I personally think having business/ID cards would be a good idea. As a student I participated in several closed scientific conferences where we worn only name tags and the rest of information was written down on "Contact list". Once I attended an international congress and I was the youngest and less honored participant among all those professors and academics:). Most of them had their business cards. I was acting as an interpreter, not a speaker. If I were in your shoes, I would ask my daughter to draw a mascot(instead of putting her picture on the card), put her title ( enthusiastic lead researcher or something more memorable), her e-mail address leaving the phone number out. Usually ID tags has an affiliation with the company/organization you represent. So you can put her "Homeschool name" instead of the company name and her title. Most people who attend such events try to reach you through e-mails. How formal is the event your daughter will be attending? If it is not too formal,she could attach her business card to a lanyard and wear it as an ID. Just my thoughts:)

Thanks for sharing! I will try to use it with one of my younger kids.

I hear you! I see the lack of motivations among my 2 oldest kids: DD11 and DS7. They are both accelerated students but their brains wired differently. My son's cursive handwriting is much neater than my daughter's. He is a very detail oriented person whose logical abilities are superior than my daughter's, but it takes a lot of efforts to motivate him to do spelling verses to do the math. I do not need to ask my boy to build a model of a car designed by him few minutes earlier. My encouragement to work on spelling doesn't give the result I want to see-learning spelling on his own. Once he told me that it wasn't essential because he could diagram his designs using a special code instead of words.He has it in his head so no need to explain what all his signs mean. Sometimes he does the same in his workbooks so I need to decipher what was written asking my daughter for some help. They both do not like spelling. They adore science, engineering, math and like making things. They are learning how to program. We use dry-erase board a lot so if a mistake is made it could be corrected immediately. For my daughter it is easy to erase the whole word than finding the place where the mistake was made. Any ideas how to motivate them to be better spellers? P.S. My daughter is "writing" a book about time-traveling but it is more likely coding/narrating it to me because she misspelled so many words( she skips vowels or switch letter places inside the same word). She is linguistically gifted having a good ear for foreign languages, but she struggles with English spelling a lot. I signed them up for 3 weeks Science Summer camps which are located 1 hour away, so I remind them that I will not be driving them there unless they work on their spelling. It works only for a short period of time and they need to be reminded again.

My daughter really liked Martine books. They are perfect little stories for 5-8 years old girls. These books are not readers, they are just authentic french stories. Illustrations are beautiful! I would love them just for that:)

Hi, I think it will depend on a language pair. My daughter had 1.5 years of French when she started Spanish. She had enough confusion with words, so she replaced a lot of Spanish words with French when they sounded similar and meant the same. She was only 6 years old.:) I think you can easily study French and German at the same time or Japanese/ Chinese with another European language. They are completely different and you will not be confused at all.

My child did several of free on-line sessions last summer including one month of summer e-learning but we were too busy to follow through. She enjoyed them a lot but my husband who has a BS and a science/computer geek found few mistakes in one of the on-line webinars. He commented that some information was not correct( Astronomy webinar), so he was against paying for it.

I have all 3 of them: CW, IP and BA. I use IP instead of workbooks for my child. If I feel he needs some reinforcement, I assign some "regular" problems from CWR and he does all challenging from the book related to the topic he is studying. We do BA as a supplement to Russian math when they cover the same topic and as a week-end fun studies. We are a STEAM oriented family.

I used levels A and B with my daughter when she was 4-5 years old and then we switched to Russian math/MEP/Singapore math. RS was moving too slow for my child who needed some challenges and acceleration. My son went through Russian math/Singapore1 when he was 4-5. Then he did RS B but we were doing several lessons per day because he is a fast learner. RightStart was just a way to have a "math vacation" for my boy before he went back to Singapore/Russian math mix. If you decide to use RS, I suggest supplementing it with Singapore challenging word problems and/or intensive practice assignments for a bigger challenge.

I agree. That is why we decided to try "Cover story" writing program for middle school this year. http:www.oneyearnovel.com My daughter is writing her own novel so I hope it will help to improve her writing style and teach her something new.

My daughter is a little older but she does about 3-5 hours of math daily including Mathletics. We use AoPS book as primary and supplement with Russian math and Mathletics. We schedule math as problem assigned, so she stops when she is done. Sometimes I break a chapter in smaller portions and assign additional outsourced problems as a reinforcement. I want to be sure she understands what she is studying before she start working on AoPS problems. It makes a process smoother and she makes less mistakes.

Congratulations to all who got their best scores this year! We missed the enrollment deadline:(.

I just found out that there is a new center located 10 minutes away from our house so I am planning my 2 oldest kids to participate next year.

We really liked a combination of SM and MEP. It worked our beautifully for my daughter. She did Miquon books on her own just for fun. My son loved Miquon books and kept hiding them under his pillow to do them overnight. You can try all three math programs to see what will work the best.

My son started doing math/logic books when he just turned 2. I was reading and translating to him and he was just getting the right answers. He also started talking in French being only 2 before he actually could built long sentences in English. By the age 4 he finished Russian kindergarten books which would be an equivalent of 1 grade Singapore math. Then he switched his love to science and history like he had already achieved a milestone. If he continued working with the same pace he would be finishing Singapore 6 or starting AOPS pre-algebra being only 6 years old. I didn't push him to stay focused on math, just letting him to learn what he wanted to. He is not a fluent reader yet and have some "lazy speech/ word pronunciation" issue, but I am not really worry about it. He spent 10 days working on 2nd grade Geometry book which dealt with 3D shapes, rotations etc. Now he is working on 4th grade book as fast as I am translating problems from Russian. I think if you let your child to focus on a subject/books he desire it is much better then "pulling his ears" into something he is not interested in. P.S. I never tested my kids on gifteness, even I know they are(at least first two), but it doesn't matter in homeschool setting. You will try to do the best for him.

We did both and for 4th grader I would choose Building Thinking Skills 2. We like Logic Lift-off a lot but we also did Building Thinking Skills 3: Figural with my 5 grader who is very strong in logic. She is done with the book. We skipped Building Thinking Skills book 2 completely. Books are different so they are not overlap in topics covered. This year we will be doing last book of Logic Lift off series. We did Logic Safari 3 but if you do Logic Lift off books you do not need Logic Safari at all.

I agree with you. I have been there myself. My child just turn 11 but she is emotionally not ready for "hormon attack" and has almost nothing to do with kids her age accept one girl. Most kids of her age she met are really shallow/ not deep enough and are very interested in pop culture not in a good way. She would rather meet people who are much older or much younger. If she wants to have just fun, she spends time with younger kids otherwise talking to 18-22 years old discussing music appreciation/ robots/ science etc. It would be easier for her to live in a different country where an average child knows more than a typical American teenager. I am so glad we live in a friendly homeschooling state with minimum legal requirements which allows us to elaborate and excel. As a parent you will not make a wrong decision because you see your child in different situations and you know how to react. You want only the best for your kids. It might take few month to figure out what work the best for both of you. We had been through 10 different math programs withing 5 years of homeschooling and still using more than half of them for particular topics/enrichment continuously.

Hi, I do plan for my 6th grader up to 2 weeks ahead of time and then record what has been done. My plan is not must to do. It is just more an overview/ projection what will be done. Sometimes my daughter does 40 math problems instead of assigned 20 eating into next day assignment or spent more time doing her French. I present her a time-schedule of upcoming work and she decides if she wants to combine things or work ahead of schedule. I also record what she actually accomplishes in a separate book where I keep a track of her time and reward points for every work/ assignment done properly. I am going to try it with my son who is an accelerated 1 st grader. For my second daughter( she just turned 5) I am just going to have a record book keeping track of her time and assignments. Since I write my own curricular where I selectively choose what/when and how to study depending on my kids interests in science, math and languages, I can beef it up or adjust the speed if we need to slow down our adventure through jungles of knowledge.

My kids are looking forward to a new EV3. My husband likes it more than the older version at least from a preview he read. I guess we will be among "guinea pigs":)

Yes, this is the one. How does your son like it? My daughter is still half way through her exploration while my husband has already done with his adventure. He spent a day exploring and training his robot.:)

I am with you. You know what your child is capable of. I do the same with my daughter. I am mean at some point but she stopped complaining when she turned 7. She gets most of "Challenging problems of IP SM" from her first try and makes stupid mistakes with regular one just because she didn't bother reading them correctly. We are almost done with PM and Russian math6 and continue challenging her mind with Singapore Olympiad assignments and few other things this summer. We really enjoyed tricky MEP problems. I signed her up with Mathletics for next year just to speed up her thinking/reaction process. Currently we are using BA as a supplement to SM2 for my 6 years old son. He likes it a lot . I think they complement each other nicely:) We also doing visual geometry(Russian book) for 4th grade which deals with 3D shapes, rotations etc. My son had a lot of success with 2nd grade book. Just my opinion:)

I signed up few days ago. I am glad it will not start until later. I am trying to learn RobotC language myself while my daughter is taking her robotics classes this summer:)

Hi, If you have kids who participate in Robotics Academy Summer of Learning classes what age are they? My daughter who just turned 11 is enjoying it a lot. You can learn more about it here: https://cs2n.org/ We are doing one with LEGO Mindstorms through virtual world. I think my husband is having even more fun:) with his adventure.

I don't know if anybody posted it before but I found a link to a free middle school chemistry curriculum. http://www.middleschoolchemistry.com/ I am thinking about incorporating it with other materials I have for a chemistry study next year.

Sorry, it would be annoying for me also. I didn't think about it. I received e-mail from them with an ad embedded. It does says to use on mathletics.com. May be if you try to come from an American IP address it might work better for you. I used an Annonimiser before and it is free. One thing I am not sure about it would be a payment in dollars instead of euro. :(

Hi, If anyone here is interested to sign your child up with mathletics.com, there is a special 60% discount(from original price) with promo code DISCOVERY which ends on June 23.