These kinds of exercises have been a huge help here, as well - and likewise were extremely hard for dd to do at the beginning. Consonant blends, in particular, were a huge bugaboo - she couldn't distinguish the individual sounds making up the blend either. I heavily used the Dekodiphukan sound pictures in doing this; it provided a visual reference for what sounds she was supposed to be hearing but still forced her to blend instead of sight read. (She could do CVC substitutions by picturing the words spelled out in her head and visually noting which letter was different, instead of doing it by sound.) I also made magnetic tiles of the sound pictures, and used them in doing these sorts of exercises - she could build the word from the sounds she heard, and then read it back and hear any mistakes. With blends, I initially had her build the word "rap", say, and then have her turn it into "trap", for instance. It gave her some visual and kinesthetic cues to help bolster her weak auditory processing, but without allowing her to "cheat" by sight reading. (I did/do the same sorts of exercises with my younger two as part of the learning-to-read process, and they were/are invaluable.) LiPS teaches kids to learn how sounds are made in the mouth to provide that additional visual and kinesthetic feedback (it also does a *ton* of sound replacement/deletion/addition activities), and though we only got through learning consonant sounds, even that little bit helped a lot. There were sounds the girls couldn't distinguish between, and sounds that even I couldn't say on their own, but only in a word that contained them, and by learning how to mouth moves to make them, we all learned to both hear them and say them.

Spelling is a harder skill than reading, so spelling skill tends to lag behind reading skill. I didn't start spelling-as-spelling until my kids were reading well. We did a spell-your-way-into-reading approach - so that they heard the word, spelled the word (with guidance in choosing the correct spelling for each sound), and then read back what they spelled. So they were spelling (with guidance) right at their reading level. It was great for learning to read, but it didn't do much for their ability to spell (which kind of surprised me). So once they were reading well (end of 2nd), I started spelling from the beginning, tying it into learning cursive. Also, ymmv, but I've been surprised at how much my kids *haven't* picked up spelling from reading. I mean, I'm sure the exposure helped, but it wasn't enough. I was a natural speller, and I've been surprised at how much deliberate spelling work my kids have needed.

I was originally baffled at the author's assertion that girls' competence doesn't lead to confidence. I mean, from where else does (justified) confidence in one's abilities come from, if not from one's competence? And then I realized that's the editorial's point: school competence leads to confidence in boys (as one would expect), but, somehow, contrary to expectations, it doesn't for girls - and the very existence of that baffling, unexpected fact is the problem the editorial is trying to explain. (It took me quite a while to move from arguing with the editorial over "but it makes no sense that competence wouldn't lead to confidence???" to "Yes, right, it *doesn't* make sense, and yet it exists anyway - *that's* the editorial's point".) I still disagree with the editorial that hyper-conscientiousness itself is what is undermining girls' confidence in their competence, though. But if you accept the article's assertion that, for many girls, demonstrated competence somehow doesn't lead to confidence in their abilities, then you're still left with the interesting question of *why*. Looking at the other article linked, things mentioned are: 1) anxiety due to perfectionism, 2) imposter syndrome, 3) women being more conscientious about qualifications than men, and 4) women being more risk-adverse than men. While numbers 1 and 2 definitely can impinge on confidence and are problems for anyone who suffers from them, numbers 3 and 4 are not actually bad in themselves - they are only a problem in mixed-sex spaces that nevertheless largely function under male expectations. I mean, #3/4 are not really about women having intrinsically less confidence in their abilities than men do, but about differences in how men and women understand and judge a given situation. It's not necessarily a lack of confidence that drives women treating a list of required qualifications as actually being required, but a difference in what "required qualifications" actually means. I mean, I've seen job listings that I am dead confident that I could do, but require paper qualifications I don't have. I don't apply not because I think I can't do the job, but because I think that the prospective employer doesn't think I can do the job - that without some personal connection, I'll be rejected by the numbers before I have a chance to show I can do the job. (But upon learning that reality works differently than I thought, I can change and apply, knowing that it is an expected thing.) And being risk adverse doesn't have to be a lack of confidence in oneself, but simply valuing the bird in the hand over two in the bush. Men may have more big successes than women, but I bet they have more big failures than women, too. It's definitely true that mismatches between how men and women consider risk and qualifications can definitely penalize women in the male-achievement-oriented business world, but it's not necessarily due to a lack of confidence in women, but differences in what men and women value and in how they judge a given set of facts. ~*~ ETA: So there's still the question of what causes anxiety due to perfectionism and imposter syndrome. I don't think perfectionism or hyper-conscientiousness *has* to lead to anxiety, although it often can. (I agree with Linda Silverman that perfectionism can also be a valuable spur to great achievement.) I think a difference is whether you are trying to achieve perfection to warn off something bad (a recipe for anxiety) or whether you are trying to achieve perfection to accomplish a positive good (a good use of perfectionism).

Also, I'm not sure that most hyper-conscientious people even *want* to be in those sort of top positions in the first place. A lot of the women in my family are fairly hyper-conscientious (though with a fair amount of confidence in their abilities, unlike the article), and they *don't* want that kind of visibility and responsibility. My mom, kind of a textbook Hermione Granger-type wrt overachieving, has a lot of confidence in her areas of strength, and part of that confidence comes from having a clear-eyed view of her weaknesses - one of which is getting anxious at moving too far out of her comfort zone. Given a choice, she'd rather be quietly competent in her areas of strength instead of push outside her comfort zone in order to stand out more. And fwiw, quiet competence and confidence together have not gone unnoticed for the hyper-conscientious women in my family - they get noticed, and tend to get offered more responsibility than they sometimes really want.

I started Getting Started With Latin in 5th with my oldest, which was pretty good. My only change for the next kids is to be more disciplined about it, so that we can finish in 5th, not dribble it out through 6th. As far as active, non-worksheet-y beginning Latin, I Speak Latin is conversational-based and pretty active. For instance, the first lesson is basically Simon Says in Latin - my kids (4th/2nd grade) really enjoyed it. (We didn't get far in it because I wasn't willing to be disciplined about Latin and we just petered out after a few lessons. But it's the most fun, active elementary Latin I know of.)

The impression I have is that presence/absence of notes only comes into play if the student was already flagged for other reasons; the presence/absence of notes is not what triggers the initial investigation. At the very least, determining the presence/absence of relevant notes is going to require human eyes, and I can't imagine that they look at *everyone's* booklets as a matter of course, or even a random subset. The impression I have is that a score is either flagged for statistical reasons (big improvement, similar pattern of right/wrong answers as the students who sat by them, etc.) or by a proctor. And then they pull all the relevant test booklets to look for clues as to who showed work that matches their answers versus who didn't show any supporting work.

Make sure you have both the bride's and groom's full names on the return address? I do think you need the last names on there *somewhere*.

The bolded statement really struck me, as I tend to think of "succeeding in school with minimal effort" as a *bad* thing. It's a well-known issue in gifted education, that a long-term dearth of sufficient challenge can cause a lot of problems, from failing to develop a habit of working hard to feeling like having to work hard means you are a failure. (The latter - feeling like having to work hard means you are a failure (and so avoiding situations that might challenge you to avoid perceived failure) - is an interesting counterpoint to the article's point that many girls feel compelled to work as hard as possible as a hedge against failure.) Personally I was more like the boys in the article, doing the minimum for an A, and I left high school with tons of confidence but a crappy work ethic, and in the end confidence was not enough to overcome a lack of competence. So I kind of take issue with the author's framing of the situation as "schooling builds boys' confidence, while it *only* builds girls' competence". She seems to be assuming that boys are building *both* confidence and competence through succeeding with minimal effort, instead of confidence at the expense of confidence, and idk that that's necessarily true - it certainly wasn't true for me. Or, at least, I had plenty of competence and confidence in academic things, but I did not have much competence in EF things, but I never noticed, because of the lack of challenge. "Succeeding with minimal effort" left me with *unwarranted* confidence in my ability to get things done. (There might be a significant difference between succeeding with *minimal* effort vs succeeding with *moderate* effort.) ~*~ That said, while I think the author is painting with too broad a brush, I think she *has* put her finger on something interesting: how some people feel compelled to overachieve to ward off failure. See, in addition to underachieving, I also overachieved out of perfectionism, but not because I thought I'd fail the teacher's standards, but because I would have failed *reality's* standards. When I set out to achieve, I wanted to do the very best possible because *I* knew it mattered, even though I knew full well it didn't matter to others; although I thought it *should* have mattered to them, I knew it didn't. So in some ways, I was as unable to set realistic, less-than-the-best priorities as the anxious girls in the article - but it wasn't because I feared school failure. And my underachieving was the flip side of my not being able to handle my perfectionism in a realistic way - if I couldn't do it *right*, then I'd just do the school-established minimum in the most slap-dash way possible. So I was as unable to set realistic standards as the girls in the article - to see a whole spectrum of options between "bare minimum" and "as perfect as possible" - to be able to judge how much effort a given assignment was really worth, and give it that and not more. But unlike the girls, I could short-circuit the problem by procrastinating and doing the best I could manage in the time available, because I wasn't overachieving to ward off school failure but was overachieving *to* accomplish something good. My problem was that I had no option between "overachieve to accomplish excellence" and "procrastinate till the last minute to create a hard limit to the time spent on overachieving effort". (Which was one more option than the girls in the article had, so there's that, but it wasn't really a great alternate option, because I was unable to keep my procrastination under control.) In many ways, I was as anxiety-driven as the girls in the article, but instead of dealing with the anxiety by constant work, I dealt with it via ignoring work as long as possible. But though I had just as unrealistic a notion of how much work it takes to do things "right" as they did - and was unable to deliberately do things to a lesser standard - my notion of doing things "right" wasn't at all rooted in school standards. So I could - and did - underachieve to minimum school standards as much as I overachieved to my own standards.

I second the rec for the Hoagies site - they have an extensive set of articles and book recs on a lot of different topics, including hs'ing a gifted child and information on twice-exceptional (2E) children (2E means gifted (one exceptionality) with some kind of disability (exceptional in the other direction)). And you'll get a feel for which authors you find helpful, and which books get mentioned over and over in articles you liked and by authors you like. In addition to Hoagies, the Davidson Center has a nice database of articles and other resources, as does the Gifted Development Center. I spent a lot of time going through articles on all three sites. With a child who is possibly on the spectrum, you might want to read about 2E kids on the spectrum (and all three sites mentioned above have a 2E article section). I've found information on typical gifted children to be of limited help in trying to figure out how to educate a 2E child. (I did find "Giftedness 101", by Linda Silverman, to be a helpful book-length intro; in general I've appreciated her articles and perspective; I also liked "A Parent's Guide to Gifted Children", by James Webb et. al.) I've gotten more help with books about the disability and articles about the 2E presentation of that disability. Right now I'm reading through "Different Minds: Gifted Children with AD/HD, Asperger Syndrome, and Other Learning Deficits", by Deirdre V. Lovecky, a rare book on 2E kids. It's got a ton of good info, but it might be a bit overwhelming as a first intro. In general, like HomeAgain, I haven't found any one book that is both broad enough (addresses homeschooling *and* gifted *and* 2E) and specific enough (gets far enough into the nitty-gritty details to help with specific approaches). On all of those subjects (homeschooling, gifted, 2E), I started by reading online articles and the general overview books available at my library. Once it felt like I'd exhausted the potential of those resources - everything seemed to be repeating itself, and I was getting frustrated by nothing ever going deeper in the areas that particularly concerned me - then I moved onto specific resources in my areas of particular concern. Everyone's going to blend together the good ideas they find in various resources into their own custom approach, and most of the good ideas I found were in more specific, targeted books, not the general overviews. So it's easy to forget how much the general overviews helped in giving me the big picture and pointing me to those more specific, targeted books that better addressed my particular situation.

Question: Is your 9yo upset with SM it because it stays on one topic for much of the book, or because it stayed on one *hard* topic for much of the book? I mean, has he always disliked staying on one topic for so long, even when it was easy for him, or is his recent dislike quite *recent*, and so might have more to do with all. that. division. instead of a general dislike for sticking with one topic? One thing I've done with my kids (in SM) is that, when the kids are getting tired of hard topics that just don't end (whether hard because calculation-intensive, like multi-digit multiplication or long division, or conceptually hard), I start working in two places in the book. We keep going on the hard section, but also start on the (usually easier) chapters past the hard section, like graphs or time or geometry. They don't usually depend over-much on the previous sections, and they've made a nice change of pace for my kids.

From this, it sounds like your bad spellers are able to accurately break words into sounds and pick a legit spelling for that sound - only it tends to be the wrong spelling option for that particular word. So things like "grate" for "great" and "fealing" for "feeling"? If so, it sounds like their auditory spelling skills are good, but their visual memory for spelling is weak. They can use their auditory processing skills and phonics knowledge to reason their way to a phonetically-legitimate spelling; what they can't do is remember *which* phonetically-legitimate spelling goes with which word. (This is the opposite problem to what my bad spellers have.) Are your bad spellers good pattern matchers? As I recall, Sequential Spelling is arranged by spelling pattern, so if your kids see and remember patterns, SS might be right up their alley. I think a lot of what you've used is more rule-based, and at a certain point you can't rule your way into spelling; sometimes the rules just narrow down the phonetically-legitimate options but still leave you with more than one option to choose from in the end, and you just have to remember which one goes with which word. I know for me, pattern-based spelling (where the rules are implicit) plays to my strengths better over explicitly rule-based spelling - I didn't really grok spelling/phonics rules (and spelling by rules) till I worked through a pattern-based phonics primer, absorbed the patterns, and then noticed how the rules described those patterns. Also, I believe Apples & Pears is supposed to be good for kids who have problems remembering which spelling to use - it really drills things over and over till they are second nature. ~*~ Just in general, my experience with my bad spellers is that it takes a lot of mom-centric work to be successful.

You're welcome - I hope it helps 🙂. I've attached my word lists in pdf form, so you don't need the sound picture font. (I also attached the sound picture font file (as a TrueType Font) and the font's keyboard layout, if you ever wanted to type your own stuff. If you want the actual editable files, either as a LibreWriter .odt file or a MS Word .doc file (which use the above font), let me know.) There are five word lists: CVC words (lessons 1-36), Blends (lessons 37-54), Consonant digraphs (lessons 55-71), vowel digraphs (lessons 72-97), and the Dolch words not covered by the above. (The vowel digraphs list has a few blank spaces where I'd had family names that I removed for the share-online copy.) There's also a sound-spelling chart, where I listed out the spellings for each sound in order of frequency (similar to WRTR/SWR). I coded all the words in the word list using that chart, and the kids had a copy of that chart to refer to when doing their words. I didn't write anything for the first sound, but for second/third/etc sounds, I wrote a little 2/3/etc under the sound. I also wrote "x2" for doubled letters; and "schwa" to indicate that while you used the indicated sound to spell the word, when speaking the vowel was schwa'd. For silent letters I had a blank space with a number to indicate which silent letter (if it was an uncommon silent letter, I just wrote the letter itself under the blank space). I had the kids color in the spellings on the chart with the SYS color-code, so they could use the same charts in doing SYS marking on their copywork. The sound-spelling chart file has a filled-in consonant page, a blank consonant page, a filled-in vowel page, a blank vowel page, a filled-in blends page, and a blank blends page. (I added blends into our SYS marking system because the kids had so much trouble hearing blends.) We also used a copy of REWARDS' prefixes and suffixes page to round off our SYS marking sheets. Silent letters are on the consonant page. (Our version of SYS's marking system is: 1) Vowel digraphs in yellow, 2) R-controlled vowels in purple, 3) y-as-a-vowel in green, 4) consonant digraphs in blue, 5) silent letters in orange, 6) blends in brown, 7) prefixes in red, 8.) suffixes in pink.) ~*~ WRT learning the sound pictures themselves, Dekodiphukan has a cute rhyming story that introduces them and makes learning them painless. If you have an ipad, you can get a free app with the story (which is what we did). Otherwise, you can download a picture of each individual page and make your own file (which I attempted but gave up), or else buy an already made ebook for $5.99 (or a paper copy for ~$50). Also, there's a summary chart for parents (or anyone who can read) here. Some of the sounds are self-explanatory (hissing snake for /s/, e.g.), while others only make sense in the context of the story. It's aimed for younger kids, but my oldest enjoyed it as a game and in helping her younger siblings. ~*~ Also, wrt to resources we used, I attempted LiPS. We didn't get all that far with the actual program (just through the consonant sounds, though that helped a lot wrt teaching the girls to differentiate between sounds better), but I organized our sound pictures using the LiPS categories, plus I learned a lot from the manual and incorporated it in other things we did. ~*~ Dolch sight words, arranged phonetically - edited for online.pdf Let's Read flashcards, lessons 01-36 (CVC words, complete).pdf Let's Read flashcards, lessons 37-54 (blends, complete).pdf Let's Read flashcards, lessons 55-71 (ng, nk, sh, ch, th, wh, ck, tch, doubled consonants, qu, x) - edited for online.pdf Let's Read flashcards, lessons 72-97 (ee, eer, ea, ear, oo, oor, ai, air, ay, oa, oar, ou, our, ow, aw, au, oy, oi, silent e) - edited for online.pdf sound-spelling chart complete (exported from speadsheet).pdf engrea51.ttf KeyboardTemplate.pdf

Only potential issue I see is that I think MM7 qualifies as Pre-Algebra, so there might be too much repetition between it and Horizon Pre-A. But that could potentially be a good thing.

We have a daily clean-up time, where we pick up the living room, dining room, and bedrooms (and sweep the living areas). So the kids are required to pick up their rooms each day, which keeps them tolerable. Every so often I go through and help them do a deeper cleaning, and occasionally I do a spot check and require them to get the stuff in the corners that gets missed. Of my kids, the middle occasionally cleans and organizes on her own; my oldest is largely oblivious and only cares because I do; my youngest is a surprisingly enthusiastic helper during deep cleaning, but left to his own devices tends to throw things in the nearest container with little thought as to whether that's where it goes.

I'm pretty sure my oldest is a stealth dyslexic, though I've never had her evaluated, fwiw. It did not show up in her silent reading or in her reading comprehension (she loves to read), but was noticeable in her inability to decode long words not in her spoken vocabulary, and extremely noticeable in her atrocious spelling and general difficulty with oral or written expression (she was a slow and reluctant writer, and was resistant to orally explaining her thoughts), plus her handwriting was bad. With reading, she used her excellent pattern matching skills and her good visual memory to make up for her horrible phonemic processing, inattention to detail, and general difficulty with putting things into linear order. When we started spelling, she was unable to perceive the middle of words either aurally or visually, which explained a lot about her truly atrocious spelling ("inrteuering" for "interrupting") - she was spelling (and reading) off the first and last syllable plus her hazy memory of the word's outline. To help her learn to pay attention to the visual details of words, I did several weeks of Spelling You See (enough for it to click) and then had her use the SYS color-coded marking system on all her copywork for a year. At the same time, to help her phonemic processing, and to force her to learn to blend, I did covert blending practice disguised as cursive practice. Learning cursive was hard for her. I've read that you have to read/spell by syllables in order to write in cursive, and well, she could do neither, so I tried to teach her how to do both through custom blending/cursive practice. After she'd learned all the cursive letters and practiced the common phonograms in cursive, I had her work through the first 2,000 words in our phonics primer (Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach). I wrote up all the words using the super-spiffy sound pictures from Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) and printed them out. (She'd already learned the sound pictures from playing with the Dekodiphukan apps.) Then, she'd have to sound out the word from the sound pictures (forcing her to practice blending because she didn't know the sound picture words by sight), write the word in cursive (I coded the pictures to indicate spelling), and then read the cursive word back. She did 20 words a day, repeating when things got tough, and took about a year to finish through most all one-syllable words. I started her on cursive copywork at that point. At the same time I did REWARDS with her, which was helpful overall, but suffered a bit from being both too hard in some areas and too easy in others. Her ability to tackle unfamiliar multi-syllable words went up, but she was still shaky on blending syllables together - I think learning to visually break up words bolstered her still-weak ability to break up words by sound. My goal between the intense one syllable word blending practice, and learning to blend syllables together into words, was that between the two she'd learn to read & spell any given syllable and learn to read (in REWARDS) & spell (in Spelling through Morphographs, discussed below) any given long word by syllables, and then would have the tools to tackle most any word. One thing with her was that she needed a ton of practice before she could generalize her phonics skills to words she hadn't seen before, so we worked through a *ton* of one syllable words, hitting all the syllable patterns. At this point her spelling improved to "garden variety bad speller", which was an immense improvement. After finished REWARDS, I started Spelling Through Morphographs (which takes a similar focus-on-syllables approach as REWARDS, only with a spelling focus instead of reading focus), and we've been slowly working through it. Something clicked one-third of the way through, and she's a much better speller now - there are a few patterns that still trip her up, but she can spell most things, certainly more than enough for spell-check, and she can usually catch her mistake when she re-reads what she wrote. (I think StM's approach has helped with her linear order problem.) I've also started typing this year, using Touch, Type, Read, and Spell, which takes an OG approach (so yet another covert pass through phonics and spelling). She struggled hard through the first module - something about typing was hard for her - but then things clicked and she's done fine since. ~*~ WRT writing and written expression in general, that's still a work in progress. We did WWE2 and part of WWE3, which was a big help in moving from "picking up the pencil is torture" to being able to write and narrate pretty fluently. At the same time I started requiring her to show her work in math, meaning equations and an answer written in a sentence. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that caused - it was the first time I really required her to figure out how to translate her intuitive jump-to-the-answer into a linear thought process. But we persevered, and it's become old hat. Now we're doing IEW SWI-B, and it's been going fairly smoothly. ~*~ Hopefully something in there was helpful. Let me know if you'd like a copy of the Dekodiphukan words, because they were *so* helpful - probably the best thing I did (I'm using them with my younger two, as well) - and also they took *so* long to type up, so it would be awesome if other people got some use out of them, too.

If you've done SWI-A, then you wouldn't do SWI-B, as it would mostly be a repeat. (As I understand, SWI-A, SWI-B, and SWI-C are all entry-level IEW; A for upper elementary students, B for middle school, and C for high school. No matter which SWI you start with, you'd only do one of them.) If I'm understanding you correctly, she can outline and summarize a given narrative. But, given a topic, she can't brainstorm original thoughts and/or arrange those original thoughts into a coherent outline and/or write an essay from her outline. Does she struggle with all those things? Or just one or two particular bits? Does she give you an incoherent outline or an unorganized essay, or does she freeze and refuse to work if she can't come up with something coherent/organized? (My reluctant writer is the latter - anything she turns in is good, but if she can't see how to make something make sense, she'll just give up altogether and resist doing any of it.) Can she outline two or three related passages, and arrange/condense/expand them into a single summary essay? (That's kind of similar to an early WWS1 exercise, where you are given a huge outline and pick and choose from the points to write a summary on the topic.)

IEW has been helpful with my reluctant writer (we're doing SWI-B). She's still reluctant, but it gives both of us a clear framework to work in, making it easier to pinpoint what *particular* thing is the sticking point in any given "I can't dooooooo iiiiittttt!" situation, and giving us concrete tools to deal with the trouble.

I'm defining Latin success as the ability to read unaltered Latin. So you don't have to have hit AP Latin levels or anything - just that you or your student can now pick up a Latin text and read it with understanding. How have actual people managed to achieve the ability to read Latin?

Thanks all :). Sounds like we just need to keep plugging along. We finally had some success last week; after days of me being unable to drag her back to the beat (instead she kept dragging me away from the beat - I swear, the longer we practised, the less *I* could feel the beat), something clicked and she was able to play it through to the beat. She was bang on - it was wonderful. I'd forgotten that metronome work could be anything but a continual and largely futile uphill slog, but when she was on, the whole thing was effortless. I think even she could feel the difference - so hopefully she has a better sense of what we're aiming at. Because if all she usually feels is the frustration of trying to hear and hang on to a faint and barely perceptible beat that is mostly overwhelmed by everything else going on - that was so tiring and demoralizing.

Cambridge's readings are fun, but Lingua Latina's readings actually *teach* the language, not just practice what you've learned outside the readings like most readers. Not to knock those readers - there's a lot of value in practicing what you've learned - but the way LL actually *teaches* new things *through* the readings is a huge step above what most readers are aiming at. (Speaking of Latin readers, to get in more reading practice and build stamina, here's a link to a free compilation of Latin readers in the public domain: https://compassclassroom.com/shop/product/latin-readers/ . As well, I bought cheap old used editions of Cambridge to use as readers and extra practice, and while they in no way replace LL, they're nonetheless definitely worth the $5 apiece I spent.) So it sounds like she definitely needs to improve her stamina, which is not unusual. Lingua Latina would help with reading stamina, and she could go ahead and start it now. WRT translating, is it the length that's the primary problem, or the number of things she has to keep in mind, or both? How long are the translations? A potential issue with starting LA at book 3 is vocabulary - there might be a lot of new vocab. If money's not too much of an issue, starting at book 2 and moving through it quickly could be an option (CAP says there's a lot of review in the LA books, so you don't have to do everything if your student doesn't need all the review) - there's a lot of benefit in reviewing in Latin learning. And if she's already feeling like things are getting tough, she might appreciate a bit of review in switching, instead of getting hit with a double dose of new things: new Latin on top of new Latin sequence. Of course, if she looks at the sample of LA 3 and finds it straightforward, then all the review in the LA books might make starting with LA 3 doable. Maybe sit down with her and look over the samples of LA 2 and LA 3, and see what she thinks. Compare length and complexity of the exercises and readings, see how much vocab is new to her, see how many grammar constructions are new vs old hat. I don't think moving quickly through LA 2 is necessarily too much of a step back, especially since continuing on with Henle is kind of a no-go. Better to repeat a bit as you build a strong foundation than to get in over your head. Although, if she starts LL now and gets a fair way through it before 9th, that alone will fill in a lot of holes, and might make jumping into LA 3 an easier proposition. I'd thought that Henle 1 taught all the grammar, but it appears that it's Henle 1 & 2 together that cover everything. So moving into book 2 of a three-book cycle is going back from 50% of the way through to 33% of the way through - it's a bit of a step back, but not a huge one.

Agree with pp that both Wheelock's and Latin Alive are going to be review to an extent. My understanding is that finishing Fourth Form/Henle pretty much covers all the Latin grammar. Since it sounds like your dd is pretty solid, she's probably ready to start the transition to reading and translating original Latin. That said, CAP rec's that students coming out of Henle 1 start with LA 2. Looking at CAP's comparison between LA and Henle, it seems like all three LA books are roughly equivalent to Henle 1 & 2. The LA Reader, which comes after LA 1-3 (but can also be used alongside LA 3), is a transition to original Latin authors. I'd think to hit 11th grade AP Latin, you'd want to do LA 2, LA 3 and the Reader in 9th/10th. Looking at CAP's online Latin courses, their AP Latin class requires their Latin 4 Readings course as a pre-req, and the Latin readings course uses the LA Reader. To be ready for their AP class, they recommend a minimum of a half-year's experience with unaltered Latin, with a year's experience preferable. ~*~ Whatever you do, I think that Lingua Latina would be a great supplement. (It can also be done as a standalone.) The main book is written entirely in Latin, and it is wonderful for learning to read Latin as Latin. Coming out of Henle, it would also help broaden vocabulary, as LL introduces quite a few more words than Henle. There's no English glosses; rather, new words are explained via pictures or Latin glosses in the margins. I think the first LL book covers about the same grammar material as the FF series, but if there's some new things, they are introduced in the text. If you are doing it as a supplement, you can just read and re-read it, 15-30 min a day, learning more each time through. Start at the beginning, go till you get stuck, and then start over from the beginning and read till you get stuck again. Each time through you get further. By the time you are done, you have a solid Latin reading ability and are ready to move into original Latin works.

I've thought about having her march to it, or maybe learn the motions for directing it (her theory book helpfully explained it). Because *I'm* not that great about feeling the beat in instrumental music - I've gotten a lot better as I've been doing this for her. And what's helped me is getting my whole body into it - connecting the beat I'm counting with what my body is doing. So far she's been a little too-cool-for-school to throw her body into counting, although she will for playing. She says she can feel the beat in her dance music, and I think a lot of it is that you are explicitly connecting the numbers you are counting with what you are hearing and what you are doing. Also, at least in my dance experience, you repeat everything so much that the count gets burned into your brain. With piano, she doesn't explicitly count unless and until she's made to, when her intuitive rhythm is wrong and needs fixing. Also, in dance the rhythm is set - you hear it the same way every time until you are feeling it in your bones - while in piano you are setting your own rhythm. She is consistent in how she plays, in that she'll settle into a routine - but isn't not a consistent rhythm, she speeds up and slows down. But consistently - she speeds up and slows down in the same places.

My girls play piano, and metronome work is ridiculously hard for my oldest. She has a hard time feeling the beat of her piano pieces in general, and the metronome beat just has no meaning for her - she can't tell the difference between matching the metronome and getting off from the metronome. So far, the only way we've been successful with metronome work is for *me* to learn to feel the beat of her piece and feel the metronome beat, and to sing the piece to the metronome while she tries to match *me*. It works, but I'd like to help her develop the ability to be able to learn to feel the beat herself, for the metronome beat to have meaning to her. Ideas?

Once my kids took off with reading - meaning they could apply their phonics knowledge to decode words they hadn't explicitly learned - basically, that they could read any word in their spoken vocabulary - I did the following: *Started spelling at beginning phonics levels (CVC, blends) *Continued phonics readers, at medium phonics levels (digraphs, second sounds, two syllable words, common suffixes) *In 3rd/4th grade, started advanced phonics - aka learning to decode unfamiliar multi-syllable words. I also started Writing With Ease at that point, as well. Eta: I tend to stop with phonics readers once they have the reading stamina and interest to do 30-45 min of silent reading in non-twaddle books plus they can read aloud smoothly and well.

The only Asimov book I remember having sexual content is The Gods Themselves, but I haven't read everything. I first read the Foundation series in middle school - there might be a few sexual references, but I don't recall anything explicit. Fwiw, while the original Foundation trilogy is more-or-less pre-1954, the rest of the Foundation series was written later - 80s and 90s iirc. Eta: Timothy Zahn is a great author- thoughtful and intriguing while also very clean. I let my kids read his YA series, Dragonback, when they were 10, and I've turned my oldest loose on his adult novels at 12.