Reading all the 5th grade plans.... now I need some opinions

[littlefamily]

Our 5th grade plans for next year....

R&S 6 - English
Megawords - Vocab & Spelling
Writing Tales 2
LL7 - Lit Studies (She & I really want to do this, so it is a must)
Singapore 5A & 5B & CWP
Science - Apologia Biology & Astronomy
History - ???? (Ancients - We are finishing the SOTW series)
Logic - Mindbenders

Swimming & diving for PE
Piano & Guitar lessons for music
She does an art class once a month or so at the nature center

My questions:
I was looking at the table of contents (haven't ordered it yet) for R&S 6 and it seems to have more writing assignments than previous books. Will it be overkill to do WT2 as well? We did R&S plus WT1 this year and had no problems with the amount of writing.

Also, I am torn between using TOG (everyone is speaking so highly of it) and just doing my own thing for ancients using The World in Ancient Times series from Oxford Press. Will it be too much to do TOG plus the LL7? We really want to do LL7, so that would make up my mind to do something other than TOG....

And then the question everyone asks.... Did I forget something? :001_smile:

Thanks
Laura

[mcconnellboys]

I can't answer your other questions, but I think your schedule looks fine,

Regena

[Hoggirl]

I don't know anything about Writing Tales, but we are doing R&S 6 this year with my 5th grade ds. We only do the grammar lessons and use IEW for writing. I have mixed and matched the SWI-B lessons and Ancient Writing lessons. If there is something of interest in a R&S writing lesson (business letters, for example) I point it out, but we don't "do" the lesson.
While I drool over TOG, I know it would not be a fit for my ds. He is not that into history. We did MOH 1 this year for the first 27 weeks and have now switched over to Biblioplan to finish out our year as I wanted greater depth of coverage for the Romans than MOH 1 had. I plan to continue with Biblioplan Year 2 for next year. It is WTM in nature. There are not discussion questions, but we do so much together talking as we go, I don't think they are necessary. For "us" TOG would be too much.

[Chris in VA]

I think your plan is fine. Like Hoggirl, I recommend just not doing the R&S writing portions, using WT2 instead, or, conversely, ditching WT2. Will you have dd outline some of the text of the history book you are using? It might be a useful skill to start. SWB says to use Kingfisher, of course, but the basic idea is to start outlining by writing one sentence for each paragraph or so (similar to finding the main ideas, points with Roman numerals in an outline).
Since LL7 has you reading heavily from the American period, I'd say add in several good historical fiction novels from the Ancient period, and just do very minimal analysis and writing with them--maybe pick 4 or 5 and just have dd write a paragraph or two on things like, summarize a few of the chapters, make a character map, etc. Maybe use some of the exercises in LL to write about these books. (I'm not familiar with the skills covered in LL, only with the titles of what is read.) Some suggested reading might be:
Black Ships Before Troy
Wanderings of Odysseus
Mara, Daughter of the Nile
Golden Goblet (thought this was boring, but that's me)
Hittite Warrior (if she's a good reader)
Cat of Bubastes
Mark of the Lion series (the first 2)

You could even read some of these aloud, if you are still reading to her. It will keep history from becoming boring.
It seems to me, what with LL, history and R&S (or R&S w/o writing, adding in WT) she'll have PLENTY to write.