I use it with my youngest right now. We are doing Saxon 2 and love it. The amount of repetition and the fact they introduce the facts in many different ways throughout the lessons has been a bonus for us. Before I was worried that my son was not mastering or getting enough of the basic facts of math, now I don't worry. He is doing awesome with this program. I also used it with my oldest when he was home. He loved it. He even asks about it sometimes and he has been back in ps for about 3 years now. It is a very solid program. You are not going to get all the flashy color that you do with some programs, but I found out the hard way all that color and flash distracted my son way too much.
My kids have done great with Saxon. My two oldest have had great ACT scores in math because of Saxon. You can jump into Saxon as long as you do the placement test. Good Luck. We are from Louisiana too.
We are using Saxon right now and the boys are loving it. Math is one of their easiest subjects because of the spiral approach it's a very gentle way of learning (no pressure to memorize on the first try), We really do like it. We switched to Saxon from MUS with no problems, and I don't anticipate any difficulty when we go back to MUS (most likely) in several years when they are ready for algebra and such.
With Saxon, you either really llike it, or really don't. I used it for grades 4, 5, and 6 with my girls. They were fine with it. We used it in fourth and part of 5th for Phillip, but it was fighting from Day One. We switched him to Teaching Textbooks, and he stopped fighting me. When he finished 4th grade, he was willing to go straight into 5th without any fussing!
We are switching from Horizons to Saxon this year. I used Saxon in high school with sd and plan on doing that with dd so I thought we would introduce the program at 4th grade which is where I start liking the Saxon program. I did not think much of it for grades 3 and under. The only thing I would say is make sure you do the placement test. I would have started dd with 54 but after giving her the placement test and looking at 54 we are instead doing 65 this coming year.
Hey, you swamp people down there at end-of-the-earth! I'm from the Prairie Cajun part of LA (toward Lake Charles)! I've used Saxon from 54 through Algebra I. It got the job done, but it was not fun in any way. The students I used it with got much better math scores than they had in public school, on their annual achievement tests, despite math being their "good" subject in ps. Nowadays, I much prefer Christian Light Education's math. It is also an incremental spiral, like Saxon is, but it's in workbooks (10 per year), so there's no need for copying on other paper. The kids can do CLE more independently. I was always finding myself having to *teach* Saxon. CLE's examples and explanations are (to me anyway, and to the kids probably too) are clearer than Saxon's. You can look at samples at www.clp.org. The diagnostic test is there too, free for the printing. I've told this story before, but it bears repeating, I think. I had a student who, when she had finished 4th grade CLE, I gave the Saxon placement test to, not because I was planning to change her over but just to see how she would do with it. She scored at "ready to begin 76". I had two boys who finished the year in the second half of 54, about 3/4 of the way through the book, so I gave them the CLE diagnostic test because I did plan to change them to CLE the following year. They had to begin at the beginning of 4th grade CLE. This year I have a boy who finished CLE 4, and I gave him the same Saxon test, and he scored at the same place as the girl I mentioned earlier. Now, this is the old version of the Saxon test, because what I have a box full of is the first and second editions (which I think are better than the new versions because John Saxon wrote them).
We have used it for the last few years, and its great, dd1 is half way through saxon 3, and ds is in saxon k! we tried lots of other maths programmes and the colour was too distracting and not enough review! so we have found it a real help and well worth it
