Incoming School Gear

A package of more school gear arrived at our house this week, such excitement! This is a programme I stumbled upon while hunting down something else. I’m familiar with The Good And The Beautiful as a curriculum, but was unaware they’d branched out with gear for high school so I was pretty excited when I spotted it. I downloaded the very large sample and poured over it for quite a while, then spent some time in prayer about it, and finally put it on the list for our official LA curriculum for the year.

We waited until after the Christmas — New year shut down of our local post office before putting in an order and then waited. We actually ordered in the wee hours of the morning {USA Time} on their Tuesday, so when their Saturday rolled around and we still had no shipping notification I became a little bit concerned and reached out to the company.

If I’m SUPER honest I’d say that the feedback at that time was unsatisfactory and indicated that my items hadn’t shipped and would likely go out Monday from their warehouse. By our Thursday I was a tad frantic about the fact that I’d still not received any indication that our parcel had shipped, and reached out to the company yet again. This time they told me my item had shipped out on their Wednesday, are you confused by all these time frames yet?!, and then passed on my tracking number. Low and behold my package was out for delivery! 

One of the huge draws for our purchase with this curriculum was that there was only 5 books for the required reading. There are reading challenges within if you want to indulge in them, but for my student who could care less about excess reading 5 books was not overwhelming to him. In fact it was very normal sounding.

Interestingly enough, even though we use a literature rich curriculum I still have a child who’s not really keen on reading all the time, and you know what I’m totally okay with that. It’s always a treat to see him curled up with a book, which does happen, but I’m also content when it’s not his “thing”.

For my student who loves to read 5 books seemed crazy limited and he told me so. I reminded him that our literature based history curriculum would have LOTS of books in it, further he could easily take up ANY of the reading challenges within the LA programme, and that it would also leave him with plenty of time for the large stack of library books he often has on the shelf too.

Another huge deal about these books is that the author of the curriculum doesn’t pick books with language in them. Our non-reader had a situation where he was reading a book by a former favourite author and came to a scene where not only was God’s name used poorly, but a slew of curse words followed. He was very upset by the situation, and it took a lot to convince him to finish the book, which I finished pre-reading and blocked out words of offence for him.

The idea is that the students work through each of these Units at the rate of 2 weeks per each. Now my kids aren’t use to “lifepacs”, but this is the second set we have on the shelf this year {PAC from HOD being the other..} I actually think these will deeply appeal to at least one of mine because it’s very obvious at a glance how much more you have to go to “be done”

I’m actually so impressed with the quality of these little booklets. All the other booklets like this from other companies that I’ve seen are very cheap paper quality, but that’s not the case with these. The only suggestion I’d make is that the art work within be on a shinier paper and possibly even perforated to remove and “save”. 

Another component is the “cards”, now if I understand correctly you get all 4 years worth of cards at one time. There are poetry cards, latin root word cards, and geography cards. Yes, geography. I know when I was researching the programme some found the idea of geography worked into LA/English, but my kids love geography so it didn’t even phase me to be something to be concerned about.

The cards are perforated and have a sturdy cardboard laminated feel to them. It’s kinda what I wish the art work in each of the booklets above was like. I should probably clarify the artwork is for picture study.