Thanks for sharing this, as we had considered it. We settled on Christian Light Education and really love how simple it is. We use their language arts and reading curricula.
Thank you for this review. I really liked the History through Master Books and was considering the Language Arts so I appreciate the walk through of the daily and weekly plans. I've decided not to go with it because I too have boys who would extremely dislike day 4 and I don't want to dread that all school year long. I did My Father's World full curriculum for my middle child last year and for history there was the occasional "draw a picture and write a summary sentence" which would cause a fight and a melt down each time. Lesson learned here!! I love the scheduling and set up of Master Books and I'll probably continue to use it for other subjects, but Language Arts will be a no go for our family. I like the Charlotte Mason concept of the Language Arts and I think it could work really well for some families, but I have to face the reality of my family and it just isn't a good fit for us.
Funny that I would find this video.. We did master books LA for 2020 and got it for the 21-22 school year also... Now half way thru the years and I am switching to bju also 😆 I love the simplicity of MB but I dont think my kids are grasping the grammer concepts and I am having trouble explaining them 🤦🏼♀️ so I definitely need a teachers manual. What spelling are you using? I have All about spelling but havent started it ..(because you need the teachers manuals as well) Are you doing a reading comprehension?
We are using BJU spelling which I really like. We are using Christian Light Education Reading for reading comprehension. We just started it this week. So far so good.
I’m going to look at BJU and TGATB for next year. We are doing masterbooks level 3 but I feel like I would like to try a level 3 of another curriculum as it didn’t seem very robust.
BJU is like jumping 2 grades ahead. It is traditional but advanced. Teacher guides are good. They do grammar, writing, grammar, writing - alternating the entire year. Just felt BJU is lacking on teaching how to write good sentences and paragraphs-more than just - this is how to do it, go do it. So we’re branching out to EIW for that! My one child has done BJU and excelled and I have enjoyed the curriculum. I’ve even had them work independently and then we go over things, but I always teach newer concepts from the manual. Again, just need some in-depth writing instruction. Language Lessons is not the the best , diff approach for sure. We did it with AAR and AAS so we only used like 3 days a week, didn’t do spelling or reading from LlL-it is not a reading program in my opinion. And the language arts is a bit all over the place. It doesn’t review and cement the ideas and skills very well, as the video mentioned. However, for a developmentally younger or overly active child who shuts down with long drawn out lessons - it was good enough. But again, it was along side AAR and AAS and I did some printouts for review, which I felt it was lacking. I do not know how it works to teach reading, without leaving a lot of wholes to fill in later. Just my honest opinion, I also taught reading b4 homeschooling. Hope BJU works for you in full or even along side something else! 😊
We also love open and go curriculums, but we don’t always use masterbooks schedules. We only do review when needed!!! We use TGTB Language Arts and I feel like there’s enough teaching!!! We have thought of using masterbooks tho. We found TGTB 1st. We use masterbooks for science and love their science!!! I remember reading TGTB FAQs and read that she has a heart for dyslexic students but couldn’t be sure but I downloaded the free levels and found that it helped my kids!!!
