Personally, I was really disappointed in the OM lab kit. It's been a few years now, but as I recall, it included some goofy stuff, like straws, along with a cheap stopwatch and a couple of little glass beakers. I'd bought it for my second kid, and my oldest had used Miller-Levine and the Biology BK-1 lab kit from Labpaq. That was BEAUTIFUL, and included all kinds of specialized equipment. The Labpaq was my favorite lab kit purchase by far, and I think I paid about $200 for it. #2 still ended up using OM, but I bought the Biology lab kit from Quality Science Labs to go along with it and supplemented with some extra reading and documentaries. The teacher guide was only useful for the answer key. I ended up passing it along to a friend when we were done with it. My son is using the Biology text from CK-12 this year and he's really enjoying that. The student text, workbook, teacher edition and test book are all available for free, and they're very well done. My personal preference is to just use the CK-12 text, pick up the book and kit that I recommended (you can check out a PDF copy of the book at the author's website!), and create my own schedule. I'm pretty comfortable teaching high school biology now though, after three times through. It's definitely easier to have it all laid out and scheduled for you the way OM does it, so I guess it really just depends on what you're comfortable doing. If you can find OM used, it's a good deal, but I don't think I'd pay that much for it new.

Oak Meadow is mostly paper labs, which are okay, but not very exciting. I understand an ASD kid wanting to avoid dissections. I'd still suggest supplementing the OM paper labs, just because they're boring (according to my younger daughter!) and there are LOTS of cool things you can do for biology labs that don't involve dissection! Maybe check out the Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments. I think I remember the author saying here that he doesn't believe dissections are necessary for a first year high school biology course. He sells a lab kit to go along with the book on his website. I'm planning on using his chemistry materials next year with my son.

Personally, I don't think it's totally necessary for kids to learn to work with others during science labs when they're in high school. Doing quality lab work at home can let the kid focus on the concepts without all the cooperative elements. My kids learned to work with others in a variety of other circumstances, and that translated easily into working with others in college labs. Considering that my oldest had a couple of semesters where she complained that her lab partners were absolutely useless and she had to do all the work anyway, it was a good thing she learned to do it on her own. My oldest did biology labs at home with me, then dual enrolled for chemistry and physics. #2 has done biology, chemistry and physics labs at home. She also dual enrolled for one semester of general chem. #3 is doing biology labs at home this year, and will do chemistry at home next year, then probably dual enroll for physics.

I honestly just think there are more options now. There's just a lot more diversity in the homeschooling community than there used to be. When I first started homeschooling many years ago in northern California, SL and Oak Meadow were pretty much the only two big packaged programs out there. There weren't loads of resources on the internet, and homeschooling didn't have the market that it has now. There are just so many other choices now.

At the bottom of our transcripts, just above the signature line, I put "Registered homeschool in accordance with (our state) statutes X and X." That negated some of the weirdness we encountered when my kids applied to schools in states with more restrictive homeschool laws. They really seemed to just want assurance that we were legally compliant with our state laws. Any school that absolutely insisted on a GED was immediately crossed off our list. Fortunately, those are few and far between.

I've used Oak Meadow 4th grade, and personally, I think it's too parent, tool and time intensive for kids that travel a lot. It's great because there's lots of hands on projects, but obviously that doesn't work as well if you're not in one place for long. We lived on our sailboat for a while when the kids were younger, and during that time, we used both K12 (when we had internet access) and Calvert (when we didn't). If you want an all in one secular curriculum that's easy to travel with, I'd either suggest paying for K12 independently, not as part of a public school program, or something like Calvert, which is pretty much all traditional textbooks. K12 took up way less space on our boat, which was important, but we didn't always have reliable internet, so that became an issue.

I guess my perspective is that at 17 or 18, it needs to be his decision, and that he might need to compromise on his criteria in order to find something that works. If he really wants to go to a 4 year university, then he needs to consider that maybe it's bigger than he'd like. He can always transfer somewhere else after a couple of years.

My third child (now a 9th grader) was a delayed reader. He was 10 before it really started to click with him. Interestingly, he is now my most avid reader. He's always got his nose in a book and stays up until the wee hours reading. I've shared a lot of my favorites with him, and we both love a lot of the same authors.

My 9th grader is using Big History Project for world history this year. He's absolutely loved it. I've added some additional documentaries and reading, but it's been very enjoyable and very different. In the teacher resources section, there's a syllabus that helps flesh it out to a full year world history credit.

I'd use Studies Weekly. That's what I'm doing this year with my youngest.

Both of my girls did full-time dual enrollment in 11th and 12th grade. One is a computer science major and the other will be majoring in mechanical engineering. Both of them received substantial merit scholarships. One thing I will add is that we were told by some universities (Creighton and... gah, I forget...) to save all the lab notebooks from dual enrollment lab science classes, if my girls wanted transfer credit for those courses as STEM majors.

My youngest has some of the same issues, so this year I decided to shelve my usual history progression. Instead, we're using Studies Weekly for history and science. We turn them into little mini unit studies each week by looking up some Youtube videos and doing some additional reading. It's giving my son practice reading informational text without trying to follow a larger narrative story. He enjoys it and seems to retain quite a bit.

I don't bother worrying about it until my kids reach higher level math. At that point, they all learn it quickly and painlessly, and it's never been an issue. For my 10yo, who is the only one of my kids not to use Singapore Primary Math, I use a piece of graph paper that I fold in half. I write the problems neatly for him, and he writes the answers. That way, he's getting a model of how to write them, but he can just focus on answering.

My senior is in the class this year. It's her only non dual enrollment class. Because of her schedule, she can't make the live class times for the most part, but it doesn't seem to have been an issue for her. I'm pretty much out of the loop though, since at this age, she's almost completely independent.

My daughter was one of the really early Fall 2016 acceptances, back in August, and I completely forgot to update with her other acceptances. Oops! Ultimately, she's decided on Iowa State for mechanical engineering. They awarded her a 4 year academic scholarship. :D Two down, two more to go!

My husband's CS degree from the UC required two semesters of general chem and two semesters of engineering physics. My older daughter's CS program required 12 units of science from the two semester chem, bio and physics sequences. She had to include both courses in one of the sequences, plus one or two from a list of elective science courses. She couldn't take non-major chem, bio or physics, but has to take the same courses that other engineering disciplines require. Maybe the science requirement is partly tied to how much electrical engineering is required as part of the particular CS degree. Both my husband's CS program and my daughter's required some EE courses. I believe the UC also offered a separate CS degree that fell under the College of Letters and Science. That had fewer science requirements and was primarily software.

I used BYL Grade 7 as the spine for my son's 8th grade World Geography course last year. I spent months pulling together books and trying to schedule things, only to see BYL and realize that it had already scheduled a lot of things I'd planned on using. I used a different science program, added more grammar and composition and scheduled some additional reading in order to have it meet my goals for 8th grade. I also scheduled in a lot of documentaries and videos, including quite a bit of Anthony Bourdain's stuff. Over the summer, I sat down and lined up all of the episodes of Cook's Tour, No Reservations, Parts Unknown and The Layover by continent and country. Then I wrote selected episodes into the schedule where they fit. (These are pretty irreverent and many parents might consider them too mature for a middle school kid.) We had a fantastic year. My son learned a lot, and really enjoyed most of the reading. I highly recommended BYL 7.

I made my own 8th grade world geography curriculum last year, but a large part of it was based on Build Your Library's 7th grade world geography course.

My youngest is a 4th grader. I've relaxed a lot over the years, so I require a lot less from him than I did from my oldest at this age. He gets OT, PT and speech each week, so I count those, along with the time spent working on those skills, as part of our school day. He has a daily binder that he does first each morning. It includes speech practice, writing the date, month and day of the week, graphing the weather, a page from his critical thinking workbook (I put them in his binder each week) and handwriting practice. Then he does math and language arts. We do history and science pretty informally using Studies Weekly. Each week, he reads through them and we turn them into a sort of mini unit study. We do some of the online activities, maybe watch a video, look up some info in our extensive personal library of science and history books, etc. One week each month, he does a Tinker Crate which we also flesh out into a little unit study. He absolutely LOVES his Tinker Crates. We have a lot of science kits, building kits and tons of board and card games, and I count all of those as educational "school" time in my head. He usually starts around 10am and by 3, he's playing with the dog or doing a board game with a sibling. Once a week, my younger two go to our 4th-12th grade co-op for a few hours, where my 4th grader is taking a Lego architecture class and state history. I don't do strict screen time limits. We've found that it works much better for us to model responsible behavior than to strictly moderate screen time. We're not TV watchers, and we don't have cable or satellite, just Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming. We are a very computer oriented family though, so those are our screens. Our rule is no recreational computer time until schoolwork is done, and none before 4pm. Basically, complete all your responsibilities before you sit down to goof off on the computer.

That's a tough call. I'm homeschooling a child with severe OCD and depression, and I know I couldn't send him away for a full week. With mental health issues, there's so much more going on that just maturity. If it was just an issue of a child being immature and needing to experience some independence, I'd say go for it. Part of cognitive behavioral therapy is working on exposure responses, but without someone to coach him through the anxiety, it could just be an exercise in exposure without giving him the tools to improve his responses.

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My oldest did a year long study on dystopian literature for English. That fall, she picked up a used copy of Fahrenheit 451 while volunteering at a thrift store and woke me up in the middle of the night saying, "I just finished this book, and I REALLY want to talk about it!" We ditched our other English plans that year, and ended up spending a fantastic year on dystopian novels, short stories, poem and film. That same kid also did a semester long course called Science in Art when she was in high school. It's interesting to look back at now, because she's a CS/studio art double major. :) Oh, and she also has high school credit for Celestial Navigation. Along with my husband, she's an avid sailor and spent a lot of time cruising the CA coast and Lake Superior with him, so we used the ASA materials and she earned ASA certification in Celestial Navigation. (She has a handful of ASA certifications, but that's the only one I gave her high school credit for taking.) My other kids haven't been quite so exciting. #2's most unusual course was a year we spent on Egypt, and #3 hasn't really done much yet that's really out of the box.

Not sure if these would count, but... In college, I wrote a paper for a Western Civ class once that was based on Iron Maiden's "Alexander the Great." I forgot it was due, wrote it at the last minute and received a B with the comment that I should cite my sources... oops! I've also used Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in our English coursework. ;)

We HATED the high school history courses. I got them used, watched a few lectures and just could not get past the stupid fake accents he tries to do that all end up sounding alike by the time the lecture is over. The dressing up was campy, but wouldn't have been as bad without the horrible accents. I passed them on to someone else. Ugh. We really enjoyed History of Ancient World: Global Perspectives. We also liked Foundations of Western Civilization and Foundations of Eastern Civilization.

I don't know many homeschoolers who bad mouth public schools. I guess this just depends on your community. After 15+ years of homeschooling, I have MORE respect for teachers than I did before. I know how much work it can be to teach my own kids. I can't imagine trying to teach other people's kids! One thing that makes me cringe when I meet other homeschool families is how within the first five minutes they'll tell me all of their children's labels. Most often, this seems to occur in families with young children. It's like a "geek code" of sorts. The other thing that drives me nuts is one-upping. I can't STAND the one-upping and competitiveness. It's why I stopped attending our local gifted group years ago. I can't handle those people at all. As far as things public school kids know that homeschooled kids don't, this is going to sound awkward, but I found that I had to teach my teens the meanings of swear words (and why we don't use them). When my older kids started encountering traditionally schooled kids as they got older, I found they'd come home and ask me what such-and-such a word meant because another teen used it. After my oldest was teased at swim team for not knowing what a word meant, I sat her down and we had a little life lesson. It was pretty uncomfortable for both of us, but I'd rather they hear this stuff from me and get my take on it than from other kids.