Heart of Dakota  4.7/5 (5)

Comment: we started HOD last year and it worked great for our kids. We liked the notebooking pages and they make a very nice book at the end of the year. We have used Beyond Little Hearts For His Glory and also Creation through Christ. This year we are going on to Resurrection To Reformation and are looking forward to the fun art projects and the nice notebooking pages. We have liked most of books and look forward to all the good books in this years curriculum. Heart Of Dakota might be more expensive than some of the curriculums but it is well worth it you get so many good reads in one package. It is also well laid out and easy to use. Another good thing about this curriculum is that you can use it for more than one student and also more than one grade. Overall it is a pretty nice curriculum.

Comment: We love Heart of Dakota! This is our first year and we are almost finished with Bigger Hearts for His Glory. We love how Bible and History tie together! We also love that there are no workbooks involved, instead the children create notebooking pages for history and science. My 9 year old son has discovered a love for biographies because of Heart of Dakota. We are excited to use Heart of Dakota next year!

Comment: I used HOD several times: Little Hearts, Bigger, Preparing and Resurrection To Reformation. It has worked well for us during times in life when I need everything open and go. There is almost no preparation.

What I liked: No teacher preparation and uses real books. The books they select are awesome! The upper levels have beautiful notebook pages.
What I don't like: Expensive, sometimes it felt like too much work for the student in the higher levels. (especially if they aren't a strong reader).

Comment: We used Little Hands to Heaven. It was developmentally perfect for my 3 year old. It had several short bible based activities each day (each day took less than 30 mins). It included math, pre-reading, pre-writing, music, art, bible stories and pretend play activities. My child knew all the letters and sounds when we finished with this program and was able to identify beginning sounds of words. The author recommended doing this program twice which we did not do. He mastered the skills in this program so we switched to a different program at age 4 that focused more on fine motor skills.
Only downside to this program was that you have to make a few copies each week.

Comment: We have tried HOD 4 different times. LHTH my 4 yr old oldest DD thought was silly. If it had been her first year of "school" it might have been fine, but it was very easy for her as well. Did parts of Preparing, enjoyed what we did use. Tried LHFHG with my middle child at 5 yrs old and she resisted all the workbooks and things to do after her gentle learning that we had done for K. Biggest attempt was with oldest doing Res2Ref as a 6th grader. Enjoyed it but caught her coping narrations from TM and she did not like the Waring history CD. Just felt it was not worth the expense and we were not doing the together things together as intended like I wanted to enjoy with her. Still may use parts of WG in the future.