I suspect that's likely to happen with my list 😛

Gosh, that sounds nice. I grew up near the beach, but now we live about an hour away from any beaches and DH doesn't much like the beach anyway. And now that we live in FL it's just so screamingly hot in the summer!

That's so cool!

What do you like to write? Journal or creative writing or both?

Over time I've gotten better at making plans that are stick-to-it-able! We just about made it through what I planned this year, and in a reasonable time frame too. Some of it, frankly, is that I've become more willing to use open-and-go style programs... I can't even calculate how many hours I used to put in to BFSU planning back in the day, only to go through the review questions at the end of my lovingly-planned lesson and have them be unable to answer 😤 Still deeply love BFSU in theory though... if we had another child I would probably still try to use it even while my internal monitor screamed YOU FOOOOL!!! 😄

I love this idea and every year I try to put it into practice, but somehow it just never really happens for me! But to be honest, I love planning so much that it feels like a "summer off" kind of activity 😄

So true, so so true! I also enjoy planning but I think I plan on such a granular level that I never make it to spring semester... and then SURPRISE spring semester is when it all falls apart. I am trying to do more macro-level planning this year, so that that won't happen. It helps that one kid will probably be in B&M school, so the planning load will be halved. I gave up on library books because I really need about six months to finish anything (unless I'm in a book club with definite finish dates). We've been enjoying Snowfall on Hulu, about the beginning of the crack epidemic. YMMV, of course - it's a solid TV-MA for language, sex, violence i just about every episode. I don't normally go for those types of shows (gave up on Game of Thrones, gave up on Breaking Bad, etc.) but we fast-forward through the naughty bits and enjoy the heck out of the knotty ethical dilemmas!

What do you fill it with? Do you do anything "just for yourself?" I have a lot of prep to do for work, and we are continuing to do math through the summer with one kid, but the schedule is much less rigid. I'm gardening, or at least trying to keep some tomatoes and watermelons alive. DD14 and I are doing a summer book swap, a book a week for 8 weeks. This week I gave her Heaven to Betsy and she gave me A Monster Calls. I have it in my mind that I'll do a Great Course just for myself - I have a number of them on my watchlist, and I'm thinking of doing Beginning French, Foundations of Eastern Civilization, or The Power of Mathematical Visualization. Of course, I actually really want to do all three, but that's unlikely to result in success 🙂 I'm getting involved with Adult Faith Formation in my parish. It's been a passion of mine for years, but I'd always held off from actually volunteering because I wanted DH to do it with me. But it's just not his passion or vocation, at least not right now, so I decided to stop waiting for him to come around to it. Book club officially goes on break for the summer, but they offer a summer reading list so I'll probably read one or two of those.

My situation is exactly swapped - I've spent the last 2 years trying to push a Sisyphean boulder of a child up the high school mountain, and my younger one is the driven and college-bound one. I don't have advice to give, but I appreciate this insight you offered... demonstrating academic level hasn't even been on my radar screen so far, completion has been the goal! With the second kid I should really buckle down on this element, since she's got actual plans 😛

I'm glad to hear that there has been a respite from the abusive language at any rate. I've been thinking about you a lot. I'll keep up my prayers for you and the situation.

I so consistently overestimate what we can get done in a day that I've taken to planning for 160 days (5 days/wk x 32 weeks). I don't know how many schools days we wind up doing in the end, because I'm not great at tracking when we miss days, but since I've been planning 160 full days we've gotten done what I've planned, with a few exceptions, by working late August-early June with 3-ish weeks off at Christmas. I don't know whether my kids are more distractible/less effective students than other kids, or whether what I estimate will take 4-5 hours of work would actually take most kids the 8-9 hours it takes mine. But I can't seem to plan shorter days for some reason, so planning a shorter year is how I resolve the issue! What doesn't get done on the day it was scheduled just rolls over to the next day. I wish we did more educational trips/activities, but I'm honestly very bad at planning them. We went kayaking with manatees last year before Covid hit and that was a blast... but it also took twice as long to get there as I'd anticipated (still don't know how that happened), I forgot to pack water, snacks, sunglasses, and ziploc bags for smartphones so we had to purchase that stuff, and everyone was ready for a meal by the end of it but I couldn't find a restaurant nearby that had gluten-free options on the menu. I suppose packing for day trips is a skill that one develops when one does day trips frequently... but I don't do day trips frequently because I'm bad at them... 😵

It was our first year homeschooling and I noticed that she was getting extremely frustrated whenever there was noise of any kind when she was trying to work. Dishwasher running, brother shuffling papers, etc. She just couldn't tune it out and focus. Even the fridge turning off and on upset her. I suspected auditory processing disorder, so I asked our primary care doctor for a referral to an audiologist and ENT for that reason. 40% loss in one ear, 10% in the other, so she was barely hearing in stereo! I can't imagine how discombobulating it must have been. The minute the ENT got a look, she commented that she was surprised we hadn't been referred for tubes years ago. The passages were swollen almost completely shut. She'd had 4-6 ear infections per year since she was very little - every cold or flu turned into an ear infection. But the ENT thought she was a little old for tubes at that point, so she put her on a course of steroids instead and then had her do Flonase for a couple of months. Once all the swelling went down, the audiologist tested her again and the right ear that had been at 40% loss was now at just 10% loss, and the left one that had been 10% was hearing normally. And she stopped being so frustrated by ambient noise, and suddenly her spelling improved too, which I hadn't been expecting at all 😄 She's still very prone to swimmer's ear, but she can have a cold without it going to her ears now.

Did he previously spell better, and now just has given up? Or has this been ongoing since he was first learning to spell? Either way, an eye check (at the eye doctor, not just the primary care) and hearing check might be good, just to make sure there are no physical impediments, and if none are found, he possibly may need an evaluation for something like dyslexia. I have a relative who was a strong reader, but struggled with spelling until he got an eye test at around age 11 or 12, not prompted by the spelling issues. He got glasses, and suddenly the spelling issues cleared up with no additional intervention. My DD (now 14) who had spelling problems got an auditory evaluation when she was 9 and it turned out she had 40% hearing loss due to inflammation in there from all her ear infections. She went on a steroid, a few months later the inflammation was down and she had regained most of the hearing, and within a year of beginning All About Spelling (linked above) she was making only very rare spelling mistakes. We went through all 7 levels of AAS, but she got the idea and rules by about Level 3 and it was very smooth sailing through the rest of the program.

This is somewhat dated info, but when my brother and I transferred in at 11th and 7th grades, respectively, my parents had to do a bunch of retrospective documentation to prove to the school's satisfaction that my brother should be an 11th grader. This was the early 2000s when homeschooling was relatively rare, and the district did not keep strict tabs on us. We were basically unschooled, so it was very difficult for my parents to produce anything resembling work samples etc. In the end they had to placement-test us for math and language arts, and took my parents' word for it that high school credit should be given to my brother for social studies, science, etc. However, we both tested extremely high on the placements, so that was a significant boost to our credibility. Bro tested into AP Literary Criticism, and I received a perfect score on the math placement test for middle school and got placed in pre-algebra. Thinking back on it though, I think I could have used another year of arithmetic skills before pre-algebra. So while it's district-dependent, I think it's usually doable for math and language arts, since there are usually placement tests to prove that the student is working at advanced level. Science, history, etc., I'm not so sure.

**blinkblink** what. The Netflix show? I always avoided it because I saw from some early reviews that it just didn't capture the spirit of the books at all, and oh boy now I'm glad I did. Wow.

LOL I was looking at this thread and thinking, "great ideas, guess I don't have anything to add" and then I saw the dates. Guess I REALLY don't have anything to add 😛

Yep, same here. TWTM even says repeatedly in the Grammar Stage section of the book that a kid who isn't solid on the three Rs needs the vast majority of time spent on that and if that means even history and science have to fall behind, that's OK. But I think we homeschool parents tend to just get excited about how many options we have, and the potential to learn something new ourselves while teaching the kiddos, that we overschedule 😛 Year by year, the more things I've removed from our schedule, the more actual learning has taken place!

I love this idea for elementary. What more do you really need at that age? There's plenty of breadth to explore within those subjects anyway!!

Yes, I did... but I wound up dropping the second major (the one I'd picked up due to insecurity) and I really only graduated at all because my faculty advisor understood what I was going through and gave a passing grade to a senior thesis that I sure wouldn't give a passing grade to. I thank God every day for his faith in me. I went on to Master's work in the same department and made it my goal to prove to him that that faith hadn't been misplaced, and I'm very, very proud of the work that came out of that degree. (But that didn't feel like "success," oddly enough. It felt like "an accomplishment.")

Yeah, I don't know that anybody can identify another person's potential in a useful way, and trying to do so lays some hefty burdens on people. I remember, as a late-teen, telling an adult that I was studying a foreign language. He said, "Oh, are you going to work for the State Department?" I said I'd never thought of that and I was just having fun studying the language. He then said, "Well it would be such a waste if you didn't do something valuable with it." That echoed in my head and really messed with my self-confidence about every life decision I made for years afterward. I'd literally never thought of learning being a waste if it weren't career-driven before, but because an adult had said it so confidently and as though it were the self-evident truth, it caused a sudden (and disastrous) shift in my worldview and I wound up attempting to double-major in something I wasn't even that interested in because the thing I actually was interested in had been judged "a waste" and not "valuable." I'm sure he wouldn't have thought that his offhand comment would have such a profound effect.

Wow, I had no idea this was even a field of consulting! I never would have thought of this as a potential career path. I feel like I've been learning so much recently about exactly how many different types of jobs there are in the world 😄

Hooray!! Congratulations and blessings!

My kids are younger than yours but I have one of each as well! One of them seems likely (at the moment anyway) to follow the typical "success" track for American educated women. The other is blazing a different trail (at the moment anyway) and needs a totally different kind of support, accountability, and definition of success. Thus how a couple of years ago I sat in a coffee shop with a journal and worked out what I want them to leave my and DH's care knowing how to do: (1) Hold down a job that will eventually allow them to live independently of us; (2) Identify romantic partners who aren't toxic, if they want a romantic relationship; (3) Manage not to screw up and lose marriages/potential spouses due to personal failings or character flaws like promiscuity or anger management issues; (4) Parent in a self-aware manner and ask forgiveness of their children when they fail them; (5) Humbly seek advice from wise people when they're in a bind. I think there were other things on the coffee shop list, but if they can check those 5 boxes by like their mid-20s, I'll consider them successful and our parenting to have been a success!

I cried a lot. I was angry at him for deceiving me but also angry at myself for not designing my work schedule (I'm self-employed) in such a way that I could have kept better track. That's one additional change I made this past year: no work hours before noontime no matter how much we need the extra cash. Homeschool isn't the thing to sacrifice in that situation, not longterm. So I have the 8am-12pm block to teach the hands-on subjects and set them up with to-do lists, and then DH keeps an eye on their progress during the afternoons while I'm working. The scheduling blocks have been a huge help.

Oh boy I'm gonna watch that!! Sounds really cool.