideas, you can always feel free to PM me, too.

I did read the WTM, and perhaps I need to read it again. It was not the right fit for our kids when I first read it, but I think it may make a lot more sense now that they are six and eight. I have most of the SOTW materials, and we did Real Science 4 Kids Chemistry last semester with a science coop of two other families.

I think I might try Sonlight again. Our kids love to read and it is a ready to go curriculum. We did it for a few months of kindergarten, and I liked it but our daughters wanted to read the entire books and at that time, I thought I had to follow the schedule. In my defense, I was brand new at homeschooling then. We are doing Dreambox right now for math, because math is not their area of strength. Our younger dd is breezing through it very fast. They both find Math U See boring, which is a shame, since I like MUS so much.

I had serious homeschool burnout by the end of last semester. I didn't even want to look at anything dimly related to homeschool.

I am just now getting my bearings again and realizing that I was heavily overcommitted, and that I was hanging out with friends who were just as scheduled but way more energetic. :-)

I have mixed feelings on WTM. When I first read it, I was just starting out homeschooling a five year old. The idea that he was in the "parrot" stage and needed to spend a lot of time regurgitating information fed to him didn't sit well with me. That wasn't who my son was at five, or even at two. He was making observations and asking thoughtful questions from the time he was a toddler.

I do use SOTW, which is the history program written by one of the authors of WTM. I don't use it exactly the way they recommend, but my kids enjoy it and we've recently come full circle and restarted the ancient world. I really like the idea of learning history chronologically. It just makes SO much more sense than the way I was taught history in school. Even my youngest is fascinated with history, and she "gets" how one event leads to another.

The coolest thing about homeschooling is that we have lots of choices, and we're not boxed in a forced to use a program that doesn't work well for our child, though it may work well for most!