Have you tried changing the password?

Alex has to be in his room by 9:30 or so. Sometimes it is as late as 10:30 or 11 but that's way later than normal. I don't insist he sleep. I don't have any investment in when he chooses to sleep or not. I just want some grownup time in the evenings, if for nothing else than a simple conversation without 5 minutes of Why This Topic Relates to Minecraft or DragonBallZ from the child who never stops talking. We start school when both of us are awake and ready. Between 6 and 11ish, depending on the day.

So, I am making a list of books I will assign in high school. My intention is for this to be worthwhile and mostly enjoyable. I was thinking about putting Dune and The Lord of the Rings on the list, and then J said maybe I shouldn't, because so often assigned reading can drive all the love of the book out of the student. Maybe we should wait for him to come to books we hope he might love, and assign him things he needs for educational or cultural literacy reasons. I can see it both ways, and often the books I have assigned he has loved, but sometimes it backfires terribly and he really hates them, so there is no way to predict that. What are your thoughts?

Have fun! I really want to do Gödel, Escher, Bach for me, but I doubt we'll have the time this year. :)

These are the high school courses: http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/courses/ The specific ones we are doing are in my signature. :)

When you write literary criticism you learn to explore the books you read more fully. You get more out of everything you read later, and enjoy it more.

I grew up in a very dysfunctional home with various men in and out (and at one point was left with the stepfather for a couple years while my mom went off doing other things). So mostly I was single parented with a lot of really bad modeling for two-parent behavior. When I was married there was very little common ground regarding parenting. My ex also came from a broken home. I have been living with my partner for three years now, which is different from starting off with the kids with a partner, but we have almost no conflict over parenting issues. BUT - I still feel like I don't know what the heck I am doing most of the time, 14 years in, and I make terrible mistakes sometimes. He is 3 years in with a kid he didn't raise from a baby and does an incredible job. He grew up in a two-parent household and I suspect had marvelous modeling. Modeling matters. One of my great hopes for our family is that my partner has enough influence on my son that he (ds) will grow up with a healthy model of how to parent.

Yes, both of the ones we are looking at are conceptual, and require little math. :)

So, the first thing to know is that ds struggles with math, a lot. We tried a lot of things and LoF makes him cry less often than any other math program. YAY! :P We have completed Fractions up through both of the Pre-Algebra books (not Physics). Also, ds is fascinated by physics and requested that physics be part of his 9th grade electives. I am thinking we will go ahead and do LoF Physics before we move on to Beginning Algebra, giving him a bit of a refresher and a confident start to the school year. Beyond that we will move through LoF using their order, and not stop for summers, with the goal being that we will be well into Geometry by the time he starts his 11th grade year. This has a few advantages - no slipping backwards over summers, keeping a small routine going in summer which this whole family benefits from, keeping the sequence of the books in the order they were intended by the author, and getting a significant amount of geometry in by the time SAT testing rolls around. And, we can combine the physics book with a couple of 8 week MIT free online physics courses and call that half a high school credit of Intro to Physics. Thoughts? We start next week and I need to make a decision about which LoF we will start with!

Jen, thanks, those are great ideas! :)

I feel exactly the same way! I am really hoping to start (again) at 35 with a teenager. I am so thrilled to hear of so many great experiences. I am very afraid of having trouble ttc, but these stories are giving me a lot of hope. :)

I wish I had been either ignored and left to self-educate or homeschooled by nice people (not my parents).

I love this! My son gets a huge kick out of being publicly recognized. We have an end of the year get-together with our homeschool group where we stand up and talk about the accomplishments of the year and he LOVES it. I will think about adding in treats for stuff we finish throughout the year. Thanks! :)

Do you think she is being careless or does she need a review or is she actually not understanding the concepts? Carelessness - retake until she passes one. Needs a review - review and then retake until a pass. Not understanding a concept - redo the relevant chapter and Your Turn to Play, and then retake until a pass. That's how we do LoF. :)

Not sure if this fits what you want, but we are watching Forrest Gump to cap off our last bit of American history.

Yay! Have fun with it! :)

I've had a "in your room and I don't care what you do as long as you are quiet and giving me peace" time since ds was around 9ish. We probably would have started that earlier had we started homeschooling earlier. He is 14 now and reads until very late some nights and sleeps in or naps the next day. I am fine with that. This relaxed lifestyle is no small part of why we homeschool. :)

I would skip the American History guide from Beautiful feet. I felt like it was really silly and obvious. Like we would read about a lake and a river and a turtle, and SURPRISE! Their idea was to map the lake and river and read up on the turtle species. I could have easily made those things up on the spot and I stopped using the guide after the first week or so. The IEW guide was invaluable. It explained how to pace the writing side of things and where to be in the units and what dress-ups to be teaching and all of that.

I finished planning Biology and Math! WOO HOO!

Use whatever spices that you feel like wasting and that you think smell good!

Because you get to learn about making a mummy and it actually works! It's soooo cool!

We are atheists and are easily annoyed with Biblical stuff. I don't remember seeing anything Biblical in the Hollings Hollings books. There are some racist / product of the times type references. I just used them as a discussion point and moved on.

I am barely started. Everyone will be able to tell when I am done because my random questions will stop peppering the high school forum. ;)

Wow. Totally inappropriate and icky thing to say! Yuck!

I don't remember any directions about soaking it in alcohol. If I remember right, we followed your steps above but never soaked them in alcohol. If the birds have a strong bad smell something is wrong. Ours had a bit of an icky smell at first, but not much, and very quickly that was replaced with a cinnamon / spicy / nutmeg / whatever smell. We have had our mummified chicken for several years and it just smells like delicious spices. We did the mummy wrap with camo fabric so it's pretty hilarious. I keep it in the living room on display. It's very entertaining. ;)