Our favourite movie version of King Lear is Peter Brook's version from the early 1970s. Paul Scofield plays Lear. It's a highly atmospheric version, not the typical Hollywood costume drama. We absolutely love it, but I hesitated to recommend it because I'm not sure how easy it is to obtain nowadays.

My dd's currently in SO Latin II with Ms. Decker. Last year she completed Latin I with the same instructor. According to dd, the main value of the chats lies in the homework review-- the students are divided into small groups and every translated homework sentence due that week is examined and common errors pointed out. There's no chance of hiding in Ms. Decker's class! :) Dd highly recommends Ms. D. I must agree, though, that pacing can sometimes be slow and that it's hard for dd to focus on the screen for one and a half hours twice a week. Dd often uses MS Paint, GIMP, and solitaire during class. :D

Thanks, Kimberleigh! The Swedish village is in Bemidji (sp?). I don't know if that's the same location as the Spanish camps. If you like, you can pm me later in the month and I'll give you a quick review. :)

Wow! Yes, I, too, would be worried about sending my dc off to camp so far away. Not so much the camp itself, but the traveling/switching flights, etc. Sounds as though she handled it beautifully. On 18 Aug. my 14yo dd and I will be participating in the Concordia Langauge Villages family week of Swedish immersion. We've been told that the only other family to sign up for Swedish has a 4yo child, so we're expecting lots of personal attention from the teachers! ;) Hard to believe that they'll hold the camp with so few students, but I was told that it would, indeed, happen. We're new to Swedish (dd and I have completed the first unit of Rosetta Stone Swedish. Dd's main foreign langs are Latin and Spanish) and have never been to Concordia, but the many reviews I've read lead us to believe that it's a top-notch place.

:grouphug: Sending warm wishes and prayers your way.

My dh is an English prof at a Virginia U. He also runs a literary publishing company from home.

My dh, a publisher and book collector, recommends that for a single volume the following procedure will get rid of a moldy odor, or mold itself, in a book: wrap the book tightly in a plastic bag and place it in the freezer for two to three months. The extreme cold will kill the spores that cause both the moldy smell and the mold itself. It will not, of course, remove any stains or discoloration caused by mold. Very valuable books should be professionally treated.

Hmm. Not in our case. Our older dd is still on our health insurance. She's now 21yo and full-time in college.

Here's some good info and a good place to start your research: http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/hslda/200112120.asp Good luck to you and to your young athlete!

My older dd (not homeschooled) took a gap year. She worked in a couple of local stores for several months and used the money earned to travel through Italy, Greece and Turkey. She viewed the travel as a culmination of her classical high school education. Her universtiy (UVa) gave her permission to take the gap year. Their only request was that she not take any coursework at another school during that year prior to coming to UVa.

The "8th Grade Jacob's Algebra Syllabus & Course Plans" from http://www.kolbe.org were also useful-- not so much for the syllabus, which my dd did follow throughout the year, but for the quarter exams. HTH.

My dd supplemented with the Algebra I CD from http://www.KingdomTutors.com . She learns best with a combination of visual and auditory materials and the 113 lessons on the CD, which closely followed the Jacobs text, were crucial to her success in Algebra I. HTH.

Rebecca-- glad to hear that you enjoyed the Lukeion trip! In one of those weird episodes that happens from time to time in life, we bumped into the Barrs in Heathrow airport while they were on their way to Italy. Perhaps you were there, too! We were on our way to Spain for a little immersion Spanish. We also saw the Barrs this month at the NoVA conference (we were there on Friday afternoon). I think they also had a booth at the HEAV conference in Richmond this year and last. Small world, huh?

My dd, now 14yo, has taken several classes with Regan and Amy Barr over the past two years. She completed a one semester Mythology course with Amy, a Word Roots course with Regan, an Ovid workshop, and a two semester in-depth Mythology sequence with Amy. Dd wanted to try the Lukeion Latin sequence, but by the time she had decided on Latin, Amy's class was full. If you're interested in the language courses, my advice is to sign up early!

They are one hour sessions. Occasionally they run over by a few minutes, depending on the instructor's schedule. In addition, the students can text chat after the class. Dd really enjoys chatting with other students about music, video games, current events, etc. It's not directed chat, but sometimes the instructor does pipe in. Good fun, if you find the right mix of kids.

Thank you for posting this inspirational article. My younger dd eagerly saves up her hard-earned cash to donate to Kiva, a fabulous microloan provider ( http://www.kiva.org/ ). It never really crossed my mind that dd's interest in finance and the third world might mesh into a career. A gap year could certainly provide an excellent means of exploring this area of interest. She seems to have so many differing areas of interest that it's hard to imagine just what she might want to do with "the rest of her life," KWIM? You've given us something new to think about. Thank you.

The EPGY courses are not intended to be surveys of literature. For two of the three classes my dd took, there was a small EPGY-provided reader consisting of several short stories and essays. For one of the courses, there was one principal text: a paperback copy of Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible. Here's what we did: we supplemented with lots of outside reading throughout the year (books such as Bless Me Ultima, The Catcher in the Rye, The Old Man and the Sea, etc. Good, meaty reads that dd fully enjoyed and that we discussed as a family without forcing her to write about any of them. We do not want to kill her love of reading and feel that too much literary analysis is likely to turn her off). She also completed two Mythology classes with the Lukeion Project, for which she read and analyzed works in translation by Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, and Virgil. HTH.

From the EPGY website: The Education Program for Gifted Youth is an ongoing research project at Stanford University dedicated to developing computer-based multimedia courses in Mathematics, Physics, English, Computer Programming and other subjects, and making these available to students of high ability. The link to the EPGY writing courses: http://epgy.stanford.edu/courses/english/

Check your pm. ;)

Check your pm. :)

No, work is not required every day. In general, every week the students read one or two short lectures and reading assignments at home. The readings usually consist of short stories. In one of the classes, they read Arthur Miller's play The Crucible over the course of the term. Every week they also submit a written assignment via email to the instructor. The students must send the work in by the weekly due date, but how they schedule such work during the course of the week is up to them. Early in the course, the written assignments tend to be short, paragraph-long responses to questions based on the text read for that week. Later in the course, the weekly written assignments become essay drafts and, later, more polished essays. The written assignments for dd's classes were due early in the week. Every week dd made sure that her draft was finished by Friday. Over the weekend, she tweaked it and emailed it to her instructor on Monday morning. I suspect that the amount of time spent on one of these courses partly depends on the level of perfectionism of the student. My dd never felt fully confident when submitting a "final" draft. But she did well, nonetheless, and has grown as a writer as a result of these classes.

As I recall, the admissions process for EPGY Writing was really straightforward. We sent dd's C.A.T. scores, along with a cover letter, and that was it. I followed up with a phone call, and she was in. For the EPGY Math classes, dd took the EPGY math test online. For her CTY acceptance, dd took a standardized test (I forget the name of it) in a testing center in McLean, Virginia.

Dd has completed EPGY's W10A, W10B, and W10C classes. In Sept she'll start the W11 series. Our current plan is to have her complete the W11 series over the course of the next two years. She likes to spread them out, and she's less likely to burn out that way. During her middle school years, we used these courses as the writing portion of her Language Arts curriculum. We used Lukeion Project's Greek and Roman Roots class for vocabulary and stumbled through AG for grammar. Next year (9th grade), we'll be using them as supplementary mini-courses taken in addition to Keystone's English 9 course. Dd is an athlete and, in order to easily qualify for NCAA eligibility, she'll be using Keystone courses in core subject areas, but that's another topic altogether! :tongue_smilie: She attended a local private school until the summer when she turned 12yo. It was considered an elite, rigorous school, but I really don't think it was anywhere near as rigorous as many of the homeschools on this WTM board. :) I would not say that she was particulary "advanced" in expository writing. She loves to write fiction, but expository writing is quite another beast. She did start the EPGY classes with a fairly solid sense of sentence structure and a good grasp of vocab and spelling. When she turned 12yo, we started homeschooling. Her first EPGY class W10A, taken that year, was my favourite. It focused on the traditional five paragraph essay. The kids were introduced to basic concepts that dd has used in all of her subsequent academic writing. That year she also completed two CTY writing classes, "The Process of Writing" and "Writing for an Audience." In comparing the two programs, dd found that she preferred the format of the EPGY classes, so we decided not to enroll her in any CTY classes for this school year. This year she finished W10B and W10C. Most of the students in the W10 series were my dd's age (12-13). Many of them returned for all three sessions, so it was nice for dd to have friends in class. One girl was a year younger and seemed to struggle a little with the assignments. Several of the students in two of dd's classes were from S. Korea. Some of these foreign students were hesitant to participate by speaking into the microphone, so the U.S. kids tended to get more attention from the instructor during class time. In one of the sessions, one of the students was an adult from S.Korea who wanted to improve her English writing skills. The kids who are willing to speak up in class receive a lot more feedback in the form of group critiques. One of the many reasons we chose to homeschool was that we felt the online offerings, such as EPGY and CTY were more challenging and ultimately better value for the money than private school. HTH!

I am not familiar with the Seton courses. My 13yo dd completed two EPGY writing classes this school year and one last year. These courses are suberb, IMHO, for students who are serious about improving their writing skills. The emphasis of the EPGY writing series is on teaching the students to write clear, well-structured essays. Although it has been a sacrifice, I feel that it has been worth the money for us and we're signing her up again for next fall. Possible negatives (other than the cost!): depending on the instructor, there can be a lot of careful writing, and rewriting, and critiquing (from the instructor and from the other students) involved. We've also found that some instructors are better suited to dd's temperament and learning style than others. Perhaps the format itself-- a "live" class with an instructor and with other students from around the country (and around the world) would be sufficient to motivate your dd. I know that I wouldn't dare critique dd's writing assignments myself.:D

Take the empties back to Staples and get the $3 rebate towards the next cartridge. Staples recycles the empty ones.