I have fought this tooth and nail since the Redesign news first came out. I have purchased all four year plans and Y2 twice. Even with the very generous 50% gift, it's yet another expense that is hard to justify.

I'm having a hard time adding extras (lapbooks, etc) and joining co-ops because I've been a longtime TOG user.

How much extra will adding the new books cost me? Also, will the Classic books go with Redesign?

Pam

Pam,

I'm afraid the books are pretty different, and in Years 2-4 there is a serious amount of reorganization as well. For individual users, this is not a problem because if you buy the books for one version, they work just as well with children who grow up to use them four years later. It is true that you have trouble adding extras to the older model; unfortunately, this is true of most products that upgrade their "models"--kind of a fact of the world in which we live.

I would say that for grammar levels you could EASILY substitute history books freely. Because of the demands of our market, we have shifted to being more resource specific in D/R levels with Redesigned so that kids and moms could be sure the answers to the SAP questions will be in their resources. It limits flexibility, but we do gain ease of use which is, after all, what we are offering busy moms. (Our "Alternates" reading assignment charts still list many older favorites that may be currently OOP from Classic lists; you can work from these if you substitute in these older books.) As has always been the case, literature is hard to substitute at all.

I think what you'll need to decide is whether the group participation is worth the upgrade investment.

Pam,
I recently bought books for the upcoming year. We are using redesigned year 3. We spent a little under $175 for the books for unit 1. I purchased 7 books for uppper grammar and 15 books for dialectic (some of those overlap with UG). I will be substituting very few books, just because I haven't had good results with our library. I purchased some from TOG and some used here and there. TOG has very competitive prices and the books come nice and new and all in one box! One thing that helped me decide what levels it would be worth it to buy alot for was to make a chart. I listed the four years of TOG across the top and the four levels down the side. Then I put a tally mark for each time one of our kids would go through that year on that level. It helped me see that in the long run, some levels of some years we will pass through only once and others we will pass through multiple times. It helped me decide if the convience of having the exact book was worth the cost or if I was willing to chance a substitution.If you go to the bookshelf and do a power search for the levels you will be using, you can see the unit one books to see how they compare to the ones for classic. If you click on each book there is a description/summary and if that book is easliy substituted or not.
Hope this helps a little.
Christie

Thank you, Marcia for your consideration of my predicament.

Christie, thank you for helping me put things into perspective. I have at least one child in each level. The last time we went through Y1, I didn't have an R.

Kudos to whomever invented the Power Search!!