I would get a timeline so that he could see that ancients are between his favorites, prehistory and knights, and then follow his interests. You might also win him to liking some ancients if you do something knight-like, such as sparta, or look at castle-like ancient structures. My kid was happy to do all history, as long as there was a battle somewhere, so maybe linking to his favorites will help. But, its not a crisis to do things out of order if thats what works (we use core knowledge, which isn't chronological...as long as you have some sort of timeline or book, it will all get sorted out).

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My public-schooled cousins did chemistry first. The only possible downside that I can think of is if the students aren't good enough in math to be able to handle the unit conversions - if they've had algebra, or even pre-algebra, they should be fine with that - I think that my son even did some preliminary work with conversions or rate in Singapore 5 or 6 - and they need to be OK with exponents, both to do metric conversions and Avagadro's number conversions.

Not knowing what she's having trouble with, these may not help. Math for kids that age is usually very concrete - counting pictures, adding by counting the 5 stars and the 3 stars and getting 8 stars, etc. Have you tried just looking at the concept that she's supposed to be working on and then incorporating that into your day instead of doing a lesson? At lunch, let her count the grapes for each person, or count how many blocks still need to be put away, or how many chicken tenders there are at the table if she has 3 and you have 4, etc? Once she's doing well with that, then go back to the book and if she struggles then relate it back to the grapes. One of my children will sometimes get into a 'math is hard' spiral, but she does fine if I turn it into food - despite her insistence that she couldn't subtract, she could figure out how many cookies each person should get. It's hard to know if the problem is with doing math, with the symbolic representations (we had that problem in K, with switching 6 and 9), or just being overwhelmed by a page of problems (that is sometimes still an issue), but this might help you sort that out.

I don't have suggestions for classes (although I'd love to have him in my Bio II class at our co-op!) but if he's interested in independent reading, Campbell Biology is a level harder than Concepts and Connections. Biochemistry textbooks (such as by Stryer or Voet) are pretty hard-core, but the textbook Genes or a molecular biology textbook might be of interest. Watson also has a DNA Technologies book. They're all pricy college texts, but if you can find a cheap older edition at a used store or amazon it would still have plenty of interesting material.

I think that it depends on so many factors! I sometimes tell people that part of it is how you're more comfortable/happy spending your time. I know people who spend 2-3 hours a day in carpool lines - I'm happier doing math with my kids, but I can see how one might choose otherwise (on days when one of my children starts wailing that they don't want to do math, I'm ready to choose otherwise, too!). If I weren't homeschooling I'd be teaching somewhere, so the reading and prep is kind of fun for me - it's what I'd choose to do if I had a full-time job. I think the biggest struggles at my house aren't the academics, they're the difficulties I'd have in raising my particular kids, only magnified becasue I'm doing it more hours each day. There's also the difficulty in trying to manage the house - there is never a point at which it's 'clean and put together' because there is always somebody home to mess it up. But, if I worked as a teacher, it would be hard because I wasn't home enough to get things done, and if my kids were in school, I'd be fighting the 'homework battle' at night...for me, it's mostly about which challenges you're dealing with, because whatever path you choose will have rough spots.

It's hard to have kids work independently until they can read well, so I'd focus on that first. Based on your description, I'd also look for lessons that are short. We had good luck with hooked on phonics - there's a short video and a short passage for your child to read aloud. Handwriting without tears might be good for making sure that he can write letters, and helps reinforce phonics some when they pair rhyming words. Story of the World would need to be read aloud, but you could try giving your son exposure to the same topics by finding library books wtih pictures that go along with the topics. You could also try coloring maps or having him draw, model, or build what you learn about. You might be able to look for videos, too - other than picture books, read alouds, and videos I don't know of any other way to teach kids history, because you have to learn the material before you can do the workbook, project, or report. If you decide to go in a different direction, HIrsh's Core Knowledge series (What your K/First/Second grader Needs to Know is a good guide for topics. It isn't pre-planned, but there are short amounts to read about history, science, and literature and you could set your own schedule and then have your child do something hands-on for most of their time. This would let you focus on the reading while still exposing your son to other topics. At this age, you don't really need a plan of assignments as much as you want a list of topics to look at. if you're trying to fill in gaps with grammar and writing, you might want to check out JakKris's Growing with Grammar and Winning with Writing series - they're quick and self-teaching. They have books for most of elementary and middle school, so you might find materials for both of your children there.

I think this can be very child-dependent. One of my children loves learning about history, especially military history. He's great at remembering things in order because 'A conquored B, who were overtaken by C' links it all together. :-) I got a world history timeline and he fits things in between the battles that he already knows. My other child has little interest in history. With her, I've taken more 'what was the culture like?' approach. She was more interested in the food and foot-binding of ancient China, while my son was interested in the various factions that fought each other. She is also has a fiesty temperament, so she's interested when oppressive leaders show up, because she things they're terrible and should be overthrown. Since there's so much history to learn, it's been OK to work with both children's quirky interests, while constantly relating them back to the timeline and location on the map.

Are they things that you ordered for class work or cultured yourself from swabbing something? if so, they're probably fine. I'd go with gloves, but probably not a mask - I worked in research labs for years and never saw anybody in a mask. We didn't work with 'germ' bacteria that make folks sick, but we did work with plenty of bacteria, yeast, and other fungi. Usually we were more worried about contaminating the sample than we were about them infecting us. We were told that you want to wear gloves because if you get a bunch of bacteria into a cut on your hand, it will take forever to heal. But, assuming you work with reasonable conditions, I wouldn't worry about breathing them in - anything that is that dangerous shouldn't be something you'd be growing at home anyway. Not knowing exactly what you're working with, this may not be correct, but if you're using the samples from something like Home Training Tools, you'll be fine with just gloves.

AoPS also puts exponents really early in pre-algebra. I don't know how much you'll use them in algebra, but if you want a practical application, you can use them to do metric conversions. You can probably find videos about metric conversions that use negative exponents, and having something concrete to think about might help your student to see how it works.

Singapore does some things differently and introduces topics in a different order than some books. I would go ahead and start where they suggest, but skip over units that are a repeat of material that you already know. You could probably move quickly through some sections and just do the topics that are new to you until you are 'caugth up'.

We started the pre-algebra towards the end of 3rd after finishing Singapore, and we finished it at the end of 4th. We didn't use the videos - we worked at our own pace. The biggest problem that my child had was attention to detail - I'm not sure if it was a maturity issue or a personality issue, since it got much better for a while and now we seem to be in some sort of flaky tween zone where he'll set up his systems of equations beautifully and then miss them because he added 2 and 2 and got 5. :-) Anyway, it's something to think about. Our biggest struggle was exponents, which he completely understood in the abstract but when we had to do a lot of problems he'd get frustrated with small mistakes that were made because he 'missed' seeing something or 'forgot about' one of the terms in the equation.

I do one class about career/college with my bio II students - kind of a fun end of the year thing. One thing that I have them do is to pick a few possible college majors and look to print out the course of study for each degree. Sometimes they find degrees that they didn't know existed (turf science, packagaing science), and other times they're surprised that 2 things that sound similar (biology and biochemistry, for instance, or a BA vs BS in the same thing) can be radically different. We look at pre-reqs for programs like nursing. We discuss what might be useful for careers that don't require a degree, too. Is their a vo-tech program, apprenticeship, on the job training, etc? Where do you have to go to find the program? How does expense of program match with likeliihood of finding a job? There are lots of things to think about. One thing that I've been thinking about lately is the difference between what people expecte a job to be like and what it is actually like, and also the disconnect between the degree program and the job. For instance, students might choose a major because it's 'easy' since it doesn't require advanced math, only to find that the job is hard. Or students will avoid a program because it requires 2 semesters of math or physics, but not think about the fact that if they get through that part, they'll enjoy the end job.

The differences between editions are often small, so if you can get it cheaply you might be able to use the TX guide if that's something that you want. I don't know about this edition specifically, but there are several biology texts that I own 2-4 different editions of from having taught the same college courses for several years. Sometimes the only differences were the chapter intros, and sometimes they'd change the end-of-chapter questions or shift a few sections around. In the end, high school books are basic enough that there isn't too much to change.

In general, bacteria don't die when they get to refridgerator temperatures - in research labs, petri plates are stored in the fridge between experiments. The bacteria will grow much more slowly if they get cool, though. In general, most 'normal' bacteria will grow fine between normal room temp and human body temp. If you get them hot enough you can kill them, and if you freeze them without using proper storage solutions they'll get holes poked in them from the ice crystals and a lot of them will die, but anything in between usually just affects the rate of growth. Depending on what you're doing, some strains could do better than others, but it shouldn't kill everything.

We don't use alcamus, but I check my son's work so that I know what he's missing. If time is an issue, maybe you could just check the reviews or check once a week? The reviews really use everything, so if she's doing OK there then she probably gets it.

I'm not sure that it's elitism or credentialism, but more about comfort and goals specific to each family. At our co-op, the Latin teacher was homeschooled himself and teaches 2 subjects, ballroom dance (he has a studio where he teaches as his 'regular job') and Latin. He doesn't have a credential, but he knows the subject. I don't, and since I have no gift for languages and no desire to learn 2 new ones, I'd rather have him teach my son and another teacher, a native Spanish speaker, teach my daughter. I'd do a reasonable job teaching clarinet, handbells, and how to read music because I have experience in those areas despite having no credentials; some of our co-op teachers have job experience in an area, for others it's a hobby, and for others, they just enjoy researching new areas and building classes. Most of our co-op students choose courses based on their needs - some take just 1, some take a whole day. I don't think that you need a teacher to learn - I learn about new things all of the time, and my kids learn plenty from books and documentaries. I do think that it can be hard to learn a subject if you don't know where to start, and it can be hard to stay motivated. It can also be difficult to know how deep is 'enough' to have a general knowledge - everybody is not going to be an expert in every subject. If you're interested in a subject, you can probably learn it faster on your own than in a classroom setting, but you can probably learn it even faster if you have a 'content expert' to explain it to you, helping on the parts where you get confused. I really don't think that it's one size fits all for students, either. It's fine for a student to decide to skim the surface of some topics and dive deeply into others. It's fine for families to work through subjects together. It's also fine for families to decide that the more efficient thing is to get the help of somebody who knows more. That might be through a recorded lecture, something more interactive like an online class, or something personal like an individual tutor. I know families that swap expertise, art lessons for math tutoring. But, the question wasn't 'What is a valid approach?' but 'What do you do?', and I think that many people answered from their own experience. I know that I would rather spend my time learning new science material to share with my students while letting somebody else handle the language classes for my own children, but other families can make different choices.

I don't think the discussion is that you need an education degree, but whether you need an education in the subject that you're trying to teach. My high school students are completely capable of working through the textbook. They could get a study guide and make sure that they're 'getting it right'. But, I think that they get a better education in the subject taking the class from me because I know more than what is in the book. I love my subject and bring in outside information that I've learned at seminars, upper level classes, or papers that I read for fun. Students could do that on their own, but most are unlikely to, either because they lack the interest, the ability to read primary papers, or they don't know that the material is there to look for (for instance, they may not know that prions exist so they would never think to look them up). Parents could learn from a book/lecture series along with the student, and if parent and student are motivated they could learn all sorts of additional information. I think the question was asking if that's what most of us do. For me, it varies. If my child is interested beyond my ability to help, I'll get additional books or teachers. If there's something that I don't think that I can do well (such as a foreign language), I'll sign them up for a class. But, I've also heard parents say 'i don't really understand this, and we're working on it together'. That seems to work for some families, but it's not something that I'm comfortable with for my family, so I get outside help. I know that a highly motivated student might be able to teach themselves a language or to write well, but since one of my motivations for homeschooling is that I want my children to have teachers who are passionate and motivated and can expose my children to things that they (and I) may not know exist, I outsource some classes. But, I've seen situations where the subject was something that the parent was fairly confident that their student wouldn't want/need to know and would take time away from a subject that they were passionate about and excel at, and I can understand why they were fine with the student learning those subjects at a more basic level.

I've wondered the same thing. I can understand working through something that you don't know well if there is some other authority - an online submission or objective test with answer key, for instance - so that you know that you've gotten the right answers (although you still might miss some nuance that isn't well explained in the book). My husband and I are STEM PhDs, so we're fine with most science - even things that we don't know well are still in a science format that we're comfortable with. My kids are still in elementary school, but I make sure that their co-op class choices include having somebody else to do foreign language most years and some sort of writing every other year starting around grade 3-4. I'll probably continue to do their science and math into high school, and I can do middle school history and basics like grammar just fine, but I don't feel 'expert' enough to teach creative writing on the level that I want them to know (although I'm good at passive voice science paper writing) and I'm not going to try to teach a foreign language that I don't know. I know other people feel the same way about different subjects - I taught biology to the daughter of my son's writing teacher a few years ago. I think that sometimes it also depends on how much you think that your student needs to learn about a topic - many parents of students interested in health-related careers want their child to really learn science well, while parents of a child headed to a music conservatory may be more comfortable with a more cursory understanding of science. I wonder if some of the 'learning along with their child' are actually teaching the class or if, as regentrude says, they are 'facilitating' the class and learn some of what their student learns. I've picked up all sorts of odds and ends of information helping my children with their activities (infield fly rule, bowing techniques on violin, types of karate blocks) and I'm sure that if they were taking classes that I worked through with them I'd learn a lot.

My child found 6A/B to be fairly easy, and struggled with parts of AoPS pre-algebra - we got through OK, but I definitely wouldn't skip straight to algebra. We're doing algebra this year, and there are a lot of things that they move through very quickly that are review from pre-algebra but weren't in 6.

We love Growing with Grammar - it does some diagramming each year, and they sell a 'digging into diagramming' book if you really love it. :-) They have a spelling curriculum, which I use with one of my children. We also use vocabulary words as spelling words sometime (we use wordly wise) or I combine spelling and vocab and use the 'vocabulary with classical roots' books, which my son loves. If you choose the classical roots books, pay attention to the order - it's weird, with part of the series using numbers and the other part using letters. I have no idea why it's not just numbers 1-7 or A-G or whatever, but I finally figured it out from a picture of 'available books' on the back of one of them. :-) My kids can use all of these mostly independently.

We did 6A and 6B because I wanted to make sure that a few concepts were more cemented in place and also because I wasn't sure that he was ready, maturity-wise, to move to something where he had to write long problems out on paper (he was in 3rd grade and had some writing issues). The Singapore 6 books weren't too hard and were a good review, and we added some of the challenging word problems. AoPS is really different - Singapore is good preparation in terms of content, but they style was different enough that I was concerned. As far as content, I don't know that you need Singapore 6, so I would make my decision based on mental/emotional readiness as much as academics. We got to AoPS at the end of the Singapore 6 year and it was fairly frustrating, but when we started up again in 4th grade with their pre-algebra he did fine, so I think that for us we needed a bit more maturity. If your kid is older/less prone to getting upsettedly frustrated, you could go straight to AoPS.

My son had a hard time with just memorizing the algorithm without understanding it, but when I explained that, when you have 4869/25, you put 1 above the 8 because you're showing that it goes 100something times, so you subtract the 2500 that you've accounted for and see how many times 25 goes into whatever is left, and then repeat the process. As the numbers got bigger, it was a pain to always write out the zeros but it really seemed to help his conceptual understanding. And, I used excel to print gridlined paper with big blocks so that he could write and keep his numbers orderly.

I kind of had the same philosophy with my K kid - whatever we could do in 30 min - and I had to adapt that because 30 min was indeed enough time for my child to get frustrated and insist that he didn't like math. In the same way that kid interests are unpredictable at that age, math interests were also quirky. My kid was fascinated by negative numbers at 4 and perfect squares at 5, but incredibly frustrated by the details of 3x2 multiplication...although he could mentally deconstruct the multiplication and do it in his head. We did Singapore because it gave several different ways to do each type of problem and explained why the standard algorithm worked, which also meant that there was no need to follow any particular method if he could do it mentally. At 5, he didn't do well with repetition, so we skipped over a lot of practice once he understood something. He's now 10, and we're still working on not getting frustrated when things get hard, and he'll now tell you that he's good in math but doesn't particularly like it. I don't know if it's because of early frustration - there are days when he thinks that figuring out the puzzles of math is fun and I often find him reading ahead in his math book - and I don't know if the frustration could have been avoided because at some point he would have to learn to be a little more meticulous, but I kind of feel like I got lucky with something that didn't completely turn him against a subject that he was good at. On a different note, I have another vote for Singapore's word problems books. He loves ratios, so he enjoyed the challenging ratio problems even when frustrated with other parts of math.

One thing to keep in mind with young kids is that sometimes they can understand complicated math concepts but there are other things that may slow them down. For my son, his handwriting in K wasn't good enough to keep his numbers in a row when doing multiplication or long division. I ended up making grid paper with big boxes to help him. He also doesn't have as much attentioin to detail as an older child should be able to manage. In complex problems where he has to combine like terms or deal with exponents, he's more likely to make careless mistakes than I'd expect from an older child. Sometimes this can make it hard to tell when he doesn't understand vs when he's not paying attention. Because he's actually more interested in history than in math, we do an advanced program (AoPS) but don't push to move at a faster pace (he's in 5th grade now). It's always hard to separate the idea that the child is good at something from the question of whether they actually like it. It's a fine line keeping them challenged without pushing them - too much struggle in an area that they're not interested in can cause them to hate the subject.