When my husband and I decided to homeschool our two girls, 1 1/2 years ago, everyone freaked out. Family o both sides shared numerous horror stories of kids that they knew who were homeschooled and turned out unable to cope with the world, ending up in jail, etc. Which I responded right back with all the peoploe I knew from public school just like that, okay so I didn't win any brownie points that day!
Anyway, once they realized that nothing they could say would change our minds, they begrudgingly accepted it. What else could they really do?
Then my Mother-in-law found the HOP Deluxe version on sale on E-Bay and bought it for us. And both my girls love it! They are both reading at a higher level than most of their friends that go to public school. They are reading all the time. So, yes, HOP worked for us! It might not work for everyone, we also don't do HOP everyday. I try to give variety and mix it up some so it's not the same things over and over again. We read everyday, it just doesn't have to be HOP.
HOP also helped tremendously with our daughters speech problems. Both had a little bit of a speech problem that our medical insurance would not cover and there was no way we could afford it out of pocket. I know that we could have gone to the school district and made them help us with speech, but I didn't really want to resort to that. Anyway, HOP helped them really learn the proper way to pronounce each letter and now you would never be able to tell that either one had a small speech delay!
Also, both sides of the family have come around to us home schooling and are quite proud of how well our girls are doing!