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Sunday, May 30, 2010

My thoughts on the curriculum we used this year

With our gifted son N. coming out of cyberschool at 8 years old having just finished 4th grade we were really looking for a homeschool curriculum that would be structured, challenging but that we had controll over so as to not be frustrating for him. We went with Alpha Omega Switched on Schoolhouse 2008 5th grade. We didn't feel the math was a good fit for him so we went with Teaching Textbooks Math 7.

We absolutely LOVE this math. It has a textbook that is basicly the printed version of the lectures with highlighted key information that N. copies daily into a notebook for review prior to the tests. It also had cd's that give the lecture with practice questions. If the student gets the answer wrong the program walks them through the correct way to do the problem. We are going to be using this math program for as far as it goes. The link on this page is for just the textbook and answers on Amazon, if you look around on Ebay or other sites you can find the whole thing used but it won't usually cost much less than new right from thier website http://www.teachingtextbooks.com/ . I also see them come up alot on The Homeschool Lounge for sale page. Word of caution, the discs are used daily so be careful getting them used. Also a quick call to the company will allow you to install them on your computer, they are very nice about it and it only takes a few minutes.

The Alpha Omega SOS was a good program. It is Christian based, a plus if that is what you are looking for, if not then you will find it frustrating. It thouroughly covers all the core subjects, is very structured while still allowing parental controll and it has nice print outs for the portfolio as well. We are not going to use the program this year. We did some supplemental research projects on our own in the form of lapbooks and N. felt he was able to learn more that way. But SOS certainly gave us the confidence we needed to get through our first year of homeschooling with structure and the support of a comprehensive curriculum.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

"Q&A" from StoryCorps

Many gifted children fail academically - UdeMNouvelles

Many gifted children fail academically - UdeMNouvelles