Anyone have links, ideas, or resources for planning homeschool high school for students who are not going on to college? This isn't a choice issue, DD15 literally cannot do college because of numerous special needs. But she's a very capable teen in everyday skills so there's no reason she can't move out, get a job, normal stuff. Currently she's leaning towards culinary arts, baking, or preschool teacher's aide. But just in general, how does the plan not to go to college affect your transcript and course plans for your teen in homeschool?

Honestly even my honors science classes in public school didn't have much math. I think for a kid with learning disabilities and no interest in science as a career it's not a problem to focus on developing the background knowledge and the skills of reading informational text and interpreting graphs and charts. Those are good skills for life. We're planning to use Power Basics Earth Science next year, then Biology, then a Chemistry course based on cooking skills, and finish up with a Physical Science course (like very basic physics concepts).

I think doing the speech therapy in the meantime is a great idea. You're addressing the visible delay and then you can use those speech therapy records to bolster your argument if you need to push for evaluations later.

I can relate to this so much! We were placed with DD15 at age 11.5 (5th grade) through the foster system. Her public school teachers kept saying how lovely and sweet she was "given her circumstances" and gave her A's. We found out a few months in she was totally illiterate! Couldn't read a baby board book. Nor could she multiply, divide, or calculate time or money. We were horrified. Given her age and the upcoming adoption finalization we did push for evaluations which she got 1 year after placement and we got the results 2 months after finalizing. I'm not sure I regret it...given her age we needed to do something. But I don't feel we got accurate answers and I'm now having her reevaluated to possibly remove the intellectual disability diagnosis. Here's the thing: a shocking amount of the testing is interviewing parents and teachers for info. So they'd ask: "can she do laundry?" And I'd say, "well, no, but she's only been with us 9-10 months so I haven't really tried." The evaluator was young and inexperienced and seemed to ignore our caveats about only having had her 9 months after the kid had had zero teaching or guidance at home before. He also gave a test not normed for hearing impaired kids (she's partly deaf) Super unprofessional. Anyway, because your kids are young I would wait on evaluations for 2 years from adoption. That way you can collect more info so the evaluator won't disregard stuff as "just because of being adopted" but also won't be assessing behaviors that are truly just because of the transition that happens in joining a new family. You can say, "so we've been doing xyz and it doesn't seem to have helped." with confidence. Or maybe the most concerning behaviors will subside and then you'll decide there is no underlying issue, or have a decent idea that it's something small and easily remediated (like dyslexia or adhd).

Even in transubantiation the bread/wine retain their accidents (physical appearance and properties). So wine could still make you drunk and bread could still cause an allergic reaction.

When DH was a Lutheran pastor this was not uncommon. They would order and store separately GF bread. Then they'd put a small paten (plate) beside the big one of gluten bread. Both would be consecrated at the same time but never touching. Pastor washes his hands before communion just like in a Catholic mass. Either one person would be in charge of handing out the GF wafers or the pastor would hold up the plate allowing the person to take it off themselves. Everything was done to reduce risk of cross contamination.

We like the thin quilts from Target for bunk beds. They're not specifically made for them but because they're soft and thin they tuck in easily. The kind we have is this one: http://www.target.com/p/basic-quilt-set-pillowfort-153/-/A-50487469

All of these exceed our annual income! Holy cow! I always wonder how on earth people find these mythical good paying careers. My husband, while he has a masters and experience, is geared towards the lowest paying of careers it seems. He hates computers and anything technical. So it seems we're stuck forever making under $40k. We make do, but it'd be nice to have money to save sometime, or take our kids to see the beach once before they grow up.

Um, my parents never knew any of my grades in college. Why would it be a relative's business if an adult taking classes fails them? I mean, unless he has cognitive disabilities? I would definitely say nothing. He needs to learn to figure stuff out on his own or quit college and find something productive to do. and I think that's what his parents want him to realize too, hence the hands-off approach.

I'd say in years when I'm not pregnant I buy: 7 t-shirts (these wear out/get stained periodically) 2 pants 2 skirts 5-6 underwear 1 bra 1 purse (I only use one at a time but they wear out because I'm hard on them, haha!) 5-6 pairs of socks 1 pair shoes So about 25 items per year? Some years it's more and others less but I feel like it's a pretty normal amount. I'm not wearing items from the 90's but I'm also not a fashionista. My clothes in my closet are ones I like, comfortable, clean, and fitted.

But that's still only 40-ish, which is not up to the 'average' of 63. My MIL probably buys about the same as you, maybe slightly more. She always looks so nice and put together! :)

Yeah, I agree. And the fact that she's made significant progress in articulation through speech therapy, but almost no progress with vocabulary/language also points to a reason beyond the hearing impairment. Not to downplay that, because I know it affects things, but there's something else going on and I don't feel it's a global delay. Now that she's settled in our home and had some actual parenting she does all the typical teen stuff. She does her own laundry sometimes, can clean her room when told, knows how to take care of her hair (AA hair, so it requires more specific steps she hadn't been told of before), she cooks totally independently every Saturday morning, and she stays home alone for 1-3 hours at a time competently. We kept telling the neuropsych before "well, no she can't do laundry, but we've only had her 9 months" and "no, we don't trust her to use the stove yet...because she seems inattentive and we've only had her 9 months"... but he seemed to not take our caveats into account. :/

That's interesting. I have an appointment scheduled to get referred to a neuropsych to update her testing and I am going to insist they use a totally non-verbal test that has been normed for hearing impaired kids! She did do a Non-Verbal Weschler (not totally nonverbal like the Leiter) at her public school 4 years ago and got an IQ of 87...which is not super smart but definitely not intellectually disabled either. That's part of why we were a bit surprised by the ID diagnosis from the Neuropsych. But that was just a school test so I don't want to totally trust that over a professional neuropsych either. She is disabled, but I am just not sure ID is the best name for her disabilities. I think they can be summed up in Hearing-Impaired, ADHD, Dyslexia, and MERLD, all of which have been diagnosed already. In the end a diagnosis is just a name, but I'd like to make sure we've pegged the right disability so we can meet her needs best and not overshoot or underestimate her abilities.

Absolutely! And at least you have the advantage of knowing generally what kind of thing works so when she is ready you can do it. I was very happy with the price and the density of the actual text. Lots of good info there. I got the Sentences workbook thing too so I can photocopy the charts to give her plenty of practice. And if it helps, Ana is at the point of writing basic sentences too. She basically only writes simple sentences, which is part of why I'm interested in this. I'm incorporating our vocabulary work with it using Landmarks' guidelines. So I have 5 verbs we're working on now in vocabulary and for writing practice we're writing article/noun/verb sentences using each of those verbs 2-3 times with different articles/nouns. Which is super helpful for her vocabulary because otherwise she gets stuck in only understanding the verb in one context. For example, with "flap" she kept saying "The bird flapped." but we brainstormed and she expanded to "A robin flapped." and "The hens flapped." Eventually my thought is to build on this until she's pulling key words from texts or jotting down brainstorming ideas and then entering them into these sentence frameworks, which we can use to create whole paragraphs and later essays. But that's more a "next year" kind of thing I think. SaveSave

Crimson Wife, I came back to this post to thank you for recommending this! I'm working through reading Landmark's books about language and I also got their "From Talking to Writing" book, which is helping her with putting thoughts on paper. It scaffolds from "kernel" sentences and explicitly teaches (or rather, shows me how and when to teach) grammatical concepts. It jives well with Barton too, talking about "where phrases" and "when phrases" and "adverb/ly words". We had tried Institute for Excellence in Writing, the lowest Student Writing Intensive but it was way too hard for Ana. Poor thing! I feel awful I'm never sure if things will work with her so we've had lots of duds :( Anyway, the Landmark School's resources are really helping *me* understand her language disorder and what she needs instructionally. And the "From Talking to Writing" book's charts with sentence structures are helping me to teach her how to structure sentences. Her SLP's had done that with her twice but only twice and only with one concept, then they switch to something else, ugh! I still think they don't know what to do with her so they teach her random vocabulary and idioms.

This is kind of what we're wondering about. We're not sure the ID is an accurate diagnosis. Her language scores were very low, but everything else was like 15 points higher than the language stuff. So....we're wondering if maybe she was misdiagnosed? I mean, she's not a quick learner by any means, but I'm not sure she's fully intellectually disabled. She was adopted domestically and grew up in a Spanish-English speaking home (all her family is fluent in both except her abuelo who speaks 90% spanish). But here's the thing: she never learned Spanish! She cannot even name all her colors accurately or count to 100. She knows basic greetings but cannot read it and doesn't know where a word ends and another begins. It's like she just memorized the phrase "Como estas" as a joint unit, all one word. It gets her by when she chats with her birth family. But anyway, my point is that she's not truly an ELL in the sense that English is her first and primary language. Being Hard of Hearing as a preschooler meant she never properly learned either until she went to school. She could hear, just not always accurately. At birth she heard fine, but sometime between age 1 and 5 she lost a good bit of hearing. So there are gaps.

Our adoptive daughter was/is horribly parentified. She's way better now, but with coming from a neglectful situation she just has this deep distrust that adults will do what is needed. So she does what she perceives as necessary. She was the middle of 3 but both she and her big sister try to parent younger kids. Super annoying since clearly they never learned good childcare anyway. I jokingly call her a "helicopter sister" 😉 It's improved a lot with explicit conversations and effort on my part. We just let her babysit for the first time ever (she's been ours 3 years) at 15.5 because we didn't want to encourage her thinking she needed to ever watch the younger ones. But now she wants practice to babysit for others and wants that independence. However, she knows if we see her acting like she is the parent her babysitting privilege will be revoked. Thankfully I think we're past most of that. To me, parentified behavior indicates it's now a habit, like the child cannot turn it off when a proper authority (parent, teacher, etc) is around. Or when a parent has the child acting as parent when they're around. It's natural (said as an oldest child myself) for big siblings to babysit at appropriate ages or stop bad behavior if mom is in the shower/on the phone. But if mom is present they shouldn't feel or be expected to be in charge.

((hugs)) Our daughter was/is much the same. And 11-12 was the worst!! Seriously, all her friends had jumped into the middle school world of boys and more nuanced conversation and were thinking about the future. And she was very much still a child and very impetuous/immature in her actions. But, now, at 15 I will say she has come a LONG way. Like, she's due to get her learner's permit in June and I'm not all that scared (a little, but no more than I'd be for any 15 year old, lol). She usually wears appropriate clothes now and when she messes up it's on little things like not wearing warm enough stuff when it's 30 degrees outside. But, and this is huge, if she steps outside she realizes it now and will say "um, I think I need to change, not sure what I was thinking, it's freezing out here!" and go change, lol! Which to me is within the realm of normal teenage ditziness. So things may improve in 3-4 years. Maybe not to where you'd like, but significantly better. Like you, I also struggle with relating to my daughter as much as our others, which is exacerbated by the fact that she is newly adopted (2 years ago) so we still deal with things like her crying for 4 hours the other day wondering why she couldn't live with her birthdad (who is seriously neglectful at the least). Kinda stings. Anyway, some things I find that do help are 1) check my own attitude/expectations and adjust down to her level as much as I can 2) focus on her strengths and brag on those 3) try to find ANY common ground. Does your daughter like to shop? Or color? Or paint her nails? Or ride horses? seriously, anything that you can do together. When in doubt...go to a movie, no need to talk during it but it gives you a common subject to bring up later and it's fun :) One of my kids had severe colic/reflux as a baby while I had postpartum depression and it was hard to love him some days. But I worked at it, because logically I did love him. So I chose to act loving. And then I 'felt' loving more and more over time. Now I have to stop myself from waking him up just to cuddle late at night when everyone else goes to bed. Love the kid to pieces, just like all my kids. You obviously choose to love your daughter logically, so you will definitely get back to feeling more affectionate to her over time. Just work at it, and I don't think it's bad to sometimes call her out on her few behaviors that irritate you the most and try to help her change those so she's more likable. It'll help her make friends too. SaveSave

I wouldn't beat yourself up for the supposed lack of diligence in those early years! Really, you were probably doing a lot more awesome stuff educationally than you even realize. And in my experience bright kids learn unless something is stopping them from learning. Now, none of what you describe is an external stoppage to learning. So maybe it's internal. But either way, please don't blame yourself! When my 8 year old was 2 I was pregnant and sick as can be. I lay on the couch and he watched Super Why with a cup of cheerios and a sippy cup of juice every morning until my poor husband came home. If I stood up I threw up, so I was supervising but certainly not reading him tons of stories or practicing colors like I wanted to be. But you know what? At 2.5 he asked to learn to read so I taught him (baby brother was born by then). He learned all his letters from goofing off watching Super Why on tv, lol! A parent's diligence on those little but important things may or may not affect age of reading/math skills by a year or two but it doesn't stop it or affect it in the long term. Anyway, if it were me I'd get an evaluation just to see if anything is up. Might be something simple like dyslexia, which is well-known, can be remediated, and has a standard list of accommodations for SATs and college later in life. Or maybe something else and it helps you understand how best to teach him, or to relax certain expectations. Or that he's a very intelligent boy who just is maturing on a different schedule from everyone else. Either way you're welcome here and you can totally glean some useful information. I think everyone starts from the basic point of "my kid seems to be struggling....what strategies and curriculums work for kids struggling with XYZ area of school" :)

High visual-spatial scores and oral vocabulary scores with low-ish working memory and normal scores in almost everything except basic numbers and reading say dyslexia to me. My guess, just from looking at the scores, would be that it's a relatively mild dyslexia but if it's obvious this early in the everyday sense of learning then it might be moderate. In any case, I think it couldn't hurt to do Barton at all. If I were you I'd order Level 1, do it with her, then sell it to order Level 2, etc. She's young, and while that's a disadvantage in getting diagnostic testing done...it's a huge advantage in every other way! If she's in Kindergarten and you got her through Barton Level 1 and 2 before 1st grade she'd be starting at the same level as her peers. If she got through Levels 3 and 4 before 2nd grade she'd be ahead in decoding ability, which would make up for the fact that she may always have a slower reading speed because of the dyslexia. I have a 6 year old, in Kindergarten, with suspected dyslexia and I'm working through Barton with him (after doing a bit of LiPS last year). We just finished Level 2 and he's on the higher end of reading in his class...even though he's way behind where his brother was at this age. It's great because while I see all the dyslexia symptoms in him (he's a classic one), he just knows he gets to play with fun colorful tiles and when he goes to co-op he reads just fine for what the teacher asks, with a few minor hiccups (they covered ALL the sounds of long-E... :banghead: ) Anyway, starting early means they get to experience more success and less failure. Worst case you spend more than necessary on Barton, except you sell it and end up out about $50 total, and your daughter gets extra-intensive reading help, way better than any school-based reading therapist has the time to offer.

My oldest isn't college bound and we're doing a mom-issued homeschool diploma because she has no other options. The public school in VA would only give her a "certificate of attendance" because she cannot pass the end of high school exam (she makes 1st percentile on every standardized test in language arts because of a language disorder). Plus she couldn't do algebra in 8th grade so the only other option is sped class, which also would put her on the no-diploma track. Accredited home school programs also have requirements she can't meet and obviously the GED is out as well. So I'm going to have to do my best to provide documentation and hope for the best!

We've dealt with this, albeit at much older ages of course. But we also had this huge background of failure and struggle to contend with. Like true failure....being 12 and not knowing how to read signs, being 12 and not understanding what your friends are talking about or 'getting' jokes, being 12 and still working to understand multiplication. I have to have regular conversations with Ana and assert very firmly that she is very capable of lots of stuff. That she is truly *good* at cooking and math and swimming and all things sports-related. That she is sweet and kind and generous and great. That it's not the 'whole' of her that she struggles to read and isn't 'on level' in subjects. No big deal. I promised her I would help her get up to the level she needed in reading and math and that she would get there because I knew she was bright and a hard worker. I also talk about how it's not her teachers' fault or her birth mom's fault (a common excuse she uses) that she couldn't read. The teachers did what they knew and were trying to teach her the way most kids learn. But many kids (1 in 5) need to learn a totally different way. Not their fault, not her fault. They were just using the wrong thing. Now we're using the right thing and it will work. Basically, a combination of talking to her straight and honest and really listing all the things they're good at. I've also found it helpful with ALL my tutoring students to spend the first lesson after doing a pre-test explaining to them what their disability (usually dyslexia and adhd for my students) is and how the stuff we were going to do would teach them to read. ((hugs)) it's hard, especially when they're young. She'll develop more resilience over time as she has a history to look back on and realize "oh, I had a hard time reading but now I do....I can master this writing thing too" or "adding was hard and now it's easy. Multiplication is hard now but in a couple years it will be easy." Experience helps us to be more patient, especially with ourselves.

We get them at the local feed store. We currently have: 1 buff orpington rooster (accidental, might eat him soon) 2 barnevelders 1 salmon faverolle (ugliest bird but calm and sweet) 1 Cinnamon Queen (very pretty) 1 Speckled Sussex (love her unique feathers) 2 White Leghorns (our old leghorns were prolific layers!) 2 Rhode Island Reds 2 Americanas (these will lay blue eggs)

When pregnant or nursing I do not fast. I abstain from meat and forego extras like sweets but that is it. Pregnancy and nursing are like running a marathon for me...good and worthy, but utterly demanding of all my physical resources.

We're coming up on this stage with DD15, who has ADHD and other issues but thankfully her ADHD is mild but we'll definitely be keeping an eye on the attention aspect of things. In your situation I would go ahead and make an appointment to talk to the doctor about meds (we've done Focalin with success). Then I'd sign him up for an additional driver's ed course, the full kind that gives them the 50 hours they need. If he does that and does some practice with you in addition that should give him the extra time he needs and give you and an objective third party a chance to really see whether he can handle his license right now. We have a good friend who has severe adult ADHD and is on medication most of the time but as you know it fades. Anyway, he's a pretty erratic driver I have to say. Way too fast and way too inattentive. He did get in several accidents in his 20's but as he ages it's gotten better and as far as I know there haven't been any real significant accidents in the past decade or so.