Homeschool 4th Grade Curriculum Questions...

[mrs.b]

So we're pulling our son out of public school after he finishes 3rd grade, and are putting our plans together to be off and running with a much happier and healthier academic environment for him. We already found a bunch of local groups to get him some daytime field trips and other outings with similar-aged peers, but have run into a minor snag with curriculum choices.

For arithmetic and history, we are using A Beka. I bought both after reading all the reviews I could find, and after receiving and digging through it, believe they are paced perfectly for his learning style (or at least his current learning style, which I imagine will change once we break him out of the traditional classroom setting). For science, we are using R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey and are very excited to get started; it is all hands on, direct application, which is how he learns best.

Language Arts... This is the issue. I bought the full LA curriculum from A Beka, but...it is not going to work. Not for him and his circumstances; we are working on getting him to a point where a system like that would not confuse him, but at least right now, he is not at a point where it would make any sense to him. We are going to return it and are hoping to find a secular (or less scripture-filled) LA curriculum. Does anyone have suggestions? We stumbled across Houghton Miflin who are just coming out with a 4th grade LA homeschool curriculum - they've done 5th through 8th previously - but this is the first release of 4th grade and will come out in April, so there are no reviews. Are there any that are tried and tested?

P.S. - We are hoping for an "out of the box" type of curriculum if possible. Maybe in a year or two when we have a better comfort level ourselves, we'll be better able to just grab random books and put something together ourselves, but to get started, we'd like something that walks us through it a bit more directly. (i.e., do this lesson here, give this test now, etc.) We'll still both be working full-time, so having it planned for us is a definite selling point until we know what we're doing.