If it was up to me we would not do one. There has only been one year we didn't do one and it was the year my kids were really asking to go back to school. I think if they had more outside activities at the time it would have been another story. Right now we do a co-op Wednesdays and we've been there a few years now so my kids don't want to switch. I hate being gone that day and it is such a bad day of the week. We are just getting going for the week and then Wednesday is a bust and it's hard to get back into the swing of school on Thursday. Plus I'm required to teach each term so usually on Tuesday it is crazy trying to get supplies together for the class. I have several local friends that will not do co-ops . I totally get why.

I don't think Challenge I will be an option. Our campus only offered A and I this year. They couldn't get enough for B so there are no kids moving on to I. My dd was registered for B and we had to move her to A or switch campuses. With her learning disabilities I think A was a better fit. We carpool with an 11th grader that is currently doing I and did A for 9th and B for 10th but I think she is just planning to go to community college next year. I wouldn't mind having high school take an extra year but dd does not like that plan at all. She seems willing to work on top of what she has for CC but I'm trying to figure what she needs. I don't want to pull her from Challenge. She has really enjoyed this year and it's gone so well. When she was home for 6th grade it was awful and I spent most of the year having to sit with her to get her to do any work. That was a big part of why she went to PS for a year. She would also stay with the same group of kids if she goes to B which for my dd is a huge plus. She doesn't have many friends and it takes her a while to be comfortable in groups. B also has the same tutor she has this year and she is really wonderful. It looks like we'll have to add an entire Science program on top of it at the bare minimum. CC doesn't do World History until IV and dd has to have that so maybe I could have her do Notgrass World History next year. I have that around here someplace I'll have to see if it wouldn't be too much for her. We could maybe try to do a good chunk in the summer of that. I also hadn't planned to homeschool for high school so I know absolutely nothing about high school transcripts at all so I'm kind of nervous about doing that. My 11 yo was planning to homeschool for high school but that is still a couple years away.

My 8th grader is doing Challenge A for school this year. The only things we've added are TT Pre-Algebra and writing classes (taught by an awesome homeschool mom who has sent all of her homeschool grad kids to ivy league schools). My daughter has seemed set on going to PS high school so I haven't looked into homeschooling high school much yet. We went to the orientation earlier this week and she looked miserable the whole time. She finally said she really didn't want to go but felt a lot of pressure to go (extended family and friends that go to PS mostly). I had also been telling her if she wanted to try high school at all it needed to be 9th grade. We've known of families in our district that have tried to send their kids for 10th or 11th and have a heck of a time getting the school to give them credits. My dd has been homeschooled except for 7th grade and she really disliked that year. She wound up staying the whole year only because she wanted so badly to do the school musical which didn't perform until April. We found Challenge for this year and dd has really liked it and would like to continue next year. My biggest concern is whether or not B is going to enough for high school credits. My biggest concern is the Science. This years Science seems quite light to me and I haven't seen any lab component to it yet. I had planned to have dd take Environmental Science through our homeschool co-op. It was a high school credit class and taught by a homeschool mom that used to teacher high school science before she had kids. It stressed dd out though and she said she just had way too much to do so I let her drop the Science class. The class for next year is tentatively set at Anatomy which isn't something that dd is particularly interested in so I'm not sure whether I should push that or not. I definitely think she needs a lab science class. The history is also Current Events/Mock Trial which I guess would have to be an elective. I looked and dd needs 3 credits of history and they have to be a certain 3 (American, World, and another I'm forgetting). My dd is dyslexic and a slow worker. She's been through vision therapy and a couple other remediation programs. She does pretty good now but it takes her a lot longer than a lot of kids to get through assignments. I'm trying to figure out how to have her do enough work for high school but still keep the workload manageable. I had thought maybe I could have her do some things in the summer like maybe Personal Finance one summer and Health another summer. She also has no idea at all what she'd like to study in college.

I've got a 4 yo with Autism who is functionally nonverbal. He also has lots of sensory issues and a fine motor delay. He attends Pre-K in the afternoon and they just started him on a voice output device. I'd like to homeschool him with my other children but right now he has a pretty good placement we're going to at least leave him there for Pre-K. Since he's only gone 3 hours a day right now we still do a lot of work in the mornings. I have an ABA trainer come to the house 2 mornings a week to do work with him. We also have ABA goals we work on with him each day.

My 8th grader who does not love math is doing quite well with TT Pre-Algebra. She started with Saxon and after 2 months we switched because it was not going well. I also have a 6th grader that hates math. She did TT4 and it turned out to be a big mistake and not a good fit. Now she is back in MUS and behind because we wound up putting her right back in where she'd left off with MUS. If it sounds like a good fit try it and see. I had a few minor annoyances with TT4 but overall I think it is a good program. My oldest also did TT5 and TT6 before going to PS for a year and she was fine going in to 7th grade math at the PS after doing TT6.

Amazon using the subscribe and save is the cheapest I've seen them anywhere. These taste really good so it's easy to get ds to take them which is nice. http://www.amazon.com/Jarrow-Formulas-Methylcobalamin-5000mcg-Lozenges/dp/B0013OQGO6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327713247&sr=8-1

That's wonderful!

My son was on the shots for 7 months. We saw some improvements in him but no speech improvements which is what we were really hoping for. Prior to doing the B12 shots my son had frequent days where he would sit around with little to no energy. The shots made those days go away. His eye contact also improved on the shots. I was not aware of issues with OCD with them. Luckily we did not have any issues with that. I have heard some kids will get quite hyper on the shots which can be helped by giving folinic acid while on the shots. I know some people say you really need the shots for efficacy but we are now using sublingual methyl-B12 (Jarrow brand) and it seems better for my son because he gets it every day. We actually give it several times throughout the day and it seems to help. The shots tend to wear off rather quickly and we were only giving two a week.

My 4 yo with ASD goes to OT once a week. He loves it. He's a big sensory seeker and gets to do things at OT like use crash mats and go on many different kinds of swings. The OT also tries to get him to play games. One of the things she is doing now is trying to get him to cross his midline more. Yesterday she had ds put ping pong balls in a tube kept moving the tube around on him. He also usually plays in the sensory box which is full of things like rice, macaroni noodles, pennies, and other things of various textures. The OT we use is in practice for herself and honestly it looks like an exhausting job. It is extremely hard to take days off because she loses income. Also most of her business is after school hours which I think is difficult because she has kids. She doesn't take insurance and says she'd never be able to stay afloat if she accepted the lower discounted rate the insurance companies would pay. She is absolutely wonderful and is always giving us ideas to work with ds at home. I'm not sure if we'd get this level of service at an in network clinic.

My 4 year old son with Autism is functionally nonverbal. His school yesterday tried him out with a 'Big Mac' Voice Output Device and they told me he was able to use it appropriately. He was able to press the button for it to say "I want cracker" at snack time. They said he hit it at the appropriate times and not just to hear the voice. They had been resistant to trying such a device because they thought he would not be able to use it. Does anyone have any experience with one of these types of devices? It will be two weeks before ds's IEP meeting. We should be able to request for ds to have a Big Mac for home use at the meeting so I'm trying to research as much as I can before hand. I'm hoping they will offer us some training on how to use it or I'm not sure we'll get the maximum benefit out of it. My son is able to speak a very limited amount but has no functional communication. He mostly speaks in single word echolalia but does occasionally say single words spontaneously. He can sometimes do two words together with maximum prompting. I'm hoping maybe he will eventually be able to repeat what the voice output device says. I'm a little worried though that it may make ds try to talk less if he knows he can have the machine do it for him.

I would recommend finding out if your insurance policy is self funded or fully funded. I never knew the difference until my son got an ASD diagnosis. I really think that might matter more than whether or not you get a referral. For example in my state there is a mandate that requires insurance companies to cover testing and therapy for developmental delays. People who have fully funded policies have this coverage because they must comply with the mandate. I have a self funded policy which does not have to comply with the mandate. They exclude therapy for developmental delays, any sort of educational testing, vision therapy, speech therapy for things like developmental delay (we pay entirely out of pocket for my older ds's speech therapy). We are lucky in that we have a specific Autism benefit so my ds with Autism can get very limited amount of therapy but I know many self funded policies exclude Autism entirely and unfortunately right now they are able to do that. Don't even get me started on how there are thousands of children going with little to no therapy because insurance won't cover them and school districts offer as little as they possibly can. It is going to be way more expensive in the long run because they don't get the help they need.

I was bummed VP made them cancel it. It would have made things much easier and the fee they were going to charge was pretty minimal. If you still have space I'm interested in enrolling my twins in a class so I'd need 2 spots.

My 11 yo is doing CTC this year. We have never used HOD before and I do not find the workload too much for her. She is on the older end of the age range. I did not add the extension pack and I think she probably could have handled it. We are doing the History read alouds as opposed to the boy/girl options but I'm having her read the girl option independently. She does much of the work independently including reading the history spines. It seems like I either read about how HOD is way too light or it's so much work. It's hard for me to comment too much because we've only used one of the programs for part of a school year but I have found the work to be about right and possibly slightly on the low end of what I'd like. I have found over the years that I have a hard time using programs on the young end of the age range. When I tried Sonlight many years ago it wound up seeming like a lot but I also tried it with the lowest age recommended. I tend to like my kids to be on the higher end of the recommended age range these days. It seems to work out a lot better. It is so much easier to add for me than to slow things down because it's overly challenging.

The public school here offers Pre-K to students that turn 4 by Sept 1st. We actually sent our 5 yo dd to this program (she was 4 when school started) even though I do intend to homeschool her. I know of several other local homeschoolers that send their kids to preschool and then homeschool starting in K. Since the public Pre-K is free it seems like most parents in my area just wait until their child is old enough for the public option. There are a couple churches that offer Pre-K for 3 year olds but I don't know of many people that do it even among my friends that send their children to PS.

I agree with you but there are already so many children going without services. I thought getting my son a diagnosis would get him more services but he gets exactly the same 1 hour of speech a week through our school district he got when he was just classified speech/language impaired. Right now they need to have some sort of mandate at the federal level. Many states have mandates for coverage but many people are still not able to get coverage. State mandates only require insurance policies that are fully funded to comply with mandates. Many companies have self funded policies and are exempt from state mandates (most large companies have self funded policies). They are mandated federally and there is currently no federal mandate requiring any sort of coverage for ASD. I'm on a yahoo list for Autism insurance and there are many people that have zero ASD coverage even for things like Speech because Autism is excluded from their policy. States that offer some sort of Autism services often have huge wait lists. Maryland where I live has a waiver program for moderate to lower functioning children and will provide up to I think 25 hours of services a week. The current wait list is 8 years long. Early intervention is so important and lots of kids spend years on wait lists waiting for services. By the time they get them their behaviors and issues are much harder to change. What happened to my son was that he got 1 hour of speech therapy a month through EI. It was obvious there was more going on but I didn't know what to do and once he hit 2.5 all they could talk about was transitioning him to school services. They basically didn't want to pay to have him evaluated and wanted to pass him onto the school district. It took us almost a year to get a diagnosis and I don't think our story is unusual. EIs in a lot of places do whatever they can to avoid having to provide services. I won't be having my son reevaluated unless it is absolutely necessary. I'm inclined to think that kids with a diagnosis will be grandfathered in. There is already such a shortage of people to do evaluations I think it would be chaos if everyone had to have theirs redone.

My 4 yo with ASD loves his I-Pad. We originally got it for all for all of the wonderful communication apps but he does not use those apps. He's lower functioning and has almost no functional communication though. He does not seem to get that he could communicate with the pictures. I think to get that to happen we'd need to have some intensive therapy to teach it to him. The biggest trouble with the I-Pad is that it is so easy to close apps so if I open something like an app to teach colors he just closes it and goes to something that interests him more. He can spend a lot of time constantly opening and closing apps. There are some games he likes on there. He knows how to play Angry Birds. He knows how to play You Tube videos on there (he loves watching silly cat videos). He also can go on Netflix and play things off of there. His current favorite is episodes of Kipper. I think as he gets older we'll find more uses for it but I don't know that it is a must have for a younger child with ASD. The biggest benefit is it helps to calm him down. He sometimes gets in a mode where he will jump constantly and sometimes giving him the I-Pad will get him to sit down and concentrate on that.

I will visit the other boards but most of my children do not have a special need. My oldest has dyslexia but it is so minor at this point I don't consider it an issue. She attended PS last year and got all As and Bs with no assistance. I generally only read threads that may pertain to my own children. I'll even venture into the accelerated forum occasionally because my older son is advanced in math but I tend to only read math threads there. I can sometimes get discouraged reading even the special needs board though as I have a very low functioning child. He's 4 years old and functions around a 15 month level. He will most likely never live on his own, go to college, get married, have children, etc. Many of the children even on the special needs board seem like they may be able to achieve some of these goals. My son has no functional language. He has no concept of what letters and numbers even are. I can't imagine teaching him to read at this point but hopefully that will be a reality some day. With him I worry about things like what if someone hurts him and he cannot communicate that to someone and what is going to happen to him when my dh and I can no longer care for him. I hate the thought of burdening another one of my children with his care.

My 7 yo son loves Fred. We've done the first 2 books. I do have to limit him or we'd be through all 8 in a couple months. My ds has a knack for math. He's told me a few times he was thinking about some of the math problems from the Fred books in bed at night. He also insists on labeling ovals as ellipses now. None of my girls like the Fred books at all. I've tried with my 3 older girls and wound up dropping with all of them. My 7 yo dd isn't at all interested in reading them with her twin brother. They don't do math together because ds is so far ahead of her anyway.

My dd did TT 4 after doing MUS Gamma. For my dd it was a complete waste of an entire year. We jumped to Saxon briefly after TT 4 and two months ago we moved back to MUS. A year later she's going to the next level and we'll be working through the next 2 summers to catch her up from TT 4. My dd did not retain much of anything with it and got to the point where she was begging not to do it. This child does not seem to do well with computer based programs though. That said I do like TT okay. I am not a fan of their grade 4 at all. My oldest is using TT Pre-Algebra this year and it is going very well for her. She seems to be retaining the info fine. She also did TT 5 and 6 without any issue. I do not get why TT 4 barely covers division at all. TT 5 and 6 I didn't have much issue with other than they seemed a bit on the easier side which was a good thing for my dyslexic dd who struggles with math.

I laminate just about everything but I haven't with my AAS cards. They mostly stay in the box and seem to be holding up fine.

We're currently using both at our house. I have my twins in MFW 1st grade and they did MFW K last year. We did do one of MFW programs for grades 2-8 last year with my 11 yo dd and she really didn't like it. My 11 yo is doing HOD Creation to Christ and loves it. She does a good chunk of it independently. I probably prefer MFW if I was the one picking but my dd has an obvious preference and this year has gone so much smoother as far as getting things done. Most of it is she likes checking the boxes off and she is taking much more responsibility for her own work. One of my issues with MFW last year was I couldn't see how Ex to 1850 was truly for grades 2-8. None of the stuff we did aside from some projects would have been anything a 2nd grader could have done. I know there is the supplement for that course for grades 2-3 but from what I saw I'd rather just use a different program for grades 2-3 because it seemed too light to me. It felt like the supplement was kind of an afterthought just to keep the family in one program. I really like MFW book choices though and I absolutely love the book basket list. I also have my issues with HOD. I do not like their science at all and don't use it. I also don't care for their recommendations for LA so we substitute all of that. Some of their projects are just plain silly and the instructions can be difficult to follow. I'd much rather track down occasional supplies than do projects that are too babyish. When my twins finish MFW 1st I still haven't decided what I will use after that. I purchased ADV at convention last spring and already have everything I would need to do that with them. I also came across a HOD Beyond manual for $20 and couldn't pass it up so I've been trying to decide which program I'd rather do. At this point we'll probably do ADV just because I've heard such good things about it and my twins are pretty used to MFW now. I don't know if we'll go to ECC after that or jump to HOD Bigger. Then there is my 5 year old. I'm not sure if it would be better to try to combine her with the twins or not. We could not do that with HOD most likely but could with MFW. I had planned on combining my 2 youngest children but my youngest is extremely delayed so combining the 5 and 7 year olds makes the most sense.

Insurance will usually pay for a speech evaluation. We opted to do private speech evaluations rather than involve the PS because the eval was all we could get. At least in our district you must enroll to get speech therapy. My 7 yo son does private speech therapy every other week for an articulation disorder. Our insurance does not cover speech therapy for articulation so unfortunately we pay entirely out of pocket on it. I am hoping to pay for most of it this year with our flex spending account which should help some. It has helped his reading so immensely that it is so worth it. He previously could not even say many sounds it sure it made it hard to sound out words. Our insurance does cover speech therapy for many different things but articulation is not one of them. My son with Autism has it covered with a $15 copay.

We've used Sonlight, MFW, and HOD at various times. Sonlight as much as I wanted it to work just wasn't a good fit for us. I actually sent Core 3 back to Sonlight under their guarantee as it was apparent the first few weeks it just wasn't going to work. I've used MFW K, 1 and Exp to 1850 and really liked all 3. However my dd that did Exp to 1850 last year absolutely hated it. It was like pulling teeth to get it done each day and we wound up only doing about half of it. She's using HOD this year and loves it so we'll likely stick with HOD for her. I actually probably prefer MFW and the layout of their TMs. The one thing I do like better about HOD but I don't think it starts until CTC is their notebooking pages. My dd is going to have a really beautiful history notebook by the end of the year. Cost wise I think they are pretty close. I know with Exp to 1850 last year there were a few extra books I had to buy in addition to the package. I also bought some of the book basket books. This year I think I've spent about the same on HOD. We have the basic package and history readers. I do not use HOD Science or any of the grammar, lit, and writing though. I also haven't bought any of the extension books. It might be difficult to combine kids in MFW at least with K and 1 just because they are so tied to the phonics instruction. I've used both with twins and it has gone fine. My youngest 2 kids are only 14 months apart and I will not be able to combine them. I think once you hit Adventures you'd be fine combining.

We did half of Explorers to 1850 last year and only added minimal book basket books. It is fine as is without adding a bunch from the book basket. I think we only did maybe 4 books total but we had a very difficult school year last year with my youngest being diagnosed with ASD. My dd also really disliked MFW and we wound up not finishing and switching to HOD. I really miss the book basket this year though oddly enough now that we actually have a bit more time for extras. There are some books astericked in the book basket that are MFW top recommendations. I tended to just pick from those for the few titles we did do.

My son has ASD and not Aspergers but GFCF did not show any noticeable improvement in him. He slept slightly better while on it but it wasn't enough change for us to stick with it long term. We also tried Specific Carbohydrate Diet and didn't see much change. The only dietary intervention we really saw a big difference on immediately was removing fruit juice. Ds has been off of it for about 3 months now and the rare occasion he does get some causes him to stim like crazy (for him that means jumping repeatedly). We're working with a certified nutrition counselor and it has been the best money we've spent on anything since ds was diagnosed. We did IgG allergy testing and my son only showed slight reaction to a handful of foods. He didn't show a strong reaction to anything. Having that done might be a good place to start. My son did react to all citrus which might be why taking out juice has helped him a lot.