We're not always sure exactly what is going on in both of them, but that leads to some interesting discussions. Generally, we're enjoying them. The youngest is reading The Hobbit for fun and the older one some sort of male escape literature. The younger one is reading Number the Stars for history. The older one is also reading a non-fiction book about the historical basis for Dracula, which he read this summer and enjoyed (except when it dragged) and doing his junior research paper on. And I'm reading the last Harry Potter in French (taking me a bit of time), a book on transcripts and portfolios, Et si c'etait ca, le bonheur?, Making Watercolour Sing, one of my beloved Patricia McKillips, and as a before sleep book, Pride and Prejudice (for the umpteenth time).

Well, I'm impressed by Maus! It is highly thought of in my extended family. And it is too good for me to read. -Nan

You probably already know this, but I would have found this post helpful when I was planning, so I wanted to post this, just in case it helps someone. Here are some things to remember when you are making the decision to homeschool high school: You don't have to give grades. Yes, it might be easier for colleges to assess your child if you do, but there are ways around that. You can present a portfolio, instead of grades. Or you can assign courses a pass or fail. Or if you decide you do need grades, you can assign them any way you want; it is your school. You can make a rubric with clear expectations for each assignment and have your child fill it out himself. Or you can decide that whatever grade your child gets on the excersizes, that is his grade. You can decide to give a final, or have the child do a final assignment that demonstrates what should have been learned and grade just that and use that grade for the year. Or you can grade on effort alone. Someone had a nice rubric for this one - post and ask for it if you want to do this. Or you can, without giving any grades during the course, give a grade at the end based on how well you think the child mastered the material, something like this: A- understands all the material well and independently applies it to new situations; B - understands most of the material and can apply it independently to new situations some of the time; C - understands most of the material and applies it independently to familiar situations; D - understands most of the material but has trouble applying it; F - only partially understands the material and can't apply it. That could probably be worded better, but you get the idea. If you are using a pre-written curriculum, then you can alter the grading scheme if you choose. You could add in lots of extra credit problems, or drop the worst test grade, or give the tests untimed and open book. I am not grading, and I have had a number of people here tell me that there children got into college without them. Just be sure you have some other way for colleges to assess your child, like outside courses, community college classes, a portfolio, or standardized test scores. And be sure you include review, even if you aren't testing. Don't forget about rubrics. These are great even if you aren't grading. Ask people to post writing ones and choose one to use. They make talking to a child about his work much easier because it makes it feel less like you are criticizing to the child. (I apologize for spelling mistakes.) You can even make these for whole courses in order to spell out the goals of the course beforehand. For literature, they could be something like: must read 8 literary works, must write a paper or do a project for 5 of them, must do a history background for each, must discuss each using TWEM questions, must read the genre section of TWEM for each if haven't done it yet this year, must put the book on a timeline, must summarize each chapter, must read independently (and just read) 3 more works. (This is approximately ours for a year of great books.) You can design your own courses. You don't have to buy a curriculum for each subject. You can even combine subjects. Look at a few other syllabi for similar courses, or the NARS guidelines, or ask people about Carnegie hours, then make up your own syllabus (see my example above). You can use whatever materials you want. Check out National Geographic's site on projects for geography or get TWTM method for using a spine (like the logic stage history and science). I decided that I wanted every subject to have an academic componant, so if I want to count travel as a class, then I add in some reading and writing, but many people count things that made their child learn without adding in the academic componant, like an internship. You don't have to do your courses all in one year. You can work on something sporadically over several years, and then smush it all together into one course. Or you can spend all day on a subject for two months (or something) until it is done and count that. You can organize the traditional transcript by subject instead of by year, or do a non-traditional transcript of some sort. A simple way to keep track of everything is to get a notebook, divide it into subjects leaving room for subjects that might crop up later, and then anytime you do something, record it under that subject. You can put it together into subjects at the end of high school, although you should be keeping track to make sure you are indeed covering the basic requirements, whatever you have decided those should be. You don't want to get to senior year and discover you don't have enough social studies for the required number of credits. You don't have to teach everything yourself for it to count. In fact, it can be an advantage to outsource some things. As teenagers grow older, their world needs to get bigger. Bigger can be outside of school-type subjects, like a job or volenteer work or travel, or it can be inside school by outsourcing. Some people outsource the whole thing at the end by sending their child to community college the last year or two. Just be careful not to dump an unprepared child into deep water without teaching them to swim first. We're doing one or two classes, to begin with. Outsourcing can be a good way to cover those things that don't lend themselves well to homeschooling, like lab sciences or foreign languages, or things that you don't feel competent to teach, or things that cause hurt feelings when a parent teaches them, like writing. Many, many people outsource writing. There are online classes. Some people do these all the way through high school and don't even try to teach writing themselves. Math. Public school kids get to watch a teacher demonstrate problems and talk about math for 45 minutes 5 times a week, and then they go home to do about an hour of homework. Make sure you compare that amount of time spent on math with the amount you spend on math. Math is one of those cumulative things that are hard to make up later. And from another recent post: I have periodic fits of panic when I think we're not doing enough. I found it helped to spell out why I was homeschooling. Definately not academic excellence, in my case. If you are after that, then I can't help you GRIN. But there are many other reasons to homeschool, like family closeness or passing on your values or culture or religion. In my case, I'm homeschooling my older one so he stays sweet, and I'm trying to give my younger one a chance to do academics at his own mix of levels, and be efficient about it so he has time to pursue his own interests, from which I can see he is learning a lot. In both those cases, I can do a very bad job of educating my children and still accomplish those goals, as long as I don't push them too hard. Constantly reminding myself of this helps keep the panic at bay. I guess this requires that you put something else before academic education, but if you can do that, then you can procede with more confidence. Don't panic if your 8th grader isn't ready for college right now. Four years is a long time. Think back to what they were like when they were in 4th grade. They don't stop growing just because they are in high school. I hope this helps someone. -Nan

and my children, who ARE actually rather odd, are being made even odder by my bad decisions or laziness or something. I have periodic fits of panic when I think we're not doing enough. I found it helped to spell out why I was homeschooling. Definately not academic excellence, in my case. If you are after that, then I can't help you GRIN. But there are many other reasons to homeschool, like family closeness or passing on your values or culture or religion. In my case, I'm homeschooling my older one so he stays sweet, and I'm trying to give my younger one a chance to do academics at his own mix of levels, and be efficient about it so he has time to pursue his own interests, from which I can see he is learning a lot. In both those cases, I can do a very bad job of educating my children and still accomplish those goals, as long as I don't push them too hard. Constantly reminding myself of this helps keep the panic at bay. I guess this requires that you put something else before academic education, but if you can do that, then you can procede with more confidence. -Nan

I have multiple reasons, not of which have anything to do with the level of Singapore math compared with the level of other typical homeschooling programs. Singapore teaches word problem solving in a nice visual way that makes algebra easier later. The word problems are worded such a way that it makes it hard to solve the problem unless you really understand how the math works. Singapore ties everything together in a unified way. Much of the problem solving is framed as a ratio, which matches my experience with real life and science. Geometry and algebra are taught in a mix, which makes math seem less like a group of unrelated algorithms and more like a tool box from which you select a tool to solve a problem. Multiple solutions are discussed constantly. It is very applied, which is important for my children, and always demonstrates that a rule works when the rule is first presented. It doesn't rely on memorization but on understanding. It was designed for a younger child (and one of mine is younger). It was designed for a mixed classroom of both slower and quicker children, so it doesn't "top out". Each problem set contains lots of problems which will challenge the brighter students, as well as more ordinary problems, and a few which will challenge a very bright one. Because all of these are included in every lesson, my children get to do hard problems in the lessons that come easily to them without having to struggle with a curriculum that was written above their level for the rest of the lessons. My math-struggling oldest happens to be a whiz at those geometry problems where you have to use your angle rules to find an unknown angle. With Singapore, he actually has a few problems that challenge him in those lessons, while he seldom gets the starred problems in the rest of the lessons. There are also lenthy puzzle-type problems at the end of every chapter that I think are important for teaching problem solving strategies. Singapore teaches from the top down, which is important for my children, and isn't wordy, which we would hate. HTH -Nan

I second the Heuer and Cohen books, and for study skills, I like a book about older students going to college (can't remember the name at the moment). It has SHORT, very succinct section on how to study.

I have three who did/do gymnastics. My oldest is 20 now. He did poorly at ps, but now that he is working, I can see that he did indeed learn all those self-discipline skills that are so necessary as an adult and appear to be so lacking in the schoolwork of some teenagers. I think he learned it in gymnastics. I don't particularly care where mine learn it, as long as they do. I would try not to worry too much. If he can succeed somewhere and apply self discipline somewhere in his life, he'll be able to apply that to more of his life when he is more grown up. At least that's what I've observed... -Nan

I like TWTM because it is half way between unschooling and school. It has figured out where the curriculum has to be tight and specifically taught to get ahead, and where loose and exploratory is a better approach. It efficiently cuts down the taught subjects to only those necessary to leave you time for the interest-centered-ness of unschooling the rest of the subjects, and it suggests a method of doing the more unschooling part that helps the child grow academically and intellectually. My children and I aren't very academically minded, so I don't have to worry about intellectual snobbery GRIN, only (usually in the middle of the night) about whether we are doing enough and I'm letting them down. TWTM works very well for those of us who are non-academic, too. -Nan

TWTM showed me how to take advantage of homeschooling's flexability in a way that works. It doesn't assume that my children will just naturally "get" how to write if they write occasionally, and things like that. It specifically teaches skills. And it isn't bound to textbooks for the other things. It showed me how to make up my own curriculum, one that suits each particular child, something very necessary, especially if you have one who isn't a whiz at the academics. Many of the specific recommendations in TWTM I'm not using, but the method is great for designing a not-too-much-work-for-the-parent, totally individualized education for your child. -Nan

I haven't read the article, so perhaps it is unfair that I comment, but I do have an older child who has been doing great books with TWTM/TWEM, and I am finding that great books has given him the balance and perspective to hold his own in the modern world. We didn't set out to do a classical education. I began TWTM because it assumed I had a reading but not writing first grader and the reading lists for the grammar stage matched my family's traditional reading list. Then we just sort of continued. I did great books because ancients were far more suitable for my boys than To Kill a Mockingbird or Lord of the Flies, and TWTM had so far had a rather uncanny way of being just the right thing education-wise, even if I didn't think it was going to be. I could see that TWEM was working beautifully to grow and stretch my children and make them thoughtful beings, so we continued. The reading has been very applicable to my son's peace activism and has allowed me to not worry too much what else he is exposed to. Some people have some pretty wacko ideas out there and it is nice when my son can say to himself, "Well, that won't work because..." or "the problem with that point of view is that it doesn't take into account..." If nothing else, great books has allowed us to talk and talk and talk about life, and it has given him a rich basis of stories for entertainment and to create out of and draw conclusions from and make comparisons to. I'm very glad we chose to do them. I accidentally seem to have chosen a really good sort of education for us. And at 17, I can say with conviction that it worked. I can't imagine a situation in which it would be a disadvantage to have read The Republic rather than Cold Mountain (which my older son read in ps). -Nan

TWTM, slowly, aloud together, using TWEM.

You may not like my solutions. I have a super high tolerance for wrong answers GRIN and when I'm not totally despairing, it doesn't really bother me if my son gets 2/3 of the questions wrong, as long as he understands what he did wrong. We use Singapore for math, and Keys to Algebra. This may not be the best, but it is very applied and has definately "fixed" my child's mathematical thinking, so we've stuck with it. He is in 11th grade now and doing NEM3. We use Ecce Romani for Latin. *I* learn well with this, and if I learn well, then I can teach it. I understand the grammar explainations, which don't assume that I know any English grammar, there are enough excersizes that we have half a chance of catching on by the end (even though there aren't enough to actually memorize the material - for that we use try to use flashcards, or more likely, the charts and dictionary at the back of the book), and a huge biggy if I'm doing the teaching, it isn't boring. It is reading based and teaches top down, which drives lots of people crazy but suits us just fine. I don't care if when answering the questions about the story the children don't give grammatically correct answers. They are using the new grammar and I know that it will explain how to do it next. The idea is to get them familiar with the material, see it and use it a little, then explain it. For my top-down learner, this is good. If I try to explain the details first, he can't retain them long enough to put them together into the big picture. Saxon math didn't work for this reason. For logic stage history, we did Kingfisher with outlining, skipping the timeline which was too time consuming and the reports. I told him to ignore the paragraph structure of the text and organize the outline any way he pleased. As long as I did this, he could outline. Before that, he struggled. I only occasionally checked his outlines. I had him fill in the maps in the map outline book in TWTM. We did the Klutz geography book. We read quite a few library books together (History of Everyday Things and Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt were favourites), and he read Early Times Greek, Roman, and Medieval, and Hakim to himself. He just read them. We didn't have time to do anything else. Now he is reading Spielvogel's Western Civ to himself. I have to say that this loose method of doing history seems to have worked. I'm not saying he would do ok on the SAT2 or anything, but he knows lots of history and applies it to his literature, science, and everyday life very well. He also doesn't hate it and so he will probably continue to enjoy reading history articles in National Geographic and Smithsonian for the rest of his life. He did lots of projects, like making arrows. The children thought up their own. As they read, they would find something they wanted to try. For geography, he travels, we listened to The Teaching Company's cultural anthropology tapes, and he will eventually do the colouring book recommended in TWTM. For government, he is a peace activist, which gives him quite a bit of hands-on experience. We are listening to the TC government tapes Power to the People (or something like that). Hopefully somewhere along the lines he will read the Idiot's Guide (these work well as overviews). And he will read some of the foundation documents in great books. Reading The Republic (took us a whole fall) and discussing it also played into this. And he read the Uncle Eric books, three of them. I don't think he remembers much from Penny Candy. For writing we've done a mix of things. We did Writing Strands 3-7, mostly. Then we did a punctuation workbook, a proofreading workbook, worked with Powerful Paragraphs and Jensen's Format Writing, and some other things. Mostly, I tried to have him write something every day. Considering that when I brought him home in 5th grade he cried when he had to write a sentence, I think he's doing great. His handwriting is awful, but I think it just is. Same with his spelling. Spelling books didn't seem to help, so I gave up and concentrated on teaching him some basic rules. This seemed to help a lot more than learning words. He did VfCR A+B. He liked this and I wish we could have continued, but there wasn't time. Latin will have to help him here. The workbooks, which might have been REM ones?, definately helped. There is an outline one, and a paragraphs one that if he had been younger when I found them I would have had him do. I thought he was a lamb to do the proofreading one at 16 without squawking. For logic, he struggled through Introductory Logic. I now know that we are better off teaching logic through geometry in this family. The thinking skills are the same, I think. We did Fallacy Detective aloud together and that was very helpful. I spent quite a lot of time getting him to speak coherently. We began with retelling folk tales and moved on to retelling Science News articles. Both were fun. The story telling has been a very useful skill, well worth the effort. For English, we are doing great books with TWEM. If you search my past posts on the old board, you can find the details of that. This has been a major reason for his academic growth, I think. Doing it very slowly together actually works! You don't have to read tons of books to get results. For science, he did MODG's Natural History Syllabus with extra reading and projects. Keeping a nature journal was great for him. So was trying to answer the questions about his reading. He got his ham license and did the anatomy, cell, and chemistry sections of Prentice Hall's Biology book. This is where he learned to read a section and answer textbook questions. He began by taking 2 hours to do a section and ended with taking 20 minutes. I thought the bio book was rather nice, but I got it at the dump swap shop so there might be better choices out there. He did The Anatomy Colouring Book and made up some experiments. We used the science museum's microscopes and did some activities. His gymnastics made him interested in anatomy and he suggested it. For drawing, he did Draw Squad in the logic stage, then Artistic Pursuits and MODG's Natural History syllabus, then a CC class. I also let him draw instead of write a whole lot. For music, we learned lots of sea chanties, did Patterns of Sound, and he is now taking piano lessons. He does gymanstics. And he peace walks. And I think that is about it. The textbooks we've used aren't perfect (Jensen's is AWFUL) and I've had to adapt everything heavily, but they seem to have worked. Mostly, I've just adapted TWTM methods to suit us. That approach seems to have worked really well for him and taught me how to teach without having a spelled-out curriculum. The experiment isn't over yet, though. I'll be able to tell you next Christmas much better how it all works out. -Nan

I think a lot of the pressure came off when we finally figured out what my middle child WAS good at, other than being a sweetheart. Obviously it wasn't conventional academics, although he had flashes here and there that made me wonder if he was going to excell at one of the more obscure subjects like topology or astrophysics/philosophy or something that take years and years of academics to get to. But as he's grown older, it became more obvious where his talents lie, and these are so awsome that we're no longer worried about him. He himself has gone from refusing to think about growing up to coming up with several very good options for further education and a career and his contribution to the world. And everyone he gets near seems to love him so much and think he's such a great, talented person that they offer to teach him how to do what they do to make a living, everything from tree work to plumbing to crew on a fishing boat to tourguide. Any of those options would probably work, too, although I'd prefer that he get some more education first. I'm really glad now that I let him go out into the world a bit and mix with other adults, and that I didn't push for independent academics at home, just made sure he was continuing to learn. The combination has allowed him to gain maturity and confidence in the area he WAS good at, and that has spilled over somewhat into the area where he struggled and helped him along. This was a really hard decision at the time. Shouldn't we make him do more academics because he needs extra work in that area? But that takes time away from the things he could be doing that he might be better at? We made the decision to allow him to spend the time developing a talent and becoming very good at something, rather than putting the time into academics, at which we thought he would be mediocre at best. We decided he just wouldn't be able to spell or punctuate, probably, and would need to get someone to edit his writing for the rest of his life. We decided that he would probably always read slowly, but made sure he could read well enough to read a textbook and read for enjoyment. We decided that he would never have the history dates down, but wanted him to have some sense of perspective, so we let him just read history rather than answer questions and memorize facts. We decided he would never be able to make a speech, but we put time into making sure he could tell a story fairly well (that seeming like an important adult skill). Then he surprised us by deciding to take speech in community college because it sounded useful, and getting an A in it. Now we're not so sure that the academics won't be much better than we thought. I knew he would be a late bloomer, but somehow I forgot that the word "bloom" is included in the phrase. So I vote that you don't give up on the academics, in case your child is a late bloomer rather than a non-bloomer, and that you let them pursue other interests, especially those that mix them with the community, so they can bloom elsewhere, if not in school. -Nan

I know that doesn't help your scheduling problems now, but it might be comforting. When he finished 8th grade, I told my older son that he had to be more independent and learn more on his own. He got all sad and begged me just to keep doing school the way we always had. At first, I was worried about the lack of independent learning. He sure wouldn't be doing things the way everyone else here seemed to be. After a while, though, I remembered that *I* hadn't learned that way at his age. I sat in class with the teacher telling me what to do, and then I came home and my mother helped me with English and my father with math and science. I'm very good at math, but my father did my homework with me almost every day all the way through high school. I was in the high math class, and almost all my classmates had engineering fathers, too, who did their math with them, or at least were available to help every evening. When I got to college, I had no trouble doing my math on my own, so it didn't make me dependent. I just happened to understand my father's explainations better than either the teacher's or the books, and my father was patient and didn't mind spending the time with me. He's doing the same with my oldest, now, for which I am incredibly grateful. Oldest is 20 and taking a refresher math course before going to college and we all know that there is no way he would sit down and do it at the end of a long day's work without company. Nobody thinks this will handicap him later. We just think that it is important to get the foundations laid well so he can build on it later on his own. He was in public school and we didn't help him with the foundations the first time round, a mistake we're trying to fix now. But I'm meandering in my effort to give you examples. Getting back to the children I'm homeschooling, my older child, while intelligent enough, isn't good at academics, so I said ok and just continued to teach him his Latin and math (particularly) and read his literature aloud with him. I solved the scheduling-more-than-one-child problem by teaching his younger brother along with him for great books and Latin and science. The younger one does piano and French while I do math with the older one, then the older one does piano and history reading (which he is doing on his own) and/or writing while I do math with the younger one. This solution probably won't work with you, but I found that even with a 4 year difference between them, as unlikely as it sounds, it was easy to do. I just expect a lower level of output from the younger child. I suppose you could say that I did "give up" on the older one a bit when I decided it wouldn't hurt him to have his brother included in the things he was learning, since it definately means we go a bit slower and cover the basics a bit more, but I think that is good for this particular older one. Meanwhile, I switched to doing math and Latin twice a day. They have "homework" in the evening, even if it is just a few problems or sentences. That makes them see the subject twice a day, which improved retention, and gives them the opportunity to work on their own. I'm usually too busy to help with homework. If they can't figure it out, we tackle it together the next day. At least they've tried, though. It also means that they need to keep a schedule book, which is good practice. I with them fought them (and in the case of the younger one, am still fighting) to get them to use it for several years before it sank in, but it was worth it. This is getting long, and I'm sorry because I don't know how useful it will be to you. I just want to encourage you to keep working with your daughter. I put what I felt was a disproportionate amount of time into my son, and during those high school years (he's a junior now), he developped hugely! He is doing an online writing class totally on his own now, and even managed some easy CC classes last semester! He developped some interests and passions. I still teach him some subjects, but some he has managed to do on his own! When I think how far he has come since mid-way through 9th grade, I can't believe it! I just let him keep getting lots wrong and kept going, rather than trying to find material where he would get more problems right. I don't grade. I did make a few modifications. Because he was so slow to get anything done, I decided to let him get his grammar through our Latin. Latin takes longer this way, but not as long as grammar and Latin separately would have. I continued to work on writing as a separate subject. I made sure that his math was applied, very applied, so he would get it more easily and it wouldn't seem a waste of his time when he looked back on the several hours a day he spent on it when he was grown up. I had him just read history on his own and put our effort into doing literature together because we simply don't have time to do both. His writing, which I totally despaired of, has improved to the point where I expect he will survive his CC composition class this spring. He used to take 2 hours to write a paragraph. It just turned out that he grew tons during high school. I hope this encourages you some. I felt like I was neglecting my younger son, but a few years of "reading something school-like" while I dealt with his older brother doesn't seem to have hurt him. If anything, it has made him more independent and creative and full of odd bits of knowledge from all those library books he's read. This is a complete mishmash and way too long. Sorry. Hopefully there are a few kernals of useful or comforting stuff in amongst. -Nan

In my older one's case, we are skipping biology altogether. He did natural history for two years of high school (and all the previous homeschooling years), with ham radio and a not very high level human anatomy course squeezed in, and then Conceptual Physics, and next year he'll do chem at the CC. Then he says he'll take biology in college. By then he'll have the background for it. I'll do the same thing with my younger one, although because he is more interested in science, he may get to biology his senior year of CC. Or he may want to leave his living creatures whole and stick to chem and physics and natural history. I'm hoping the lack of a biology course doesn't cause problems with college admissions. -Nan

It is wild that we are finding so many of these things in my lifetime. I hope it means we are more open minded than previous generations. I have a horrid suspition that it just means that we are more connected. But I guess that is the beginnings of being open minded. Enjoy! http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/moving_big_rocks (And I can't seem to figure out how to unbold this. Sorry. I'm not shouting, really.) -Nan

The hands-on part is really important, but for most children, it can't all be hands-on. Most children will have trouble correllating the concepts with their experiences unless they receive some help. This is where the work for the mother comes in. It is easier for me to do this with natural history than narrower subjects like physics, so with physics, we're doing a textbook. Well, we're doing a textbook along with anything else they think of. For chemistry, I'm sending them to cc LOL. But my experience (and hence my desire not to teach it) with chemistry is what we are trying to avoid. When I took chemistry, I just didn't "get" it. I got A's easily, but it didn't seem to have anything to do with real life (other than renaming things like salt or pointing out that ice melts, something I knew before I took chemistry), and I didn't retain any of it. It wasn't until we began doing natural history that I realized that chemistry is at the bottom of everything else. I'm hoping that when my children take chemistry, their years of natural history will keep them from having the same problem. I ought to teach it myself and make it real as we go, but I just plain don't want to. It is probably worth giving some thought to which activities are a demonstration, an experiment, a curiosity, taking a principle and designing an experiment to demonstrate it, giving a child a series of activities meant to force them to come up with the underlying principle themselves (sometime a good idea and sometimes forcing them to reinvent the wheel), aquiring science vocabulary, or aquiring science skills (usually familiarity with measuring devices of various types), and making sure the child knows which they are doing so they know why. I don't mean to make doing your own science sound more complicated than it really is; I just want to point out that many times an activity is meant only as a curiosity or to learn some science skills, and you need to have more than that if you want to do a mostly hands-on science. That would take some careful planning. If you are mixing reading and hands-on, it is much easier. That wasn't very clear, but hopefully you can figure out what I mean. The activity is more meaningful if the activity is designed to make the child come up with a principle for themselves (difficult) or the activity comes after the principle has been explained (fairly easy but may seem like a waste of time to a teenager unless they came up with the idea themselves) or the activity has a real life purpose, like saving the life of a bird. HTH -Nan

We did Natural History for 2 years, using MODG's syllabus as the basis and adding in lots of extra projects and reading. Natural history is fun, applied, local, and lends itself very, very well to "make up your own science". Just don't be surprised if in the process you discover that you wish your own knowledge of chemistry were better GRIN. I had to borrow my sister's biology book in order to explain certain things, and I called my mother and sister (bio majors) over and over to get them to explain things to me so I could explain them to the children. There are many fun real books out there. If you make your own course, no matter what subject you pick, you will be able to read them. It is always better, I think, to teach your children how to make their own experiments and keep a lab notebook. That isn't very complicated and children are much more interested in science if they try the things they want to try. My older one has been waiting for the lake to freeze solidly enough that he try to correlate the force of his bow and the distance of his arrows. We're doing physics this year with a textbook, but he is used to making his own experiments, so we've done a number of them. The egg drop was particularly fun. We did ham radio one semester. And we did human anatomy another. I sort of made up both of those. For anatomy, we did a few experiments, The Anatomy Coloring Book, and the anatomy sections of Prentice Hall's Bio textbook. We did an electrical kit, read "Now You're Talking", and got our ham licenses for the ham radio one. Lots of homeschoolers do this. Most of the people on this board use textbooks for science so you aren't getting an accurate picture of homeschooling science in general. If you are labelling something like biology or chemistry, then you probably want to check a high school textbook to make sure you are covering all the bits. -Nan

I'm in Mass. ;)

Have you looked at Singapore's NEM? I wouldn't suggest starting there, necessarily, but NEM1 is a combination of pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry. It has some fun problems at the end of every chapter like: In a chess tournament, each competitor is to play with every other competitor once only. If there are 12 players, how many games are played? This year, a man's age is a multiple of 3. Next year, his age will be a multiple of 5. The year after next, his age will be a multiple of 13. Find his age. Mary has 20 cups of pecans. She wants to make as many fruit cakes as she can with the pecans. Each cake requires 2 1/4 cups of pecans. After making the cakes, how many cups of pecans will she have left? (Just a few examples) It is written for a younger child (7th grade). Each chapter begins with a comic. The mix of algebra and geometry keeps it from getting too heavy. You get to practise the algebra when you do the geometry. There is a lot of construction in the geometry, which makes it fun. You get to draw things with your protractor and ruler and triangles and compass. There are sections on symmetry which have you cutting paper, tessellations, and scaling maps up and down. Definately not dry math. It explains the whys and talks about how there are many right ways to do a problem. Definately more interesting than a college math book GRIN. -Nan

We have a horizontal and vertical goal, also. I want mine to be able to read Latin and speak a modern language. They don't have to be fluent before they leave me. If they have the basics, they can aquire the fluency later just by reading (or speaking). I've made them promise to read a book a year, even if it is just an Astrix, in their other languages as adults, so they won't lose them. Then, any time in the future that they want to revive the language, they just have to read a few more books, dictionary in hand, and the fluency will come. -Nan

I forgot to add - At the time, I thought his teeth were probably moving and making him uncomfortable. Now I'm wondering if the highstrungness is something like sensory integration problems (about which I know nothing). Perhaps you could show your son how to sew in a fake tag of rag? It wouldn't require high level sewing skills and if he did it himself, you wouldn't be bothered by it. You could cut up one of the most ragged teeshirts for the fake tags. -Nan

We cut the tags out, too, but we bought a new batch of shirts because the old new batch a week later were just too awful to wear. And I'm totally not picky about things like this. Strangers comments about mice were beginning to get to me, though, perhaps because some of my older son's shirts had identical looking holes in them because he would throw up (carsick - stress - strange food - ...) and we would throw the yucky clothes on the deck until I could get to scraping them off and putting them through the washing machine, and the racoon would come and do part of the job for me. Anyway, when I gave him the new shirts I told him no chewing and this was his solution. Almost every aspect of our everyday lives has been modified somehow to make the children more comfortable. I guess I must have been pretty successful because nobody, even our close extended family, knew how high strung my children were until they sort of exploded as teenagers because they insisted on managing themselves and they didn't do as good a job as I had. I'm all for making small changes like this to make everyone comfortable GRIN. It doesn't exactly make for children who are like everyone else, though. -Nan

When I forbid my son to do this because his shirts were becoming rags a few days after we bought them, he ingeniously turned them inside out and backwards and chewed on the tag instead. This worked fine until he outgrew it. I recommend it. ;) -Nan

I guess I should add that we are doing TWEM, which lets us do whatever we want, even scifi, in whatever order we want. -Nan