Several people have asked me to elaborate, so I'll post my little review here.
I have a 9yo son who, like most boys his age, loves doing anything the computer. I was definitely tired of struggling through "school at home" the last few years and I wanted to do something new. Switched On Schoolhouse sounded ideal. We got the 3rd grade SOS off of eBay for about $150, brand new.
Initially I wasn't sure what level PJ should go into. Switched-On Schoolhouse (SOS) does have a placement test, and he tested around the 7th grade level in language arts and 4th for math. I knew that this wasn't right. His reading level is indeed far above a 3rd grade level, but I also knew he wasn't on a 7th grade level of grammar, reading comprehension or writing, so I was immediately a little suspect. The problem is that the placement test is multiple choice, and my son has very good deductive reasoning skills, and was able to get many of the questions right just by process of elimination.
I had heard (incorrectly, in hindsight) that SOS was "very rigorous" and I was concerned if he had "learned enough" to go into 4th grade. PJ was technically entering-3rd-grade-age, but when I took him out of kindergarten, he was testing at "late first grade level" and I had just had him skip kindergarten, so he was, for several years, "a year ahead." However, I had a severe respiratory infection for about 1/3 of PJ's third grade and I was afraid that he had "missed" too much, so I decided to get 3rd grade SOS because it was better for him to have a very firm grasp of the fundamentals than it would be to have him struggling through things he was barely ready for. This was only the first of many regrets I was to have with this program.
PROBLEMS WITH THE GENERAL CURRICULUM:
It didn't take long for me to realize that the 3rd grade level material, generally speaking, is that which you commonly see covered in 2nd and 3rd grade materials - not 3rd and 4th grade. He could have handled the 4th grade level just fine, but despite their placement tests, there is really just no way to tell this before you buy. So this is my first gripe against SOS - since it is designed to be used in the homeschool as well as the traditional Christian private school, it is geared to the lowest common denominator.
It is also very obviously not an exclusively homeschool program. In the 3rd grade section, there are many numerous examples, word problems, and reading comprehension passages that reference traditional school, recess, and school days. If your child has never been to school or barely remembers it the way mine does, this is very frustrating. The program normatizes the institutional school experience - surprising, given its popularity among homeschoolers; frustrating for a homeschool parent, especially one whose child longs to experience "real school." (Mine doesn't, but I know others who do.) Basically, if you do Switched-on Schoolhouse, you are expected to "do school at home." This could be a boon to parents who expect to transition their child into a regular classroom at some point, but since I intend to homeschool as long as God gives me breath, this is a non-issue for us.
The total lack of parental involvement except as an aid to the occasional question was very alienating for me. The reality is that Switched-On Schoolhouse does not need you. You, as a parent, are more or less extraneous the educational process. You can take the time to add in your own lessons - away from the computer - and you can customize the process however you like, taking out units, rearranging their order, etc., but it is a losing battle. At the end of the day, when your child sits down to do Switched-On Schoolhouse, you really don't need to be there unless your child has a question about part of the text.
Thus as the year progressed, I felt more and more like a bystander in my own child's education - not unlike how I felt when he was in school. It was very boring for me, because like many 8-year-old boys, my son was not completely ready to work independently, still needing a great deal of redirection and "Okay, on to the next question now," which, trust me, after a week or two of doing this for hours daily, gets very old and boring very fast. But I didn't choose the subject matter, I didn't choose the presentation, I had little or no part of teaching my child this year in the subjects in which he did SOS. More and more, his education was becoming an "off to the computer with you!" process and I hated that. This, more than any other reason, is why we will not be using SOS for anything other than Math and Bible Studies again. Now I'm going to go through why I found the specific subjects problematic.
Language Arts
The first and most immediately obvious problem with SOS Language Arts for 3rd grade is that the spelling is far below grade level. In many of the early lists for 3rd grade, there were 3-letter words. I was assured that they would get progressively harder, and they did - now, at the end of the year, they are starting to get closer to 3rd grade level. My son never scored below a 100 on any spelling test and he has never studied for them. I do not think this is a good thing.
Secondly, the writing component is very thin. My son has only been asked to do 3 or 4 book reports all year. I can only recall two or three brief, paper-thin creative writing assignments - something for which most children discover a love at this age. Of course, you do have to supplement penmanship - they are upfront about that. They recommend Horizons Penmanship, but we did A Reason For Handwriting Cursive (C) at first, and now we just do copywork of hymns, poetry and Scripture. There is very little coaching on constructing a well-thought-out book report or essay - the process by which they present it is almost fill-in-the-blank ("First, state the title. Then state the author. Then state what the title says about the story. Then state where it is set." etc.) There is a single assignment on correspondence the entire year, at the end, and no other instruction on any other kinds of writing. My son has had to write a single poem - a haiku - all year long.
As a great lover of poetry, this is the cause of great consternation for me. There is next to no poetry study. My son has only had one assignment all year on poetry, the haiku essay - for which we had to check out a book from the library. I don't mind this at all, but certainly replacing the meaningless "reading comprehension" passages with meaningful poetry or based them on required reading or easily found children's literature wouldn't have hurt anyone. An anthology of children's poetry is among the recommended reading list for third grade, but it never ties in to the curriculum and I'm sure most parents aren't sure what, exactly, they're supposed to DO with that anthology.
The book list makes an attempt to diversify, in the sense that it recommends biographies as well as speculative fiction and non-fiction, but again, it is bare bones and I don't think it's enough reading for any child, especially if he is reading the recommended minimum 20 to 45 minutes a day. I also am of the mind that PJ should read literature from many cultures and points of view, and needless to say, SOS does not provide that. It doesn't even pretend to be multicultural in any way, shape or form, except for a few "reading comprehension" passages about an English-speaking child enlightening a Spanish-speaking child about Jesus. This despite the fact that the Spanish-speaking child's family was Christian in the passages.
I believe children should read traditional "classic books" like the handful of books on the SOS list, but like Charlotte Mason, I believe that as new books are published or resources are newly discovered, there is nothing revisionist about including it in your quest to have your child intellectually feed off of "living books." Living books can be old or new, and can come from any culture. Of course this takes a great deal of discernment on behalf of the parent, and SOS is counting on a parent who doesn't want to exercise a great deal of discernment when it comes to their child's education.
Next year, I plan to use Sonlight's reading recommendations, both for read-aloud and independent reading, along with some of K12.com's 4th and 5th grade recommendations, which tend to be heavy on the high-quality and multicultural. For grammar, spelling and writing, I plan to use Rod and Staff Grade 4 and 5, with an eye toward Charlotte Mason's emphasis on copywork and dictation, plus Shakespeare and poet studies. Much, much more rigorous than SOS, and probably a lot more interesting to PJ too.
History and Geography
This is the subject that we threw out earliest on. It is a total misnomer to call this a history and geography course. There is very little history and the brief, disconnected forays into geography were almost extraneous to the lessons. What it is, is a course about different types of communities - farming (1/3 of the course is about different types of farms), mining, fishing and manufacturing. After the eighth week of learning about the endless minutiae of processes on soybean farms, cotton farms, lettuce farms, etc. etc. etc., my inner-city kid was ready to stage a revolt. I have no problem to "my communities" or "my community helpers" approaches to very early childhood social studies, but I feel that a 3rd grader has long been ready to learn about real, actual history.
So the subject matter was way below a 3rd grade level, but written so dryly and with so much attention to pointless technicalities (do all 3rd graders really need to know the 2397523 types of machinery used on cotton farms?) that its presentation was almost too sophisticated. It was, in short, totally inaccessible and irrelevant for my child. We ditched it after the first quarter for Story of the World, Vol 3, both the text and activity book, and we've been having a ball learning about world history and geography ever since. SOS History and Geography is not a history and geography course - it is a generalized social studies course. Grade 4 is more of the same. A child strictly on the SOS curriculum doesn't get to actual world history until the SEVENTH GRADE! On the SOS Yahoo! group, "my child hated Gr4/Gr3/Gr5 history" is a common complaint. I would not recommend this SOS subject to ANYONE. It is not a good history or geography curriculum, period.
Math
My son has difficulty writing, so he actually enjoys doing math on the computer. Unfortunately, the SOS approach was, once again, way below 3rd grade level. We spent the first three months doing nothing but addition and subtraction of multi-digit numbers - a 1st and 2nd grade skill. We are just now getting to multiplication and division.
There is a TON of review. This is a pro and a con. Some children need that much review but I question if the SOS approach is helpful for all but a small number of students. They are often just a batch of the same kinds of problems over and over and over. Some of the review lessons have more than 40 of the same kinds of problems!!! I feel this is excessive. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - if your child has done 400+ addition problems and is still not getting multi-digit addition, the answer is not to do 400 more, but to try a different approach.
There is no guidance about how the child should study for tests or quizzes whatsoever, except, presumably, more review. The lesson itself is presumed to be the studying and the quizzes are just a more high-pressure version of the lessons; the only real difference between the quizzes and the lessons is that there's no explanatory text and you're only allowed to answer once. They are otherwise indistinguishable. My son doesn't like a lot of review and finds it tedious, so I have had to sharply edit every single math lesson, starting from the 3rd unit on out, and just omit a lot of the review units. I wish I had done this earlier; we'd be done with 3rd grade math by now.
That said, my son does enjoy doing math on the computer and he HAS learned basic math facts quite thoroughly. But because so much of it was so basic, he is now behind. We have basically done 3rd grade math twice, which was unnecessary. I plan to do a "4th grade summer math skills" briefly over the summer and then start a heavily modified 5th grade Math SOS in the fall. (In another earmark of poor continuity planning that SOS generally suffers from, 4th grade SOS math doesn't cover any subjects that 3rd and 5th grade don't cover - so 4th grade is basically a year of repetition.)
Science
SOS's approach to science is a lot like the traditional classroom - it introduces the child to many disciplines and subjects all in one year, all unrelated to each other, over and over, year after year, in the hopes that each year its presentation is more "in depth." I don't think this is an intuitive or logical way to learn science and we have had to do a LOT of supplementing: reading from children's science encyclopedias, going to the museum, using Klutz books, etc. There is no mention of the scientific process anywhere. Next year, I plan to do a lot of hands-on science, nature studies and things like that. I plan to do one semester of chemistry using The Well Trained Mind's recommendation, Adventures in Atoms and Molecules (we did a little this year - good times!) and one semester of physics using Physics Experiments for Children, as well as nature studies, nature walks, gardening and nature journaling. Needless to say, SOS never brings up the suggestion that the child should actually leave the computer and experience science in a hands-on way. Many of the "experiments" can be done right at the computer. Embarrassing.
Many people choose SOS because it is a Christian curriculum, but it is only a Christian curriculm for science in the most cursory ways imaginable. It's almost like mention of God is shoehorned into the content. (Example, studying the human ear may say something like "God gave us ears to hear his word!" Gee, ya think? LOL) There is no mention of creation or dinosaurs or any other subject that typically grab the average 3rd grader's imagination. It is just honestly a very sad attempt at teaching Science.
Bible Studies
For me, this was the most problematic SOS subject - and for PJ, it was the most enjoyable. I think the program does a good job of presenting the content in a child-friendly, engaging way, and PJ has learned a lot not just about the Bible, but about theology and how to do theological research, as well as how to reference the Bible in various ways. However, there was relentless quizzing and testing and it treated Bible Studies like just another academic subject. This made me very uncomfortable. Eventually I took a recommendation of someone on the SOS Yahoo! list and took out all the quizzes and tests, and we simply did the lessons as a family devotional together. The drawback is that you will go through about 2 grade levels per year if you do it daily and will need to buy the second grade level individually, and eventually you will not be able to purchase the entire package for one grade. One other disadvantage - the third grade level has no system of scripture memorization whatsoever. You will have to do this on your own. It is not required by the program.
Conclusion
I feel like we wasted a lot of valuable time this year with SOS. It isn't at all what I would like for our home or homeschool; that it is a Christian curriculum that so thoroughly removes the parent from the educational process and instills such an institutional school mentality in homeschooled students is troubling; that it is a Christian curriculum that treats Bible studies and devotionals as just another generic academic subject is even more so.
There are some families that would find its approach advantageous. The parent who requires a child to work independently for whatever reason - illness in the family, a new baby, a sibling who requires a great deal more attention with learning struggles, the need to work from home simultaneously as the child, etc. - would find SOS very helpful. Likewise, I have known families who used it for high school, because it does keep very good records. Similarly, a parent who requires excellent and exact records of their school day for legal reasons would find this helpful. The software even times your child and prints out how long he or she worked on any given lesson, and you can print out daily, weekly, monthly and yearly reports of activity. Instant portfolio. For high school and junior high school, I understand there are a great many electives.
I don't think Switched-On Schoolhouse is a bad program and I do believe it has some advantages. My own son has benefitted from working on the computer for various subjects. It just was not at all in line with my goals for my home or homeschool, and not in line with the standards I have set through Charlotte Mason's ideals. I would caution Christian parents to purchase and use it with a great deal of discernment and supplementation. As a backbone to an education it isn't bad (except for the History/Geography, which I think really is bad), but it isn't self-contained as it purports to be, and parents should know that going in. Next year, we will ONLY be using Bible Studies and Math from Switched on Schoolhouse. Both require a lot of customization, but they were the only subjects I did not find to be vastly subpar to other approaches. We're sticking with Story of the World, and investigating WinterPromise as a possible curriculum as well. Literature based and less structured - as a reaction against SOS.
I hope this account of our experience with this curriculum can be of use to someone. I welcome feedback and responses! |
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- With the corresponding activity guides. We started SOTW3 in the middle of the school year last year and we didn't get through the whole thing, so we're starting in the middle of Vol 3 this year and continuing on with Vol 4 after we're done. As I have plotted it, taking our time and really exploring into each topic, we'll be a little more than halfway done with SOTW4 by the end of the school year next year. That's fine. We'll just keep reading it over the summer as fun summer reading :) The munchkin looooves geography (there goes that spatial intelligence thing again!) so I'm going to try to emphasize that, as well as let him make his own pages for his history notebook instead of coloring the pages. I really don't want to leave Vol 4 until next year because I want to do a totally different program for 5th grade, and PJ is big on "follow through" and will want to finish both volumes if possible, so we're going to try for that.
- The easy methodology, short lessons, simple copywork based on Bible verses and emphasis on ministry with the "finished products" are very Charlotte Mason in approach. PJ needs tons and tons of help in handwriting, and we didn't get far in our cursive studies last year. The mechanics of handwriting still elude PJ, who is severely dysgraphic, and I think this is a disservice to him since his head is so full of ideas for great stories and games, so I'm going to try the slow-and-steady gentle approach to writing, combined with a typing program, and that'll hopefully make it all click for him. 
- To be honest, this is the one I'm iffiest about. I have the feeling I may ditch it early on. My son is a very good speller and has very good grammar for a 9-year-old and doesn't need all the extra help in that, but he really enjoys grammar (he says that it and geography are his favorite subjects) and may actually have fun with sentence diagramming. Also, they emphasis a very gentle introduction into independent creative writing, and have many hands-on activities suggested. The lessons are sometimes overwhelming if done as instructed, but they can be adapted to be done orally or shortened in every case. But I have the feeling with Animals and their World and A Reason For Handwriting and everything else, he may already be getting plenty of writing, so if it seems like our schedule isn't accommodating this, we'll ditch it. It's not entirely necessary.
and 
- again, the emphasis is on short lessons with many activities, manipulatives and games. PJ enjoys working with flash cards. We used this program a couple of years ago and we really liked it. Since the entire tables of content are available online for both books, I have determined that I will be able to get through Grade 4 and half of Grade 5 this year, with the other half of Grade 5 and the entirety of Grade 6 for the following year. This series unfortunately only goes up to Grade 6, but after that, we will probably NOT be learning Spanish. It's our native language and I just want him to have a basic grasp of its grammatical and spelling rules. In his 6th grade, we'll probably do a third language, such as French or Japanese. He's very keen to learn Japanese, due to his japanime obsession. I have promised him that if he diligently studies Japanese, we will spend at least 2 weeks in Japan over the summer the subsequent year. Ooooh. :)