We looked for videos on YouTube. :)

Have any people you'd like to get to know more? You could invite them over. We go through phases where we hang out with a group & then we don't. During our last "we don't" phase we hung out weekly with just 2 select families. This worked for us on many levels & while we each hosted from time to time, one family hosted more than anyone else. I was grateful for that for a variety of reasons. You could try to reach out if your kids have connected with anyone in particular. If they haven't you could select a family that you feel you kinda know & have them over to see how it goes.. Just a thought. I get the "alone" & "isolated" feeling..

This is actually false. While it does look that way, if you are part of their Homeschool Chat Group, you will hear from BkSk alone, that the #'s on the History Guides are actually levels & not grades. It makes no sense, really, because those levels are also what they put for the grades so it is semi-confusing, but just like with SL you stick to the higher age on the Guide/Core & you'll be fine. We've used some BkSk {currently doing so with a younger child} & SL. BkSk schedules far less books & moves at a slower, more even pace. Their IG does not have Bible or LA intertwined with it. This can be good or bad depending on your tastes. I don't mind because I don't use SL LA or BkSk LA. The slower pace is nice if you have a slower reader or want a more even pace. You will find in some levels BkSk has half as many books as SL.. Having said that, both my children will be using SL again next year. The oldest is this year anyway {as mentioned above}, but the youngest will move back into SL as well. :)

We use Fix-It. I have an extreme aversion to Rod & Staff, so it wasn't even on my radar. ;) We like Fix-It, it's to the point & it works. It can take 10-20 minutes for the kids to do in a day depending on how quickly they are moving. It does not including writing, but we do that via IEW Writing or other sources. In the past we were using WWE & WWS depending on the age of the child. Now we're using IEW.. It's all about what you prefer. I found that once my students were done with WWE & WWS there weren't a lot of writing choices that were NOT heavy on grammar. Something we didn't need/want because we had a perfectly sound grammar programme. Which is what led me to IEW. One of those incredibly "duh" moments in which you can't believe it took that long to think of. ;)

Not really.. I think you'd be better off to obtain things like: Australia Her First 100 Years, Ashton Scholastic Australian History, Jackie French novels {historical based}, & so on.. We do spines & then draw from other books, so for instance we started My Father's Island for Abel Tasman. Another great idea might be the Australian Story An Illustrated Timeline. Fabre Castell was actually offering up a wall timeline based on the book for $10 AUD for a while. It's BEAUTIFUL, but when i went to look for a link for a friend this week I couldn't find it.

We use SL, we have since about 4th or 5th grade. My high schooler is still using SL, he loves it. :)

Koala Box or Disney Circle would fix that problem..

The more often you use Duo the less often those levels revert to their normal colour vs being golden too.. So if your children don't do Spanish on the weekend there's a high chance the levels will revert. Further, if your student struggles with a particular type of word {verb, adverbs, pronouns, etc.} that level is likely to change from golden to it's normal colour. It just gives you an idea of where your weak spots are & which ones to practice. I'm doing French & I've been working for 50 straight days on it & I still have levels in my tree that will revert here & there. It's all good. ;)

We've been Audible members for 10 or 11 years now. It's our #1 place to go. If you are a member you get discounted prices, private sales, & special offers all the time. I very rarely pay full price for our audio book collection with is huge. You can easily download the books to your phone & then play them through your car radio. We have an older car so our model doesn't provide for our phones to synch, but we can still play them through the radio with the the help of a $40 device from the local shop. ;) Or, you can just download your book to the computer & put it on cd if you prefer. Both ways work.

Does anyone here use this programme? I signed up for a free trial & while I've managed to figure out some aspects, I'm really struggling with others, & would love some tips.. :) I did speak with Andy before I signed up for the free trial period because I didn't want to have to make assignments each week on there {we use paper planners} in order to log grades. He said I wouldn't need to create assignments in order to give grades, but I'm not figuring out how that is possible.. Any hints? I added my high schooler's book list for US History & while it's sitting there, it doesn't come up in the report section. Do I have to assign those books in order to get them to show up in the report section? While I'm really floundering a bit to get it set up I do love the professional look in many aspects for printing things out to have proper hard copies. That's something I haven't noticed with many of the other programmes I've tried. I really want to get the most out of the trial to decide if this is something I want to keep up with for the next 3 years for high school. Of course I'm kinda scrambling because what I was using previously was only half working for me so I wasn't keeping up with it & now need to back track & add 81 days worth of school grades & such into the new one. I did figure out attendance which was pretty simple.. ha!

Necessary? No. :) I have one who used it, & loved it, but I have another where it's unlikely to be a good fit for him. It is a lovely curriculum & I do love how it's put together & all that it covers, but you don't have to use it. :)

We've been using IEW this year, it's worked really well for us to be honest. My kids enjoy it, they remember the parts of speech, punctation, & so on. I do think the cards that you are required to print out are needed until they are firm with what they are doing. I don't have my kids do re-writes, I have them do re-types.. meaning that instead of writing it by hand they type it up. Win-Win :D

I can't see much of that happening without food in tummies & little people being awake. That's my house though, & yours may run differently, but as I'm sitting here reading this I'm thinking there's just no way my kids would attack school, memorization, or anything else without having refuelled their bodies, kwim? Take this for what it's worth, but in fairness I learned many many years ago in our homeschool journey that it's far easier to only worry about essential chores first thing in the morning {in our home that means pets} & leave the rest until after the work is done. If you think of your kids school as their job, consider how much house cleaning you'd do before leaving the home for a job.. would you save more of it to do when you got home & only worry about the essentials? That's my .02 ;)

My high schooler is using Sonlight, my middle schooler is using BookShark. :)

The year I was ready to enrol my kids in school I did something I never thought I'd do, I went with boxed curriculum. There was no more scrambling to plan while caring for an ageing parent, moving house, & all the other craziness we were enduring at that time. Lessons were open & go, grab a couple of books, read them with the kids, set them up with math.. We still look back on that year as our best homeschooling year. Funny thing is, we never went back, we loved our year so much we've stayed with "boxed curriculum". The extra bonus was that we had yet another crazy year where said aged parent was dealing with surgeries, broken bones, & therapy afterwards. We bought a house & had to move 7 days before Christmas.. oh our life was crazy. I was able to grab the books in audio format & we enjoyed listening to them together while driving to & from the hospital, therapy, or while packing boxes like crazy. We were able to keep our pace in that area. :) For us, it was a matter of taking the stress off myself for finding all the right things & accepting that while it wasn't my first choice that there was nothing horrible about "boxed curriculum", & in the end it was so well loved that when I offer, each year, to move away from it they aren't really interested. :)

I only have boys.. my eldest didn't go through much of any "ugly period" & if he would have moments if we said something he changed.. Oh was I spoiled, because the next one in line.. It could be the reason I go grey..

Aww, thanks Janet. We were talking about that WP Theme the other day & how much fun we had with it. I told one of the kids that I'd love to do it again, but I didn't know if we had time with high school obligations staring the oldest in the face & the other not far behind..

Hmm, I guess my idea of affordable is greatly different. At $200-$300 per semester/class I'd be looking at $1600 per year. Private school in my neck of the woods is $1800. Or, I can buy all our school curriculum, brand new for $1000, if I go the second hand route I can get it for half that or less. ;) I do love the idea of online classes so my kids get the experience of working for someone else, deadlines created by someone else, expectations of another teacher/person, etc. but I just can't justify the prices at the time, especially as we'll no longer be getting our annual education refund. Ouch. ;) Aside from the bonus of being able to ask questions in person, at that moment, is there a huge benefit to a live class vs a recorded class? That's another HUGE issue for us, being on the other side of the world my son would have to get up anywhere between 1-6am for classes. :lol: Not exactly desirable! ;)

Is there any such thing as an affordable online class? I'm just curious as I know many of the online courses are hundreds of dollars. I can purchase my entire homeschool year's needs for 2 or 3 online classes, having multiple children means I could put them all in a private school for the cost of online courses.. Which makes me wonder, aside from VHSG are there any affordable options?!

If blogging is out you could look at Homeschool Thing. It's private, free, & simple. You can snap photos & upload them with dates, times, locations, & what happened. You could even let kids & hubby help. When called upon it can all be printed out in PDF format or you could just log in & let them scroll through.

We do this. I have a school planner & the kids each have a planner of their own. For the youngest, at this stage I write out his plans {he'll be learning to do this himself over this year..} & he just takes it & does his work, checking in with me after each item is done. The eldest is an old hat with his planner & can fill it out on his own. A meeting at the end of the week {either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning} where we go over things happening in the new week & then he fills it in.. Sometimes I do it for him, but not always. He's use to a particular pattern from the years I've filled it in for him.

Yeah, we had this problem.. For us, the situation was a little different. He'd finished WWE, but is honestly not ready for WWS. He's a different breed of writer then the last one & while WWS is full of awesomeness I'm not sure if it will ever be a GREAT fit for him, but we'll see.. This year I opted to purchase the enormous Writers In Residence. We only got a short distance in before laying it aside for holidays, & I'm not 100% sold on it yet. It is heavily Christian so if that doesn't appeal it might not suit your needs. There is a very very large sample of it on the website, a FB group, & other avenues you can go in order to find more info. I've opted to buy the LA that goes along with the level of BookShark {BkSk} that my son is currently using as a "backup" plan should I opted not to pull out WIR or should it not suit us entirely. As we're still on holidays for another 2 weeks my hope is to sit down & have a good look at both to see what's coming up & what I think I'll use/not use. I really just want my boy to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, & get some things writing. WWE worked wonders for him & took him from the "I hate writing.." to, "Can we do writing now.." I'm not going to say it won stars every day, but it was never dead last on his list of things to get done either. It really was a lovely fit for us.. I feel your pain in looking for something to fill the gap or just use in general if you're not interested in WWS.

Wow, first off I'm really sorry that you got such rotten news. :grouphug: Secondly, I worry a little bit, that if you make a list if there will be a need for your husband, in the future, to follow it without wavering to honour you. Does that make sense? As things change {curriculum} & needs may differ {children} I wonder how easy it would be to make a long term plan if someone wasn't willing to override things if they needed to be without feeling guilt or concern. I'd think the best you could hope to do is something very loose like: 8th Grade x Math Curriculum if applicable {readiness} Ancients {or whatever you'd want your child studying at that time} Biology {see note above} French {or whatever language..} Etc. I also wonder if using an "out of the box" curriculum would make things a little easier on all of you for a while & into the future. You've asked a really hard question, & I bet you'll get a lot of interesting answers..

We home educate so HOME comes far before anything outside the home. It can be tough at times, but I find that anything that cuts into our normal "working time" means a few minutes of fun for a more frazzled feeling down the road. We've had years where we've hung out with a homeschool group & years where we haven't. One year we refused to participate when our group met at 10am on a Thursday. Years when they met on a Friday afternoon was a totally different story. ;) For our home each child generally has 1 extra thing going on outside of the home, but it doesn't happen during school hours. That's it. We aren't currently active with a local group as it's going through some ugly growing pains right now & their time/date doesn't work for our normal schedule either. :) Instead, we choose to seek out a few select families & get together with them as times suit :D

Age will have a lot to do with it. :)