I am so sorry I took so long to even begin to answer this, I have no excuse! I must admit, though, if I seem distracted, its because it is 10 at night, and for some reason, my neighbor is screaming at someone and I am sitting right next to the window being half-nosy...:blush: TMI, I know... OK, one of the main reasons that I thought the new Glencoe book was so good was because I thought it was just the right mix of cell biology and animal biology for an intro class. I did NOT like the way the chapters were ordered, but that is easily remedied and is my own preference. Really, it was just unit one in the wrong spot, for me. The book actually followed very closely to the Exploring Life book topic-wise, but seemed way more readable and friendly for kids (who may or may not like to read textbooks). Plus, I really like how Glencoe offers free support materials on their website including quizzes and virtual labs. I have seen them used, check amazon because I just saw a TE for $26! As for the Exploring Life book dh used, he did not touch the CD or any of the resource materials and believe me, he struggled with the topics. He should have taken it in person, or paid me for all the teaching I tried to do. I think its really difficult for me to address the depth vs breadth question. I think that it is so important for kids to be exposed to as much as possible as often as possible. That will lead them to areas that they want to study in-depth. I think that pumping fact after fact into a child drains the love of learning. They stop asking why and stop seeing connections to life and begin the process of remembering something long enough to take the test. I hate the whole teaching to the SAT subject test idea, but I know it has to be done (yes, Im sure we could all argue with that). I think that either book, along with a good test prep book, should be a good prep for the test, but I have not actually taken the subject test to know for certain. Do you think they would let me?? What a great idea, we could all sign up for one in our area of expertise and swap notes and know for sure! Another book I just dug out literally two days ago is Campbell's Essential Biology. This book focuses way more on the microbiological side of biology. It still addresses some animal/plant biology and ecology but definitely nowhere near the other books. I really think it would be appropriate for someone who wants to go for the SAT biology M test, or has had enough of protists, fungi, moss and fish. Probably not so interesting for your son who likes birds. Or maybe, you never know! So sorry if I rambled a bunch, hopefully it was somewhat coherent. I really did not mean to get up on a soapbox about testing, I dont always think its a bad thing, I just saw one of my favorite kids get the life sucked out of him this year as a sophomore. I really hope this helped, at least a little bit!

Congratulations! That's so wonderful!! :party:

I cannot answer the question about SAT prep helping for ACT, but I can say that it has not worked the other way around, here! When choosing a test for talent search last year, I chose ACT because I knew that dd would struggle with the SAT. So we went through a little bit of prep and she has scored very well the last two years. I figured I would let her take the SAT for the experience this upcoming 8th grade year, before it "counts". She just finished going through a complete practice test last week, and ended up with a much, MUCH lower score percentile-wise than any ACT test she took, practice or otherwise. She did nothing but complain about how much more difficult it was, but couldnt exactly tell me how, sorry that didnt help much... From what I have gathered, ACT is an achievement test, it is a straightforward check of whether or not you have certain skills. The SAT, on the other hand, is an aptitude test, meaning can you reason through stuff to get to an answer. I have noticed that the SAT reading really asks you to analyze the selections rather than fetter out details. However, the science portion of the ACT does that, as well, just in a different way. The essays are different in that same sense, also. The SAT test wanted reasoning and analysis using examples, an d the ACT just seems to want a 5 paragraph essay. For test prep, though, we just used a variety of practice tests we found online. Even the older ones helped. There are a couple here http://www.petersons.com/education_planner/preparing_article.asp?sponsor=2859&articleName=ACT_Practice_Tests one here http://www2.leapfrog.com/worksheets/iquest/testprep/act1exp.pdf and I have some more lurking somewhere on my hard drive, I wish I could find them right now! I have also heard that the Real ACT prep book is the best book to buy. HTH somewhat!

My first job was at a bowling alley where all of my friends worked. I wanted to be a pin chaser, but since I was a girl, and only 15, I got to be the snack bar girl.:glare: It was a morning shift, and some guy wanted his eggs poached. I had no idea what to do, so I asked the manager. When I served the guy he seriously FREAKED and started yelling at me that I was a horrible excuse for a woman. I had some choice words for him, as well. Over the PA. For which I was immediately fired. It wasnt until later that I found out the manager had instructed me in how to make basted eggs, not poached eggs. He felt so bad that my friends and I bowled for free for the next three years :lol: In retrospect, Im not sure what was wrong with me, because my 12yo dd knows all her eggs...

I am not very familiar with the Holt books, but I do know that the older Glencoe books are minimal and frustrating in their content. Also, the order in which the present the material does not flow (for me). Strangely though, one of the best HS Bio textbooks I have ever seen is Glencoe's 2007 Biology book. DH used "baby Campbell" (:lol:) for a college-level bio class and it seemed like a fine, comprehensive intro-level biology text, but I couldnt help having this nagging sensation like I wanted it to have more... I am certain, though, that the feeling was totally based on my biology background, and had nothing at all to do with the book. In addition to where everyone else said, sometimes people sell sets of stuff of ebay that included everything you need and sometimes, schools will let you have their exam copies of things they dont use. I even recently acquired an intro-chemistry text with all support materials from our CC!

:iagree::iagree: However, I am going to out myself and admit that until today, I had no idea what the green boxes meant. :blushing: Somehow, I thought it was related to # of posts, or whatever, it made no difference at all to me. I want to brush it off and say, "Who cares about reputation, what are we 12?" But the very idea that someone can anonymously snipe someone else with a hurtful comment makes me care about those who have experienced it. It is just so surprising to me because I have never, let me stress NEVER, been aware of anyone being outright mean or disrespectful to anyone else. To me, everyone seems to be so supportive of everyone else, even when they disagree. Of course, that is my lurking POV...:leaving:

:smilielol5::smilielol5: You just made my day.

This was almost EXACTLY our experience with this test. I was trying to get dd into a school for "highly gifted/high acheivers" in 1st grade and they gave this test to Kindy kids along with the 2nd grade IOWAs. She was barely above average on the Raven's test, but 95+%ile on the IOWA and they recommended that she take a "standard" IQ test. About 6 months later, I had her sit for the WISC-IV and her overall score was ridiculously higher, she ceilinged the verbal part. I honestly think her troubles with the Ravens and the quantitative part of the WISC may have been because she was just not yet able to reason as well as she could have, since she was struggling with language learning. But what do I know? Its all moot point now! But she is still really horrible with mentally manipulating images (like the put-together-the-dice stuff and the paper holes, etc).

Im 30 years old... Im hoping some sort of motivation to do something meaningful will kick in at 31... :smilielol5: But seriously, I never do anything until the very last possible second because I work so well under pressure. (At least, thats what I have come to tell myself...) Im so glad dd is not like that! Sorry I can't help...:lol:

dd just sat the AP Chemistry, she told me that the student sitting next to her, answered a couple of multiple choice questions, then put his head down and went to sleep. Strangely, he worked really hard on the free response questions after the break. Wow, now I feel so terrible. Just yesterday, I was talking with some kids who had sat some AP exams last week and they were telling me the same thing... And I was teasing them about exaggerating:blush: And these kids were all from different states! That is just so disturbing. Although, I think that eventually, whoever does the high school rankings will begin taking into account the actual AP grade. OK, I hope that, rather. I remember reading the US news top high school list and thinking about how misleading it is to rank schools like that and, that to me, its less important about how many AP exams are offered than how well the kids are prepared for them.

I know I completely lurk over here, and am an odd voice, I apologize. I wanted to share with you, though, that my dd had a severe phonological delay with unknown etiology that I was told by the ps would probably take years and years of speech therapy, and that she was most likely going to have a moderate to severe LD. At 3, I enrolled her in a private, therapeutic preschool that was intensive in the correcting, and my mother began teaching her to read (unbeknownst to me)(I dont think unbeknownst is a word) and there was a massive click that showed her that there was a huge difference between what she was hearing and saying and what the word actually was. Her reading skills took off, her expressive speech went from below 7%ile to 75%ile in one year and now people who know her look at me funny when I tell them that.:glare: So my point is, imho, I see no harm in teaching basic reading skills and letter sounds. Kids who are in ps have to learn those things with speech problems anyways. However, I will always feel that a speech evaluation would be beneficial. That way, even if you do not commit to "official" therapy, you will know the areas needed to work on!

I introduced dd to the topic in 5th grade, but it was fully covered in 6th grade in the Dolciani S&M book. Like both Bev's and Pamela's children, she loved these things. They are not in my ps'd niece's Glencoe Pre-Algebra book at all, if that helps.

I know this only partially relates, but I wanted to share, just in case it may help. DD had a speech delay that stemmed from her mishearing things (and therefore saying them wrong) and although she was never diagnosed with a hearing impairment, or any other auditory processing problems, it was suggested rather heavily to me that she put off learning a language. However, the school that she attended the next year taught French beginning in Pre-K. She really flourished the next few years in learning the language and for whatever reason, never had an issue with mishearing or even mispronouncing the language. I realize that this is not the same problem that you are facing, but I guess my point is that you have nothing to lose by trying a foreign language now. Especially since the first couple of years are very, very basic. At the very least, she will be able to read and write

:iagree::iagree: Also, Lies my Teacher Told Me by James W Loewen is a good read. I really enjoyed how it compared school textbooks and what they leave out (or add in).

What I did was color the words the same color as the thing I was coloring in the color of my choosing. Did that make sense? Im sorry, its rather late for me...:sleep: The words are all hollow so that you can color code them to the thing you are coloring! HTH!

What is funny about this question is that my dd (7th) is finishing up Traditional Logic 2 and then we were going to do the Critical Thinking series! I am by NO means an expert on logic curriculum, but the reason we started TL was because it seemed easier somehow, it was more of a study of pure logic rather than relate the logic to everyday life. Which, now that I said it out loud seems very backwards:glare: I have no experience at all with Introductory/Intermediate Logic, I apologize, but TL was very straightforward and easy to follow, dd never complained and with some exposure already to some of the terms, I cannot imagine there would be a problem for you guys! Although, for some mysterious reason I cannot remember, after looking through the book, I had decided to wait until 9th grade to start Material Logic. HTH!

:iagree: A third for Zinn's book and a second for Lies!Both of these books are very readable and offered a POV that really added to the standard textbook POV.

I was considering enrolling dd at a ps this year (7th), and I remember having this argument at one point about how Algebra I absolutely needed to come from their school system to count in high school. After what seemed like forever, I realized it was not that she needed it to enroll in whatever class she was going to take, but she needed it to be "real" so that it would count towards her four years of math, like Nan was saying. After I figured out this was where the communication difficulties were, I told them it would not be a problem, and they could pretend she had no incoming math credits, as long as she was placed appropriately. They then told me that they could not accommodate any math beyond Geometry at their campus, and we parted ways. And this was for their pilot gifted district program thingy. Now with Latin, though, does the high school offer enough Latin to accommodate him through 3, or even 4, more years? Has he already taken the placement exam? Different courses cover things at different times, so it may not be a terrible thing for him to repeat Latin 2?

I think calling it French Literature would be fine, if not downright interesting. I mean, you are going to be reading literature in French... Im not sure I would call it Conversational French because you will be doing more reading and writing than learning basic phrases. Will you already have French 1, 2 and 3 on the transcript? Plus, no matter what you call it, before he would be allowed to take any French classes in college, they would give him a placement test, even if you were planning on following up with an SAT-II or AP test. Heck, even if you were fresh off the boat from France, they would still want to conduct an interview before placement in upper-division courses. And even if his grammar is less than stellar now, after a few more years of writing and working on it, I would be willing to bet he would make huge strides. FWIW, my first semester of French Literature, we read out of an anthology of poems and plays (@1/wk) and the second semester we read short stories and two novels. I found it exceptionally interesting because it was a history-based literature analysis class that just happened to be conducted in French (which was a far cry from the bio/chem classes I was taking).

Fahrenheit 451 the movie was HORRIBLE, freaking CRIMINAL. :cursing: BUT, if you take a step back and accept that perhaps it was merely inspired by the book, rather than an adaptation of the book, it becomes just plain dull and pointless. Except for Mockingbird, which I thought was not a bad adaptation, the other movies, I have not seen, sorry!

Hi, Im not Nan (obviously), but I did just finish this book with dd. The part where The Captain goes off in his long lecture in the first part was SO thick, I almost lost her. It is a fabulous book and a great introduction to dystopia in literature, but I found that I needed to really give her a large background on the era in which the book was written and make sure that if she found something too thick, we could pull out and analyze it closer. However, as far as the original list goes, like the others, I highly recommend some Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov or even Heinlein. At this point, I really appreciate and love the "older" books, but when I was younger, I just could NOT make it through LOTR and anything written before 1900 was SO boring I would not even pick the book up. Of course, just to contradict me, dd reads that stuff for fun :glare: I picked up a version of Jekyll and Hyde that included some of Stevenson's other short stories and they are really quite good, although Im not sure that they would be considered science fiction. But you cannot go wrong with counting Gulliver's Travels or Jules Verne as early science fiction, plus the history in those books are amazing!

I always though that Spanish was regionally considered the easiest language because we hear it most often and are attuned to it. Im not sure that this would be true in an Creole speaking area, or in Maine. Plus, like Mabelen said, aside from the sounds, German may actually be easier due to its grammatical construction. I have to admit I thought that my background in Spanish would make it much easier in college, but the upper-division classes were DIFFICULT. The nuances were enough to make my head spin. Plus, there are so many countries with so many different accents...:ack2: I will tell you that for me, each language I learned got easier, because I knew what to expect and how to learn it. HOWEVER, my first semester of Japanese, I had a teacher that used his own materials and presented everything VERY different than any other language class I had taken. I had to leave him and find a "normal" teacher!

I really think that after some exposure to Italian, she could go either way. However, the pronunciation would be most similar to Spanish. I speak Spanish and French very well and, interestingly enough, can fumble my way through an Italian movie or book. Im not sure I could actually speak it, but I can understand most of it because it is so close to both languages!

There is GiftedHomeSchoolEdMaterials, which is a yahoo group. I have seen some really interesting things go through there!

I am looking for a program that allows me to design and put flashcards onto an mp3 player, such as flashmybrain.com, but I have heard nothing but bad things about that program! It does not need to specifically be for an mp3 player, I can convert files as necessary. I suppose I could make a movie, but would rather have something that randomly cycled through the "cards" Anyone use them, or have a recommendation? TIA!