If you want any fiction set in that time period, I recently heard about this one: https://shop.smidgenpress.com/products/the-lost-dragon-of-wessex-ebook I think it sounds very interesting - it's on my to-read list with DS11.

Bumping this with another resource with TWR-inspired methods - LitHouse Learning - https://lithouselearning.com/ This site has novel studies and history-based writing workbooks at a couple different levels. The prices are really great, and since the novel studies are a la carte, it would be super inexpensive to try it out. That being said, I think these have significantly less direct instruction than the Redwood Literacy materials I linked to above. I think a struggling student wouldn't necessarily be equipped to succeed just with the instruction provided here unless the parent was also pretty familiar with TWR. But a strong student who has had other grammar instruction as well would probably quickly catch on to the methods and be able to apply them.

I do think there's a high likelihood that the story with the toddler will turn out to be something other than any actual kid on the side of the road (delusion, hoax, her being coerced into saying something, etc)...But I also totally agree that just because no child was reported missing to the police, does not mean there was not a child on the side of the road for a few minutes. When one of my DS's was about three, we had a phase where he would run off. Several times in a row all he did was run around the block to a neighbor friend's front porch, so we didn't panic too much - we just went and retrieved him. Then one time he slipped out the door when we were at a neighbor's party. We were all getting our shoes on to leave, and he slipped his little sandals on first and just run out the door before we even realized what happened. We caught a couple glimpses of him running in and out of yards down the block, so honestly we grabbed a couple other neighbors and just fanned out to try and catch him. No one thought to call the police because we were pretty confident he was very close by, and we tracked him down ten minutes later or so playing in a backyard well down the block. But in retrospect, we were only a couple blocks from a fairly busy road and he could have easily been a little kid standing on the edge or wandering out into traffic. So I could imagine a little kid wandering out, and then maybe wandering back toward their house and not being seen very much in the dark, and maybe parents searching by their house for a kid that ran out of the house had been not ready to involve the police yet.

We were able to get an older, bare-bones CRV for around the $10,000 mark this summer. We think it's a good basic teen driver car ..DH and DS16 are currently sharing it because DH's normal car is a "project" currently. 😂. I think we were lucky to find the CRV for such a good price - DH saw a FB ad for it at a small dealership, and went in and basically bought it immediately after a quick drive. It met the criteria and was exactly what we were looking for. He couldn't actually take it home until later in the day since I needed to go with him in the other car (DS16 and DD19 were gone), and they said so many people came in and were disappointed it had already sold. I like good visibility and I like the CRV way better than the old accord that DD19 drives.

This. And where “home” is. Community College and a couple of small “satellite” programs of larger 4 year schools with very limited majors offered is all we have locally. I guess a student could live at home here and commute 60-90 minutes each way every day to the closest 4 year university campuses (and maybe there are some that do that), but gas and wear and tear on a car would quickly limit the savings compared to maybe finding a cheap apartment with a few roommates. My DD made it through year 1 debt free and is looking good for year 2 so far with a combination of money earned from working, scholarships, our contribution, and a small amount from a grandparent. I’m not sure if she’ll make it through all 4 years debt free though - by her senior year she will overlap with her brother, and I’m not sure we can double what we are spending now if he is in a similar position.

So, I'm not exactly the target of your question because so far my two older kids went to public school for high school...but I feel like their school doesn't push information about certain colleges much at all (as a parent, I've seen certain announcements like "xyz univeristy will be room 123 during lunch if you want to visit with a representative" but my kids have never done any of those rep visits. And DD was online for most of her junior year for COVID, the prime time when she needed to start thinking about colleges...so I feel like everything that has happened in terms of any serious consideration of any universities happened at home. So, that being said my kids are growing up hearing a lot about the University DH and I went to. DH did both undergrad and grad degree there, so we were in that city a long time, made friends that we still keep up with, DD was born in that city, etc. We are big fans, wear the shirts, etc. They've also been familiar with our state flagship university because we've attended events on the campus. DD knew by her junior year what she wanted to study, but was the type who didn't really want to think through where to go. Honestly with no input from DH or I, she probably would have just gone to our alma mater, just because she was most familiar with it and they have her major (a less common one, that is not available just anywhere). DH insisted that she visit at least 3 campuses, so she could really feel like she was choosing and not just defaulting. I helped her get started...we sat down with a few research sites I found from the college motherload thread here, and asked her some questions (Do you want to consider in-state? How far away is the most you are willing to go?) and then we worked together to make a spreadsheet of maybe a dozen options, most of which she knew nothing about before we did this. Then honestly, she starting crossing some off right away for arbitrary reasons. (North Dakota? That seems like a really boring place, cross it off!). 😁 She picked the three closest out of state options that weren't already crossed off (happened to include our alma mater), and said she wanted to start with those three. In the end, she picked our alma mater anyway, but she did it knowing that she liked it better than other schools she toured. So, in her case it was kind of a tag team research effort. DS16 is a whole different story. He is a super driven kid, and in 9th grade he was googling things like "best universities for math majors" and stuff like that. By mid way through this past year, he was posting on reddit threads and reading other forums...and he has made many, many lists of schools he is interested in, and I have pointed him in the direction of where to look for things like cost and acceptance rates of said schools. He has refined his list a few times, and I think we have a game plan of the first few he wants to visit during his junior year. But he has totally taken the research into his own hands and is eager to learn about alllll the options.

I don't know what your style is for Chinese food, but we really enjoyed visiting a "hand pulled noodles" restaurant in Chinatown. This is the one we went to: https://goo.gl/maps/irndr5DkipcC6xPz5 - but I'm sure there are others. It was amazing noodle soup, and so much better than anything I've had before. The met museum was my favorite thing in NYC!

I agree with the posters above that testing in K isn't super helpful, unless it is a requirement for you. Besides the fact that on any standardized test some questions are "above level" of what is typical, I wouldn't be surprised if that test was designed with balanced literacy or even whole word reading (Cat/5 is an older test, and potentially when reading not based at all in phonics was more the trend). Those words strike me as words that kids would learn in reading books where students are taught to memorize words - they would be typical for K vocabulary. A student who learns phonics is going to seem at the beginning like they are making "slower" progress because they can't read "mother" or "bear" - but as you probably know, in the long run their reading should far surpass a student taught with whole word/sight word/"balanced" methods.

I'm not a transcript expert at all, but honestly that 9th grade doesn't look all that "light" to me - I think that would be a pretty typical 9th grade year for a lot of students and maybe even slightly advanced due to two science courses. The only thing slightly light about it is Algebra 1, but given that your student still took Calc, the overall result is awesome!

My keens have been on their last legs for a while but I was trying to squeeze every ounce of use out of them...then they broke as I was taking them off after a long hike today. So thankful that they didn't break in the middle of the hike AND it's Prime Day so I could order a new pair at 30% off!

I just looked too using a google site search and I couldn't find it either...weird! I'm sure someone will find it now. 🤪 But I'll join your party here now as I am never ready to think about planning when these threads get posted for the first time. DS11 is dyslexic, and I am Orton-Gillingham trained and work with him on reading/spelling using that approach. Beyond that we are doing: Math: Finish up Jacobs algebra, Probably start AOPS algebra after that? Review previous skills with Alcumus. Writing: Writing Our World from Redwood Literacy (based on The Writing Revolution) Grammar: we're going to try KISS Grammar History: Ancients, using our own list of living books/literature (lots of audiobooks and read alouds!) Science: Possibly just interest-led using audiobooks and read-alouds. Still considering using one of Jay Wile's science through history textbooks. Electives/Extracurricular: Band and gym at our neighborhood middle school. Mountain bike team, chess club, board game club, church activities

I have read that APUSH is common one for students to be "highly encouraged" to take, and perhaps a greater number don't care about the exam. I read a twitter thread (I can't find it again to link to it...it was something random that twitter showed me, probably after clicking on all the AP guy's twitter posts about the score distribution) where someone who had been an exam grader for AP in the past comment on how surprisingly many blank exams he saw while grading APUSH. Student didn't even care enough or felt prepared enough to try writing anything. My DS16 (public school student) is typically a math guy, but he got a 5 on APUSH and a 4 on Stats. He was very surprised, but in some ways this result was not entirely surprising to me. He had just a bit harder time with stats that he has with other math classes - he barely got an A, and was often telling me about "dumb mistakes" he made while reading the multiple choice test questions in that class. He was missing details in reading the questions. This contrasted with the A he fairly easily got both semesters this past year in DE Calc 1 and 2 classes. Meanwhile, he had close to 100% in the class both semesters of APUSH. Yet, he studied a lot for the APUSH exam, because he thought he wouldn't do well on that one and was convinced that Stats would be an easy 5 for him. I think he probably could have benefited from more prep for stats, but I guess that's a good lesson to learn.

Just a few more thoughts, now that I have a bit more time to write them out... I feel like a lot of homeschoolers zero in on the "writing across the curriculum" aspect of TWR, but I actually don't think that's its #1 strength. That's not really what it's "about" at its core. There are a lot of ways to do "writing across the curriculum" and TWR does present that as being important because it pairs knowledge/content with the writing assignments and avoids the "I don't know what to write about" problem that I don't feel like I hear as a concern as often with homeschoolers using structured writing curricula. Where I do think TWR shines is the explicit methodology it presents to improve sentences and paragraphs, and move from there to longer compositions, without inventing its own weird terminology and rules. I was actually struck while reading TWR recently (this was my second time through - I read parts and skimmed the rest a couple years ago, then listened to the whole audiobook over the last few months while implementing just a few elements with DS11) how similar many of the techniques are to IEW. But instead of requiring X number of "dress ups" that all have weird IEW specific names, we get sentence expansion and variety strategies that use real grammatical terms. Instead of the KWO (key word outline) with lots of rules about how many words per line and what "counts" or doesn't count as a word for the purposes of an outline, you get a common sense method of making a Single Paragraph Outline. I think for students with language based learning disabilities (my DS11 is dyslexic and struggles with written expression), TRW gives more potential for breaking down the process into small steps and camping out at the sentence level as long as necessary. I would actually just suggest most people try IEW first and see if it works for them (being more flexible than the curriculum suggests to not produce stilted writing). IEW's methods can be used across the curriculum as well.

Redwood Literacy has a new curriculum out called "Writing Our World" based substantially on The Writing Revolution. I'm going to try the 6th-8th level with my youngest this fall. Well, I'm at least going to start with the sample and see how it goes. I'm optimistic about it though from what I've looked at so far: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Redwood-Literacy

Archivist or Archival Librarian Fact-checker or research assistant for an author or someone else creating content (I love doing random research) some kind of Linguistics researcher...not sure what the actual jobs are in Linguistics other than college professors or people out studying rare languages...I don't think I would actually want to do either of those things!

I feel like there's a lot more fragmentation now. Every now and then something will pop up as a big hit (I'm thinking about, say, the movie Encanto a couple years ago, when it seemed like any kid we met would be singing "We don't talk about Bruno."), but now there are some kids obsessed with Tik Tok or certain YouTube channels, some that are watching everything Disney+ puts out, some are just watching whatever random thing on Netflix. So there's no guarantee with anything you would want to watch that any given group of kids will know about it. My younger boys are really into Star Wars shows, superhero movies, and have also watched every season of "Avatar the Last Air Bender" and "Phineas and Ferb"...those two are both older shows but still a fair number of kids like them. But they don't have TikTok and only watch a few science/engineering/math channels on YouTube...so if people are into some other thing they probably don't know about it. They just "own it" that they like certain things and find other people that like those things too. I think if you were looking to get your most bang for your buck/time, there are generally a lot of widely popular things on Disney+, and "classics" like all the older Disney and Pixar movies that most kids would know even if they aren't the most popular thing.

Ugh...we had an ongoing mouse problem in a rental we lived in for a number of years. The landlord was a little nutty and really against hiring professional help to deal with it, then the first ones she hired were worthless (we loved everything else about the house and it was a great deal, or we would have moved out!). After trying everything under the sun to deal with the mice ourselves, the landlord hiring a reputable pest control company really did the trick. That and the fact that we finally found one large hole in the foundation in a spot that was basically inaccessible to humans but accessable to mice and visible to us when some work was being done on the house for other reasons! (But the mice did not just disappear with the hole being filled....we needed pest control too!).

I think others have responded as well, but this is much harder in STEM fields, particularly engineering. My DS16 has been looking at the classes required for some engineering programs (He is first and foremost interested in a math major, but is looking at how potential double majors in various fields might work out). It's not uncommon for 1-2 engineering-specific courses to be required freshman year, but then in the 2nd year of the degree program it is starting to get very specialized into different engineering courses - some that are the same for many engineering disciplines, some that are specific to the type of engineering degree. It might not be impossible to find some of those classes at a CC, but seems somewhat unlikely. And the 2nd year courses must be taken before the 3rd year courses, etc... So it seems like it would be rare to shave off more than 1 year by DE in some of these engineering programs unless you have access to a 4 year school for DE. My DD18 is a lighter STEM field (a specialization of Food Science), and she also has a very step-by-step degree program that starts with freshman year classes that are fairly specific to the major. She did need basic biology, math, chemistry...but also a nutrition class, another food science related class, and a hands-on lab-type class related to food science. She takes organic chem and biochem next year but also more food science labs. Another thing I find interesting about her degree program is they double dip some major requirements with university-wide requirements. For example, all students have to take a "US Diversity Perspectives" class, but she doesn't get to pick which one - she has one that is food related to also meet a requirement of the degree program (it's about regional US foods and cuisines...sounds like a super fun class!). So she has even fewer "elective" or liberal arts choices to fill than some students. All that to say I can't imagine her having been able to DE two years of this degree program in high school...the specific classes just would not have been available. Some of the 1st year classes are requirements for 2nd year classes, etc in her degree program also.

Even what counts to meet a "fine arts" requirement in public schools can vary drastically, so if you do chose to add something it could be a more STEM oriented "fine arts" like graphic design. At the public school DS16 attends, a "global cuisines" cooking class counts toward the school's fine arts requirements for graduation, as does a "floral arts" course for flower arranging and presentation. Neither the global cuisine or the floral arts course really screams "fine arts" to me, so I think there is definitely some leeway in what might be counted as such. I was surprised by the poster above who suggested speech as a fine arts course, because it is counted toward English-related graduation requirements at DS16's school.

I think I would feel weird not tipping at a haircut - but I've also never had a haircut from a salon owner! You could give a small tip? ($5 or something). You could also scope out the situation and decide...like, is this a tiny shop where she doesn't have any other stylists, or did she take over a shop with many stylists renting chairs? If it's a tiny shop, I might be more inclined to tip more, to support the business (unless the cut was overpriced to begin with or the cut turns out badly!).

Another series to look at might be Childhood of Famous Americans: https://www.simonandschuster.com/series/Childhood-of-Famous-Americans There are a ton of these, especially when you consider older titles that aren't in print but are still available used. This is technically a non-fiction series, but I would call it "lightly fictionalized", as it is covering childhood stories from the lives of people who later became famous (in all sorts of areas - politics, sports, media, business, etc), and there is still dialog. They read more like a fiction book. It's definitely a step-up from Magic Treehouse, but might be something like a 3rd-4th grade reading level.

I think it depends a little bit on the major, and on the type of hours required by the job. My DD worked this past year. She is trying really hard to avoid loans, and working during the school year needed to be a part of meeting that goal. She got a job in her dorm's food service. A nice thing about it is that it pays pretty well (they really need workers), and most of her shifts were at times she wouldn't have been studying anyway. A trade-off for her was that first semester she had to work both Friday and Saturday nights, so less social time. Second semester she had a bit of seniority in picking shifts, so she worked on Friday nights but not Saturday nights. Shifts are also sometimes before class in the morning (most students are not studying between 7-`10am when their first class is at 11am, for example). But, I also have to say, she is in a major that is only moderately challenging in terms of the classes. She had to study and work hard, but did not put in nearly the hours studying that I needed to as a freshman in Engineering (and maybe part of the problem for me was despite hours upon hours of studying I still didn't understand the material and changed majors...I wasn't cut out for it!). I had friends in architecture and other design majors who literally had to spend all night in the studio at times to finish projects that were assigned with barely enough time to complete them...those students would have really been hurting if they had to work too. I think if I had a student in a very challenging major like Engineering, I would be less inclined to think that holding a job is a good idea unless absolutely necessary.

A couple other series that cover different events in history would be the "I Survived" and the "We Were There" series (this second one has only had a few titles republished by Dover books, but there are older vintage copies available of other books in the series). "I Survived" is a bit easier reading level than "We Were There". These both share in common with Magic Treehouse that they feature different historical events (more focused on disasters/battles in the case of "I Survived"). If you are looking for a series with the same kids present throughout (but missing the historical fiction aspect), the old A to Z mysteries series is pretty similar in reading level to magic treehouse or maybe just a bit higher. The Boxcar Children series would be just a step up from Magic Treehouse in terms of difficulty. Both of those would be the same characters through the series, but more focused on solving different mysteries, not historical fiction content.

Parents don't ride along here. I'm not sure if it is explicitly "not allowed" but it was never mentioned as a possibility and I don't know anyone who has done it. Professional instructor hours are required in our state, and there are a few options in our small city. We went with different companies for DD and DS16, just for scheduling reasons for the classroom portion. Both of these companies happened to have only one main behind the wheel instructor (also the company owner), both older guys. I've heard that locally almost all the driving instructors are guys. So doing it with a female instructor was probably not going to be a possibility with DD. Before we signed up I read reviews and saw what people said in local Facebook groups. Both companies had many satisfied customers, and I think people would have been complaining if there were any inappropriateness issues (especially in the local Facebook groups, where people complain about everything!).

I've used Storms in the Skyy also...She does group buy-ins for prodigy - sometimes it is as often as once per week. Plus she has other programs too. Here's the website for it (but you might have to join the Facebook group also, not sure...I joined the group before she had the website): https://stormsintheskyy.ecwid.com/