Another possibility is that you write the second letter (if she hears back from the AP bio teacher), even though you're also writing the counselor letter. You can focus on different things in the two different letters and also offer an explanation about why she's had few outside teachers. I just did some quick googling, and Vassar actually only requires one teacher rec plus the counselor letter. I know Emory's not on the list, but I remember that they say specifically on their homeschool info page that homeschooled students need one letter not from a family member (it looks like the wording has changed now, but when we were looking it suggested someone like a pastor or a music teacher, I think--i.e. they expected some homeschoolers would not have any outside academic references to offer). Having just done the college application thing last year, I know it's super stressful and that you feel like there are a million opportunities for you to mess everything up and undo all her hard work....but I honestly don't think you need to focus too much on this one thing. Letters of recommendation are almost never the thing that makes or breaks an application, and your kid has a very strong profile, and schools will recognize that.

She shouldn't need more than 2 letters of recommendation, so if she has the AP bio teacher she's halfway there (and one of my son's letters was from his Spanish tutor who hadn't taught him since 10th grade; it made sense because she knew him better than one semester DE profs). If she's not doing early decision anywhere, she won't need the letters until mid year, which should give her new coaches time to get to know her well enough to write a letter. I know most colleges will say 2 academic recommendations, but they also probably understand that things can be different for homeschoolers. Of course, it would be ideal if every kid had a dozen perfect people to ask for recommendations, but that's not how it is most of the time. Having the recommendations as the weakest part of her application (particularly when you have a clear explanation about why) is much better than grades or test scores! Particularly at schools where she's being recruited, I can't imagine only having one academic recommendation would be a dealbreaker.

I neither hate nor love The Scarlet Letter, but I found it really useful to read with high schoolers because Hawthorne has some really interesting symbolism that he absolutely smacks you over the head with. So it's sort of obvious and easy to interpret (or at least understand how to interpret once it's pointed out) for high schoolers but it still feels like you're doing legit analysis. It's also about as close as one gets these days to canon, so it's a good thing to have read. If you don't want to read it, I think it's perfectly fine to have her read it and maybe find a good lecture or two on it for her to listen to (Great Courses, open courseware, etc.....for something like Scarlet Letter, I'm sure there's a ton out there).

Now that we're a couple of weeks in, it looks like my high schooler (10th grade) will be doing 9-4:30 or 5 most days with an hour for lunch and then a couple of hours most evenings. This has about 2 1/2 hours of music practice built in to it. One afternoon a week he has a game club he goes to and Friday afternoons are music with homeschool band. Weekends are pretty crazy right now, too, with a clarinet lesson Saturday morning and youth orchestra Sunday afternoons. Trying to take advantage of all the time in the car to knock out some Great Courses and audiobooks.

I'm doing the Great Courses How to Draw with my 13 year old this year. Just started, so can't say much about it yet.

Incidentally, my DS ended up getting offered admission off the waitlist at Emory's Oxford campus in early June (he didn't take it because the financial aid wasn't great--would have been tempting otherwise--and I wouldn't mind driving him 60 miles away in a couple of weeks instead of 1100!). Final count I believe was that he was waitlisted at 7 schools, accepted the spot on 4 of them, and then offered admission at 1. So getting off the waitlist DOES happen sometimes (even for kids who need FA at needs-met schools; we had heard that waitlists are almost never need blind even at need blind schools)

I've seen people say they just list the first year of music on the transcript and then shift it to EC after that....I've never quite understood the logic, though. In my mind, if they were in school and taking band every day it would go on a transcript. I guess the thinking is just that they should have a fine arts credit somewhere on the transcript and beyond that it doesn't matter much? I'm not really sure how much it matters in the end--either way, it will be clear that he put the time into music. Unless you're worried of being short on having enough credits to graduate (which I don't think is usually a problem for homeschoolers) I think it's kind of a wash. But I'm interested to hear what other people think; my oldest just had piano lessons (and I did the put it on his transcript for 9th grade and not after that thing), but my next kid has tons more music and I have no idea how I'm going to end up "counting" it.

I'm starting to grapple with this as my 10th grader gets more and more involved with music (he DOES want to do music as a career....right now). I'm currently mourning taking weekend trips, as he has a private lesson on Saturday mornings and youth orchestra on Sunday afternoons. The thing is they really just don't know at that age--they might think music or whatever is just a hobby and then it turns into more or the opposite might be true and they get burned out in 11th or 12th grade or halfway through college and change direction entirely. So right now I'm feeling the pressure of making sure DS is ready for either thing--auditioning for music schools AND having a strong enough academic record to give him a lot of other college options. But on the other hand, when else in life are they going to have the time to devote all these hours to something they love just because they love it? So as long as he's enjoying it and we can afford it (sort of) we're going with it for now.

In my state 4 units of science is a graduation requirement...not that you have to follow your state's graduation requirements as a homeschooler, but more selective colleges will expect to see 4 sciences. So it might come down to what her college plans are. Of course, if she's taking community college classes, she can always take 2 sciences (one per semester) another year to get 4 credits in.

Echoing all of this! I see so many people who have planned out high school with the idea that dual enrollment and/or AP courses are going to mean their kid can get through college in two years only to be upset when they hit 11th or 12th grade and realize that that's not necessarily true. And then a lot of people end up severely limiting the college search because they're so committed to the idea that all of those credits HAVE TO transfer. We have a great state-funded dual enrollment program in Georgia--my oldest took honors classes at a 4 year university completely for free, books included. It was amazing that he had the opportunity to take some great classes, learn from great professors, get a feel for what college is like...not to mention benefits like having a transcript that showed he could handle college level work and having good people to ask for letters of recommendation. I'm totally happy that he had that experience (FOR FREE!) even if he doesn't get college credit. I don't want to be dismissive of the financial concerns with all of this....of course that has to come into play, too. But I just think everyone needs to go into planning out high school understanding how the game works: AP and dual enrollment both have benefits and ONE of those benefits is the possibility of getting college credit. But, despite the college board's marketing, it's far from a sure thing, especially at selective private schools.

I'd lean toward having him redo calc 1 with another program and then go from there. There's no reason to be doing advanced calculus in 9th or 10th grade if it's stressing him out; if he has calculus on his transcript for 9th grade he's going to be more advanced than the vast majority of students, even the ones who are strong at math and science and plan to go into those fields.

It's trickier if they actually have an opinion about it! This is my most laid back kid; he pretty much just shrugged and said, "whatever" when I proposed it 😂

FWIW, I gave my second summer b-day kid an extra year before calling him a 9th grader (after seeing how challenging high school is with my oldest), and so far (he's just starting 10th) now, it's been a great decision with no downsides.

DS applied to 15 schools, and we didn't encounter any wanting detailed information on labs. There were two that had kind of vague "additional information" requests of homeschoolers, and we submitted a portfolio that included one lab report, IIRC, for each of those. We didn't do any of his high school science at home except biology senior year, but I don't think it would have made any difference if we had. I've heard Georgia Tech is very picky about lab sciences for homeschooled applicants, but I don't know the specifics. DS applied to mostly small LACs.

Are you looking at online or the books? We do the online version largely because my 6 year old gets tired of writing pretty quickly. He reads well, but I usually read the comics to him and sometimes the word problems, too, depending on his mood.

I'd just like to say that, as someone who was a regular poster years ago and then took a break, I'm....fascinated, I guess? that Bill's still around. IIRC relentless pro-circumcision posts were his thing back in my day....unless I have him mixed up with some other dude who talks a lot.

I wish I had some super well-thought out and planned schedule to share with you, but it was pretty loose 🙂 . He went through the Khan Academy stuff mostly on his own (I just checked in periodically to make sure he was staying on track, time-wise)...I'd say he spent 30-45 minutes a day most days on that--reading the material, watching the videos, and doing the quizzes at the end (for the first few units they have discussion questions, and I'd have him write a couple of paragraphs for some of those...but if I remember right they faded out after the first few. Maybe they're still working on it and have more done now). Other stuff we just fit in when we could. We listened to and talked about Great Courses lectures and History of the World in 100 Objects podcasts in the car, we watched Crash Course together, he did the essays and then we went over them together, and we worked together (along with his 7th grade brother) on Reading Like a Historian. He also read a couple of extra books during the year, though not as many as I meant to have him read. I'm not sure if he finished any other than A History of the World in Six Glasses, actually. We watched a few documentaries and movies that went along with what he was learning. Oh--we did world mythology for literature last year, too, with went along with nicely with the history. It all felt kind of frantic and disorganized at the time (big goal for this year is NOT to feel like that all year about school!) but it worked out well; he did well on the exam, learned a lot, and mostly enjoyed it.

Mostly just lots of essays....as we got closer to the test day we did them as timed essays like on the exam; earlier in the year I used prompts from past exams to get him used to them, but had him take some time, do research, and quote sources in the essays. The Reading like a Historian lessons have some written output, and we did some guided document based question exercises, where he'd answer questions as he went along before attempting a whole essay answer. We didn't do any tests other than the quizzes included with Khan Academy and some practice multiple choice sections for the AP exam. On Teachers Pay Teachers you can buy worksheets to go along with Crash Course....I thought about doing this, but by the time I looked into it we were so far into the year it didn't seem worth it. He was more self-motivated than I expected and really wanted to do well on the exam, so that always helps a lot 🙂 .

Right--I didn't submit a syllabus, but he took the AP exam. On the transcript, I call it "World History with AP exam" (because you're not supposed to call it an AP class without the approved syllabus. Because the College Board 🙄). My oldest son did several AP classes this way. I do weight the grades like an AP class, and I checked with the admissions office at the University of Georgia and they said they would also weight the classes the same way as "real" AP classes when they re-calculate the GPA. This was my second kid's first exam, but my oldest did 5 AP classes, all at home on our own (my husband's an AP calc teacher at a public school, so for that one we did have an approved syllabus and he just followed along with DH's class, but at home) with good results (all 4s and 5s). All of that said, I wasn't necessarily suggesting you have them take the AP exam--although it's certainly a possibility!--just throwing out ideas for resources we found helpful.

My 9th grader did AP World History last year....for a "textbook" he just did Khan Academy and then we just cobbled together other resources: Crash Course World History, Turning Points in Modern History from Great Courses (we really liked this one), lots of practice essays for the AP exam, History of the World in 100 Objects podcast, Reading Like a Historian.... for a Great Courses that goes with the Spielvogel, there's a Western Civilization II course that should correspond well....we're doing AP euro now in 10th, and we'll be using that. Listened to the first lecture and like what we hear so far.

One or two of DS's colleges requested that he upload a photo with his application, but I've never seen one on a transcript before.

Why does a school care if your kid is likely to do well? Isn't the separate testing code for homeschoolers specifically so that our scores aren't lumped in with the school's?

Following. Just finally got around to switching the dogs away from Taste of the Wild because of the now not very recent issues with it....I also went with Victor Hi-Pro Plus for now--which is way cheaper than the Taste of the Wild and has almost as much protein (and more fat, I think). Now I'm turning to cat food. We switched the cats from dry food awhile back because my male cat was getting bad UTIs, but he's gone 2 years without a UTI now, and I'd really like to stop spending a fortune doing nothing but wet food. I just looked at Taste of the Wild dry food for cats (apparently I miss buying TOTW?) and the protein content is almost identical to the wet food we feed them (Abound grain free, from Kroger)....so I'm thinking of starting to do one meal a day of each for them.

I've never seen it as a must do, maybe because I never went to camp as a kid (I actually desperately wanted to for a long time and devoured book after book about summer camps....but I never got to go and it hasn't haunted me or anything). DH went to camp for a summer or two and said it was fun but not life altering. We've prioritized vacations over summer camp (we bought an RV a few years ago and have done very long summer trips since then). My 16 year old just did a one week music camp this summer for the first time--it was much more about helping him meet his goals with music (he's leaning toward a music major in college) than having the experience of being away from home, though.

On the upside, I've always found the list the college board gives you to be completely useless (out of date and/or incomplete) anyway 😡