FWIW, I did a trial of AoPS Pre-A with my oldest (after finishing SM), which conclusively showed that AoPS wasn't a good fit for her. I had Dolciani as a back-up. When I'd flipped through Dolciani prior to trialling AoPS Pre-A, it had seemed dry and kinda uninspiring. But after the trial, when I opened it and started teaching from it, the straightforward logic of it all was a sight for sore eyes, lol. We're 2/3 of the way through it now, and I just keep liking it more and more, to the point making Dolciani my top Alg choice.

Agree it varies by denomination. For ours (Lutheran - LCMS), seminary is a 4yr Masters of Divinity degree. You have to have a bachelor's degree, but it can be in anything - dh's is in biomedical science. Our seminaries also have been working hard to subsidize tuition as much as possible. When dh attended, tuition was 100% subsidized; now it's a significant percentage but not 100%. Even so, he still took out the max federal student loans each year to cover room&board (on top of working part time). There are a *lot* of "second career" guys at the sem, too - over half the students - so they could have built up savings from years of full-time work.

My thought is to do just that. Figure out what publisher/author/series you want to use, get their Alg 2 book, and have him go through the chapter reviews. If he indeed aces the review, then he's "tested out" of that chapter. If he only misses a few topics and aces the rest, have him just do those sections. If he's not solid on several topics, have him do the whole chapter. That way he can get what he needs without a ton of review, and be ready for the next math book in the series. It doesn't surprise me at all that a kid who's done all the AOPS Alg book has mostly mastered the "usual" Alg 2 content. (IIRC doing chs 1-7 of AOPS Introductory Alg covers all the "usual" Alg 1 topics, and the rest of the book moves into typical "Alg 2" topics.)

I vote for starting with book 2A. It sounds like it's an enjoyable confidence builder for her, and that she could use such a thing.

The quote from Corraleno was from the "What makes the classical approach to LA rigorous?" thread.

In the interests of full disclosure, no one would judge my homeschool rigorous (in any sense). I still have the same ideals of academic rigor (in the depth sense) as I used to have, and every year we are closer to them than before (both in depth and, especially, consistency). I'm really quite proud of the progress we all have made, and quite happy with the current state of our homeschool. But compared to your average depth-and-consistency rigorously-minded educator, we started way behind the 8-ball. I was only semi-functional when I started K with my oldest, and it's taken years and years of baby-stepping consistent work to get to this point - a point that is still below what your average well-functioning rigorously-minded educator has been doing all this time. I think we've achieved a multum non multa sort of semi-rigorous hs - one that I'm proud of, but not one that is objectively rigorous in the usual sense (or in the sense I'd imagined back in the day). ETA: And, also, though I wish I'd been at my current level wrt capable and functional when I'd started hs'ing, I don't know that I even wish to be objectively rigorous in the usual senses (including my pie-in-the-sky imaginings). I *like* what we are doing, and I am pretty much academically content with where we are. But it's not at all what I thought I meant to accomplish a decade ago, kwim? But in many ways, that's actually a *good* thing.

Ha! As I recall, back in those halcyon days of planning how to educate an ideal child (when I could blithely ignore the nuts & bolts of actually teaching the actual child in front of me), I wanted to combine the great depth of a traditional classical education with a libertarian kind of child-led unschooling (based more on "treating my children as I, the parent, want to be treated" fairness than in a "children flower best when left to choose their own path" romantic view of nature), plus a dash of CM (the lit focus and the general sense of treating children as real persons). I was a very philosophically-minded hs'er (still am), and the above were the philosophies that most resonated with me and reflected the beliefs I already held (and, yes, in many ways they *were* rather contradictory beliefs, and that *did* reflect an underlying core conflict). But there was also a strong "have your cake and eat it too" element - we were going to have all the rigor and depth and also all the effortless child-led joy; all the in-depth math and languages and music and literature and history and science, plus all the time to explore interests and rabbit trails and play outside. I was in the middle of a years-long depression then, and the gulf between my goals and what I was capable of doing was so vast, and the magic fairy dust of unschooling was going to magically bridge the gap. Anyway, so three major things happened between then and now: *the ongoing effort of hs'ing my actual (not ideal) children, using my actual (not ideal) capabilities *the ongoing effort of building up my actual capabilities through step-by-step consistency (not magic fairy dust) *a major crisis in belief - I lost confidence in everything I'd believed except faith and family (so both wide-ranging, yet not affecting the *most* core things) - and the ongoing effort of figuring out how *should* one live life (and, therefore, how one should be educated). I'm not 100% sure how I defined rigor then - probably something like delving as deeply as possibly into the foundational whys (combined with an unstated assumption that such delving would also somehow magically end up achieving all the more "conventional" forms of excellence). Based on my own experiences as a gifted student, I thought hitting the "usual" things would be trivial, or nearly so, leaving plenty of time for both delving deeper and for individual interests. And then I ended up with 2E kids, and all the usual things weren't so trivial after all; "doing it all" wasn't going to happen. And then I lost faith that "conventional excellences" were even worth having at all. But I also lost faith in my previous reasons for seeking an ever-more-pure traditional classical path. I'd previously assumed that academic rigor (both in the delving ever-deeper into foundational whys sense and in the achieving academic prowess sense) was a self-evident good, but now nothing to do with living life or educating was self-evident to me anymore. Anyway, I still very much value delving deeply into foundational whys - everything we do, we do with as much deep understanding as we can manage - but at the same time I'm more modest in how far I think we can realistically get. (And I'm not as gung-ho on academics as *the* focus of educating for deep understanding of reality.) I have a *much* greater respect for the importance of consistency now, and have put in a *lot* of effort at building up our consistency. I really like square25's "depth and consistency"; I always appreciated the depth side, but now I equally value the consistency side. I now have a greater respect for the practical utility of academic prowess (before I both denigrated it while also assuming it would of course always be there), while still deliberately choosing to not let it drive us - just with a more clear-eyed view of the potential consequences. I've pretty much rejected unschooling entirely; it's still important to me to treat kids as genuine persons and for adults to not be hypocritical in how they treat kids (and for education to have a whole-life focus), but I don't see the removal of restrictions as the path to human flourishing anymore. I'm still inspired by traditional classical education, but I've lost that fervent drive for finding The One True Best Classical Approach. I have a much better sense now how there isn't any "one true classical education"; in the entire history of Christian classical education, at least, people were constantly adapting classical education to fit their view of reality and human life and human nature. I used to seek out an ever-more-pure classical approach in an effort to *learn* the "one true view of reality and human life and human nature", but I agree with David Hicks - you can't really classically educate without *already* knowing all that. And *not* knowing all that - and having contradictory notions in what bits I did have - was a factor in my crisis of belief. Also, I'm more of a religious homeschooler now than I used to be. I was always religious, but I didn't homeschool for religious reasons; now, after a few years of trying to rebuild from scratch on the foundation of my Christian faith, I do. IDK, this is getting long and possibly off track. I've both changed a lot and yet not changed that much on rigor, lol. Most of the things that were important to me then are still important to me now (with the exception of the libertarian notion of removing restrictions as a path to human flourishing), but many of them are *differently* important. Education used to take on an almost religious cast for me - it was *the* path to human flourishing - and so my notions of rigor were caught up in that. Education meant learning to live well, and rigor meant doing the best one could do to learn to live well. Considering the thread topic, I think my notion of a "rigorous education" was in fact *synonymous* with a "deep, meaningful education", even as I also equated "rigorous education" with "academic education". That's where I think the biggest change is. I used to consider "learn to live well" in predominately academic terms; not necessarily in a conventional sense, but in a "explicitly philosophical" sense. Now I consider "learn to live well" in predominately *religious* terms, with the academic/philosophical aspect as one of several aspects, not *the* aspect. I still see rigor/rigorous as striving to do one's best (which is why I've tended to see rigor as a positive term), but I do tend to restrict it as applying to academic/philosophical goals (IDK whether that's the best use of the term or not, but it's the assumption I've tended to make thus far). So rigor (in the depth sense) used to be a top-level goal of mine, because learning to live well via an academic/philosophical path was a top-level goal of mine. But now, while learning to live well is still a top-level goal of mine, and seeking a deep understanding of reality is still a top-level goal of mine, the academic/philosophical path is now one of several second-tier goals supporting the top-tier, instead of being the top-tier. And so seeking rigor - seeking excellence, seeking depth - in academic study is likewise been somewhat downgraded. It's still important, but it's no longer top-tier important.

I've seen the distinction made before (by someone connected with AOPS iirc). This article says that it's a common distinction among mathematicians:

My non-reader was able to do snap circuits on his own from the pictures at age 7 (after having watched his older sisters do it).

Per the author's HSP self-test, answering yes to more than half of the items (more than 14 out of 28) means you are likely HSP. AKA, you don't need to have all the attributes to be HSP. (And she also says that people who answer yes to less than half, but those yeses are very strong yeses, might well be HSP as well.) I read the book a few years after it came out, and one thing the author talked about was how she had observed two different "levels", so to speak, of HSPs. Based on her research, she said that not only was there was a clear line between HSP and not HSP (where 40% are HSP and 60% aren't), but there was also a distinction between those who were more strongly HSP (meaning, iirc, something like over 20-22 on her HSP questionnaire) and those who were clearly HSP but partially or less strongly so (clustering around the "just over half mark" on her questionnaire). Strongly HSP is about 15% of the total population, with another 25% of the total population being partially or less strongly HSP. If you just look at HSPs, a little over a third are strongly HSP. Meaning that it's definitely possible to be HSP without having all the HSP traits. Just anecdotally, in my family, my dh and dsis are HSP, while I'm strongly HSP. And one thing I noticed is that they are highly sensitive in their areas of strength but not in their areas of weakness. Whereas I am highly sensitive in my areas of weakness as well as my areas of strength. (And let me tell you, it is weird and kind of difficult to notice things when you otherwise have no context for understanding or dealing with them.) ~*~ Quick thoughts: *If you are regularly feeling completely overwhelmed, it's likely you might have a lot of stored stress; at the very least, if you aren't thoroughly de-stressing in the afternoon/evening, you are likely adding to your stored stress every day. (Am using "stored stress" as a metaphor for all the cumulative effects of chronic stress.) So it's not just the stress of the day that is overwhelming you, but the stress of the day on top of stored stress; if you begin the day with your stress cup half-full, then you can only take half the amount of stress you can handle before your stress cup overflows. (And being HSP means that a) you might have a smaller stress cup than some and/or that b) you experience more stress than non-HSPs to common events. In any case, HSPs on average need less stress to thrive than non-HSPs, and hit "too much" stress earlier than non-HSPs.) In my case, I reached the point where my default "resting" state was at red-alert stress levels - my stress cup was full, and it took very, very little to send me over. It had confused me, how quick I was to lose it when nothing terribly stressful was happening - but it was because of years of stored stress from stressful times, plus little bits added on each day. De-stressing is now a big concern of mine. *It also helps me to keep one area of the house as a retreat of sorts - tidy, quiet, restful - and retreat there *before* I get to the exploding stage. Also, to have a regular rest-and-retreat time. When the kids were littler, I had mandatory "mommy alone time" in my bedroom once dh came home, which he enforced. I locked the door and stretched and did devotions and read, and he didn't let the kids bother me. Now that they are older, I have a better shot of getting alone time just by telling the kids.

We're all strong-willed in this family. The first things that come to mind are: follow your own rules, and both know *why* each rule you make exists and be able to *explain* that why to your kids (avoid stand-alone "because I said so"). (Eta: I'm using rule really generically here, to include expectations, etc., any sort of guide-to-life.) "Follow your own rules" means that the vast majority of rules should apply to kids and adults equally, and should be followed by kids and adults equally. If limits on screen time are good for kids, they're good for adults, too - and the adults setting the limits should follow them, too. If limits on treats are good for kids, they're good for adults, too - and the adults setting the limits should follow them, too. What's good for the goose is good for the gander - and what's good for the goslings is good for the goose and gander, too. Aka no hypocrisy. No "rules for thee, not for me". Not that there's no differences between adults and kids, but that the point of the rules should be to help guide and teach your kids how to live as an adult - and if you aren't doing your best to live as you want your dc to live, it's rather hypocritical, and undermines your teaching. "Do as I say, not as I do" rarely works out in the long run, and tends to fail in the short term with strong-willed kids. If it's not worth doing yourself, it's probably not worth requiring of your kids; if it's worth requiring of your kids, it's probably worth doing yourself. Which leads into knowing and explaining the why of your rules. The "why" is rooted in "what it means to live a good life" - which is equally applicable to both kids and adults. Often the specifics play out differently for those in different life circumstances - but all should be rooted in clear, applicable-to-all reasons. And I try to allow discussions and questions as much as possible, and reserve "Just do it now, I'll explain later" for when it's needed. ~*~ Also that you can (and should) apologize for accidents. Too many people think apologies are just for intentional wrongdoing/harms, not unintentional ones, and strong-willed people will often refuse to say things they don't mean just to make people happy (not necessarily a bad trait, if channelled toward valuing and upholding truth and honor and away from valuing self over others). I've seen plenty of marriage and family complaints centered around people who refuse to admit that unintentional wrongdoing/harm-causing is in fact wrong/caused-harm. (I used to be one of them.) I tell my kids all the time, when they protest, "But it was an accident!" that *you can apologize for accidents*. Why? Well, if you didn't *intend* to do wrong, then of course you regret it, right? Well, then an apology is sincere and appropriate and called-for. And parents should super lead by example when it comes to apologising, especially including to their kids. No hypocrisy. We all screw up, which means we should all apologize when we do.

Mine really is an "everything" journal, in that I have my book notes and writing and personal journaling cheek-by-jowl with my reminders and piano lesson notes and random jottings. A lot of my book notes and writings span multiple pages, and I title them "<subject/title>, part <#>". My book notes have the book name as the title, and I usually abbreviate it, so only the first page has the full title (and the abbr. in parentheses), and all the rest have just the abbreviation and part <whatever>. Eta: oh, and I write the starting and ending dates for the journal on the cover. They don't correspond to anything except the date I ran out of space in one and so started another.

I have one everything journal, and that's what I do. I don't necessarily even start a new page, if there's room on the current page - just draw a line across the page under the existing text. I write the date in the left margin on the line I start the text, and write a title/subject on the top line. If I have multiple entries on a page, I have multiple titles, separated by semi-colons. In my current journal, I'm experimenting with a running index at the back of the journal. I started at the very back page (and spill over into the next-to-last page, etc); I write the subject/title and whatever page numbers that subject is on, updating as I go (or whenever I feel like dealing with the backlog). (So the subject/titles are in chronological order of first mention, not alphabetical or anything.) For me, the amount of time I spend organizing or planning my journal arrangement is inversely proportional to the time I actually spend *writing* in it. So a blank composition book where I write as I go has been great. I've been doing it that way since college, taking notes in one everything notebook, always just writing on the next page or next available space. Generally the date and a title/subject has been sufficient documentation for future reference (unwieldy documentation breeds avoidance with me).

I really like "that's unfortunate" as a response, too. Currently I say, "I'm sorry to hear that", but I've been looking for a replacement for sorry-as-an-expression-of-sympathy-not-fault. (But I can't help but hear it as the tagline to Dude Perfect's Wheel Unfortunate: "That's UN-fortunate!" It doesn't work so well as low-key, non-committal sympathy that way :lol:.)

There is actually an option for reading about it instead of watching, but it's somewhat less user-friendly. "Blended Structure and Style in Composition" is, as I understand it, the original inspiration for the IEW program. And what IEW did was take it, digest it, teach it, and then used their experience to make TWSS, et. al., to teach their version of that approach to others and provide supports for using it. I have the book, it's really quite awesome - lots of good info, presented well - but it's also *a lot of info*. (Full disclosure, I only made it somewhere to Unit 2; it was definitely my fault, not the book's.) This is against all IEW advice, but I did in fact use SWI-B without having done TWSS (or finishing BSSC). I watched the videos with the kids, paused repeatedly to answer questions and offer my two cents and have the kids answer Pudewa's questions, and learned on the fly with the kids. I had read several overviews of the approach (including the one in BSSC) and, idk, it seemed to work out well enough.

Fwiw, my girls have worn both flats and low heeled sandals/boots/dress-shoes for piano recitals. I never worried about black flats not being dressy enough, and none of the various heeled shoes (1-1.5in heels) they wore ever gave them any pedalling problems. All that their teachers have ever said is to make sure to practice with whatever shoe you mean to wear, and in the half-dozen ones they've tried pedalling in, there's been no duds.

welth, wich/witch (which), fredom, seperation, anglacain, arived, richises, tobaco, coton, wich/witch (which), colenists (got right earlier), where (were), persacution Mayflour, arived, clearde, indinn, vilage, previouse, arived, where (were), moor, of (off), wilingly, folow, governer Ok, it looks like homophones and doubled letters are not his friend, and he missed some schwa'd vowels (where the unaccented vowel gets smooshed to an /uh/ sound). And he has problems figuring out which vowel spelling to use. And in "richises", when he spells something phonetically (but incorrectly), it looks like he realizes that something is wrong with his phonetic-but-incorrect spelling ('richis') - he knows it ends in 'es' - but he doesn't know how to fix it and so just kind of adds it on. "Clearde" seems similar - sounds like "cleard", but he knows there's an 'e', so he throws it on the end. (And "previouse" - correct except for the added silent 'e'. Is that a common problem for him, throwing on an extra silent 'e'?) And how he crossed out the 't' in "witch" - he knows it wasn't right, but he wasn't getting the 'wh'. His phonetic spelling is quite good, though. In a lot of ways, this reminds me of my 5th grader's spelling - they are the same sorts of mistakes she makes. Some of them can be addressed phonetically. It helped dd11 to figure out whether to use 'w' or 'wh' when I explained how they are actually different sounds, only our dialect pronounces them the same (as 'w'). We practiced saying some 'wh' words, where I emphasized the /hw/ sound, and it helped her to learn that the w/wh spelling isn't actually random. And many of the cases where he's not doubling a consonant, that doubled consonant is protecting a short vowel. So 'vilage' is actually vi-lage, with a long i; it needs that second 'l' to be vil-lage, with a short i. Same with 'tobaco' (makes it to-ba-co, with a long a, instead of to-bac-co, with a short a), 'folow', 'wilingly', and 'coton'. When dd makes mistakes like that, I usually read it aloud just like it sounds, and if she doesn't figure out how to fix it on her own, I explain how she needs that doubled consonant. Generally homophones are a matter of thinking about the meaning plus visual memory (to remember how each meaning is spelled); when dd makes one of those mistakes, I do my best to take the sentence literally as written and ask her, for example, how the Moors fit into the Atlantic crossing. I try to exaggerate the humor of the mistake as much as possible, both to highlight the error and also to fix the spelling/meaning connections into memory. Schwa'd vowels are mostly memory, but SWR has a think-to-spell technique to help bring auditory memory into it. Basically, when you learn to spell a word, and whenever you spell it thereafter, instead of saying it normally, you say it while pronouncing the usually-schwa'd vowel as written. So, for governor, you'd say to yourself "gov-en-OR" as you spelled it, to help remember the spelling. Likewise, with 'separation', you'd think "sep-AR-a-tion", to remember the 'ar' instead of 'er'. With 'indian', you'd think "in-di-An", to remember the 'a'. With 'arrived', to remember the double r, you could think "AR-ri-ved". Whenever dd makes one of these kinds of mistakes, I explain how unfortunately our ear isn't a good enough guide, thanks to the schwa'ing, and do the exaggerated "think to spell" pronunciation. ETA: I agree with Lori D.: I don't think this is that bad in the scheme of things. Not where you want to leave it, no, but there's a lot more good than bad here. It's about where both my girls were spelling when I started StM with them. But it is also the level of spelling that prompted me to get more serious about doing dictation with my 5th grader this year - where we had overcome so many difficulties, yet somehow there were still enough misspellings to be eyebrow-raising. (When older dd was at this point, I was still just happy about her getting more and more words right, and wasn't worrying yet about what words she still got wrong; somehow my expectations for dd11 are higher, probably because she was never as bad as dd13.) Dictation has helped with cementing common irregular words and getting homophones right - it provides targeted practice that comes pretty close to mimicking the "in the wild" writing task. (And I've started having dd13 write things from memory. IDK what it is, but apparently doing dictation from short-term memory isn't the same task as writing down things from long-term memory, and for dd13, the latter is the harder one.) ETA2: Another program, which I haven't used but which gets rave reviews for kids who need a lot of practice at the sorts of things your ds needs practice with, is Apples & Pears.

I agree with Lori D. that what works will be whatever addresses your ds's particular root issue(s). My kids' issues have mostly been auditory processing weaknesses, not visual memory weaknesses; on Lori's list above we had low auditory-sequential memory and difficulties breaking words into syllables and blending syllables together (also difficulties breaking words into individual sounds and blending sounds together). But, other than needing to teach oldest dd to pay attention to the visual details of words in the first place (which we did using Spelling You See's marking system, very similar to Lori's colored whiteboard spelling technique), once they could finally *hear* the sounds, they've had few problems with remembering the spelling. That said, I've found Spelling Through Morphographs to be pretty darn awesome and thorough, hitting things through several different methods to address several common issues. If your ds is reliable at spelling phonetically regular one syllable words, but is bad at remembering which phonetically-correct spelling to use and/or is bad at multi-syllable words, it could be a good choice. My oldest started StM as a garden-variety bad speller (which was a huge accomplishment in itself, because she was truly awful before we started working at it), and exited it as a pretty decent speller. Not perfect, but her spelling doesn't hold her back anymore; she correctly spells at least 95% of the words she writes, and the ones she misses are usually unfamiliar words she's not written before. At any rate, here's what we did and why: *went back through phonics book and spelled (in cursive) all the phonetically-regular one-syllable words (all 2,000 of them, from CVC through vowel and consonant digraphs). My goal here was to teach them a) to be able to hear the sounds in a one-syllable word, and b) to spell by syllable, not by individual letter or sound. Thus working in cursive (I combined cursive practice and spelling practice), because I've read that you can't effectively write in cursive if you can't write by syllables. Certainly the kids found spelling in cursive much harder than doing so in print - a lot more had to be automatic. At the end of this step the goal was for them to be solid at spelling one syllable words by sound, in cursive. *at the same time, we did Spelling You See and/or marked up copywork with the SYS visual marking system. The idea was that, just as in the previous step they were learning to aurally break spoken words into sounds, here they were learning to break written words into individual phonograms. (At the time, my oldest couldn't distinguish individual sounds in spoken words or distinguish individual letters in written words - she remembered words as hazy aural or visual outlines. No surprise she couldn't spell.) Once they completed all the one syllable words in cursive (step one), I started having them do their SYS and other copywork in cursive. *After finishing step one, we did REWARDS reading. This teaches reading by syllables and reading by morphographs. I used it to help them learn to break words into syllables and blend syllables together into words. They needed the advanced reading work, and it also served as an intro to working with words by syllables. *Once they were done with REWARDS - aka once they could spell one-syllable words by sound and could break words into syllables - we started Spelling Through Morphographs. The goal was to combine all the previous skill-bits into spelling by syllable/morphograph, and to do it in cursive. StM also works on common non-phonetically regular short words, so there's a lot of practice with those, as well. It worked as advertised. Oldest dd had a breakthrough about 1/3 of the way through (something clicked and spelling started coming easier), and another 2/3 of the way through (something else clicked and spelling became old hat). *At the same time as StM, we did Touch, Type, Read & Spell, to hit typing and spelling together.

I've seen the movie (a lot) and that line always bothers me. I agree that it's certainly not saying "the reason he kills people is that he's adopted", and it's understandable that Thor would feel the need to distance himself from his brother's actions at that point for lots of reasons (to confirm his support in the fight against Loki, to confirm he's against mass murder). But to use *adoption* as the means to place distance between Thor and Loki? It was a funny one-liner, as intended - but wow! the (probably unintentional) things the movie said about adoption with that line! I feel the need to comment on that line just about every time the kids watch it - in the "what *were* the movie people thinking!?!" sense - and my take is that the movie people just didn't *think*. All it was to them was a zingy one-liner, and they neither intended nor even considered the wider implications of what they were saying (that an adopted brother is less close than a biological brother). I don't think the line says anything terribly deep about what people think about adoption - other than most people simply *don't think* about adoption one way or another. I still don't like the line, though.

Oh, that would be perfect for a photo ornament. For the past few years, I've made photo origami ornaments, where I photoshop the photos so that when the photo paper is folded, the pictures end up just where they need to be. But it's not easy to find appropriately-sized Christmas-themed origami patterns that are simple enough to fold with photo paper (photo paper is not ideal origami paper - can't do anything that requires too many folds or too narrow of folds), and last year I gave up and did a photo book instead. But this looks perfect - thanks!

Extra-curricular, I think.

The way I placed my oldest in WWE, when we started at age 9, was to use the example lessons in the Instructor's Guide as placement tests. I started right at Year 1, Week 1, and then did Yr1/Wk4, then Yr1/Wk11, and so on, till we got to a level that was a good fit (which, in our case, was the beginning of Level 2). If your library has a copy of the Instructor's Guide (mine did), then I'd rec using it to fine-tune his starting level. If your library doesn't have it, it's probably not worth buying just to use as a placement test. In that case, I'd rec using the end-of-year mastery tests as placement tests. If he has no problems with the WWE1 mastery test, then he's ready for WWE2; if he has no problems with the WWE2 mastery test, he's ready for WWE3, and so on. Somewhat related, WWE is quite gentle and fairly quick, and so it would be quite doable to supplement it (although I didn't, even doing it "behind", WWE2 in 4th and WWE3 in 5th). ~*~ WWE: awesome for kids who love literature. I started it with a very reluctant writer, and it was the lit selections that made it not just tolerable but enjoyable for her; the lit-centric-ness keeps it interesting. (And it exposed both dds to a wide variety of literature, and sparked their interest in new books - we used the WWE selections as a book list.) And it's awesome for parents who aren't sure how to teach writing, because it's totally scripted (but, once you get the feel of it, it's easy to ignore or paraphrase the script if you want). Other pros: because it's lit-centric, it manages to both break writing skills into parts and teach the parts separately, while also keeping those parts embedded in a meaning-centric big picture. And I feel like teaching from it helped teach *me* how to teach beginning writing. Cons: Not a traditional program (that can be a pro, too); not a lot of output (sentences and paragraphs, not pages - was also a pro for us); doesn't have a wide variety of writing assignments (focuses on narration, copywork and dictation). I originally went into WWS with oldest (in 6th), but ended up stopping after six weeks or so because parts of it were too hard for her. Originally I figured I'd try again in 7th, but I ended up dropping it entirely because I decided I liked the philosophy of LToW better. In general, though, I've been very impressed with how SWB makes each step explicit in the WWE/WWS series. IEW: I've just done SWI B (as a bridge between WWE and LToW), but I liked it and it did what I wanted it to do. I watched the videos with my student (one every two weeks, if you are doing it over a full year), pausing as needed to come up with our own answers or to make comments or to answer questions. Then we did the writing project for that lesson. It was broken down into logical steps, that were consistent from lesson to lesson, and I assigned and evaluated and helped as needed with each step. It provided a chance for us to move into multi-paragraph writing and was an introduction to outlining and writing from an outline. Plenty of hand-holding. People who like their writing programs really free-form probably wouldn't like it, but we all appreciated the step-by-step directions. Again, like WWE, I learned with the kids - the videos taught us both what to do, and taught me enough that I could reteach and otherwise help the kids through any difficulties.

This, pretty much - I post the week's checklist on the fridge. Although, unlike some, my master checklist lists subject/curricula, but doesn't give specific assignments. (I'm a do-the-next-thing homeschooler, where "do-the-next-thing" means "you can figure out 'the next thing' on the fly".) So it's a "master checklist" in two senses: it has the master plan for this year's hs, and it's the copymaster I use to run off that week's blank checklist on the copier ;). I do just as much planning as it takes to find a rhythm to our days and weeks, as well as a rhythm to our subjects. Once I've got that, I can figure out the specifics on the fly and am ready to go forth and do the next thing. I also tend to do as much in my head as possible, only turning to paper when things get too complex and I need an external brain to help ;). I had to start writing down our daily/weekly rhythms once my middle hit 3rd grade (my beloved general checklist), and this year looks like the year I have to start actually writing down some of our subject rhythms. So until 7th grade, "independent assignments" pretty much entirely consisted of "go down the general daily/weekly checklist and do-the-next-thing or do-the-thing-assigned-today", where I came up with the assignments on the fly after teaching the lesson and nobody wrote anything down. (And, really, the only specifics were "which pages in the math workbook"; everything else just followed the general pattern or flow.) 7th grade was our first year with a non-consumable math book, so math assignments now had *two* moving parts: "which problems", as well as "which pages". But I quickly got in the habit of assigning odds, so that was easy to remember, and dd still had no problems remembering which section without any of us writing it down. And our new writing program went from the weekly pattern we were used to, to a two-week pattern. But it was pretty easy to grasp and turn into do-the-next-thing assignments. But this year, 8th grade, we're starting to move from daily classes and daily assignments to twice-weekly classes and weekly assignments that have several parts. (AKA more than dd - or I - can reliably keep in our heads.) It's mainly just in one subject (writing, LToW), so right now I'm just writing out (on the fly) a more detailed checklist in that subject's notebook, complete with due dates, but I hope to transition to her writing that into her planner. Or else I'll actually type up a more-detailed-yet-generic checklist for that subject, now that I'm getting a feel for the rhythm of it, and have her work off that, writing in specifics and due dates as needed. (I really like checklists - they're my external brain. The making of the checklist is how I plan out our daily and weekly - and now subject - rhythms, and checking things off is both a means of recording and accountability.)

Ok, it sounds like she understands active and passive voice in English, then? Active voice is where the subject does the verb, and passive voice is where the verb is done to the subject. It's the same way in Latin. So look at the changes she made in the English sentence. Say you have "The boy rode the horse". To change from active to passive, you switch the subject and direct object, and you change the verb from active to passive: "The horse was ridden by the boy." You're going to make those same changes in Latin. Just like in English, you're going to switch the subject and direct object, but where in English you switch the word order, in Latin you change the endings (there can also be a word order switch, but it's the endings that are key). Switch the subject ending to a direct object ending and vice versa (watching out for differences in declension and number). And just like in English, you're going to change the verb from active to passive, but unlike English it's strictly a matter of changing endings (again, watching out for changes in number, if the subject is singular and the direct object is plural, or vice versa). If she hasn't already, I strongly suggest that she parses every word in each Latin sentence. It's a lot easier to see what needs to be changed and what stays the same that way. Parsing is where you state all the attributes of each word. Nouns and adjectives have declension, gender, case, and number; verbs have conjugation, person, number, tense, mood, and voice. With changing from active to passive, all that's going to change wrt nouns and adjectives is case; all that's going to change wrt verbs is voice and maybe number (if the subject is singular and the direct object is plural, or vice versa). Once she's parsed the active sentence, and then written the parsings for the transformed sentence, then it's just a matter of adding the endings that correspond with the new parsings.

I think you might have better luck if you post your daughter's answers and ask for feedback on them. Or point to the specific issue she's having. Or if she's so stuck that she has no idea even where to begin or what questions to ask, that might be something for her to email the teacher about.