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Five In A Row (FIAR) For Older Kids!! There's a general misconception out in the homeschool world that Five In A Row (FIAR) is just a kindergarten curriculum.  That's pretty sad to me because I know from experience that it can make a wonderful multi-age (multi-grade) experience....it just takes some tweeking.  One room schoolhouses did this type of thing all the time and since you are probably homeschooling more than one child, you can glean from the one room schoolhouse experience.

One of the struggles with homeschooling is having a curriculum for everyone.  Now there are people who can keep things together for a while with everyone in different levels but as someone who has homeschooled a long time I can assure you at some point you will burn out running from one kid to another.  Yes, you will have to keep the 3R's at each individual level but you can learn the other things together just at different levels.   You can also have the older students help with the younger students and I can tell you  that something amazing happens when children teach a younger sibling.  Older siblings can "teach" in a way that younger students really understand!  Don't underestimate what a 7 yo can do! ;)

If you would like to see how that might work in action just read the book Understood Betsy, and you will get great insight into how multi-level teaching aka one-room schoolhouses worked. Now how do you actually use FIAR for older kids?  Here's some great wisdom from Melissa Crabtree, at Five In A Row, who wrote about this very topic:

Can I use Five in a Row with my Older Child?

My child is 9 or 10 or… can I use Five in a Row with him? This is a question I see almost every week on one of our social media pages. The short answer is: YES! Here’s the long answer: One of the beautiful things about Five in a Row is its flexibility. It can easily be adapted to fit many ages of children, many groups of siblings, and even more ability levels.  If you have children whose ages are spread over several years, you can still keep them together in order to simplify your schooling.  Here are a few tips to doing it and still have it be “enough:”
Many families need to simplify and these are some tips to assist that mama! There will be a point where your child will be ready to move on to Beyond Five in a Row, and you will know when you’ve reached that point. We certainly wouldn’t discourage you from moving on from Five in a Row when your child is truly ready, because Beyond is full of delightful chapter books you won’t want to miss! The Beyond books are perfect read-alouds for the entire family, and I bet you’ll find that even when your student is well into Beyond, you’ll find him listening in to the Five in a Row titles! We find that even when we try really hard to separate the levels, they end up overlapping naturally in every day life!

If you're like me and like to listen to some encouragement, I'd recommend Steve Lambert's (the owner of FIAR) I Can't Teach All The Grades at Once or better yet....just get the whole series for $20!

And Here's a Page from my old FIAR vol. 3 that explains really well how to do it with an older child. If you're curious how we tweek it just go to the FIAR tab at the top and most of the books have "beefing it up" options.
 Posted by Sprocket & Bliss at 7:31 AM Labels: curriculum planning, FIAR, homeschool planning, Unit Study

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