I love our "homeschool room". When we were looking for a house, my DH and I agreed that the best/largest room in the house will be our living room, as in the room where we spend the most of our time. The house is 1921 Mediterranean, and the living room is lovely, albeit a little dark. It has two huge desks (one for DH, one for me and 2 kids), plus a "library wall" with three built-in "library desk" one for each of us. It also has a huge fireplace and two loveseats for when we have guests or just want to cuddle and read something together. The loveseats and the fireplace between them is the only thing you see from the entrance, so it is good, too :) Is it a pinterest material? Not sure. If I spend those 3 hours Garga mentioned, I would be proud to show it, but I am not sure it would be everyone's cup of tea, As I said, it is pretty dark, with black/darkbrown furniture and not child-friendly looking at all. But we love it :)

I went to school in Russia. Math classes followed the general curriculum (I don't really remember now, but I think it stopped at about precalculus level). The differentiation was done during tests. My teacher had 16 versions of the same test, each pair of levels harder than the next (so 8 levels of difficulty). So for me it was like studying math by a regular public school textbook and taking a test from the challenging problem section of AOPS. Given that the standard practice was 1 mistake = 1 grade down, 3 mistakes = fail, it was interesting. When i complained once that I got 4 for the same exact work as my friend, who got 5, I was told that for me it was a 4-level work, while for her it was a 5. She did change my friend's grade to 4 though, but we both remembered the lesson. That teacher would probably be fired in no time in the USA for her manners and style, but math was and still is my favorite subject, and many of my classmates, even those who hated her during school, went back after the college entrance exams to thank her. Physics was OK, Chemistry was atrocious. Biology was average, but I was on the Olympiad team, so we were given free reign during classes and often spent them alone in the adjacent teacher's room in the company of the dusty lab equipment. The subject I knew best is biology, but I also went to a biology club which produced All-Russian biology Olympiad winners. I went to study economics in college, but it had nothing to do with my school teachers.

Probably more than I should. :) And with my oldest going to 9th grade, I probably already have enough at home to teach through all high school, if not part of college, :blushing: (OK, I would need some more higher level math books. Somehow buying calculus books when she studies algebra doesn't feel right, but calculus-based physics is fair game.) Now I am mostly researching different ways to teach and how they relate to my particular students. Sometimes it relates to curricula, sometimes it is separate. It's is still research and a huge time-sink. I tell myself that at the moment it is my hobby :)

I am sure it is!

I think it is pretty normal? At least I tell myself that. I recently started fencing, and sometimes (well, often) it is hard to get the movement right, even after it is explained and demonstrated by other people. I think, at least in my case, it comes from trying to control many things at once, my hand, wrist, footwork plus pay attention to whatever the other person is doing. It is a lot like driving. At first, you have to think about the wheel, pedals, lights, other cars, your speed, etc, and it is overwhelming. After a while, it all becomes automatic. Some people can be better with dealing with this kind of stuff, but I still like to think it is normal :)

I agree. My mom recently told me, roughly translated "yeah, it's a shame your daughter inherited your weirdness," when I told her that two years after bringing her home, she started opening up and finally looks like a happy child. Only it sounded worse than weirdness...

People totally need different amount of interaction. Just as not all people need other real-life adult interaction to feel intellectually challenged. So, I don't find it offensive when people say that they can't imagine staying home all day. It is their need. In my case, staying at home gave me time to think about things I never had time to think when I worked. I have time to learn new stuff, another thing I couldn't do when I worked. I know some people can, but I couldn't manage it on top of housework and time spent with my husband. Besides, I am more intellectually challenged as a SAHM, because anything new happening at work didn't give me challenge for more then a week. It was routine, even developing new things was routine. I need change gears completely to feel intellectually stimulated and challenged. At home I can dive into writing a novel one month, learning a foreign language another, then switching to planning a trip to Europe and researching the history of all the places I want to visit. Every now and then I stop to make sure my homeschool is on track, make some plans, devote some time to going through the material I don't remember from my own school time, and then spend time researching techniques of epee fencing. The moment I feel that whatever I am doing at the moment is not challenging, I feel depressed. That is the time when I stop and change gears. It usually takes a few days or even weeks, but I feel that it is a challenge in itself. Often I return to something I already did (like that novel), but it is always on a new level. I don't tell people how being chained to a workplace would turn my brain to mush, even if it is the truth and my own valid experience. I can honestly understand the need in socialization, but I do not understand why people feel the need to tell me I need other adults to challenge me more that I can do myself (That is something I was told in RL, not a reference to anything said here.) By the way, the worst offender here is my mom, who grew up with a SAHM, and now considers the looming retirement as the worst thing that could happen to a person.

I definitely feel judged when I say I am a SAHM. I am seriously tired of hearing that staying with your children all day is way too boring for those ladies and they would go nuts if forced to do it. I usually don't say that I find the company of my children preferable to theirs. As for the clean house... My mom couldn't stand any signs of actual human life in her house. I swore I would never put such stress on my family. I may have gone a little too far the other way...

Thanks! Well, I guess we now can only hope that my DD likes it.

I am curious what grade-level classes are you talking about? Looking at descriptions, classes for younger students don't look as challenging as those for middle and high schoolers, even with an adjustment for age. My DD is going to a CTY camp this summer where it is described pretty much as a college course and it is offered to students 7 grade and up. It sounds pretty challenging to me. I am pretty sure you are not the only one disappointed. Unfortunately, it's hard to find reviews of these courses and most of them are not detailed, mostly just one word, usually "liked" or "loved", which leaves me suspicious :) So, thank you for offering another opinion!

I am another INTP who wouldn't love a ready-to-go curriculum :) I am totally unable to follow a recipe without tweaking something. I see glimpses of myself in other descriptions, but INTP goes for the most important one, so it does fit the best.

My DD13 loves puzzles. She gets at least one for Christmas and birthdays. Thanks to this thread, I just got her this one. This one was actually her first choice, and their prices were very close when I bought it, but upon careful measurement of her room, she chose "the small one". She is very visual-spacial, and has no organizing tendencies or capabilities outside her puzzle world. My son, on the other hand can spend a grand total of 2 minutes pretending he is helping, but he likes the rest of his life organized.

My son is in the division section of BA3C right now. He also didn't quite get it after the 2 pages BA spent on long division. I went to the math fact cafe site and printed a few sheets of long division problems. We went through a few, with explanations in all possible ways I could come up with, then he also watched some videos on Khan academy (I suspect that part was entirely to watch that and then quietly continue with programming videos, but that is another story :) ). I think he gets it now, so we moved on with BA. I am planning to give him a few long division problems every few days until I am sure he is solid with it.

She actually prefers 2-column proofs, because she hates writing. We are working on that in other classes, so I allowed her to use 2-colums with AOPS geometry, which teaches paragraph style. It made a difference between geometry being her favorite and most hated subject, and since 2 column proof is an acceptable form of proofs, I didn't push. I do require all steps mentioned and explained, including those that AOPS solution guide skips as obvious. Her computational skills are actually were her lowest subscores in ITBS, with whole number computations trailing far behind fractions and decimal computations. I don't understand how one can do computations with fractions without computations with whole numbers, but I have two years worth of tests to prove it. And she did fine with simpler equations that she could do in her head, although her reasoning was often not obvious to me. That is why Kathy's suggestion that there might be hidden dyslexia involved really rings a bell. Sometimes she looks at an equation and it feels like she has never seen anything like that before. She calls algebra Elvish. I ignored it before, thinking she was just being silly, but there might be more truth to it then I cared to admit. Maybe there are even moon runes involved :) I am not going to test her, as she still performs well enough not to need any accommodations for that, except maybe an advance apology for writing with excessive corrections, but at least I have a grounding point. Before it was total twilight zone for me, now it makes sense and I can deal with it.

I thought about that. I also suspect that a student who applies with those minimum required SAT scores and DE C's in transferable courses has about 0 chance of getting accepted to most of the campuses.

Thank you for your comments! Kathy, your post especially hit home. I recently started suspecting 2E, just couldn't place that second E. When she was a kid, I thought she was just bright, but in the normal range. She did have a small trouble starting to read. She learned Russian alphabet around 3, but wouldn't blend sounds. I didn't push, and she started reading sometime after English K. So pretty normal. Math was fine. She had and still has executive skills troubles. But the way she talked... I have a son who is ahead of her in many areas, but I feel that she is more gifted, just has to compensate for something. Stealth dyslexia plus dysgraphia symptoms sound eerily familiar although she compensates for many things they mention, such as spelling. I am pretty sure that if I ask her to spell a word she doesn't know/hasn't seen it written, it will be a disaster, but she never had to study for spelling tests. And dysgraphia is almost 100%. She always had aversion to writing anything down. If there is any hope of skipping a word, she will. For a long time she would try to do everything in her head. Now we are at the point when she writes scribbles consistently, and I started requiring her physics problems written out neatly all the way from given to answer. She doesn't like colored pencils, but the glittery gel pens are a total hit. Nothing like a page of physics problems in sparkly pink :) Still, she often has trouble writing down a word on the first try, so her writing is often messy because of all the corrected mistakes, but she knows her spelling. AOPS is working here. I started pre-algebra with her the summer after her disastrous 6th grade. It really helped with her ITBS scores (her school tested during the first few weeks of the year, just before I took her out in 7th grade), and she does fine with it, although I do sometimes have to explain thing to her in another way. We did have an episode of total wipe out of anything algebra-related from her brain this fall, so I sent her to master Alcumus. She did, and pretty fast, sometimes a few tasks a day. In general, her math has improved a lot since her 6 grade test when she was in 24 percentile for calculations, and from an outside perspective, she is doing fine, It's just I see that she struggles more than she should, given the rest of her abilities. It's kind of like she struggles in the wrong place. And thank you for the recommendation of CP book. She does pretty well with that and it might be just the morale boost she needs to break that "I am bad at math" mindset. I am a bit apprehensive about AOPS class, since it will require both algebra and writing, but I may start with a writing class next year. So, thank you once again. I feel much better now that I see that there might be more to it than just lack of attention.

I had dark circles often as a kid, and I don't have allergies, but do need higher than average sleep. I only started feeling human on 8 hours of sleep in the last couple of years. One thing that actually helped me not to feel totally exhausted was getting sufficient exercise regularly. Other than that, if there are no other health problems, let them sleep.

I was reading the thread below, and finally decided to ask the question that is on my mind more often than not. It was said in that thread that math is really logic. A few years ago I would have totally agreed with it. Now I have my DD13. I have never had her tested for giftedness/learning disabilities, and maybe I should have. Anyway, her brain definitely doesn't work "normally". She is very logical, she is strongly VSL, loves geometry, has no trouble with proofs, but only when I let her do two-columns as she hates writing. And she is terrible at algebra. Well, maybe not really terrible, but still it feels like she is missing a little something, and I can't tell what exactly that something is. It's almost like dyslexia when it comes to mathematical notations. Recently she was doing a problem, and while I do not remember the topic, she derived whatever formula she was supposed to be using. So she does understand it. The thing is, she was supposed to know that formula since prealgebra. She is also very slow. At some point I thought it might be processing speed, but during practice with CR sections of SAT she finished with at least 7 minutes to spare. And there you have to read it, keep it all in your brain, and then analyze it to answer the questions. So it can't be processing speed, right? Her long-term memory is fine, too, at least when it comes to other things, like noticing a mistake on a map that she looked at, not really studied, weeks ago, but remembering how to deal with parentheses after two years of regular review sessions, is apparently an insurmountable task. So, what does math take that she doesn't have? And how can I help her?

I still have days when I want to register my DD13 in the nearest public school :) Other days are spent trying to figure out how to tackle this whole highschool project. Current plans: Math: continue AOPS. It will probably be Algebra 2. Geometry is halfway done, but I am not sure, I may have her do UC Scouts Geometry or CC HS recovery credit class, which is individual and has a flexible schedule. This is entirely for UC system, Science: hopefully Intro to Chemistry in CC. We'll see how it goes and then decide what to do for the spring semester. History: She is studying US History now. We will probably do a summer semester of US History 1850s - current with an SAT subject in October. Either Ancients or Ancients/Medieval history, with an SAT subject test at the end of 10-beginning of 11 grade. We may consider an AP, too. English: Still working on that. Something with studying epics. French: continue working with the tutor. Russian: I want her to take the Russian placement test in UC, which will cover the requirement, but I also want to to do something to confirm her French, so either SAT or AP or DE later. For this year I want to start studying Russian classics in Russian. Probably an analog to a Russian school literature course with less writing. PE: fencing Fine Arts: DE art course seems to be the easiest. I will try to enroll her this summer. A 3 credit course can count as a year, right? UC seems to agree :)

Thanks! I suppose I can let her finish it during summer, and then put US History as a summer course with a test in October... I am not even sure she will apply to UC, I just want to make sure I am not closing that door.

I skipped this part when reading a-g requirements. Does it mean that we will have to redo US History in high school? My DD really hoped to take the test after 8th and be done with it. She hates it.

DS came home in November, so we are not likely to finish this year's curriculum, so we'll continue what we are doing now. Math: Beast Academy. If he continues at the same speed, we should be done by Christmas, then AOPS Prealgebra English: A mix of Writing from Rethoric and Image Grammar. History: We probably won't finish the Ancients by September, so we'll continue. We use a mix of very different levels, from SOTW to Spielvogel, with a variety of library books in the mix. Science: I feel bad about it, but mostly it is a mix of library books and documentaries, which we discuss while driving around. French: Amis et compagnie 1 with a tutor and daily Duolingo Russian Saturday school (Russian language, reading, history, plus some math, theater, and art) PE: fencing

My daughter read it when she was 7, and it was the book that got her reading silently for pleasure. All the books that were supposedly her age just didn't hold her attention. I did ask her to take a break after book 3, and I think she waited a year or two before finishing the series. My son didn't want to start it until he was 8, and he also stopped after book three. I am almost tempted to pick up the illustrated version, even though we have all the books, plus double copies of the last three, because we couldn't agree who would read them first :)

I would ask him to try. It really depends on the child. My DD13 still growls when I ask her, and then does a poor job. My DS8 can do it easily, but needs me to sit next to him, just for moral support (so no sending him to a different room).

I just brought home my son, and I am not sure what curriculum to use for LA. At this point, I am trying to figure out what skills he should work on. He seems to be fairly advanced in the area of writing. As an example, we started SOTW1 for history. This week (our first at home), he read chapter 1 and wrote a very good outline of it (his own initiative). He also read an Eyewitness book on early humans. I told him to write a report on what he learned. This is what he wrote: Early Humans Hello, today I will tell about the Old Stone Age humans. The Old Stone Age, also called the Paleolithic Era, ended roughly 12,000 years ago. It was named the Stone Age because that is what the tools were made of: stone. The old stone age humans strapped stones to sticks to make tools. Different stones made different tools. A curved rock might make a hoe, a straight rock will probably make a spear, a flat rock might make a hatchet or axe. They also used stones to break nuts and seeds. They ate food that they could hunt or gather. Women and children gathered nuts, seeds, honey, berries, leaves, and eggs. Men hunted and sometimes fished when they settled near a lake or river. When they hunted for a while, the animals moved away and the people followed. Because they moved all the time, they were called nomads, which means wanderers. Nomads had temporary homes such as tents and caves. In these caves they painted pictures. Sometimes they drew pictures of a hunting scene or an animal. There is a cave named Lascaux in France with many of these pictures. There is another one with many paintings in Spain called Altamira. Nomads wore animal skins as clothes. Nomads made sure they didn’t waste any part of an animal. When there were bones they might have made hammers and other tools out of bone. That is what I can tell you about the Stone Age. My input was minimal, and mostly pertaining to the content, like, add where they lived. No grammar corrections. So, what would you work on with him? He is 8, btw. ETA: Is there any book that describes as a list or stages the skills the writers should acquire? My own writing instructions were limited to grammar studies. After that it was just figuring everything out on my own and through critiques. I hope to offer something better to my kids, but so far I am lost. Nothing seems to work for my daughter, and my son picks everything up on his own. I need an education in this area.