I'm Australian. We are used to long flights! Try to fly at night when you are already tired. Stay up for as long as you can when you get to your destination and go to bed as close to proper bed time at your destination as you can manage without collapsing. Try to get seats in the very back row of the plane - they have a bit more leg room. I second the big, light scarf recommendation - it's often easier to get some sleep if you have a light covering. Drink lots of water and steer clear of caffeine and alcohol or you'll end up like a dried chip. You can take a water bottle through most security points as long as it's empty, then fill it up on the other side. Ask the steward where they keep the drinks so that you can get another one whenever you need to. Take baby wipes with you. Take your make-up off when you get on the plane (it's dark, no one will see and at the end of the flight everyone looks horrible anyway). Take lip balm, a toothbrush and moisturiser. Don't eat too much. Airlines feed you to pass the time and the food is pretty ordinary. Its full of salt because your sense of taste is lowered at altitude and you need more salt to taste it, so that increases fluid retention. Bring fruit instead. Walk around at least once every hour. Do silly toe and heel raises. Laugh and get excited as the plane takes off, remember that defying gravity is an enormous privilege and ENJOY YOURSELVES! D

I'm an only and the mother of an only. Because of my own "onliness" I think I tend to be less cosseting of DS13. That and the fact that DH is the eldest of 3, so he thinks that we shouldn't be too soft on DS (and you know how bossy eldest children are!). I know I'm the parent of an only because I am the one who always has spare seats in the car and can thus transport everyone else's unruly kids; I never, ever get second child or family discounts; I am frequently called on to babysit other people's kids because my child "must be lonely" (he's usually not - onlies are good at making friends, good at amusing themselves, and generally happy with our own company); and I have a massive collection of curriculum materials in pristine condition because there is too much good stuff and not enough kids to experiment on! D

Yes books are expensive in Australia. We tax books. It keeps the nation dumbed down, which allows us to have the world's most stupid prime minister! D

Here's a plan: set your address to Australia on Amazon. The staggeringly high shipping charges for even the cheapest second hand paperback will make you think long and hard about buying anything. Am I jealous of Amazon Prime? You bet!!! D

I LOVE A.A. Milne. I can't read 'Us two' without tearing up. I remember working with a lovely teenage boy who told me that one of the tragedies of the modern age was that the only Pooh most kids knew was the Disney version. I just couldn't read Huckleberry Finn aloud! That accent is impossible. D

My son spent pre-school to grade 2 in a Steiner school. We used Christopherus from grade 2 to grade 5 (Christopherus finished after grade 5). It is an excellent curriculum and rigorous enough that our transition to a more classical style in grade 6 was seamless. Live ed is very beautiful but not as academically strong, and the science is pretty loopy. OM is closer to classical than Steiner, IMHO. I have used all three and they are all good, but Christopherus would be my pick. It's also easy to remove most of Steiner's spiritualism from this curriculum. Waldorf Essentials is very good and very gentle, but does not lay out each unit lesson by lesson. If your sister doesn't want or need something overly prescriptive, it may be perfect, but I didn't have the time or confidence to do that much work on my own at the beginning of our journey. D

I loathe Wuthering Heights. I still find it deeply confronting. My mother, who had a true classical education, loved it. I think it's a book to use judiciously. I grew up in a violent home. Wuthering Heights makes me physically uncomfortable, not because the characters seem irredeemable but because of the bullying and abuse. I have to move into a very clinical headspace to get past this. My mother revelled in the blackness - for her it was the epitome of teenage melancholy (I suspect she would have been an Emo had she been a teenager in the noughties ;-)). For my son, with his melancholy nature and our family history of depression, I will probably give it a wide berth, at least until he is much older and the book can be an academic exercise rather than an emotional one. BUT Lori D is right: it is THE most wonderful book for exploring setting and symbolism, and Romanticism because of its bleakness and the stripping back of both setting and character, and the way it almost seems to look down on its own genre. It's also a salutary lesson to the reader: you don't have to like the characters to read and appreciate the writers craft. Can I just say that it's 1am in Sydney and I am thoroughly enjoying being glued to a thread about lit analysis! D

I'm a choleric. DH is a melancholic (Eeyore). DS is a melancholic. Except on the days when he is being choleric. Their innate gloominess drive me insane if I stop to think about it (after 20 years of marriage, I have learned not to think about it often). Many's the day when I have stopped myself running about the house yelling, "Oh just bloody CHEER UP." This would be soothing to my choleric soul, but unhelpful. I need to go to bed (not something cholerics are good at especially if there is a chance to show off our superior knowledge on a great topic like, well, us!) but I promise to come back tomorrow. Meanwhile, there is much info to be had about cholerics, melancholics, phlegmatics and sanguines in Waldorf literature, much of it fabulously unscientific but interesting nonetheless. D

I have worked for many years as a researcher. Ethical standards require that all researchers participate in an informed consent process where each participant is given information about the aims and objectives of the project, data security and what will be done with the results before any participation is expected. In my opinion, book writers and their information gatherers are researchers if they plan to write an accurate book, and they shouldn't get stroppy when asked to give more than a couple of lines of information. As for the assertion that you are too busy, as a homeschooling mother, I would think that you would appreciate how busy the rest of us are. We are certainly too busy to trawl the web looking for info about your boss and his likely intentions. We come to this forum to get and give support. Many people here share very personal information. We're not scared of your intentions, we simply want to be treated with respect. Your current method is giving you biased results. You have some answers to work with. In the future, can I suggest that you provide more information and less judgement when asking personal questions online. Danielle

Have a look at Christopherus. It's a Waldorf curriculum. Some of the maths is available separately from the full curriculum bundles. Lots of hands on, lots of art, lots of stories, lots of Squirrels. Lovely, gentle, fun and gets the job done.

Try MEP. It's broken down by units, so you could simply map out the topics she needs to cover. It's an integrated program, rather than the US style of algebra, then geometry, etc (you guys do know you are the only people on the planet who do this to maths, don't you?), you can download all the bits you need to a USB when the internet is up, and there is enough meat in the student work books that she could teach herself. If she needs help, you can look at the detailed lesson plans. Best of all, it's free, so if it's a flop you've lost nothing. It's also an excellent maths program! D

We have cyclones, but very few earthquakes. Apart from drought, flood and bush fires, I think we fair pretty well on the natural disaster front. No bears, no rabies, very little in the way of carnivorous wildlife, and until recently, no Costco! We also have pretty tight gun control laws. I'm staying here! D

You're all spoilt! No homeschooling conventions here in Oz. Two mums bringing a few new books along to the park is as good as it gets here. Thank god for YouTube!

I'm a terrible speller. DS13 (outstanding natural speller) says it's because I don't picture the word in my head. It is unfathomable to me that anyone would be able to picture a word in their head! I worked for many years as a scientific writer. The spell checker is my friend. If the spell check can't find it, I find another word. Sad but true, and I'm not sure that it's held me back, apart from a few torrid years in primary school when I was the only one in the class without a gold star on their spelling chart. I quickly developed truly awful handwriting to cover my spelling mistakes and walked away with the English prize. I'd leave him be. He probably knows he's rubbish at spelling. Teaching him to cope with it may be better than teaching spelling. D

When he got better than me, about grade 3. I'm not kidding. DS is a natural speller. I am shocking! My spelling is a running joke. We pulled out a book with lists of spelling words given to high schoolers in the 1950's. DS blitzed them, right up to fifth form. I failed year 6. It would be beyond hypercritical of me to teach him spelling. We do vocab instead. D

Wind in the Willows has similar descriptive language to Anne. I don't find the story as rich in character development, but the clincher is that the favourite girl has chosen it, and therefore the boys will read it and behave well because they love her. I'm feeling a little cheap but needs must! D

Yep. Just keep going. Years 7 and 8 of MEP are a bit of a rehash of the primary stuff, so you may be able to move through it quite quickly. Keep in mind that it's a 13 year, rather than a 12 year program, so if you get years 7 and 8 done as a review in your year 7 and start year 9 of MEP in your year 8 you'll be on target to finish in high school, and you'll have covered quite a bit of uni maths. I'm not using MEP in the order it's written. I'm using the order set by an Australian curriculum and using MEP years 7 and 8 as the teaching materials to make sure we have everything covered. MEP has some extra topics that I'll do at the end of the year. We'll probably do the same thing in years 9 and 10 - Australian list for content, MEP teaching materials, then add the missing bits. This has come about because we didn't start MEP till year 6 so we had some backtracking to do. Now I wish I'd just started MEP 7 in our year 6, but I liked the integrated primary syllabus better and DS needed the spiral approach. It's been worth it. His maths is much more solid. D

Forgot: Alice in Wonderland. I'd love to do Anne of Green Gable but the boys would be wretched D

I'm doing a similar thing, with kids aged 12-14. Their skill levels are pretty varied. So far we have covered: War Horse (Morpurgo) Huckleberry Finn - not a big hit! Animal Farm - went down fairly well, big objections to the ending Playing Beatie Bow (Ruth Park, Australian) On the list for later this year Wind in the Willows (glorious language) Let the Balloon Go, and Hill End (Ivan Southall, Australian) - chance to compare the works of one author Macbeth And then something like Lord of the Flies if they are all up for it. Some are already, others no way. Watching this thread with interest! D

There is a British book called Free Range Education that might be helpful. Lots of parents giving the experiences of their families. The idea of an 80's style unschooling is interesting. In Australia the term "natural learning" seems to be preferred over unschooling. In my experience (lots of them in our homeschooling group) Most of them use child led, active learning, and are devotees of Holt.

MEP. Free, teaches concepts over procedures, has all the answers and teachers notes freely available, presents kids with only one page of work per day so it's not overwhelming, spiral program so lots of review, but sophisticated enough to prevent boredom and feelings of "I've done that before". Really, this is an outstanding program. I still can't believe its free. Only possible down side is that it's teacher intensive, which I like D

For the younger years, Christopherus curriculum. Rigorous, fun, beautiful, easy to adapt to Australian content, just fantastic. The only downside is that it only goes up to year 5. If it went up to year 8, we'd still be using it. MEP for maths. This is a standout at teaching conceptual mathematical thinking. While I loved Key to....., I wished we'd started MEP earlier. Peter McInnes' Australian Backyard Explorer, and companions Backyard Naturalist and Back Astronomer. Great for us Aussies who usually spend time adapting US curricula. Honestly, these are so good you might want to immigrate just so you can use them. History Alive books by Peter Moss. Published in the UK in the 1970s. Great treatment of history from 55BCE onwards. I'm slowly collecting the set (I'm missing book 3). D

Lori D I'll happily send you DS13 so you can justify your addiction. You can send him back when he's 16. Meanwhile, I'll stay here and read all my books........ Someone should put a "book hoarders" tag on this thread D

I used Huck Finn with our book club last year (ages 11-13). They read it under sufferance, and got it after we worked through it but it definitely wasn't a big hit. Because we are in Australia the book doesn't have the same cultural appeal. I'm glad we did it because it was a great book to ask "what is this book really about?" and to discuss the ideas of nobility and civilisation, but it was a tough read for some of the kids. We're now doing Animal Farm. They like it, although DS13 thought the ending was pretty weak. I spending lots of time on history with this one, though. D

I wouldn't touch AoPS for my DS13. He's quite capable with maths but he doesn't enjoy it. He doesn't want maths problems to solve. His high IQ and problem solving abilities are far better directed towards building his own PC and motorising bikes. He has a very low tolerance for problems outside his areas of interest. So we use MEP and he does just fine. I'm not sure AoPS would have been my thing either, yet I loved maths and was very good at it. I learn best from studying other people's models. My husband, on the other hand, went to school thinking he was very ordinary, but came into his own as a mature aged uni student. He would have thrived with AoPS - he loves problem solving and retains lots of information that way. D