It's such a good feeling to wrap up a schoolyear! We used Heart of Dakota's Preparing Hearts for His Glory with Silas, my 6th grader, and Titus, my 4th grader, this year. Heart of Dakota is a really great homeschool provider, and we've used several of their programs throughout our homeschool years. While we had a mostly fantastic year with Preparing, we aren't going to use Heart of Dakota next year.
WHAT WE LOVED
There are many things we loved about Preparing Hearts for His Glory. First I really loved the Teacher's Guide. You don't have a weekly grid schedule like most programs; instead there is a two-page layout for each day. That's right, for each day of the 4-day a week, 35-week program, you have a two-page spread detailing each and every assignment. This helped me a lot and kept me from flipping back and forth too much.
We also loved most of the history hands-on projects. I tried to do the majority of them with the boys, and even when the activity sounded silly, they always had fun with it. The history projects were relevant to each week's lessons, easy to follow, and almost always used easy-to-find supplies. Toward the end of the year, we skipped most of the activities because we were so ready to finish with the schoolyear! I wish we would have done them, though, looking back.
stained glass project
The literature choices were excellent, and there were only a few books that we didn't enjoy - The Wonderful Winter, which we never finished because it was so incredibly long and repetitive, and Door in the Wall, which was interesting but really hard to read aloud because of all the old-fashioned language. Silas had some great literature in his history extension package!
I loved being able to open the Guide, see exactly which books we would be using for the day, which supplies I needed to gather, and some of the "Key Ideas" which helped me see at a glance what we would be learning about.
WHAT WE DIDN'T LOVE
There were a few things we didn't love about Preparing Hearts for His Glory. The science portion is very disjointed in my opinion. Some days and weeks were full and fun, while others were dull, boring, and short. We didn't enjoy the constellation theme and substituted with a space unit from Gather 'Round Homeschool. Toward the end, we just read the book sections and asked the questions, skipping the experiments and demonstrations.
We also skipped the Bible memory as we were doing Bible Drill with our church, and we didn't enjoy the memory CD that was included and scheduled in.
I don't love their math, grammar, and reading program choices, so we used our own. Toward the end of the year, I felt like I was only using the Guide for our history lessons (which I was!), and it felt wasted.
Heart of Dakota is also very expensive, as there are so many books to read. You could use your library if you wanted to, but our library doesn't have a good selection and the Interlibrary Loan isn't very user-friendly.
We weren't crazy about Drawn into the Heart of Reading, which is the reading program by Heart of Dakota. The worksheets were hard to fill in and it was so time-consuming. We dropped it after just a few months of trying to make it work for us.
OUR TAKEAWAY
Heart of Dakota is a great program, but this coming year we are choosing to use something different. We wanted something more independent for the boys instead of teacher intensive. With a baby due right after the start of the schoolyear, I need something that is going to be streamlined. Heart of Dakota is also very expensive, and I feel like I could use that money on some better resources.
I can't wait to share what we will be using for this coming schoolyear!
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