Eliana, :grouphug: and congratulations on your beautiful granddaughter. My prayers are with you and your family.

One year already! Wow, I remember you writing about their arrival, like a couple of months ago? Congratulations :party:

Soror, I just want to say that I really like your post about your Year of Enchantment! I'm experiencing something similar here although I can't quite articulate it.

:D, that's exactly what I always think when people talk about Agatha Christie. I guess I never read the unique ones. I'll be :bigear: to people's favorites and give AG a second chance.

I woke the kids at 4:00 AM and we watched for an hour at least then went to bed again. Everybody was super excited. I'm not so excited anymore, because now everyone is :smash: and it is only noon. What was I thinking?? :smilielol5: This is going to be a long day.

I was also thinking of Orson Scott Card when I read your post :D. I looooooove Ender's Game and as a teen I bought several of his Ender books. I have been looking forward to reading them with my dd for a long time. On the other hand, since reading about OSC when the movie came out.....I'm not so happy about it anymore. Sigh.

I really liked The Martian (read it in January) and don't even remember any colorful language, I read it in Dutch so maybe they eddited it all out :huh:.

If I remember correctly the last link is to a curriculum site that contains some weird stuff ("high-brow, high-IQ curriculum"?), you might need to check it out a bit more before using their lists. HTH. Otherwise I'm :bigear:

The coffee would be cold before it reaches you...but I'll send :grouphug:.

Thank you!

Congratulations! :party: I'm so sorry that your family isn't excited. Regarding the HG, you can do it! It won't be fun, but you already know that, but it is worth it. (I had HG at pregnancy 2-3-4.)

I'm really glad she enjoyed the afternoon! To be frank, I would have expected a child with selective mutism to have trouble with something like this, so it's great that she didn't! I understand your frustration with the situation, we have the same sort of situation in the Netherlands. A friend of mine has a little boy with some sort of speech delay and she had to send him to a special playgroup....which was filled with children who needed to learn Dutch, sigh. Maybe there is another way to motivate her to speak French, some informal playgroup or story time, or something?

Thank you very much. English is a foreign language for me and I find it difficult to judge which books are appropriate for what grade, so I´m always looking for great lists made by more knowledgeable people :D.

Yes! I know your sons are very accelerated and I don't presume to be able to speak for your situation, but yes, this proved to be a big obstacle for us. English is a foreign language for us, we are not a bilingual family. I used Singapore Science gr 3&4, including all the extra supplements, with my then 7yo dd and she was bored out of her mind, but I couldn't accelerate her to grade 5&6 or higher because she couldn't handle that level of English input. She begged me to stop using English science materials and go back to Dutch curriculum. I used Classical Writing Homer A&B with her at 9yo, I don't think she learnt a thing except for some diagramming, but I couldn't accelerate her to the next level, which caused massive frustration. I'm a bit too tired at the moment to remember other situations, but I have had this exact same thing several times. Untill I stopped trying :blushing: . I know other families who have succesfully done this, so I know it can be done, but I haven't managed to do it. Either my kids are too accelerated, or their foreign language learning skills are too slow, either way the combination proved to be too difficult. On the bright side, from what I read about your sons, I would guess their foreign language learning skills will probably be very good/fast and the gap between the level of academics they need and the level they can handle in Spanish will not be too big. So don't let my experience prevent you from trying!

Timely question. Chances are that homeschooling will become illegal in the Netherlands in the next few years, worst case scenario this coming school year might be our last. So I have been thinking about this a lot. I don't want to go completely school-at-home NOW, out of fear for school-at-school THEN. That would be silly :lol:. I'm going to try (!) to get math and Dutch LA on the same grade level, because being a 2th grader working on a 4th grade level in LA and a 5th grade level for Math is a problem in school. Not sure this will work, though. I'm going to use curriculum with tests, so that I can prove on which level they work. I might throw in some specific test prep stuff. My oldest will need to learn to finish a schoolyear's worth of work in a schoolyear. It's great that she is working several grade levels ahead, but unless she can keep the pace, I will not be able to convince anyone to grade skip her. Grade skipping is always problematic here. You are not supposed to be better than your peers. It often feels that the more I do at home, the more difficult situation I'm creating. Sigh. ETA, Monica, luckily I have done cursive from the beginning, so no need to worry about that ;)

:bigear: Dd6 is working at the level of dd9 and I'm quite certain she has been holding herself back for a while. Not consiously but more of a 'if my older sister can't do this/read this/understand this, it will be too difficult for me' thing. She seems to be past that now....which is great!.....but it's going to be difficult for dd9 and I can see trouble coming, especially if it gets more and more clear that dd6 is overtaking her.

Hi ladies, It's the first day of our summer break here (finally! Let's just say that reading on this forum with everyone on break since May is not exactly helpful for a strong end of the schoolyear :D) and I hope I will be able to post on this thread again. I'm still reading HoMA, chapter 40. I'm also reading Robinson Crusoe, so that's good for Jane and VC's 18th century novelist plan :). I'm looking forward to six summer weeks of READING!

Yes, we have vocational schools for the lowest track and other vocational schools for the middle track. Nowadays, with everything getting more international, a part of the vocational schools of the middle track is getting added to the universities. Because....when your goals is to get 50% of the kids to university....you have to change what constitutes a university otherwise it won't work :001_rolleyes: . To steer this thread back to the OP :blushing: : OP, your thread caught my eye, because I'm very attracted to discussions/blogs/podcasts about Teaching from Rest, Truth&Beauty&Goodness, about giving my kids a real human education with time to think. In the Netherlands there are very few homeschoolers, most are radical unschoolers, so American homeschoolers who are interested in these things feel like my nearest colleagues. But the practical situation is so different when you are not in America. Anyway, I do not have a solution, just a :grouphug: .

Yes, that is my idea also, getting used to the hoops, getting used to the process. To the bolded: that's probably the best idea, although with my type A personality, I have a hard time accepting that some subjects have to become less important ;) . Thank you for your kind advice. To the OP, sorry for highjacking your thread!

Stutterfish, do you have different tracks for high school? In the Netherlands we have 3 different tracks, the lowest track has less exams and those are at a much lower level. For entrance to a university, you do need to follow the highest track, which only 10% of Dutch students do. But a university degree is not at all necessary for a lot of jobs. I wish I could opt out of the system completely, however at one point my dds will have to re-enter the system and there is no re-entry without a high school diploma. No one will hire you, no school/university will accept you. The only way out of the system is through the arts, if your child is a world-class piano player or ballerina, he/she might get accepted into a program based on talent. It would be easier if I wasn't aiming for university entrance, that is for sure. I'm just not sure I could do that to my gifted kids. 'Yes, we decided to homeschool you, although homeschooling is barely legal and noone else is doing it, and yes, your peers are learning 3 languages and passing the state exams easily, but sorry....I couldn't manage that for you.....but believe me.....homeschooling is better'. Hmmpf. ETA, I'm not angry at you, I'm just frustrated with the situation.

I'm not completely sure I'm understanding your question. In the Netherlands students do not take general courses at university. I have a masters degree in astrophysics and the only courses I took in my 5 years at the university were Math, Physics and Astrophysics. No languages, no literature, no history. To me, that makes it even *more* important to take lots of different courses in high school (7-12grade). If I had specialised early, and taken only math/physics state exams, I would not have had any kind of all round education. Oh, I'm thinking of something. Wintermom, I guess you are concerned about university entrance. It is true that if you want to study eg physics, you have to have taken the physics state exam. But other than that, if my dd passes the state exams and gets her high school diploma, every Dutch university has to accept her for whatever study she decides to take. There are only a few studies where there are limited places and there is a lottery. What I find difficult in our situation, is that in order for my dd to choose her state exams, she needs to have experienced those subjects. How would she know if she likes physics or economy or philosophy, if she has never studied them. This means that Dutch students on the highest track, take up to 16(?) different subjects simultanously in 7-9th grade. At least Dutch&English&French&German, Latin&Greek, Bio&Chemistry&Physics, History&Geography, Economics, Art&Music, depending on the school other subjects can be added. This is very difficult to do at home. Especially if you want to 'teach from rest' and have time to experience Goodness, Truth and Beauty :lol:. I do plan to spread out the state exams, to make them less overwhelming. On the other hand, I'm sometimes wondering, just like with a young child when you work long to teach them something they could have picked up really quickly when a bit older......sometimes I wonder if my dd would not spend way more time preparing for a state exam at 14 in stead of at 17. I don't know. I find this very difficult to decide.

I mentioned an oral exam for history and biology, but I'm not in the UK. All state exams in the Netherlands have an oral part, yes, including math :001_rolleyes: .

I don't know much about the content of the GSCE exams, but I'm from the Netherlands and we have a similar exam structure to get accepted into a university. Dutch students need to take 10-11 state exams. Only 10% of Dutch students go to University. I have been wrestling with the same questions you have. And I'm always a bit envious of American homescholers, who seem to have much more freedom, at least it looks that way :). You write that your dd needs to take at least 5 exams. Can you choose which subjects to take the exam for? Because, for me at least, certain subjects are much more problematic to teach/learn with textbooks than others. I don't like to use a textbook for Dutch language arts, because it will contain lots of busy work for my dd who reads voracious and loves to write. But I don't mind at all using a textbook to teach English & French & Latin (adding Greek next year). I don't mind using a textbook for math......but for history or geography it is problematic. Dutch students can choose which exams to take, but within a prescribed framework. Looking at my dds interests, she probably has to take the history exam. My current plan is to give her a good living book knowledge of history and spend the last 2 years before the exam, working our way through the syllabus and accompanying books. We are not there yet, so I can't say for sure it's going to work. I don't plan on having her take the history exam early, because of the oral exam. I do plan on her taking eg Biology early, I'm not so worried about the oral exam for that subject.

I'm taking a board break for Lent, but wanted to post my list before siging off. Currently reading: -HotMW (on schedule) -Jane Eyre (slowly, the font is killing my eyes, I should get it on my ereader) -All the Light We Cannot See (very good) -Doris Lessing's - Shikasta (awesome, thanks Shukriyya for mentioning it!) Recently I finished The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, very sweet story about a houskeeper and a mathematics professor who can only remember the last 80 minutes. Too bad the editor didn't know any math, after getting lots of stories about prime numbers, it's a bit dumb to include 21 and 27 as primes :rolleyes: . At least I'm assuming it's an editor's mistake :D. After being dissapointed in The Circle by Dave Eggers, I saw Your Fathers Where Are They in the library, read the first page and got sucked into it immediately. Very interesting idea, a troubled young man kidnaps several people to talk with them, the whole book is written in dialogue. But despite the nice idea, it didn't work, it felt lame and unfinished. No more Eggers for me. Loved No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. Oh, and I read 10 books in J.D. Robb's In Death serie :tongue_smilie: . Total for this year: 24. 2 Dusties, 1 chunky. ------------ 14. Yoko Ogawa – The Housekeeper and the Professor (BaW recommendaton) (N) 13. Colin Beavan – No Impact Man (simple living) (N) 12. Gerhard Hormann – Helemaal vrij! (simple living) (N) 11. Jon Krakauer – Into the Wild (N) 10. Dave Eggers – Your fathers where are they and the prophets do they live forever?(N) 9. Gerhard Hormann - Het nieuwe nietsdoen (simple living) (N) 8. Mortimer Adler – The Paideia Proposal, an Educational Manifesto (dusty) 7. Marguerite Duras – The Lover (dusty) 6. Penelope Lively – Consequenses (BaW recommendation) 5. José Eduardo Agualusa – Book of Chameleons (BaW recommendation) 4. Murakami – Kafka on the Beach (BaW recommendation, chunky) (N) 3. Marieke Henselman – Eigenwijs je hypotheek aflossen. (N) 2. Gerhard Hormann – Hypotheekvrij! (N) 1. Andy Weir - The Martian. (BaW recommendation) (N)

:grouphug: waiting is so difficult!