With IEW, units 3 and 5 lay the ground work for unit 7, inventive writing. It's a great program for kids who melt down when given a blank piece of paper and told to write about whatever they want. If you've got a kid that will happily turn out pages and pages of writing, it wont be a good fit. As kids progress through the levels, the creativity comes in the form of 'dress ups' and advanced techniques. One of the high school samples is a retelling of The Tortoise and the Hare written in the style of Poe's The Raven. It is very important for the parent to understand why the units are laid out the way they are and how to implement the course. They give away the whole online Teaching Structure and Style course every year during their 12 days of Christmas event. It's a must for any parent trying to use IEW curriculum.
Did they give it away this year? I jumped in about day 5 or 6 and don’t remember seeing it. I was excited to get level 1 of the poetry memorization though!
I just found your channel and watched almost all your videos on Moving Beyond the Page!! I’m so glad I found your videos!! 💗 We have been using The Good and the Beautiful for my 4th and 6th grader. My 4th grader hated it and my older one didn’t complain, but wasn’t loving it. We have started MBTP together and both my kids are loving it!!! It has been a complete transformation in our homeschool!! Just wanted to say thank you for making these videos, I appreciate you! ❤
Your info on IEW is exactly why I haven’t used it. That was exactly my train of thought! I felt the same way, but I was always unsure since I hadn’t personally given it a try but hearing you say that reaffirmed every reason I initially had.
I feel the same. If you have the whole series, choose parts of it for a few weeks and then switch to a new book. But that’s spendy to buy all of the books at one time.
Thank you for the honest review of Apologia Earth Science. I've been looking at it and considering it for my rising 2nd grader, but I think I'll hold off for a couple of years. The reason why I've never wanted to use anything from IEW is because it looks so rigid.
I’m looking at IEW for my kids for the reasons you mention - the handholding and the unique structure it has. I do plan on doing the teacher course before starting their program in a couple years. I’ve listened to a lot of the IEW podcasts and hearing Andrew talk about and explain so much of the program and a host of other things just really makes me want to get behind their curriculum. Writing was a very difficult subject for me in school. I really hated having to write papers, especially when I had to come up with what I was going to write about. I went into engineering and when I got into technical writing I had more success. But knowing myself, I need a program that’s gonna hold my hand and I don’t want my kids to have the same struggles I did.
Same with my son! I think because I don’t feel the need to do every single activity, especially for K. If I feel he gets the gist (he’s over 6 already which is a benefit to us) I go ahead and move on! Sometimes we don’t even do the workbook because it doesn’t always seem necessary 🤣
I’ve been on the fence about IEW for my 10y/o for next school year. Thank you for your sharing your thoughts and experience with it. Word roots looks like it’s something we will be implementing as well. Thanks!
We love Beowulf grammar. I learned about it from you and I’m so glad you introduced us to it. My kids have really enjoyed it and it’s been a fun break from traditional language arts.
I’ve heard a lot of about those school nest notebooks. I haven’t really looked at a flip-through yet, so idk much about them. However, I use standard composition notebooks for any notes, math work, & my child’s fav; dictionary copy work. I’ll select 3 grade appropriate words (sometimes similar words, think thesaurus). My child will then put them in alphabetical order, & just copy the definitions. As she gets older, I’ll have her use 1 (or all) words in a sentence. I’ll also select more “difficult” words to put in abc order. This is my child’s fav part of her independent work. Her handwriting has improved tremendously! And now she uses her dictionary more often too.
What are your thoughts on next year? Just curious because I am also starting to think about next year. 😄 Also, do you have a video on what your weekly schedule is like? Do you do all of the things you mentioned every day? Or break it up and do some things on certain days and others on different days? I’d love to see how you schedule all of the things.
Still planning for next year but I’ll be sharing videos soon! I do have lots of videos up sharing our schedule and how our day to day looks and plan on filming some upstate one soon. Math & Language arts are every day. Science 2x a week, history 2x a week.
Yeah, put all the tectonic plates in the dishwasher! As to the water cycle: כל הנחלים הלכים אל הים והים איננו מלא אל מקום שהנחלים הלכים שם הם שבים ללכת:
Yes! If your child prefers "straight to the point" lessons, Abeka is the way to go. We use their math Pre-K, Kinder, 1st, and 2nd. In 3rd we switch to Teaching Textbooks. Straight to the point, and independent.
Mwc works great for my oldest, but not my youngest. I can't decide if I should scrap it and go with something like math you see or Singapore math or keep pressing on. For now I use it as a guideline and teach using different manipulatives, games and concepts for the topics that don't click. I just added the Kumon books to my Amazon cart. Thanks for the suggestions.
We did two books of Apologia, Astronomy and Botany. Btw there is an order that is recommended with the junior series, starting from Astronomy, Botancy. They go from simple to more complex. But tbh Astronomy was in-depth for my ten 8 and 6 year old! We switched to Sonlight Science and on my goodness we love it! All your pros for Apolgia, Sonlight is the opposite, it’s brilliant.
I Just bought IEW. I have the same concerns as you about it. My oldest daughter is in college and she said that the Essentials In Writing program would prepare more for college writing. BUT,I already bought IEW. lol. I will see how it goes and maybe check out EIW for later.
Thanks for that feedback. I have been looking at IEW and EIW. Your comment just helped me out because my son definitely wants to attend college....EIW it is!
We've done IEW and are currently using EIW...I honestly saw more of an improvement in my children's writing while using IEW. They didn't love the long videos and some of the rules, but we all had subjects in school that we didn't like 😅. I'm thinking of switching back next year.
No we did not. It was too teacher intensive for me and we already had enough LA resources it would have been over kill. Still looked amazing just didn’t fit in our homeschool 🥰
I’d love to see how you make it through Saxon in a year while only schooling 3 days a week…I tried plugging that into my calendar to make it work for us, but I couldn’t manage it 🤦♀️
It’s in a lot of my planning videos how we do it but simply we do school course books 3x a week for 40 weeks. Which is 120 days, and the older levels of Saxon have 120 lessons/tests. We do not do the investigations. There have been times where we have a “double day” where they complete two lessons to stay on track. We school from mid-July to end of May normally and take about a solid 5 - 6 week break in summer and then have random weeks off the rest of the year.
@@brittanyedwards3293 we did them last year and that is when we would double up on lessons. But those felt like they just took so long for them to work through and I haven’t seen any struggles this year not doing them 😊
Hi! Do you complete the grammar lessons in the MBTP units or do you skip those since you have other grammar books? Thanks for all of your reviews! Super helpful.
I’m curious if you do the morning meeting that is part of the Saxon 3 curriculum for your 3rd grader? We are using Nicole the Math Lady also and I didn’t even realize that was part of the curriculum until recently. Just hope I’m not missing anything by not doing it.
We don’t do the morning meetings! If your child needs extra fact practice you can incorporate them but since we use the Kumon workbook that’s kinda our extra supplement
So what are you going to use for science next year? - we are doing the human anatomy and physiology with my 8th and 3rd graders... I have the same complaint :/ it would be nice to have a variety of topics. so I was curious what you are considering.
what are your thoughts on math for younger ages? My fourth grader is doing Saxon and loves it but I’m not sure what math to do. For my first going into second grader.
You had purchased BJU English for both of your daughters and I don’t think I ever saw an update video on that? Did you end up using it at all? And if not, was there a specific reason why? I have a very reluctant writer who needs quite a bit of hand-holding on that particular subject, so I’m looking at trying it out. There aren’t a ton of videos out there on it.
I switch to Math w/Confidence from TGTB for my 1st grader. I LOVED TGTB, but it was a bit “all over the place”. Now my experience with MWC is that it’s really, really repetitive. I get that it’s more mastery & that’s probably why. But both child & I are getting a bit frustrated with it, & for the same reasons you mentioned. I’m having to make sure I have all the materials/manipulatives ready to go. I’ve already paid for it, so I’m just going to fly through it & get it done. I still have her incomplete TGTB math, so I might go back to it & hope it works the second time around. If not, then I’ll be looking forward to a shiny new math curriculum, wink-wink lol
