You could try MEP math: http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/mep/default.htm It doesn't follow the US sequence, but I think all the topics are there. It's free. It's all in pdf. You can save money by not printing it all out -- just read it off the computer. You might have to get the answer keys from them. I got them by saying I was homeschooling and they were happy to give me access. However, it's been a few years, so the method for doing this may have changed. (Although, I think the online interactive parts will tell you whether you've got the right answer or not.) Otherwise, if you can get any sort of regular school text that has the answers (better yet, a solutions manual) you should be good. (You might have better luck finding a college algebra text with solutions. If it's basic algebra, it should cover what you need to cover. I have a vague recollection that ebay and amazon won't sell solutions manuals to high school texts.) If you want to spend money and would like lectures, the Thinkwell lectures are pretty good for math. However, the problem sets can be a little hairy (particularly for a self learner). You'd still need a book with problems. Is there anyone at your school who would be willing to tutor you? It's possible there are some frustrated teachers who would really like to teach the material but feel they can't do it in the class room. Alternatively, you could just take the intro math courses at a local community college, if such a thing exists near you. Khan Academy is also supposed to teach with online videos. It's free, but you kind of get what you pay for. While the problem sets are good, the lectures are pretty confusing. At least, that's my daughter's take on it. She much prefers to have me explain things to her.

If you are doing this for college credit, you might want to check with the colleges you are considering. It's becoming somewhat more common for colleges to not accept the AP Bio exam for credit. (And some colleges will only give credit for a non-majors Bio class.) It would still be good for admissions, but if you're counting on credit, you should do some research. A lot of colleges have this sort of information online. Also, if your student is planning to major in biology, you might want to consider whether you want them to place out of the intro bio course using a course they took 4 years before college. AP Bio is usually either a 2nd year of biology OR a first year that follows a chemistry course -- or both. With a student who was very willing to work a lot, that might not be an absolute prerequisite, but I suspect it's going to take more time. It's possible you won't finish up in one year. The chemistry can be done as you go, but it might not be a thorough treatment. A student can take the exam no matter what they studied or who their teacher was. There are only strict requirements if you CALL the class AP. Then it has to be approved by the College Board. But I wouldn't bother with that. It's the test score that will matter to colleges, not what the class was called. Campbell is generally accepted to be a good text, but that doesn't mean you can't use another one. There are plenty of decent texts out there. If your student is going to take the AP test, the most important thing to get a copy of is the list of topics and labs that the College Board puts out. That's what will be on the test. This is usually on their site as some sort of pdf file. To score high on the test, the prep books put out by places like McGraw-Hill or Peterson's (there are a lot more) are the way to go. Which of these is the best tends to vary by subject matter, so don't pick one out that someone else found to be good for, say, US History. (We tend to use more than one.) ETA: Generally, a full year of an AP course is supposed to translate into one semester of college credit. This is why the AP Bio test might not get credit as a full year major's class. (This is also problematic for the AP Chem test.) I think colleges tend to see the AP Bio as a one semester survey of all the topics that usually take a full year in college, so they don't know what to do with the AP credit. Is it the first semester of biology? The second? Really nothing because none of the topics were covered in the depth that one would get in a full year course? Colleges have also made the unfortunate discovery that many students who scored well on the AP test really don't know the material well enough to go on to the higher level classes. Even more disturbing is students who may have scored well but take the intro college bio class anyway -- and can't even do well after supposedly doing well in the AP class. One would think the intro level college class should be easy review, but it often isn't. Obviously, this is probably student-specific, but colleges are looking at the general trends.

I got the play bar to come up in Explorer, but it doesn't play. Has anyone actually gotten it to play? It says it's "connecting", but it's still at this after 15 minutes. I wonder if this site is no longer being supported. The fact that it only comes up in Explorer seems to imply that. It's possible it's only working in an older version of Windows Media Player? There was another site on the web where this was available, but it now needs a password. Possibly the owners of the material didn't like it being available for free.

They don't work for me either.

Are you sure it's not a mistake? What answer are they trying to get? (I'm having a little difficulty figuring out what the problem is, due to the lack of decent typesetting that's possible on this board.)

We started with the intention of doing BC in one year, with the AP test at the end, but I (we) found that the material was just not getting absorbed as well as it should at that speed (at that age). So we slowed down. We had the option because we were not doing an outside class. However, I'm not entirely sure that this would be noticed by the parent if the parent wasn't actually doing the teaching. And given that I work in a physics dept and see the problems kids have if they don't understand calculus very well, I have pretty high standards for what is an acceptable level of learning. So I was the one slowing us down. I wanted to be sure my daughter didn't just have the superficial knowledge that would get her through the AP test. We started calculus about the same time as your daughter, and I found that slowing down was really very helpful. That's why I would tend to lean toward the slower track. But that was our experience. My daughter did really well in math up to that point, needed to slow down to really get calculus down, and is now doing very well in her college math courses (at least in comparison to her class mates). So our experience was that taking things slow at this stage was really a good thing. It gave a lot more time for real understanding and absorption of the material. One thing to keep in mind is that although, a lot of times, kids THINK they've done the material and will balk at doing a class or topic over again that happens to have the same name, the reality is they often could really benefit from the review. Many students aren't able to really recognize this, though. (Sometimes they'll really need the review, will end up in the next level class unprepared, but will be able to do all the review on the side on their own - but this will make the class a whole lot more time consuming, so the student ought to be aware that this can happen.)

Theater takes a huge amount of time, but that shouldn't determine whether it's a credit or not. I gave my daughter one semester of credit for Drama - for reading and writing about plays. This didn't include any of the considerable time she spent in rehearsals. Those were all listed as extracurriculars. (She was in a play just about every semester, so it would have a been a LOT of credits.) But I have the impression that the high school near us does give some kind of credit for participation in the plays. It might fulfill a fine arts class requirement, much as band would do (which does meet during class period and gets academic credit). I don't think all the kids at the high school bother to get this credit, though. It may only be those kids who need the fine arts credit, or who need more credits to graduate. The college bound kids tend to already have pretty full transcripts, so they either don't need the credit, or don't want it on there for other considerations (perhaps they think it looks suspicious to have too many theater credits? that they might overwhelm what otherwise looks like an academic load?) You might want to consider whether giving credit for all the plays will make it so you can't claim those as extracurriculars. Sometimes the considerations of making the college application look "balanced" come into play. And generally, for most college bound kids, most (but maybe not all) of the theater activity will come under extracurricular. If it is an actual class with an instructor teaching theater skills, then that might be more likely to go as an academic credit - but even there you'd have leeway. Many kids list outside classes as extracurricular activities and not as credit classes.

One reason I would suggest doing a year of AB and then a year of BC is because it would give the student a chance to "re-do" calculus. I find that students do a lot of review of algebra over the course of their math career, but once they hit calculus, review seems to disappear. A lot of kids really benefit from re-doing the concepts in a second year. It cements the learning better. Also, a lot of kids who do well in earlier math do tend to run into a wall at calculus. It's often because they really don't know the earlier math as well as they thought they did. They may have done well on tests, so they may think that they'll be bored with review of lines and whatnot, but then they get into the harder class and realize they really didn't have it down as well as they needed. But it will depend on the specific class as to whether this is good advice or not. Some classes will spend forever on review, others won't. You might also want to think about whether your daughter is really ready for calc. My experience has been that bright kids her age do very well in the math up to that point, but then can't keep up with the calc at the speed it's normally taught. But if they wait a year or two, they're able to do it just fine. This isn't true of all students (obviously), but you might want to think about it. It is possible that taking a year "off the track" and doing something like AP Statistics would be useful. I've watched a number of kids (not just my own) get into calc a bit before they were ready. Some had to repeat it (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but some gave up and went into college majors that would never require a calc course. And those kids who made it through the first time at an early age (and didn't have to repeat it for a grade), just seem not to have a grasp of the concepts quite as well as those equally bright kids who waited a year or two. I'm seeing this in college kids now that I work with. There is always that whiz kid who defied these odds, but I think it is something, as the advisor and the parent, to consider. Also, the individual teacher that a student gets makes a HUGE difference in how well calculus is understood. I haven't seen that this is as obvious in the earlier math. For others reading this thread (who aren't considering the 2 courses mentioned), I'll point out that Thinkwell has a nice series of calculus lectures. The associated problem sets are AWFUL (not correlated well, and they don't start out with easy problems to get the student thinking), but the lectures are worthwhile. I've been trying Khan Academy, but I just don't think his lectures are terribly helpful. He tends to do things in ways my kids just don't understand. However, the problem sets for the math before calculus are pretty good (I haven't tried the ones for calc yet).

He was very charming, but still...

That might be true -- because my guy was from Kenya.

Re-skilling? Or is it something else?

This is the first I've ever heard of colleges wanting Environmental Science, let alone it being one of the Big 4. Most high schools will encourage 4 science courses for the college bound - physical science, biology, chemistry, and physics, although the physical science may get dropped if the student tests out of it or has had it in middle school. If so, then the 4th year is up to the discretion of the student. Often it's an advanced course of biology, chemistry, or physics, or a further course such as field biology or anatomy, or maybe a college level course in something like astronomy. However, a lot of kids don't even take a 4th year of science. A lot of kids actually only ever take biology. And back when I was in high school, most college bound kids only took biology and chemistry. Only the really serious ones bothered with physics.

Haven't seen the newer one, but my kids really liked the Hepburn/O'Toole version. I seem to recall that Simon Schama (The History of Britain by the BBC) did an episode covering these two, but I might be thinking of a different show.

Is Free World U just flash cards? I wouldn't think I could learn anything from flash cards. There isn't any context like one would find in a book or a video on the subject. I think you'd be a lot better off just giving your student some books to read on various subjects. If you need tips on books to choose, I'm sure there are lots of people on this forum eager to give advice. For free online things, you might try http://academicearth.org/ These are college lectures, but some are suitable for high school. Also, the Khan Academy can be good for math: http://www.khanacademy.org/ What subjects are you hoping to cover?

The student gets an A if they learned most of the material the teacher expected them to learn. A B means they learned a bit less, etc. That's about it. Percentages mean nothing, in fact. There really is NO hard and fast way to grade anything. Even math grades are highly subjective. A grade is based on what the teacher expected. A teacher can expect a lot or a little. Getting all the math problems right on a test might only mean that the test didn't test very deeply. Getting very few right might only mean that the test was particularly challenging and maybe a better learning experience than an easy test. I grade my kids based on what I expect them to learn in each subject. My expectations are shaped by similar classes I've had in high school and college, in addition to ones I've taught in college. I think it would be impossible to give any sort of meaningful grade if I didn't have that model of expectation in the back of my mind. But that being said, I don't test much. If my child knows the material, I tend see that. If they don't know it, we just work on it more. But I also think grading is a big scam. If a student bombs a test, but then comes back and learns the material, why should that bad grade stay with them? Much of grading is really about competition and ranking, not about learning. As homeschoolers, we can focus much more on the learning. As a result, I tend to give my kids the benefit of the doubt. If they struggle for a long time with a concept, but they finally get it, it's that final understanding that I would grade, not all the struggle in the middle. In my experience, very few college professors will turn a strict percentage grade into a letter grade. They move the grade cutoffs around and give the benefit of the doubt to lots of students who on the border. They count a lot of "participation" -- a lot of the grade in a math or science class might be based solely on the fact that a student turned in their homework, regardless of how they did on it. Professors are trying to encourage students to think and interact with the material, so they may not want to grade homework too harshly. (There's plenty of room for harsh grading on exams if the professor wants to do that.) Students in these classes may not be aware of all this. The professor may have said at the beginning of class that 90 and above would be an A, but that doesn't mean they will stick with it. A lot happens when the final grades are getting calculated that the students never see. For a lot of professors, the grade cut offs may sink quite a bit, when they really sit down and think about how hard their tests were. In fact, I can really only think of a couple college professors who graded on a strict 90 percent and above is an A type of scale. And, to be honest, those professors taught pretty awful classes. There wasn't much content. As there wasn't much to test, the professor couldn't do much to distinguish between students' performance. In order to get any kind of grade spread, they had to ask nitpicky questions about the little content the course did offer, and then deduct points for tiny mistakes.

Maybe do something fun together? When things get bad here, we tend to watch TV. We try to find something that's educational, or at least that will spark a discussion. Or we bake. Or go for a walk. Maybe the literature you're trying to discuss is too hard? Or too easy? Or not very engaging? If you need suggestions for literature that might work out better, I'm sure the folks here would be happy to help out. If you're using a literature program, that might be the problem.

Just as a random sample of what I do on facebook -- in the last few minutes I posted a NY Times editorial (and received several thoughtful comments on it), had a discussion about the concept of memes (whether Dawkins should get credit for the idea when all he did was coin the term), watched a cool dance video that my daughter posted last night (which she likely would have forgotten to show me this morning), and was informed that it takes 12 crushed candy canes to make one cup (which may save me a lot of grief later today). I also discovered that my neighbor has laryngitis, so she likely won't be calling anyone on the phone today. (Do I care of the entire world knows this? Not really. It's not really of any importance to anyone else, so why would they bother to search this out?) It's all about picking the right friends. There's nothing inherently wrong with facebook, unless you have dull friends. As far as privacy goes, I see people post way more on this forum that can be accessed by *anyone* than I ever see of a personal nature on facebook. The general rule of thumb on the internet is not to post anything that you wouldn't want the entire world to read, even if you think you're protected by a username that is not your own. So I do think facebook is useful, if you use it right. Most of the arguments I've seen on this thread seem to think things about facebook that aren't true (at least not anymore). The only argument for staying off facebook is the time issue, but that can be controlled, if you aren't silly about it.

I see nothing about that on his wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre) although I could have missed it. But that kind of misses the point. Just because the person who first came up with an idea later thinks it was a bad, unsupported idea, doesn't mean that it is in fact, unsupported. It's not what the originator thinks, but whether further observations support the idea that matters. However, I see this type of argument popping up a lot. There must be some term for this type of logical fallacy.

But one doesn't "believe" in evolution. It's not a creed. It's just that that's where the scientific evidence points. Now one might make an argument that one "believes" in the scientific method, as opposed to other ways of knowing, but the idea of saying one "believes" in evolution is frankly just odd.

Unless they've made themselves invisible. In which case, they might be on, but you can't see them.

Yeah, that pretty much summed it up for me. Except that I also found the faculty to be way over the top unrealistic. And I was having trouble believing that the main character actually was brilliant. They didn't really prove it to me. Also, I was expecting to see some challenging math problems. (Apparently this is not why other people go to the movies, though.) I didn't even notice the language.

I never found the Johnson and Johnson to be all that eye friendly anyway. For a time, we just didn't bother with shampoo on our little kids. They always opened their eyes and it was a horrible experience for everyone involved. When they were small, we just used water. But I'm not sure this would work so well on older kids.

Gossip, mostly. Share neighborhood news. Talk about the book a bit.

Back when I was in high school, a lot of kids were taking the GED as "insurance". I'm not quite sure what that meant. (They ended up with a high school diploma anyway.) I don't think having the GED score in their background has ever hindered them. After all, they don't need to report it. In any case, I suspect that there are plenty of colleges who would consider her, down the road, if she has a solid GED score and a lot of life experience with the mission work she plans to do. This will be even more true if she shows she can handle cc work. If she eventually takes the ACT or SAT to get into a 4 year college, the GED will count for very little at that point. Some kids do kind of lose academic steam part way through high school. It can be really good for them to just go off and do something else for a bit -- volunteer or work. And it is possible that you could "graduate" her if you wished. If you look at where she stands academically, and where the average high school graduate stands, you might be surprised to find that she's on a par with them. In that case, I wouldn't worry about what credits she may not have completed. The important thing is whether she has the academic skills that make her ready for a job or college. Remember that a lot of high school kids take really easy classes, or have to do "remedial" work through most of high school. If your daughter is beyond those things and already ready for cc, then she truly might have finished the basic requirements and it would not be at all stretching the truth to say she has graduated. She just might not have done as much as you might have wished.

Graphing calculators are very cool and useful. It's not a bad thing to learn how to use them. Graphing by hand is also a useful skill, but that doesn't mean that all graphs should be done by hand. I'd recommend working on both, if possible.