I think so too. Thanks for that information. That was incredibly helpful.

I just asked this very question over on the dyslexia thread. I am eager to hear word retrieval suggestions. I can give you one thing that we do in that situation where she is trying to find a word and unable to access it. DS "I want to say that the uh, you know, the thing...." Me "Food processor?" DS laughing "no" Me "radiator?" DS "no" Me "empire state building?" etc. until he finds the word. I think I got this idea from the Eides in the "Mislabled Child" book. It does two things. It lightens the mood (I always start with food processor which my son finds completely ridiculous) and it helps jump start his brain to actually find the word. I am eager to hear other suggestions for word finding difficulties since this is something DS continues to struggle with.

Following this rabbit trail I am wondering what sorts of things people do to help their children with word retrieval. Word retrieval is a major issue with DS, I feel pretty on top of spelling (finally) but formulating his thoughts into words is still pretty challenging for him.

Oh, I see, she isn't really interested in science at all. Perhaps history related videos will help kindle her interest. Good luck on your mission.

Yes, that's what he has been using. He is finishing it up and this year he'll be using a Bio text. I am not home so I don't have it next to me. I think it's Ravens and Johnson. I homeschool through a charter and it was in their library. He looked at it and chose it himself. TC is a good place to start. What about Thinkwell? Those are very traditional classes but she might enjoy the lectures. I wonder if there are samples that she can look at. I found DS really enjoys lectures. or opencourseware videos. He is VERY auditory, the interest in textbooks is new. Really just starting last year. If he weren't interested now I don't think I'd worry too much. Our children are still young. But I do understand where you are coming from. I have a pretty contrary child too. Has she checked out Mechanical Universe at learner.org? It is really cool and might be something to get her motivated. It's very history based. Hmm, if she isn't interested in Joy Hakim she might not be interested in this. However perhaps it is the modality that is the problem. She is 2e no? For DS the progression went like this. #1) Years and years of listening and watching. #2) Years of reading about science and only finally now #3) writing about science. I think the sequence was very important because of dyslexia. He has to be mentally a few years ahead of what he is reading and several years ahead of what he is writing. What is she interested in? Try the library for TC courses. I haven't been able to find previews. It's too bad.

Here's an idea. What if you take a look at the HS standards (most states have pretty detailed descriptions these days) and see if your out of the box ideas fit in with the standards. Use the standards as a checklist to see what might be missing (if anything) and only "school" the parts of science that she might not get with your plan. Does this make sense? I am not the biggest fan of standards but you can use them in this way to line up interest led learning with traditional school. Unless that is not a huge priority for you, I am not sure. Do you want DD to have traditional HS science courses on her transcript? Or is this something that you are mulling over? I think the traditional route has two values. #1 your general hoop jumping to get into a certain school (if the school requires this sort of thing) and #2 to help your child deal with college science. #2 would only really be important for certain majors. Some colleges don't require science at all. I took a "philosophy of science" course to fulfill one of my science requirements, and this was for a math degree. For #1 there is no intrinsic value. So if your DD doesn't need to jump this hoop it wouldn't be a big deal to throw caution to the wind and go your own path completely. However, I think it wouldn't be too difficult to merge interest led learning with a traditional high school course. If I were to go this route with DS, I would just have him read the state standards himself and decide how we would fulfill them. As it is he is happy as a clam working from a textbook so that makes my job a little easier. Still, I think it would be doable. BTW I am curious to hear more about your plans for HS. (or ideas if it is a work in progress) This makes complete sense to me. I think making science relevant is important for both STEM majors and non science majors.

Jackie, my library has the "Creepy Crawlies" book and I will go an get it. Thanks for all the recommendations. Jane, thanks for the second recommendation. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/ Ask and you shall receive. Lots of interesting ideas.

I asked him and he doesn't see anything wrong with it but he is extremely sensitive and he doesn't think he can handle the "yuck" factor. He has trouble sitting next to people eating meatloaf. Is dissection an important part of the Bio Lab experience? Essentially, he'd rather not. I think he probably could but it would have to wait several years. On this topic can anyone steer my toward a book on setting up labs? What about how to design your own labs and experiments. I think DS would dig on this. Does anyone ever do this?

:lol: I can just see him sticking up for the rights of microbes. He eats yogurt though so I think we are safe.

Indeed, that's why I am here.

Thanks! :D

I am pretty sure mine is one of these kids. Shouldn't I be helping put together some sort of lab experience for him, though? This is one of those places where I am clueless, I only took one real science class in college and I never got much out of labs in high school. I always just went through the motions. They need a College Labs for Dummies book or something. I can tell you one thing we won't be doing frog disections. He is king of an extremist when it comes to animal rights. He called me from camp this summer kind of flustered because one of his friends killed an ant. I said "you know son, not everyone feels the way you do about animals." he said "yeah, but he did it, INTENTIONALLY?" I had to laugh. I love this. And I have to agree. Still, I am pretty sure my son would never be a mindless drone no matter what I did. I suppose there is a small part of me that wishes he were a mindless drone once and awhile.:lol:I am kidding, really I am "Jump when I say frog" my son was dragged out of a preschool for acting like a frog during horsey time. Getting him to jump is easy, getting him to stop is harder. I mean this both metaphorically and literally. I think that's why some top down learning is hard for him. It is hard for him to stop his brain to simplify a thought enough to get it on paper. He wants to keep thinking the big ideas, but in order to get skills he needs to backtrack, slow down and "be a horsey" for awhile. I want him to be able to go with the flow if he needs to, in order to to meet his goals. If this means doing what an authority says then, yes I'd like him to be able to do it. But I don't need for him to do it mindlessly. I'd like him to have the judgment to decide if it is worth it.

I didn't stay on the path with my son. I suspect I will with my daughter (also accelerated and also 2e but just different than DS). At the time it was way too hard to figure out where DS was. He never seemed to be in the Grammar Stage. He was all over the map and I couldn't tease out the different skills involved in Grammar stage. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say and I think I see now some of the things that I missed (and am playing catch up on now). I started easing back into WTMish learning last year. He seemed almost ready for rhetoric but was missing a few skills. My son is 2e, but I think accelerated kids can be all over the map 2e or no. My daughter is on the map though so classically schooling her during the elementary years is WAY easier. It would be great to have a checklist of skills for each stage so you could just scan them and see what you actually need to teach. Many of the Grammar stage skills my son had mastered without me having to teach him. Other skills were almost impossible for him at the time. Now that he is a bit older what was impossible is now possible and he is playing catch up with a few things (most notably writing). It hasn't hurt him a great deal but if I had it to do over again, I'd be a little more on top of writing. I don't think I would have needed to change anything about other subjects. He was very much able to fly on his own with them. Runningmom, it is hard to plan. Things change every year. Hang on to your hat.

Cool. Now I feel even better about what we have done. Now if I can only figure out how to teach the more rigorous HS level science. I feel that my son is really ready for this. Just not sure I am.:tongue_smilie:

Your daughter is 12 right? I think doing that sort of thing now rather than later would be better. She is of Jr. High age and there really isn't much Science at that age anyway. It is much easier to teach a subject a child loves in a child led way. In fact, I think it is much easier to teach a subject a child loves period. Perhaps you could be creative this year and find resources to cultivate interest in science. DS has been a science lover since he was 6. He discovered the David Attenborough series "Life on Earth" and then "Cosmos" (both great for any age) and he was hooked into the story. He has watched "The Mechanical Universe" on learner.org 3 times. Each time he gets a little bit more out of it. There is real math in the series but what is cool is that you don't need to follow the math or science. That is a benefit of TTC math and science courses. I think it makes them a bit weaker for rigorous (pardon the term) High School courses. But super excellent for cultivating interest in a novice. He tells me the book "5 equations that changed the world." Was mostly about math but also about Science.

You nailed it I think. My son has sensory issues for sure. Running around outside and baths seem to help him deal. Still even with these issues I work on moving him out of his comfort zone so he can handle the big wide world. For my son there is also blood sugar involved. If he has eaten recently, he is more amenable to difficult situations. Absolutely. It is one of the reasons that I have to be so flexible in order to teach him how to be flexible. It's more than modeling. It's like a frog in a pot of boiling water. I have tried to very slowly introduce him to things that I think he will need later in life. I have to meet him where he is.

Except for AOPS I have used no High School Texts. For History and Science I have gone straight to college texts, I just haven't found any HS level text that I love. I didn't use a text for lit but we loosely followed one of the HS lightning lit courses last year. I am not a lit person and I really feel like I am winging it with literature. My son likes Dickens so I got the Mid 18th century British lit. and we worked through that last year. It was OK. This year we are working on ancients and I have a copy of CW Herodotus. I haven't a clue what I am doing but he loves to read and discuss these books so that's good, I think. He struggles with writing about lit (or anything else) because he has the stamina to write a 5 paragraph essay (barely, if you give him a week) but he is thinking about a short book. I am still working on how to bridge these two. I am trying to build a bridge from both sides. Then there is the problem that I don't know what I am doing as far as teaching literature. Goodness homeschooling the older grades is not for the feint of heart. Well we do oral pre-writes but usually on walks we talk about everything else. He is busy working on History, Science and Math and while he does write about these every day I am very interested in what he has to say. Also his writing is not essays in History and Science. Paragraphs maybe. He understands more than he puts on paper. And frankly his knowledge of History is WAY beyond mine. Our discussions give me a little background so I am better prepared to teach his sister. Seriously, he is like a little encyclopedia. With math I am OK since I have a degree (for now anyway) but we enjoy talking about math. It is getting to the point where I have to say "wait until we get back home and you can write down for me". The other thing he likes to talk about is astronomy. He had been big on black holes. Aside from helping with skills he needs for writing and the usefulness of the general update, these discussions are tremendously useful in getting him to put his thoughts into words. He really struggles with this. He asked me once what lettuce was. In the fourth grade. So when we are taking walks I let our talks just be as they are. It's very informal. He is talking about high interest things (most of the time, sometimes I am curious about something so I steer it towards what I want to hear). And he has to explain things to a novice (most of the time).

I think it is so cool how differently people work child led learning into their homeschool environment. It has to work for both mom and kid and there are many different ways to do it. I actually suspected a spectrum issue when he was young but was told he wasn't because of how strongly empathetic he is. This is one of those issues that I am not sure if is a GT thing or an undiagnosed other LD thing but it has been a thing. Though it is (thankfully) becoming less of a thing. I am not sure. I think I ebb and flow with structure. In some ways I have added more as he has gotten older. But I do back off when he gets the hang of things. It probably depends on the subject. There definitely has been growth but as he grows I raise the bar and expect more He's 13. My son is not fast either. He also has this "his eyes are bigger than his stomach" syndrome. When he was very young I toyed with more child led learning. This led to my son picking enormous projects that he could not even come close to completing in 8 years. Lots of frustration. So I learned and adapted and took the reins How anyone gets anything done with a toddler in the house is a mystery to me. My daughter is 6 and that age is just a blur. Well goodness, I am pretty sure I can't live up to this but I really appreciate the companionship. I am certainly no expert. Just muddling through myself. I have never been completely satisfied with what we are doing for Science. This past year he worked out of the book "The Cosmos" and listened to the TTC lectures by Fillipenko. Next year the plan is Bio. He reads, watched videos, works out of the text and we discuss. The thing I like about what we are doing with Science is I am having him write, write and write and since it is high interest he doesn't complain. What I don't like is it doesn't feel "sciencey" enough (for lack of a better term). I'd like an AOPS for science. A typical week? I am not sure if it has changed much from this year to last. As a matter of fact I am not even sure how much it has changed from last week to this week. I am not strong on the organizational skills but we do get things done. In the morning DS works on math, 2hrs usually. Sometimes I steal him away to go on a walk with me or (when I am motivated) a jog. DH sometimes goes to work later so he watches my 6 year old when this happens. DHs schedule is not regular so ours isn't either. I can't get as much done when he's at home. I just can't. When DS works on math I work with my daughter. DS runs around next (Play). Inevitably. Movement helps him. It's like therapy. When he doesn't run he gets emotional. I say "What are you going to do next?" (actually I might say this at any point in the day, he works and takes breaks and if it looks like he needs to do something else I nudge.) He grabs either a history or science book and reads and writes. Some days if he's not feeling well (allergies), he'll ask for a TTC lecture. At some point I say let's do X. X usually involves language arts. I throw things at him and hope something will stick. I work much closer with him in this area because it is where he has LDs. I check in him with other things but for LA he gets my full attention. Luckily my daughter is excellent at entertaining herself. She is an artist and will draw for an hour on her own. Later in the day he will work on Spanish. Most days as he feels like it, I would say probably 4 days a week. Usually every day he practices clarinet. Sometimes we have even done work at night. We have read and discussed books. We haven't done this lately. I am up later night with my daughter reading to her and getting read too. I should do that again. It was really a nice thing to do. I am notoriously bad at following recipes. I am, however, a pretty decent cook. It is kind of like this in my homeschool. I give my kids "a little of this" and "a little of that". It works pretty well and yet it is sometimes difficult to put down on a page. I really love list makers because it is so easy to see and follow what they are doing. I am strongly on the intuitive side. I get a feeling and I do it. I have seen a ton of growth in DS over the past year, both academically and emotionally. 8fill was saying (in another thread) that a ton of growth happens between 13 and 15. Gotta love maturity. I appreciate this topic and I love hearing your thoughts on it as well.

Ack. It's my fault. I can't help but look at these threads. I am not trying to advocate for a separate board. Sorry for the confusion. IRL it is hard sometimes to convince people that 2e kids have a real problem. This is one of the challenges of raising a 2e kid. You would think that the giftedness masking the disability would be great and perhaps there is something good in it. I think people often misunderstand how difficult the GT parts of 2e are. Sometimes I think that aspect of my child is more difficult. But usually it is hard to tell where things are coming from. Anyhow just to be clear I am not posting this in any way to say this conversation should be had in a separate forum. It is perfectly ok to have these conversations on the special needs forum or on the accelerated learner forum or really anywhere. I have found this type of dialogue and this "you are not alone" feeling to be extraordinarily helpful in the day to day raising of my child. It certainly doesn't matter where the conversation takes place. Anyhow apologies for having it on THIS thread. It probably should be on a thread with no mention of "sub forum" in the title. I almost didn't post back but I didn't want to ignore your question. I don't see any harm in leaving things the way they are.

Our kids are in no way "gray". Most of the time giftedness does not make an LD easier to handle and LDs do not make the giftedness less of an issue either. I often feel as if I am juggling flaming cats. Flaming cat #1 is the gifted kid and flaming cat #2 is the LD kid. If I stop for a second to try to look at one of the cats, the other comes down and hits me on the head.

Oh, this is my favorite topic. I find the balance between prescribed schooling and child led learning to be the most important aspect of our homeschool. We have discussions on what we are going to do and decide it on almost a consensus basis. I can't call what we do child led since I definitely have input (and veto power for things that are non negotiable) but it is not top down either. Most of our discussions usually happen over the summer when we decide what we are going to do for the year. Some things I let him decide on his own (Math for example, I can just say "What book(s) am I going to get you dear?" and it really gets done. For other less loved subjects we look at the materials together until we find something we both like. The latest thing I am excited about is Kilgallon. I should him the HS Grammar samples and he not only thought they were OK but he actually enjoyed them. Wow and whew. Once we decide on things I let him decide on the schedule. Last year we actually made a real schedule (it didn't get followed but it wasn't a big deal, really it was just a way to lay out our goals on paper for time management). This year we may not make a schedule at all. If it looks like he needs to do more of a subject I tell him (ie "you haven't been working on X lately") He inevitably tells me I am right and gets on track. He is really quite agreeable and flexible, which is odd because he is not generally an agreeable and flexible kid. I think I have won his complete trust and so he goes along with what I want almost all the time. I think I have had one conflict with him in the past year. He was very upset by the word "skiing" and did not want to write it. If he were 7, I probably would have let it go but at 13 I think you can learn to just deal. He seriously did not want to write down the word. This is the kind of thing I had to deal with on a daily basis when he was little. It is such a relief to have it happen only once a year. The end of the tragedy of the spelling of the "word that shall not be named" was that he had to write the word down. I pulled the "look at all the things I do for you" card. I am telling him the one thing I ask from him is that he be more flexible. A real "child led" person would not have forced her child to do such an uncomfortable thing. Teaching my son to be more flexible is my primary goal for his education. I do this partially by modeling flexibility and partially by insisting on it. It has been quite a balancing act.

My children are both right handed. I teach them "Your right hand is the hand that you write with." It seems to work well. ETA. I am not a terribly careful reader as I now see that this didn't work for the OP. I have a terrible time telling right from left and I am not dyslexic. If I say "turn right" people ask me "which right?", I use the L on my left hand to remember. This doesn't work for DD who is still reversing letters and numbers.

:iagree:

I am on SCD, my son is gluten free and has expressive language issues. I have never connected any of these or thought that they might have any connection. So I am intrigued. When my son eats gluten he gets cranky. He decided to go gluten free himself. I convinced him to try GF for two weeks and he noticed a difference.

"I'm glad" said I "That your daughter." said Jack. "Prefers." I said. "The boxcar children." Said Jack. "Instead." said I. "Did you know that she reads boxcar children everyday?" Said Benny. "It's no E.B. White" Cried Jessie. "But I could listen all day" Remarked Henry