We used ABeka until myelinaton set in then it was Saxon Math for our two. Saxon was great. They did a little of each of the 5 subjects daily. By January they had finished the books on science and history, thus they doubled up on the math. Because composition and reports were more subjective than objective we had others oversee that subject. Our 16 year old took a course in a local college in English, the two semesters in Spanish, so she entered college at 18 with 12 credits that transferred.
Teaching Textbooks were also quality materials in our view. Our two also liked the way the subjects were approached and explained in TT.
My kids were all math whizzes and we started with Saxon 54 in third grade with them.
For first and second grade, we actually found school workbooks at Sam’s club that did just as well are fancy expensive curriculum in nteaching the math basics. Sam’s (and BJ’s) had books for other sujects, too, like science and history IIRC.
We also did stuff like play scrabble for spelling, and doing games like Yahtzee for math. MY oldest benefitted greatly from a dot to dot book to learn the concept of counting past ten, how you do the teens, twenties, thirties, etc.
We used baking adn cooking for teaching fractions.
A lot of it leaned towards unschooling but as a teaching method, I didn’t depend on it. For English and Math especially, I felt the text book lessons were critical.
Our schedule was to start schoolinn Aug when theys tarted complaining about being bored. Then we’d start with Math and REnglish because they have the most lessons.
My goal was to reach the halfway point by Thanksgiving, and then we’d take off for Christmas and New Year’s and would n ot start again until Jan. WHat I discovered was if I gave them one day off, it was just as hard to get them back into schooling as tkaing the whole month off. So no special days off until we took them all off in Dec. It made the holidays SOOOOOO much easier.
Enjoyable thread.
I learned a new word thanks to you!
Myelination
Myelin
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-020-00379-8
“Throughout our lifespan, new sensory experiences and learning continually shape our neuronal circuits to form new memories. Plasticity at the level of synapses has been recognized and studied for decades, but recent work has revealed an additional form of plasticity — affecting oligodendrocytes and the myelin sheaths they produce — that plays a crucial role in learning and memory.”