Thank you!

Thank you both. Twitter isn't something I'd thought of...hmmm. Yours sounds like a very stressful situation, madteaparty. I hope your son wound up at the college where he wanted to be and that all is well now!

Edited: too long boring saga that amounted to the fact that my senior's ACT sitting was cancelled (after multiple prior cancellations). Is there any point phoning or emailing ACT? Any hot tips about communicating with them?

Would she be interested in any of the Great Courses, do you think? My kids liked the ones we used when we had a subscription some years ago, though we never tried any of the chemistry or US History ones. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/ You can buy the videos, or many public libraries have them, too. The subscription service seems to have changed names to Wondrium--I don't know why, but here is the Great Courses page: https://www.wondrium.com/format/classic-great-courses?CFM=mega_menu Hope that might help! Good luck with your new adventure!

My math major hasn't had any classes in university that allow graphing calculators, so he has felt ahead of the game, having used really old books for his math courses at home (for precalc, he used the old Addison-Wesley book by Shanks, Fleenor, Brumfield and Eicholz). I do think it's an advantage to not become too dependent on them in high school, because you might not be allowed to use them in post-secondary.

There are so many ways to think about our literature courses, aren't there. I found with my kids that a chronological arrangement didn't really suit us--we did literature in thematic groupings, by and large (though a couple of mine did do ancients in a single year). Depending on the kid, we did things like "Country Houses and City Streets," "Fathers and Sons," "European Literature in Translation," "The Idea of North," "Love and Romance in Literature," "Satire, Fantasy, and the Absurd," and some other groupings that were tailored to their individual interests or that gathered a group of thematically similar works around something they really wanted to read, or that took advantage of the opportunity to see some exciting theatrical productions. Too, depending on what record-keeping requirements are like in your province (we have none), you can write up your course descriptions however you'd like--say you had read books from a certain period (or theme) in grade 10 but read something more challenging in grade 11 (when she was readier for it) that really "belonged" (chronologically, thematically, whatever) to the first group, there's nothing stopping you from retroactively including on paper that book with the previous year's work. This gives you the freedom to read what she seems ready for without having to conform to a scheme, and then sort out all the paperwork later. Just keep track as you go! There's so much flexibility in homeschooling, and I don't believe that there are specific works that absolutely must be included to consider one's students well-educated. (It might be instructive to look at your province's PLOs for English 12--I was startled to see how few things they actually read; Literature 12 is better, but English 12 is the one that's actually required to graduate, at least in our province; I assume the standard reading lists for English 9, 10, and 11 are not more extensive than that for grade 12.) One last thought--if she loved Pride and Prejudice, you might have a very happy year reading the other five Jane Austen novels. And then, if you had time, you could investigate some of her artistic antecedents and descendants as well as her contemporaries (read some of the works that Northanger Abbey is spoofing, for example), look into some of the secondary literature, find out about contemporary social issues (slavery is very much a part of the background to Mansfield Park, for instance), learn about publishing practices, all sorts of things. There is as much--or more, arguably--value to be had in a deep dive as in a broad survey, I think.

A couple of YA fantasies that one of mine loved were by China Miéville: Un Lun Dun and Railsea. I haven't read them myself, but I think he would have told me at the time had he found them upsetting at all; he was a sensitive soul at that age. My youngest is just starting the Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume's I Am a Cat. So far I gather that it is witty and satirical; it doesn't look from the reviews that I have seen that it gets very dark. (I have no idea about how it unfolds, though, so it might be worth looking into first.) The same kid is also reading Beatrice Weinrich's collection of Yiddish folktales in translation, many of which are delightful. Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories was very popular here, but might well be too young for her. It could be worth a try if you are reading together with your younger ones some evening. (I think I remember that you have some elementary age children, but I could be mixed up!) I don't want to sound political in any way, but considered just as pieces of excellent writing, I think you could do a lot worse than the Obamas' books if you are looking to add diversity without getting too sad or scary. Dreams from My Father is so beautifully written (I read it and loved it when it first came out in the mid '90s, when I didn't really know who he was yet), and Becoming is very good, too. (I am Canadian, so have nothing at stake here, but I wouldn't want to recommend anything that would make your family uncomfortable.) You might be looking mostly for fiction, though. I will come back if I think of anything else that might suit. Editing to add one more, this one a memoir; Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand, and Stars. All of my children loved this book; it's very close to all of our hearts. I also did it with a teen book club one year, and all of the twelve or so kids liked it a lot. It's special.

We didn't do depressing, either. What kinds of books does she love? Funny, fantasy, love stories, adventures? A few non-depressing ideas that are I think pretty accessible to a young teen: EM Forster, A Room With a View Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (note that the heroine dies at the end) or The Blessing Carol Shields, The Republic of Love Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm WE Bowman, The Ascent of Rum Doodle Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat Evelyn Waugh, Scoop Anthony Trollope, Dr. Thorne Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small, or Ex Libris (both essay collections) Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (one of mine adored this book) About a century before your cutoff date, but all of my kids loved Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield Any of Ivan Doig--he's so wonderful--but I think possibly English Creek or The Whistling Season might be great ones to try first. I wonder if she'd like some of the books published by Persephone (mostly neglected 20th-c. women writers from the UK); here's a list of their recommendations for teens: https://persephonebooks.co.uk/collections/grey-books-teenagers-books-for Not on that list, but another Persephone book that looks intriguing (I've not read it) is Frances Towers's Tea with Mr Rochester: https://persephonebooks.co.uk/products/tea-with-mr-rochester?_pos=1&_sid=836e84da8&_ss=r

My husband and I wrote page after page of very silly, spoofy paragraphs with lots of mistakes. My kids always learned best with humour, and they found our little stories with all of our mistakes very hilarious! Then they started writing even sillier stuff for us, with even more mistakes for us to find instead; somehow that really cemented the rules for them, and they are all excellent writers. (We also bought them very fancy "special editing pens"!) Another thing we did was asking them to choose a paragraph they loved in a book they were reading (at the time, it was a lot of PG Wodehouse, as I recall). They rewrote the passage about a completely different topic in completely different words, but duplicating exactly the parts of speech and punctuation. That also was very good practice. Handing them a workbook wouldn't have gone anywhere, I'm afraid, but anything funny always went over in a big way here!

Wonderful! Halifax is a fantastic student city--I hope she loves it!

Thank you! I've just requested it from the library!

I see that West Virginia University has his desired program--a quick scan of their site looks as though an out-of-state student would pay about $36000 before scholarships. They have some charts of automatic scholarships for various grade points and SAT scores, so you could see where you might wind up after that. https://admissions.wvu.edu/cost-and-aid South Dakota State also has landscape architecture. Out of state students pay around $26000 before scholarships or financial aid.. https://www.sdstate.edu/office-financial-aid/undergraduate-cost-attendance There are a couple of ideas, anyway, for different parts of the country. Undoubtedly there are other good schools that are comparative bargains--it might just take some poking around. I hope you find just the right place for him, and that he has a fantastic experience! Good luck! Editing to add link to map of states with undergrad landscape architecture programs: https://www.asla.org/schools.aspx

Agh. This makes our lives so much harder. There is not one school anywhere around us that will allow homeschoolers to write AP exams. The community colleges here will not allow dual enrollment. SAT subject tests were our nice easy solution. Back to the drawing board...

Oh! How could I have forgotten Murderous Maths?? Here's the trig book: http://www.murderousmaths.co.uk/books/bkmm10.htm

There are some interesting books published by Dover; here's Mathographics by Robert Dixon: https://store.doverpublications.com/0486266397.html And here are some Lewis Carroll mathematical puzzles (I had these when I was a teen--much fun!!): https://store.doverpublications.com/0486204936.html Or maybe some spherical trig? This book is one I've browsed quite a bit--one of my teens will be reading it after Christmas: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691148922/heavenly-mathematics Hope you find the perfect gift!