My feeling is that if the TSA wants to prevent child trafficking, then they should spell that it out in the ID requirements in their website. I'm fine with following the rules as long as I know what they are. Don't tell me that I don't need to bring anything for my kids and then stare down a shy 4-year-old because she won't say her name. I could do without the accusatory tone of the agent because traveling with kids is stressful enough. But US immigration and TSA are great at making everyone feel like a criminal.

Reading the threads on cooperating with CPS and other authorities made me question the interaction I just had with the TSA. My children (4 and 13) and I were flying domesticallt, so all I brought was my ID and none for the children because it's not required. At the check point when I handed the agent the boarding passes and my ID, she tried to get my younger child to verify her name and state her age. Of course she didn't answer, because she rarely speaks to any non-family adult. The agent said, "I'll give you a pass this time" in a threatening tone. Then she questioned my teenager instead, asking his name, age, how I am related to him, who the little girl was. It was obviously some kind of child trafficking prevention tactic that made me feel a bit icky. My kids look like me but what about families with non-bio children? Or non-verbal older children? Or even my dark-haired husband traveling with our blonde daughter? I travel frequently with my children, usually internationally, and I have never encountered this line of questioning before, probably because I have always presented their passports in those situations. I told my daughter that in the return flight, she needs to tell the agent her name and age. However, after reading those other threads, I am feeling like I should take a stand. But then again, I do want to make the flight back home!

When I went to early voting, I had to walk a gauntlet of people trying to shake my hands or hand me leaflets. They have to stay a certain distance from the polling place, but they crowded the sidewalk leading from the parking lot to the door. Plus all those people are taking up space in the parking lot. When I was leaving, all the signs along the road made it really difficult to see to turn out of the lot.

This is an area of great interest to me because I have learned 4 languages in my life and am raising bilingual children. I have not seen any research that indicates that later is better, though the research gives a wide definition of "early" as before the age of 12-13. All I can offer you is my own experience that later can work out fine and early might be wasted. My first language was German. Then, I lived in France from age 3-6. At the end of that time, I spoke French well enough to get through preschool and better than my parents. However, after we returned to Germany, no effort was made to maintain my French, so I lost it. At the age of 11, we moved to the US and I have lived here since. I had begun learning English in German at about age 9. English is by far the language in which I function best across all domains of language skills. There was no effort made to maintain my German until I was an adult, except that parents continued to speak to me in German and there were German books around. I took Spanish in school for 5 years as a teen. I can still manage a simple conversation in Spanish even though my last class was 20 years ago. I do use it occasionally and have done various things retain my skills in recent years. Based on my experience, I think that it is possible to learn a language proficiently even if it wasn't learned until later childhood. I think being literate in a language is critical to being able to retain it over longer periods of time when you don't use the language. Learning a language only as a pre-literate child may prep the brain to be able to better absorb languages later. Of course, I learned French and English through immersion, so I don't know how much the observations would translate to someone learning through instruction only.

We do graph paper and fold the paper in half longways, so that he writes the problems in two columns. Otherwise, he was squeezing many problems next to each other. He also circles/boxes the answers.

In addition to strong Algebra skills being critical the success in other high school math classes, many college now look for students to have a math credit in each year of high school regardless if Algebra 1 was taken in middle school. So, he wouldn't be saving himself any time if you count the 8th grade credit, because he may need 4 more math classes anyway.

We didn't do a program, but I picked out several literature works to read for 6th grade. I found free reading guides online for most of them. We read them together and talked about various aspects as they came up.

My son (7th grader) works on AOPS for about an average of 45 minutes a day. He usually does the lesson one day and the exercises the next day. Some sections are shorter than others and can be completed (lesson and exercises) in much less time. Some sections are more difficult and require an extra day. We did Prealgebra for 6th grade and are more than halfway through Intro to Alg.

I used it last year, but ended up switching to Homeschool Tracker after a year. I found HP to be really slow loading (like between assignments and resources). Some reports I wanted were cumbersome to make in HP. I like that HT has a much more up-to-date style and it's really easy to make PDFs of tons of reports.

We went to Williamsburg during the homeschool days last fall. The discount during that time made it worth it over going any other time. If you can, go for a couple of days. We tried to see everything on one day and it was a LONG day, from the morning opening show to the ghost tour. I have no advice on lodging because we stayed with my mom in Richmond and just drove to Williamsburg in the morning and back at night.

We are doing RSO Astronomy 2 and Blair Lee's book on climate change.