This whole thing about using the choise of sodas as an analogy to disagreeing without being disagreeable, came from talking with my sister in law, who thinks that I live my lifestyle JUST to make her look bad... sigh..... So I told her, "Just because I do X,Y or Z does not mean it is a direct indictment against what you do.... I do not spend my day thinking up ways to make you look bad..... Just because I drink Mr.Pibb does not mean that I think you are less just because you drink Dr.Pepper." Of course, when it comes to soda choice, I really DO descriminate, because you HAVE to be picky about your friends... Ok, kidding, again! Pibb Rules!
We use mainstream textbooks with supplemental workbooks. We use McH, Harcourt, Houghton M also. We did buy the consumables for Math but the rest are texts with math. Added MCP Phonics consumable also and HB Spelling and Vocab Consumable. I want to keep DS on track for public school in case he goes back. They use textbooks in College also, and if he has never used one it could end up being a difficult transition someday either way. Downfall is that I did not get the teachers manual so I go ahead and make my own lesson plans. Last year we paid $900 for boxed curriculum that had less 'meat and bones' than this one did so I comparison shopped and opted for this.
Try this site for Teacher Editions. If you don't find what you need, do a 'textbook' search in the bar on the left. http://www.blujay.com/?page=profile&profile_username=schoolcity
We are moving more in that direction. We will be using some "textbooks" from BJU, and other public school type textbooks that I have come across. We are getting away from the workbook format to some extent. We pretty much have outgrown the Horizons workbook only type format. I love textbook type readers. My kids enjoy the eclectic mixture of stories in them. I like the artwork, especially in the older one when they used paintings and drawings instead of computer generated art.
Augh! You know I despise text books or anything that even remotely resembles public school! Haha! Seriously I do But I think people should do what works for their kids. Textbooks are not for me and my kids.
We use several different textbooks; mainly because I sort of fell into possesion of some of them...and found that we liked them. We have two Harcourt Science books, one with a workbook. Granted, Zach loved doing the experiments and hated doing the studies/questions. But I think lots of the info in there is valuable. Not sure how I'll incorporate them next year. I got a great set of teacher's guides and textbooks from Hampton-Brown called "Avenues". This was actually on craigslist and I couldn't pass it up when I looked on the H.B. website and saw that I was getting five grades' worth of material, over $1000 worth of material for just $50. I'm really glad I bought them. I realized that they're actually for ESL students, but (like many other boys, I imagine) Zach's really benefited from the more in-depth word studies that accompany these lessons. With the teacher's guides, you can actually build an entire two weeks around just one story...they provide so many supplemental lessons. I find that one week is long enough for Zach, but again...we really like these. Also, I really like the Sadlier-Oxford math book my kindergartener is using. I bought him the one for first grade for next year, too, after I saw how much he liked this one. They have supplemental resources online, and I add a few other things to what we do, so it's not straight "workbook" math. www.sadlier-oxford.com is their site. I know textbooks don't work for everyone, but they seem to be working well for us. And it's been a very reasonable way to HS, cost-wise.
I'll be using FLL for my two youngers, and when they finish that (it's 1 and 2 together) then we'll start with R&S 3. When we first started homeschooling, ALL we used pretty much were textbooks. I liked the Houghton-Mifflin English book we used (and now we have a workbook to go with it), we used a math book (don't remember who it's by), and we used two years' worth of spelling books (I think HBJ?). Also used a social studies book (HBJ) for our Texas study a while back, which was a short study, and have a whole Texas History ps text set for the middle years. I have a science book, but it didn't work for us and I put it away. I have TONS and TONS of ps readers. I am always looking for ways to use them; thanks to Becky for the teacher editions link! I'll check that out for these. I don't have workbooks or anything; these are JUST the stories and generally don't have the questions for them in the books. We use them for outlining and lapbooks to aid our comprehension studies, for now. For science, we'll probably lean towards one of the creation science homeschool "textbooks" from AiG or Apologia or some other source. I'm no good with science. I *HAVE* a lot of textbooks, and I'm all about not spending money if I don't have to.
I have a few science texts. The pre-college ones I don't like. They're grade 1, 3 and 7 and all seem to repreat the same info simply with more complex language. We just take a look at a college biology text or biology-for-dummies type book when we're in the mood. I do have a calculus and an great high school geometry text that we aren't using yet. Not much else though. I really find traditional texts are a lot of work to adapt in some cases.
