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Maureen

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About Maureen

  • Birthday 08/23/1971

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    Northern California
  1. My three girls took all four of the high school Latin classes. We liked them, but obviously they didn't have a speaking component. I think learning a foreign langauge is hard without a native speaker to help with pronounciation. I think foreign language study is the hardest subject for homeschoolers unless one of the parents is fluent. If your goal is exposure, it might be fine. If your child shows real interest, you may want to switch to community college to continue on.
  2. FriedClams - The BYU Provo website does not care about the age of the student. You can enroll in any of the classes at any time during the year and just have one calendar year to complete it. Some college classes do have pre-reqs. The registration process is minimal. My girls have taken over a dozen of the the high school courses over the years. This year they are all taking Freshman English - Writing 150, Biology 100, and American Heritage. My mathy 14 year old is taking Math 111- Trigonometry, and my two math phobic daughters are taking Philosophy 205 - Logic. They decided that the first three classes were more appealing than taking a high school AP class and then the AP exam to get credit. The Trig class is probably the hardest just because higher math can be hard to learn on your own. She is very good at math, but most of the BYU online math classes have been lacking in really good instructional material. The high school Geometry online was maybe the exception. It was pretty well written. Biology 100 has three midterms and a final. The class is bascially divided into quarters - the final is not cumulative. The exams are tough and detailed though. The 4 tests are the entire grade. American Heritage is a great class. For each chapter they have to find some article, op-ed, or political news story that relates to the chapter's main theme and write a short paper on it. It has really helped them think about how our country has changed since the Founding. Two midterms and a comprehensive final. English is definitely the easiest class, but then two of my three like to write, and it is just writing - no literature. Philosophy 205 is hard but really good. These two daughters don't like numbers, but the logicc class has really made them work hard and think crritically without the computations. One final. These 4 classes have kept them busy with just a little time for literature and art. I wanted to push them this year (junior year) and show them how much they needed to step up their game to succeed in college and these classe have definitely done that. All three plan to go to BYU (provo) or BYU-I so this is just getting some of the GE classes out of the way so that their first year can be a lighter load while they're figuring out college life. None of them have taken a BYU-I course yet because the fall start date didn't work for us and my youngest is just 14. I plan to have the older two take at least one next year to have the experience of hard deadlines. The initial application is online, but whenever I have called them with questions, they have been very helpful. HTH
  3. FYI - BYU (provo) allows you to take uni level courses at any age and you have one year to complete. BYU-I requires the student to be 16 and a junior before taking any of the classes. They are also tracked with one of BYU-I's trimesters and have to be done on that time schedule. I'm pretty sure you can only take 2 classes as well. My 3 girls are taking 4 BYU (provo) college courses this year. Exams for college courses must be proctored at a college testing center or an LDS institute (near many college campuses). The college courses often have midterms as well as finals so this affects the speed of the course and adds some cost if taking at college testing centers. I use my charter/cover school funds to help pay for these courses. The only hiccup is that I have to pay upfront and the charter will reimburse when the course is complete.
  4. My girls have only done the paper version. I have worked through most of the material alongside them. I used the curriculum so I didn't have to come up with my own for those subjects. I have explained a few concepts they found difficult and so I have essentially been the teacher. The exams are proctored though. so obviously the girls are on their own for those, but I have used the classes to help them prepare for finals and figure out how to guess what will be on the exams and learn how to study for them. I do have a friend who used the teacher-led Spanish I this year. There was a language chat room to practice and then they had regular sessions with the teacher to practice conversation. The teacher-led option is fairly new so it wasn't even an option for most of the classes we've taken and it is quite a bit more expensive. The girls did the science and language classes together, so it wasn't that big a deal for me to keep up with them since I was working with 3 of my kids together. Next year we are actually venturing into two university level courses - American Heritage and Freshman English. My youngest is deciding between high school BYU trig or the university level version as well.
  5. My girls have taken about a dozen BYU high school courses. As far as science goes, they have taken the regular biology and chemistry courses as well as Astronomy and Meteorology. The biology and chem classes were great. Astronomy and Meteorology were fine but easy. Classes do vary in quality. The biology, chemistry, and geometry classes were the best of all of the ones we've tried. I've been disappointed with some of the math courses and I haven't finished any of the English courses because I don't think they are rigorous enough. They've done all four semesters of Latin which were good. You can sign up for the class and have 72 hours to look over the material and could withdraw in that time for a full refund I believe. HTH
  6. Muttichen - Thank you for the great ideas! I will have to put them to use in our family. Got any more??
  7. Are you asking about high school English through BYU Independent Study? I have looked at the 9, 10, and 11 grade first semester courses with them. Each semester requires one novel which is spread over the semester. Each lesson has some vocabulary and a couple of short stories or poems. There is some sort of writing assignment for each lesson, but they are turned in as groups of around 5 lessons at a time. You can work at your own pace. The graded writing assignments will take a bit of time to get graded by the instructor, but the lesson tests are done online and graded immediately. The final exam has to be proctored and takes several days to set up. I didn't have any of my kids take the courses for credit because I require much more reading than is in these classes, but that might be just the thing for credit recovery. HTH
  8. This happened here at the local high school. I tutored a friend's son in Geometry this past year and he never had a textbook until March!!! It was really frustrating because the teacher just expected the kids to take notes from the overhead and then do problems she photocopied for them. This was a smart kid who could totally learn the material but didn't have a textbook to look anything up. Ridiculous! And this is a top ranked high school.
  9. My three daughters are going through Lively Art of Writing now and I am very happy with it. I think you could work through it in one semester. There is a link to a pdf workbook somewhere on this board where another homeschool mom has graciously transferred all of the writing exercises from the book. We have done some exercises and added in writing on topics of their choice to practice the chapter theme. I think it has really improved their writing in a short period of time and you can't beat the price of the book! I was not really a fan of Writing with the Best that we tried in an earlier year and wound up chucking it. HTH
  10. AMJ If you PM me your email address I will try to send you a list of everything I had my girls read and watch over those two years. Realize that was for 7th/8th grades. I haven't made a definitive list for high school yet since I'm planning medieval for next year (10th).
  11. We are continuing the 4 year cycle through the high school years (finishing Ancients this year). In 7th and 8th grade we covered 1600-present and I would say that just over half of the books read and movies watched focused on the US. I taught everything in a chronological way throughout, so we shifted from the American Revolution to the French revolution for instance. I think this worked well as those two revolutions are good to compare/contrast. We plan to do it again in 11th/12th grade. I'll simply assign more sophisticated literature and require more analysis on how events in one area of the world affect others. This way of studying history has been so much better IMHO than taking one area of the world and studying it all the way through because we've been able to draw so many cause/effect relationships. I also personally believe kids need more than just one year of world history in high school, so the 4 year plan gives time to go much more in depth. For the high school years, I'm also requiring more study on the governmental and economic structures of the various civilizations studied as a lead up to studying US government later. I still haven't decided exactly how I'll structure the class when I get there, but we've spent quite a bit of time this year studying Greece and Rome which should help when we talk about the influences on the Founding Fathers.
  12. All three of my daughters have completed both semesters. We were very happy with it. Straight forward class. Covered everything I think should be covered in Geometry. They were allowed to take one page of hand written formulas, theorems, etc. into the final exams. The first semester focused a lot on proofs, parallel lines, and transversals. The second semester focused more on circles, geometric solids, and coordinate geometry.
  13. I just wanted to add that we are currently going through the Vandiver lectures on Greek Tragedy and have just watched a two part stage production of Agamemnon on Youtube. The cast was all male and everyone wore masks so it was a great way to show how tragedy would have actually been staged in Ancient Greece. Today we finished watching an 11 part stage production of Antigone on Youtube. It was excellent. It used female actors for the female roles and no one was masked (which actually made it easier to understand what they were saying!) I particularly liked the way it staged the chorus members. I'm trying to let my girls SEE Greek Tragedy rather than just read it. We have to read it translation anyway and it was meant to be seen and experienced just like Shakespeare.
  14. I second the Vandiver lectures. They are fabulous! My girls and I have listened to them all. We are currently finishing up with Greek Tragedy and Herodotus. We have learned so much. We just watched a stage production of Agamemnon that we found on Youtube today since we just listened to the lecture on Agamemnon. My girls are very familiar with the material from the Iliad and her lectures on Greek Mythology. I also had them read the material about Agamemnon from shmoop.com before they watched the video. I had shmoop's plot points printed out to help us follow along as we watched the play. Greek tragedy was meant to be watched just like Shakespeare. It's not the same simply reading it. We've also watched some videos we've found on Netflix of Jason and the Argonauts, the Odyssey, etc., which we watch after we've read and then listened to her lectures so we can judge how faithful the movies are. Medea from Netflix is sitting by our DVD player right now waiting to be watched! Hope you enjoy Ancient Greece as much as we have.
  15. GThomas - In response to your question #4 about re-enrolling in a PS later in high school I can tell you what my experience has been. My son has a rather muddy HS transcript so far. He just re-enrolled in PS for the 2nd semester of his junior year. Half of his 9th grade year was homeschooled through an umbrella school here in the Bay Area and the PS had no problem counting those grades as college prep. He also had some classes through BYU's Independent Study program which the PS accepted without question. Last semester, however, I did a few classes with him at home and I'm no longer with an umbrella school and instead filed as my own Private school in the fall. The high school accepted my credits and grades but said they would not list the classes as college prep (a-g) because I was not an accredited school in their eyes. I'm fine with this since my son is not planning to attend college in CA but this might be a problem for your child. I'm not sure how much SAT/ACT scores help admissions officers overlook homeschool grades in CA. Good luck!
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