I love to workout. When I run on the treadmill, that is in my bedroom and I shut the door and turn up my music really loud. I don't have any "babies" anymore so it's easy to do, plus my husband is usually home. Occasionally I get to run outside and I leave the kids home with my husband or my 13 year old in charge. I have also done DVD workouts, and my kids love working out right next to me! I haven't worked out in a couple of weeks because I've been very sick and my 6 year old son asked me last night, "Will we ever work out again?"

I've only colored my hair on my own twice...just recently discovered grays and I can't afford the salon treatments every 2 months. I used Garnier Nutrisse both times. #42 (deep burgundy/black cherry, which wasn't as fun as it sounded.

oh my gosh thank you for this! I am busting my tail looking at secular options and I didn't even come up with half of these.

We don't own a set and I went to public school myself, but my parents bought a set (1992) brand new and I LOVED them! I loved picking one off a shelf and reading about random things. Hmmm. Now I think I'll have to buy a set.

We are not home schooling yet (I really should put that in my signature--I keep explaining myself in every post!) but this fall I will home school my oldest daughter (13) and we will be schooling year round. My two middle kids go to a year round public elementary school and we will pretty much follow that schedule. It goes: Start the 1st Monday in August 2 week break in October 1 week break (Thanksgiving) in November 2 week break in (Winter break) December/January 1 week break in February 1 week break (Spring break) in March Then there is a 2 week break allotted in May, but the public school's snow days are taken from this break. End the 3rd week of June, giving them a 5 week break for summer. Personally, I love having these breaks from school. I can imagine they'll be more valuable once we start home schooling (coming from a 1st time home school mom.)

I am also looking for a pre-algebra program for my 13 year old, currently in public school but will be home schooled in the fall. :) I am looking at MUS and TT, leaning heavily towards MUS. My daughter struggles with math...she is getting an F this quarter in pre-algebra at her school, and she had a D for the 1st and 2nd quarters. If MUS worked well for her in the past, why don't you want to go back to it?

:lurk5: I'm considering it for my 8th grader in the fall. (It will be our first year home schooling.) I just posted a thread asking about doing IEW and a separate English course...I'm considering Oak Meadow English 8 but I'm not sure if that would be too much work.

Wow, great blog! Bookmarking now.

Thanks for your input! Actually, as of now, I am only planning on using OM's English curriculum. Of course, that could change since I'm in my early planning stage. :)

Thank you!! I am so glad to hear that you love OM. I really don't know much about it but it's #1 on my list right now.

Would this be too much? We're brand new to homeschooling and I'm choosing curriculum for next school year. I'm thinking of OM English 8, but would it be too much to add IEW SWI-B? It would be a separate course...and I'd like to go somewhat easy on my daughter because it's our first year (and she is also repeating 8th grade, coming out of public school.) Our plans for now are pre-algebra, a science course, English, and some sort of social studies/history. From what I can tell, OM does include writing, but I think her writing skills are pretty weak so I wanted to add onto it.

Our local public schools offer Algebra I in 8th grade for advanced students. Very advanced students in 6th grade are offered a test to see if they can take Algebra I in 7th grade, and it is included on their high school transcript. My friend's son did that and is doing very well in pre-calc as a sophomore in high school now. But, he is an extremely advanced math student. Like the others said, I would not do it before 9th grade unless pre-algebra had been mastered. (In my own situation, we are repeating pre-algebra.)

I didn't even think about the NCAA! :banghead: Thank you for pointing that out. Sounds very much like my situation, I appreciate you sharing how it worked out for your son.

Thank you all, again. EKS, I will call the last psychologist she saw and set up another appointment and start pushing this again. All of you have been very helpful and kind...I'm glad I found this website.

I did realize that when I was perusing some "high school spread out over 5 years" threads here in this forum. In that sense, two years of 8th grade would be better. She did Saxon math in elementary school and middle school. It wasn't great, but I am not totally faulting Saxon for that. I am looking into MUS and TT for her.

You all have been helpful, thank you. Yes, besides the school thing, an extra year of gymnastics would be very beneficial to her. She is already "old" for her level...blame that on her parents who wouldn't let her join the team before she was 10 years old...I didn't want her under that kind of pressure at such a young age, and couple that with the fact that she broke both her left foot and right ankle within 3 weeks of each other last year and missed her entire season...simply put, yes, an extra year of gymnastics before college would be great. Truth be told, we are not going to cut back on the gymnastics unless she wants to, for the reason LBS mentioned. It is the one thing she has that makes her feel really confident. Now that I've been researching home schooling, I certainly see the benefit of not assigning my child to a particular grade each year, and I certainly wouldn't put emphasis on the fact that she is repeating 8th grade (if that's what we do), but I will have to declare her a certain grade to the state when we turn in our intent to home school. We have actually done that. It was a very long process. We started through the public school system which was a joke. I don't really want to get into it all, but we ended up pursuing this privately. We went through a few child psychologists for different reasons. One said she tested very low--borderline retardation--on the IQ test, but was baffled because she scored average to above average on some other test he gave her. One of them said she had anxiety disorder and recommended counseling, which she did. Another said she had an auditory processing disability and recommended speech therapy (I can't remember the reason for that) so we did that along with counseling, until the speech therapist said my daughter was no longer benefiting from therapy. She is no longer in counseling because the counselor said my daughter was "fine" and to come back if she wanted. We started all this when she was in 2nd grade when she first began "falling behind" at the recommendation of her teacher and school counselor. They thought ADD/ADHD at the time. ETA: When I say she is "old" for her gymnastics level, I meant by grade, not by age. Her gym would like college-bound athletes to be level 10 by 10th grade. At her current rate, she will be level 10 by 12th grade, although she is trying to skip a level so that will happen by 11th grade for her, assuming she started 9th grade in the fall.

Thanks for your response, Brindee. I do agree with you on not using her age as an excuse. Honestly, I never really thought it was a huge issue until her math teacher brought it up to me this morning. From what I know, public schools discourage holding back students beyond kindy/1st grade for age reasons. I was surprised that she brought it up and I only brought it up so that you guys would know the whole story. I think my daughter is having a hard time grasping the material. She works HARD. She comes home from the gym just before 8pm, scarfs down some dinner, and does homework from then until 10 or 11 every night. She has a gym teammate and classmate on the same schedule, but her friend hardly has homework because she understands it the first time and can even complete most of it in school during their seminar/study hall hour.

I realize the decision in her father's and mine to make but I would like some WWYD answers here. ;) My daughter is currently 13 years old and in the 8th grade at public school. She's an August baby so she's one of the youngest (if not THE youngest) in her grade. She barely made the cutoff date for kindergarten and we sent her thinking that if she had to repeat the year, it would not be the end of the world. Well, kindergarten and 1st grade were both fantastic. She was easily at the top of her class. 2nd grade was when we could tell (behaviorally) that she was younger than everyone else. While still near the top of her class, she was slooooow to complete assignments, often taking hours to finish what others could in a matter of minutes. 3rd grade was much of the same school-wise except now she was falling behind because she really couldn't keep up with the pace...she would shove assignments in her desk instead of bringing them home because she felt there was no way she could get it all done, and it was in that school year that we could see she was emotionally and socially (I hate that word, btw) behind her classmates. Again, 4th grade was the same. She received great grades (in fact, I think that was the last time she brought home straight As) only because I was on top of her every move and met with the teacher weekly so that I didn't have to rely on only my daughter to trust she was getting all her work done. In our district, 5th grade begins middle school. This was a whole different ballgame now, and on top of switching classes and having multiple teachers, the 5th graders did not get lockers, so they had to carry with them the materials needed for the first half of the day, then switch them out in their homeroom class at lunch for the remainder of the day. This was a nightmare for my child. This is the year she began bringing home poor grades, like Cs and Ds. 6th grade was better--she matured a lot--and 7th grade (which is jr. high) was okay, too. Well, 8th grade has been difficult for her. She has been getting a D in pre-algebra all year long and currently has an F. She is taking a pre-AP English class (the pre-AP was a big mistake on our part) and she's getting a C in that class. A C in science, Spanish, etc. And her Cs are pretty low. My daughter is a competitive gymnast. She works out a lot. Her dad & I have decided that we cannot let her go to high school next year and do competitive gymnastics, so we are going to home school. My plan was to have her repeat pre-algebra this summer and continue on with 9th grade in the fall. Because she's so young, I briefly thought about just repeating her entire 8th grade year. She is very against this, though, and I don't want to discourage her when she is already down about school. That's when I came up with the plan I mentioned. However, I spoke with her math teacher on the phone today and her math teacher actually suggested repeating her 8th grade year as long as we were going to home school. (I had marketed it to my daughter as more of a "finish high school over 5 years" type plan but she didn't fall for it. And really, I'd have to officially enroll her as an 8th grader because our state requires standardized testing in grades 3-9.) I don't want my child to barely get through school. I would like to her to want to go to college and while her goal is to compete gymnastics in college, I can't see that happening for her because her grades are so poor. In this situation, would you hold her back a year? Thanks for reading.

Hi! I'm very new here and not even home schooling at the moment, but we are going to begin home schooling this fall in 9th grade because of my daughter's gymnastics schedule. She currently practices 20 hours/week and this May will begin two-a-days and practice 25 hours/week. So I have no experience with what you are asking and not sure of our schedule because of her two practices per day. I am planning on algebra I, physical science, english, writing, civics, and health. I have not decided on anything else. I would like to just school four days a week and use the 5th day to play catch up or read, etc., but we'll have to figure out if that will work for us. I'm so glad I joined this forum where there are parents with kids heavily involved in an extracurricular. I know I will learn a lot from you! There are other home schooled girls in the gym, but half of them go to Providence 2-3 days/week (2 days for the younger kids and 3 days for the high school kids) and the other half do Abeka. Nothing wrong with either and everyone at the gym is happy with their choice, but I am going with my own plan and feel a bit out there.

Thank you! :) Looking forward to getting to know everyone.

I'm new to home schooling. I'm currently picking out curriculum for a 9th grader in the fall. None of this is set in stone; I'm still in the research phase. I would like to stay as secular as possible. Math U See or Teaching Textbooks Algebra I High School Physical Science in Your Home Switched on Schoolhouse Civics (one semester) Institute for Excellence in Writing SWI-C Oak Meadow English 9 Oak Meadow Health (one semester) Haven't begun looking at electives. She is a competitive gymnast (hence the reason for our home schooling.) We might just leave it there to keep our first year simple. The subjects I've picked so far mimics our local public high school (minus the electives)...I thought it might be easier for her to transfer there one day if she chose to quit gymnastics.