History of California (4-6)

So far I like the idea of the program. I'm currently using it with my 9 year old and he's liking the book selections. I can't stand the guide though. It's beautiful for sure but it's so awfully put together. It's a wall of text for each lessons and nothing is broken down. I had to make my own pdf file to break down each lesson into something I can see. I have 4 kids so I dont have the time to go through the guide and try to understand what's going on. It's definitely not open and go. The review questions are bunched up into the guide. It's not worth dealing with the guide. I don't use it anymore because it's hard to focus and read. For an example, each lesson is a giant wall of text with numbers. The first is what to read, then after that is a giant wall of text with tons of info, question and things to do but its not broken up well. The answers to the questions are in the back of the book. It would be nice if it were laid out better. I don't want to flip to the back to check the answers. There's a poem to learn and copy but its in the back of the book and you can't clearly see what to do until you've read down the giant wall of text to find the part about the poem. There will be activities and such but once again it's in a giant wall of text. It's a beautiful guide, and when I can break it down, it looks like there's great activities and ideas, extra books to check out, field trips, etc. but I cannot get over the way its laid out. Simple bullet points with to dos and q&a laid out with the answers in each section would go a long way. I don't feel like a homeschool mom was ever consulted on how this was laid out. I can't recommend it until the layout is fixed.

We purchased this study for my son during his 4th grade year. We love Charlotte Mason's model, incorporating good and beautiful literature into our homeschool. I'd love to start with what we enjoyed about this curriculum. First, this curriculum offers extended reading recommendations (not included), recipes that apply to the units, videos online, and field trip opportunities. The recipies were really fun and the field trip opportunities could be easily researched online if you can't go in person. All of these aspects create quite a dreamy, immersive experience to learning history and my family loved that! What was most difficult was the layout of the curriculum. It's very hard to plan and follow. We came from a more structured literarture-based program which offers a weekly overview, specific pages to read, and a simple layout. Beautiful Feet's curriculum is written in units and has mini paragraphs for each lesson. In the paragraphs, there is content to talk about, pages to read, and more. However, there isn't a way to separate the content. It's almost like you have to read the paragraphs as you go and think about what you're saying out loud vs. what you should do (like grab a book). I was 50/50 on the book selections. I loved some while others I felt disappointed by. The literature we did love painted beautiful pictures of the time periods, authentically told history and made us feel like we were there. They built compassion and we learned things we never knew before. However, many of the chapter books felt dry and did not hold our attention. I really did like some of the books and the overall style of the curriculum. We are unsure if we'd buy again.

We LOVED this curriculum! I'm so glad we chose it for CA history. All the books were so much fun. I was thrown off a little in the beginning with the looser format, but I like how you could adapt it to what you wanted. Just make sure to read through it before you start so you know what to expect. We tried some of the recipes and enjoyed doing the art and journal. Highly recommend!!

So like many other series from BF Books I did not but all the books but only some of them. We have enjoyed the books we have covered so far. However I DO NOT like the teacher book and organization for this program. It jumps all over the place. So to study 1 book for example you have to search the whole book and piece it together yourself.

California is truly such a beautiful state. I was excited to be digging into California history this year with my 4th grader. Both he and I are enjoying learning all about the native roots and those who dreamed of making California their home. As with anything there is good and bad but we learn from the hard parts and move forward with the good. I will definitely be using this curriculum with our younger two children one day as well. As always, Beautiful Feet uses wonderful literature and finds ways to bring the history to life for little (and big) eager minds.