We know some people who use SOS, but I don't know much about it.  I got a message from Alpha Omega and found that up to 5 students can us one copy of SOS at one time and it can be handed down to younger students so you would not have to rebuy it.  I love that, but an wondering if children should be on the computer that much and I would think it would tie you down to staying at home all the time and having to have multiple computers.  Ideas anyone?  They start at 3rd grade, so we have a year to wait anyway, but was just hoping for some imput.

We have used SOS off and on for 5 years with our boys and as long as you do not do all the subjects on SOS it should be OK.  We did all the subjects the first year with our son and he liked it for a month then he got bored and he needed more interaction with me...I did too with him. :)

We then only used Bible and then Consumer Math with our older son. And he enjoyed them. The Bible one is pretty good. If he had been younger we would have done language arts with SOS.

Hope this helps. Oh by the way when he (doing 6th grade math) had to figure out answers to math questions on paper and then type it into the computer it was like double work so he hated it. So you may run into that if you do math with SOS.

Blessings,

Rachel

Hi Christa,

I would encourage you to check out:  www.Robinsoncurriculum.com ... we used A Beka, SOS, Bob Jones etc.,  My children are now "freed up" to CLEP out of school and have their degrees before they are 18.  Homeschooling is wonderful, in that the children do not have to "do school" the conventional way. My kids did not care for SOS because of "multiple choice" spoon feeding questions.  Also, check out:   www.oldfashionededucation.com

My two cents ... but remember, your children belong to Christ (you know that already) and He will give you the wisdom, with the peace that surpasses all understanding, to know what is best for your family!

I have been homeschooling for nearly 10 years.  I tried SOS for the first time with two of my kids this school year - 6th and 4th Language Arts.  My kids had trouble with completing some of the activities, just because of the format of the presentation.  Often, they would have to move the cursor up and down with arrow keys, you could not see all the answers at once if it was a matching question because of the screen size, and if you make any sort of typo at all, the whole answer is wrong.  They found it frustrating.  It seemed to be a lot of work on the parent side of things too, just trying to keep up with the work load.  If you have something happen in the family and you don't get to the computer that day, the child feels like they are getting under a mountain of work because the incomplete assignments begin piling up.  You can "unassign" a lesson if you feel the child already knows the information, it is similar to something assigned in another subject area, or for whatever reason, but that too was not the easiest task. 

I do like that multiple kids can use the same program at the same time, or in different years.  That's fantastic.  It does the grading too. 

All that to say this... this method might work well for other subjects or upper grades.  Our family wasn't too crazy about it, and we didn't use it more than about 6 weeks.