2nd and 4th grade lit

[Heathersaysyeah]

For various reasons I need to scale back this year and change my plans of full cores for 2nd and 4th grade.
I didn't think I would be doing this....It was a hard but necessary choice.
We've used parts of cores since my daughter was in Kindergarten. This year we did full cores for 1st and 3rd.

I don't want to completely abandon MP! Its one of the best.

That being said, I do want to go with 2nd and 4th literature packages, but it needs to be more manageable. Maybe CM (ish)?
I've looked at a lot of alternatives, but keep coming back to MP lit.
HELP!

Any thoughts or advice?
I have an almost 5 year old and 17 month old boys who are exuberant to say the least. All the climbing and screaming from the baby has left me frazzled. Living in Alaska may be a beautiful and memorable experience, but we have no family here, though a good homeschool community.

I hope that wasn't too all over the place. I love being apart of the MP community. We are in this together, giving our children such a rich and valuable education! It saddens to me to have to step away for a bit.

Thank you for any advice.

[pickandgrin]

What about this? For 4th grade, scale down to fewer total books opting for slowness but still going deep. For second, you could go at whatever pace works and get done what you could. The purpose of the second grade set is really more to scale readers up to "non-primary" work in third which you've already seen. I would just do second lit until you are done, even if that overlaps into next year. Could you describe how you are currently completing the lit guides-you may be able to scale back what you are doing to lighten the load. You also may already be light! Just give us a little more time picture and we can help you with ideas. Many families modify MP successfully-you can too!

[KF2000]

Jessica has already asked for you to share a bit more of how you are currently doing things, which I wanted to echo as well. I wanted to encourage you that you are definitely not alone in hitting a rough patch...if that is what is occurring. This time of having all four of your children be young can be more trying than any other because you are stretched so thin without any big-kid helpers yet. And feeling so isolated without outside support only compounds that effect! When our family was young like that, we lived at least 5 hours away from any family at all; sometimes up to 15 hours away. If there are even more extenuating circumstances, it simply ups the ante of how difficult a time period can be. I really hope you know that you have support from our community here, and that if you ever want help in more ways than just adjusting your literature plans, please reach out. You can PM any of us if you want to keep it off-public Forum, but I do want to encourage you that there is such a great community of moms here who would love to offer whatever experience they can to help keep you going. And I hope you know that even the most difficult times do pass.

Hugs to you, and prayers coming your way!
AMDG,
Sarah

[enbateau]

Any update?

Some of us are in the same boat with those young ones and would love to provide some useful ideas.