This is what my daughter has experienced in her dual enrollment college courses as well. The non-homeschooled kids seem to have a knack for never getting anything done on time. Working with lab partners is incredibly frustrating. It's almost as if the schools are teaching this skill.

My mom hasn't visited us in a long time, but she's coming this week. She wants to have coffee. She is distressed that we don't have a coffee maker. Short of buying a coffee maker just for this visit, what should I buy her? Is instant ok? Are there some instant coffees that are better than others? Is there some other option in between instant and coffee maker brewed coffee? I don't see the point of buying a coffee maker as we will never drink coffee when she's not here, and I'm not sure she'll ever visit again.

Actually, ASL probably does have a body of literature, and that may be why colleges are now starting to accept it. However, it's recent and visual, which is why a lot of people may not know about it. Also, I get the impression that a fair number of people think ASL is really just fingerspelling English. Given that, I can see why they would balk at calling ASL a language. It does have a lot of similarity to English, but then, so does French, so I don't see the problem there. However, if you already have 2 years of Italian, you may not need to do more language. Have you checked with various colleges for their admissions requirements for languages? A lot of schools only require 2 years, and they do know that means 2 years of your standard high school language, which may not be much. If your goal is to learn more of either of these languages rather than satisfy admissions requirements, then it really doesn't matter how you go about furthering your education in this area, as long as it satisfies you that you are learning more. Also, although some colleges may say they have requirements beyond 2 years, that can be negotiable, if you're the sort of student they want. ASL interpreting can be a pretty neat job, if you're in an area that uses a lot of interpreters. Around here, there's a lot of interpreting going on at theater events, so it's also good for someone who has a flair for the dramatic as well. My only concern would be that it might be difficult to cobble together full time employment. However, there are also teaching opportunities. Here's a link to the Italian learning website of the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/italian/ You're probably beyond that, but I thought I'd put it up for others who might be interested.

My daughter was using Signing Naturally for her college ASL course. It was great with a teacher. Not so great without one or some other means of figuring out what all the signs in the book mean (a glossary would have been real nice). We've also got a library with some great resources. We really like some of the tapes by Billy Seago. We tried a few books, but have trouble figuring out the signs if they're not actually moving. But if you find others to recommend, please post. As I recall, there's also some guy (an ASL major?) who has posted ASL interpretations of popular songs on youtube. They seemed pretty good. If you don't know about these I'll see if I can find the link. It should be in my daughter's bookmarks, but all I'm coming up with right now is juggling videos.

If you don't plan to go to Italy, the ASL might actually be more useful. There are a certain number of colleges that do not accept ASL for college graduation, but I don't know that there are a whole lot of them that don't accept it for admission. You might end up having to take another language in college however. However, around us, even the die hard "ASL is not a language" colleges are now starting to accept it, even for college graduation. You might be pleasantly surprised when you ask around. Here is one example of an ASL interpreter major: http://www.stkate.edu/academic/asl_interpreting/ It takes 4 years if you start with no ASL at all. What materials would you use for more ASL in high school? (I'm just shamelessly looking for ideas.)

I have to say that I'm not convinced that washing actually accomplishes anything. It's the dryer that kills them. I think you have to get them up to 140 degrees or so to kill them and most hot water heaters don't heat the water up that high, nor will it still be that hot when it gets into the washing machine. You could just dry things (like scarves etc) on high and skip the washing. Regular shampooing on a head obviously has no effect. I've seen lice just get up, shake themselves off, and walk away after shampooing. I've read that soap and shampoo used to be effective, but well, selection has been at work here. I suspect picking the lice off the head is really the best treatment there is. Even after insecticide shampoo, there are plenty of lice climbing around in the hair. And it's not entirely clear if that gets in to the eggs. I know the shampoo companies say the insecticide sterilizes the adults, but I'm not sure this is really proven. (For some strange reason, there isn't a lot of lice research being done. I think the problem is that they really only survive on the human head.) And you can't really pull the nits off the hair with a nit comb unless they're fresh. If the cement has hardened, all you'll do is pull the hair out. It's less traumatic to just cut off each strand that has a nit. When there was a major infestation at my daughter's school, we finally only succeeded in keeping her from getting reinfested by keeping her home for 3 weeks.

On my daughter's transcript, in the main part I listed only what she had done in 9-12. I had a separate footnote to list what she had done before that. I probably could have left that out altogether as it mostly consisted of the math she had taken before 9th grade (which might have been obvious, given what math she was then taking in high school), Spanish (also obvious, as she started high school with Spanish 2), and a year of Latin (which wouldn't have been obvious because she didn't go on with it in high school, but by the same token, might just have been ignored by the admissions people because she had another language to fulfill that requirement -- still I put it there, just in case anyone was interested). Science might be a different issue, though. If a student does biology in 8th grade and doesn't go on to advanced biology, it will look like they didn't do biology at all if you leave off all the 8th grade classes. But if it really is a high school level class, I could see slipping it on to the high school transcript. I'd be leer of including all 8th grade classes, though. For example, colleges like to see X number of classes in English or history in the high school years. They will not be impressed if the student did them earlier. They won't look like high school classes. If the student goes on to do that X number of years in high school on top of what they did in 8th grade, then there's probably not much point to listing the 8th grade class -- unless it was some really interesting topic that you want to get on the transcript.

Doing both is a completely acceptable option. However, we didn't do any SAT IIs here. My daughter was just too tested out. She didn't apply to any schools that needed them. I'm not sure which schools do. I know the Univ of CA used to, but I think I recall that they were giving them up(?). You might want to do a quick check to see which colleges want the SAT IIs. It could be a lot of state schools or "selective" schools are still using them a lot.

1- What magazines are you using? My kids like Natural History. 2- My daughter did a couple AP tests on her own. She learned a lot, but then she went on to take some dual enrollment college classes. She really preferred the classes. She found that her professors (most of them, anyway) were always throwing in interesting tidbits of information. This was not the report she got from kids taking AP classes at the local high school, though. A few AP courses may be helpful for admissions, but it's not the end of the world if your student doesn't do them. By very judicious choices of an AP test (calculus) and some dual enrollment classes (physics), my daughter is going to be able to enter into the 2nd year of the physics program when she goes to college. But that took some planning over several years. And she probably won't graduate in 3 years because she wants to do a 2nd major (ok, maybe we will have avoided having her do 5 years, so that might be a savings). She might not have been able to graduate in 3 years even without the 2nd major as she will still have a lot of general ed requirements to finish. She could have done a couple more AP tests and maybe chosen her dual enrollment courses more wisely to have gotten out of more gen ed classes, but then she wouldn't be able to do the honors program at college, which she wants to do. Or she could have done the "right" courses, but then ended up repeating them in the honors program. The reality is that many times those pre-college courses don't do what you thought they'd do for you. Anyway, I think most kids would really prefer to stay in college 4 years, if they're having an ok experience. There is a lot more going on in college than just the coursework. Where I work (with a lot of physics students), some of them are in a program where they could do 3 years at the college, then 2 at the local university, and finish with a bachelor's in physics and a master's in engineering. The reality is that no one actually completes this option. They all decide to stay at the college for 4 years for the bachelor's and then go to the university for the master's after that. Their reasons are that they want to stay for the extracurriculars like band and theater and sports and research projects and internships and volunteer work -- some of which is going to be very important for getting a job after college.

The Story of Science is interesting, but it's more history than science. It would be a good supplement, but that wouldn't be much of a science credit. How intensive are you looking for? And what particular science? There are college texts that are pretty good, but take a fair amount of work. There are also high school texts, but we haven't found those to be easy to understand. The written texts tend to be "simplified' to the point of being hard to follow. For biology, we've done kind of a mishmash, not a program. This has ranged from the Reader's Digest How Nature Works to lots of videos (David Attenborough is good). We also did some reading in "popular" texts (The Dinosaur Heresies, The Double Helix). However, we have a big advantage in that both my husband and I have PhDs in biology, so when we run into a concept, we just explain it. This has always worked better for us than the textbook route. My daughter considered AP bio (but we didn't get around to it). For that we would have probably used the Campbell college text. You might look into online lectures. This is one at Berkeley: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2010-B-7703&semesterid=2010-B I haven't watched that one, although I have gone through a couple other lectures at Berkeley which have been good. We did try the lectures on biology at Yale (I think it was Yale), but they weren't so useful. I think all the biology was being taught in the sections with the TAs while the professors mostly talked about how exciting biology is, with a few examples. For chemistry, we used a few chapters of the Zumdahl college text. My older daughter never got off the ground with physics, so she just took it dual enrollment at a college. For the younger one, we've been attempting to use Conceptual Physics by Hewitt. It's been ok, but we have to do a lot of picking and choosing. It also has a lot of incomprehensible text trying to explain a figure that is perfectly obvious. A lot of times, I have to steer my daughter away from reading the text because it's just confusing her. Also, the problems aren't all that I would hope for. For 9th grade, though, it seems to be passable. We'll want something more meaty for the later years. (I believe this is the college text, but it's pretty simple. It's for nonmajors.) There is a somewhat decent lecture course at the MIT site in physics, but we found it somewhat difficult to use because the picture quality wasn't so good. (This was what my older daughter started on and didn't finish.) I found I'd have to watch it with her and then copy out on paper what was up on the board. I could kind of make it out because I knew what it was supposed to be, but she couldn't read the fuzzy letters on her own.

The high school students around here take physical science in 9th grade unless they test out of it. If they do test out of it (and many do) they just go straight into biology and never take physical science. They are doing "science" in 8th grade, so maybe that is where they get the physical science that they are then tested on. I wonder if General Science is pretty much the same thing. What test will she be taking? I'd be inclined to do what she's interested in. But I can't speak for Apologia in particular, and that may have been what you were asking.

You know, one does run into weirdos now and then. Even if most people wouldn't assume she was a single parent, there might be a few people out there who would. And who would bother her about it. There might even be a clique of such people. So it is just possible she's run in to something odd. And maybe she'd prefer not to deal with it.

When we use texts for high school, we've mostly used college texts. The few times we've tried high school texts they really didn't work for us (except geometry, which I couldn't find as a high school text). The high school books tend to be so dumbed down that it's impossible to figure out what they're talking about. College texts for non majors courses usually work well, although we've done a couple that were for majors courses. Generally, we don't cover the whole text for science, though. We do most of the text for math or history. Science texts tend to be kind of all encompassing and even college classes will cover very little of them. The professor just chooses what they think is most important. (Despite how people will tell you that you just aren't doing a "full" course without doing every single detail in the book.) For chemistry, for example, I think we only did 5-6 chapters of Zumdahl. This pretty much covered everything that would be in a first year high school course, though. There were tons of problems to work through and I thought it was better to spend a lot of time really getting the calculation aspect of things down. As it turns out, this really helped my daughter when she took college physics (without any high school physics at all). So it was really better that we worked on mastery of a few important things rather than skimming over the surface. For math, there are always a couple chapters that we don't do. There isn't time, and the chapters in the backs of math books tend to be a little fluffy. However, I think I have a pretty good sense as to what's needed in the next level, so I don't worry about skipping what seems superfluous to me. If it turns out they need something in the next level that we didn't cover, we just do it then.

When my kids were in school, they were allowed back in after we had shampooed with an insecticide shampoo and there were no "visible" nits or lice. Visible meant the school staff couldn't see them. I don't know if this policy really works, though. My kids got reinfested several times at school. Yes, the adults in a louse infested household should be checked, along with the other kids. So should teachers, etc. I don't think long hair is going to be any more susceptible to lice or harder to search. The lice stay up by the scalp so the length of hair shouldn't matter. The nits may be found further down in the hair as they stay stuck for a long time, but the older nits will either be already hatched or dead. If lice keep reappearing, it's either a reinfestation from a source that isn't getting cleaned up, or the insecticide shampoo is no longer working. A lot of lice are now resistant to the insecticide. Last I checked the most resistance was to the prescription insecticide, not the OTC stuff. (Although there were apparently plenty of lice resistant to the OTC stuff as well.) The source is generally another head. The lice don't seem to live very long off the head. I did find that the lice we had were basically blond in color and rather hard to see. However, there are different strains of lice around. They might come in different colors as an adaptation. I've heard that there are different strains, for example, that do well in straight hair vs others that do well in curly hair. However, I don't know how much of that has any scientific basis and how much is hearsay. If kids are around lots of other kids, they may tend to get lice more often, so no, it probably isn't just "bad luck". Kids in daycare and school will be exposed more. But I don't know that one can do much to avoid them other than not sharing pillows and brushes or being a hermit. Young kids tend to spread them really easily, probably just because they get so up close and personal.

I never found skimping on household items was all that big of a cost saver. I'm careful. We don't throw out much food. We don't eat a ton of prepared foods. I stock up at sales if they're really sales. But I don't find that that's a place where we can save a whole lot of money. Other things we did were more helpful: We went down to one car. That was our biggest cost savings ever. We've considered going to no car, but it seemed that taxis and buses might actually cost more than the jalopy we're driving now. Also, drive a crummy car and don't pay for collision insurance. Live close enough to work that you can walk or bike. When you have to buy a new car (which you should delay as long as possible) don't buy new. Buy used. Eat less meat. Replace it with legumes and such. (Milk and cheese are still pretty pricey.) Don't eat out. (This goes for school lunches too. When my kids were in school, I could pack a lunch for less than the reduced price lunch we could get. And they were things the kids would eat.) Switch to a health insurance plan with a higher deductible. It may or may not save money. Our insurance company plans are such that if we go to the high deductible plan and everyone in our family gets sick so that we have to pay out all the deductibles, we end up breaking even. It costs the same as if we had gone with the low deductible plan in the first place. If we don't all get sick, we've saved money. You'd have to crunch the numbers on your available plans, though. Switch to a high deductible on your house and car insurance, if you have the cash to cover smaller losses. Avoid sales unless you've really done your homework on what prices should be. Don't use coupons at all, unless it's something you're going to buy anyway. Don't drive all over town looking for deals. Skip cable. Don't keep oodles of money accessible. Pay off the credit card each month. If you can't pay it off, you've spent too much. Don't do that again. Shop thrift stores for clothes. Use the library for books. We paid off our house in 7 years on one rather low salary (so low we could have qualified for WIC). We didn't really skimp all that much except for the above mentioned items. Although I was careful with buying household items and stocking up when there were sales, that really wasn't what allowed us to save a ton of money. I've heard that after washing hair with baking soda you can do a vinegar rinse. It's supposed to make hair more manageable. I haven't tried it (being allergic to vinegar).

Thanks for the advice everyone! I have kept the Sansa Clip instead of getting the ipod. So far it's been fine, except that it took me a bit of time to figure out how to get music onto it. If I'd got the ipod, the kids would have already known how. That's been the biggest drawback. It really beats my CD player for sound quality and ease of use, though. And the price is so much lower than the ipod. Admittedly, it only has 4 GB, but I wasn't planning on using this for storage. I've got a computer for that. My plan is to use it like crazy so if it's going to fail it will do it during the warranty period.

There was a BBC (?) miniseries of Ivanhoe that we watched. The kids really liked that. They couldn't get into the book, although may still do that. At least, though, they got the story of it. They enjoyed The Once and Future King more (which is vaguely about that time period).

If the goal is an easing into the college experience, maybe he'd be better off taking something other than math? If it were me, and I'd already done the math, I'd be bored out of my mind. I'd rather take something more interesting. Actually, he might find that a stats course would be fairly easy, and it wouldn't be a repeat. It wouldn't be like jumping into calculus. Statistics courses tend not to be too difficult until you hit the upper division/grad level ones. I mentioned the idea of doing college algebra to my daughter. She said there was no way she would have redone algebra. What would be the point? She's much happier with what she did, even if it was a lot of work.

For my daughter, the private schools ended up being cheaper than the state schools. I think it's impossible to predict. You just need to apply and see what they come up with. Some schools have cutoffs for ACT/SAT scores above which they give X amount of aid. This may only be the minimum amount that they will give. Some schools publish this info, some would rather you didn't know. However, my feeling is that if you can find one school that has a certain "range" of students (based on avg ACT scores, for example) that publishes this info, it's probable that other schools in this range give out pretty much the same merit award money based on ACT scores. This is more likely, I'd imagine, if the schools are in close proximity. However, they do seem to all be watching what the others are doing and adjust this accordingly. The highest cutoff I've seen is a 30 on the ACT. At a couple schools that seemed to correlate with about 19000 in automatic merit aid when the tuition was about 30000. There were cutoffs below that. A 28 would get somewhat less, a 26 a little less. Then the student MAY qualify for other aid as well (and this is not counting need based aid). However, this extra aid is probably going to be much more dependent on how much the college wants the student. I would apply to a range of schools to see what deal you can get. Many schools now waive the application fee if you apply online, so you may find that the biggest cost is getting the test scores sent to them. However, the financial cost of applying isn't the only consideration. Every single one of these schools feel they have to ask a different essay question, so your student may just burn on writing essays. So be sure to finish the applications for the schools you're really interested in first. Also, apply EARLY. Not necessarily early decision, but just early. A lot of further scholarship opportunities start and finish their decisions before a lot of students even apply.

My daughter went right on to AP calculus after the same math that your son has had. After that she did Calc 3 at the local 4 year college. It was a challenge, but she was up to it. (She did really well, in fact.) With that ACT score and math background, I'm not sure I'd want to hold him back. People do get bored and slack off and do badly if they've already had the class. If he does do the college Alg, you'd have to check the college to see what that is a prerequisite for. If they cover trig, or if he's already had trig (in the precalculus he did), he might go right into calculus. However, it may depend on what he wants to major in. With some majors, he might just as well take statistics. If he wants to head into physics or chem or such, he might be happier in the long run getting the calculus over with now. My daughter is really glad she did it already, so she won't be saddled with another hard class while she's trying to get through other hard classes. She took the approach of spreading the hardness out rather than taking baby steps at first. I've also found that my daughter has a really good sense as to what she can handle, what will be too much, and what will bore her so much that she'll stop paying attention. I laid out what she was going to have to do for certain majors and she made decisions from that. You might want to let your son make the decision. Another thing you might do is talk to a counselor or professor at the cc. They may have some sense as to how a student in your son's position might do as they may have seen the situation before. I'm thinking they'd be likely to tell you to put him in calculus. (Unless you get a counselor who is math phobic, in which case you can't trust their advice.) They may even have a placement test. A lot of colleges do that. However, the ACT score alone may place him past Algebra.

In places that require 4 science courses, what are students taking? Bio/Chem/Physics -- and physical science? Or a second year of the big three? Or an elective?

Lots of reading -- classics, junk books, wikipedia, news articles on the web, magazines, etc. We still read out loud. We don't get very far at each sitting because we're always stopping to discuss and end up tangenting off here and there. We discuss everything. It's not my choice. The kids are very interested in talking things through. I talk too much and use words that are way too big for their understanding. They've just had to keep up. My older daughter scored way better on her language scores than her math. This doesn't mean she's bad at math (she's one of those top students you see in math/science classes in college). It just means she's a lot slower at it. Which, counterintuitively, is a very good thing. It's what makes her a good student in math. She actually thinks about things rather than just scribbling down whatever comes to mind first. We've also talked a lot about test taking strategies. We've never used any formal curriculum for language studies. I kept meaning to, but we never got around to it because there were always too many books to read.

The small private schools we contacted didn't have any trouble talking to me. Also, I think my daughter had decided early on that she might not be interested in a school that didn't want to talk to me. She wants my advice and wouldn't trust a school that didn't want me involved. However, she has done most of the emailing herself. As far as initial contact is concerned, she just started things off by submitting her application.

Where I grew up (in Los Angeles) it was 7-9 Jr High and 10-12 High school. None of our 9th grade grades were computed in our GPA or counted as credit - except that math and foreign language put us "ahead" in the sequence. Where I am now: 6-8 is middle school and 9-12 is high school. I report my kids' classes from 9-12 (because that's what the colleges around here are used to seeing) with an added note about which "high school" classes they did before 9th grade. Math and foreign language count for that. Although my kids have probably done high school level work in 8th grade and below for other courses, I don't report it on the transcript. Colleges would see it as fluff.

Thanks! I'm really thinking I will like the Sandisk better, as long as it holds up. My kids each have an ipod touch (not that we bought them -- it was part of a promotional deal). So I imagine using the Sandisk will involve using a different program for getting things onto it. Mostly, I want to listen to my language CDs and my CD player is dying.