Thank you very much for all the responses so far! I think it's a good point that APs aren't the only path to college admission. I mentioned them because that was something that my husband and I both did as teenagers, him in public school and me at home as a convenient way of obtaining outside validation, and they make a relatively clear target. But dmmetler, I found your description of your daughter's science path very interesting -- we would definitely be open to something more specialized and research-based. DD6 is currently pretty obsessed with dinosaurs (and generally loves "fact books", especially about animals), and we are happy to encourage that interest. We just want to make sure she also gets a good general knowledge base. I definitely like the idea of incorporating a lot of hands-on elements, whether that's experiments, models or other craft projects. I am pretty excited about this aspect of homeschooling. I look forward to seeing any other suggestions as we get ourselves organized. 🙂

Hi! My husband and I are just starting to homeschool our kids, and we are trying to get ourselves organized. Our oldest just finished kindergarten at the local public elementary school, and although she liked it, we were not satisfied with the academic experience (she's an advanced reader, and we've been working on math at home with her; she's working on fractions, exponents, negative numbers -- even the advanced/gifted program teachers don't seem to understand why we would introduce her to these concepts at her age). We can do better. One of our goals in teaching our kids is to make sure that they are prepared for admission to a selective college, when the time comes. (We understand that they might choose another path, but we want to make sure it's a choice, not a lack of options.) Presumably this will mean lots of AP classes in high school (or potentially earlier). I am not too worried about planning for math, because it builds on itself in a pretty logical way. Similarly for English -- it's not quite as clear-cut in my mind, but it's still a natural progression of skills in comprehension, vocabulary, composition, etc. When we get to science and social science, though, I am a lot less certain about how to set benchmarks to make sure we stay "on track", given the wide range of topics that fall into each category. I could look up the Common Core standards for each grade level and say, OK, we want to do 1.5 years of material each year, or something like that, but I'm not sure if that is the most sensible approach. I was homeschooled myself growing up, and I don't think we did too much formal stuff for science/social science in the elementary grades, but looking back, I do recognize that there were a few gaps, things we just neglected to cover. I'm hoping to avoid that for my own kids by planning ahead. Does anyone have thoughts on these issues?

Hi! My husband and I live in North Carolina with our four daughters, currently ages 6/4/2/0. I was homeschooled growing up, and he went to public school. Our oldest just finished kindergarten at the local public elementary, but although she enjoyed it (playing with friends, lots of craft projects), they weren't challenging her academically, so we are planning to keep her at home next year. We hope that in addition to giving us more opportunity to help her (and her younger sisters) learn, this will also allow us to travel more as a family. I am excited about this new phase in our family life, just want to make sure we do right by our kids.