We were fortunate with CalGrant for our oldest; it helped that we had 3 other kids at home! With our youngest, dh will be at his highest salary level (eligible to retire but can't afford it) and no other kids in the home. Frankly, no matter what she does it will be much more expensive than her older siblings, and we've had the least opportunity to save in her name (because, 3 other kids going to college). Going back to work @ 64 to finance her college....not sure it's even worth it. She'll be the one we work hardest to find scholarships for, without a doubt!

DH and I are deep-cleaning the bedroom. Moving furniture, cleaning fan & its fixtures (for which our high ceilings mean we need a step ladder), and choosing more stuff for online sales. Turns out we need to add vacuum cleaner repair to that list as well.

AHG Court of Honor completed!! Such a busy year (our troop put on first-ever regional Camporee for 8 other troops). Our roster of leaders for next year is ALMOST in place, and I actually have all my dd's badges sewn on her sash already. She earned SIX badges this year as a Pioneer!!! Very proud of her.

LisaK's experience mirrors the general charter school experience....innovative and flexible at the start, but increasingly rigid and rule-oriented as time went on and the bureaucrats got to it. If you want to homeschool with confidence, choose an out-of-the-box program with all the books and a teacher guide like Sonlight, Winter's Promise, or Hearts of Dakota (in my personal order of preference). You could also choose Oak Meadow, Laurel Springs, or Calvert, which have teacher oversight and cost quite a bit more but can do grading for you and are more tailored for standard K-12 expectations. There are similar private providers, like Kolbe Academy....also significantly more costly than option #1. If you're feeling courageous, go with the program outlined by TWTM and keep your kids together for science and history chronologically, then find other resources at their level. You CAN do it!! In our story, we started with Sonlight and used it for 5 years, then began transitioning to WTM-eclectic approach. We've worked with several charters and seen the restrictions grow over the years (and none of them used K12 because I didn't want my kids online that much); we are happy NOT to be doing that now.

Now I don't feel so badly. We crashed and burned about 1/2 way thru LA 2 this year (we'd done LFC A-C and LA 1). Now we're doing Jenney's First Year Latin for the rest of a year as review and to keep ourselves in practice. Not sure about next year, which will be dd's last year planned for latin as I've told her she can do Spanish @ CC for a modern foreign language.

We found a guy in our area who specialized in what he called "college kid cars" - they were older models in good condition that he bought and gave a once-over in terms of maintenance. We've gotten 3 cars from him now....because we may not be college kids, but we live on a budget!! Our minivan, when we bought it, was a lease return with 35K mile on it. We paid cash with a legacy from my dad. When it wears out (has 125K on it now), we will severely downsize because, by then, we won't need that size anymore.

My brother and his wife live in Spain; their kids have dual US/Canadian citizenship and speak English, French, and Spanish. When my nephew applied to university in Canada (MUCH cheaper than US), they couldn't seem to believe an english speaker was applying to university from Spain. He had to take the TESOL (a joke; he's fluent in English), despite his quite high score on the english-language SAT (which he had to take @ embassy in Madrid). They insisted on looking only at his grades from Spanish high school (passed every class by examination, in Spanish) rather than giving his SAT credibility....and his freshman-year grades were lower because it was his first year transitioning into classes in Spanish. End result, he ended up at a community college adjacent to the university he'd wanted. At which point he discovered how much cheaper the CC was and decided he'd do all the undergrad stuff he could there instead of at the university. They have a transfer agreement with the university, which he is very happy about. In the end, it seemed that the Canadian university just didn't know how to treat an expat student....so they treated him like a Spaniard. It caused a lot of stress but in the end turned out well for him; his brother is going to follow the same method by choice rather than by need.

I agree life drawing is important, as is developing a mind set of sketching daily. Assignments in dd's art college life drawing class would be to practice 60-plus poses a week; for some schools it's 100-plus/week. But for us, a $300 portfolio class (drawing on all her previous work for examples) yielded $22,000 in scholarship money over 4 years, so it was way worth it.

Our oldest took art class once/week, 90 min. in high school and then took a portfolio prep class there the summer before senior year. Her oil painting experience, though, was through a local class for seniors (free). We just called up & asked if she could enroll. The instructor was enthusiastic and the seniors there loved her. The portfolio included pencil sketches and a finished product, colored pencil sketches and a finished selfportrait, charcoal warmup exercises, for life drawing she had a couple of animal drawings. She also had an acrylic painting and photos of a 3-D project she'd done, a pastel piece, and a couple of multi-media pieces of various kinds. The class helped her sort thru her work for the best examples, create a body of work that showcased different skills and techniques, how to create an artist's statement and table of contents, arrange them in a couple different size portfolios (we ended up using the 9x11 one as it was easiest to carry) and (most important) a digital portfolio that could be submitted for scholarships. We could have done those things at home, but I wasn't clear at all on what was needed and how to arrange it. She took the portfolio hardcopy with her to national portfolio day and also to several college tours. And she used the digital portfolio for scholarship applications and got a good scholarship.

DD - 23, soon to be 24 - is giving up her p/t amusement park art kiosk job and working f/t as a graphic designer. Woooohoooo! Another step in adulting. Well, she may still work one weekend day @ the park because she likes it. And she's preparing work for a gallery show. DS - 21 - will be continuing full-time for the summer @ his usual part-time job. Redwood canopy zipline tours. He'll probably do two tours/day and then close, which comes w/a bonus that doesn't quite equal tips. This is his 3rd year working there. DD - 19 - will be lifeguarding @ a senior center pool and teaching classes there. She's also looking into p/t work at an assisted living center in the area, where she would be hired out to senior residents on an hourly or as-needed basis. This is as an alternative to what she's currently doing, which is in-home assistance and involves lots and lots of driving. DD - soon to be 13 -- taking two art-related day-camp classes @ local state U (one on how to write your own graphic novel), taking some swim classes (pre-lifeguard and fitness) and I think I am going to try to get her to do some video art lessons.

Our troop is hosting Camporee next weekend for 9 AHG troops and I am the registrar (oh joy). Still finishing up booklets for each level of girls. Still shopping for our skit boxes. (Since we're working on the Space Exploration badge, each level is going to act out some of the things they're supposed to learn about, plus the Pi/Pa girls will be putting together skits based on constellation stories.) I am still waiting for final payments from several troops, and making schedule changes. I will be so glad when this is successfully completed. Only 2 badge meetings after that, plus some boards of review, and then our court of honor in May.

Quark, we're north across the bay from Cal, but I know our local CC transfers a number of students to UC schools and is quite well regarded; lots of international students make it a magnet for starting studies in the US as well. If you're interested, totally as a backup plan, pm me.

I have to say there was a lot of this stuff my ds did not cooperate with. He would NOT get up on time at home....but he's NEVER missed a college class because of oversleeping. Apparently, mom's requirements were not "real." But when it was real, he made it. Deadlines for homework were treated exactly the same way -- not real and not respected at home, real and respected at college. Once he realized that you could go talk to profs, he really took advantage of that. And he found that he also needed a couple of PE classes every semester to help him wear off some of his energy and let him sit still & concentrate in more academic classes. Another important thing for him was finding friends to study with. I have told my kids, if they make even one friend in each class, they'll be rich by the time they graduate (all of them are introverts). They've really enjoyed the larger social pool, even tho' they find it a bit of a challenge. All my kids have worked p/t Friday - Sunday while in school and done a lot of commuting. That makes it difficult to join clubs, but study groups have been good. My son found a bunch of people who all liked to nap up in the student lounge and they became good buddies.

This is a name of a rescue horse operation near us. Has had me chuckling all day.

Story of my youngest dd's life. We've found department stores just don't carry her size (32DDD; requires underwire or very high support sports bra) in store at all, and often not online. Have had some luck with Amazon but it's very, very hard to find anything under $40. Last time we bought from Bare Necessities.

Yes, we did LFC A-C and then LA 1 before beginning LA 2. It was just too much for this non-latin mom unless I'd been doing every lesson with dd. We're powering thru the Jenney's First Year Latin -- text lesson 1 day, wb pages the next day -- and dd is encouraged to see how much she *does* know instead of how much she gets wrong. I don't know where we'll go after that. Our goal is *something* her 8th grade year and Spanish 1 in high school, probably at the CC.

Don't forget to look at the new set of badges in the supplement. Some of them are quite academic and challenging.

Punctuation, capitalization and spelling are "mechanics" - not really the same between languages. Think of the upside down ? and ! in Spanish at the beginning of sentences. Latin uses few, if any, commas....all that meaning is in the inflections. We've usually done grammar thru R&S 6...by that time we are into latin further and at that point we've dropped the grammar stuff. My kids are natural spellers, so not an issue for our family and therefore I don't give advice on it. 8-) I do have my older kids read Eats Shoots and Leaves.

My older kids had each other and did plenty of 4-H stuff, but my youngest is now in this age range and is finding it tough to find friends or a learning community that shares her interest. In our AHG troop, she'll be the oldest next year; her friends are all leaving AHG for high school and/or Venturing and she's not an outdoorsy person. We do a homeschool skate day once a week....next year she'll be the oldest there; she has a younger girl who loves talking with her but no peers. Co-ops in our area are mostly enrichment, not really suitable for what she needs academically, but we may try one of those in desperation....she'll probably be one of the oldest there, too. There's a local PSP sponsored by a christian day-school, but I don't need the oversight and don't want to pay the $$ for on-campus classes, and its mandatory parent meetings interfere with AHG as they're on the same night. She does have some friends @ church youth group, but that's the only place they see each other: Sunday mornings and every other Tuesday. Not enough. I looked really hard at Classical Conversations for next year, but half of the program, at least, wouldn't fit what we'd be doing at home and that's a lot of money (and/or work, if I were to tutor) for half a program, KWIM? We are trying some art classes @ the local state U's summer program for kids--one called Davinci Drawing (pen and ink, journaling focus) and one on finishing your own graphic novel. I am hoping this will expose her to the larger art community and help her make some connections in her primary area of interest and skill. She really needs private art lessons, as she seems to be following the same path as her oldest sister, our BFA girl. With her middle sister's help, she maintains a Polyvore account and interacts with her fashion followers there. 8-)

I call it "shoot yourself in the foot marketing."

Yep, book descriptions are back in the catalog this year and LA has been separated from history/bible/lit. Those are positive steps, IMHO. The reason we stopped with SL was that my ds wanted JUST ONE book, please, mom, for each subject in high school. That is so NOT SL's style. We'd always veered off in the LA anyhow, following TWTM suggestions with a more structured grammar text.

AHG and Trail Life also have a graduated leadership program....planning an event for the troop, for multiple troops, with another organization, on your own. Our Pioneers/Patriots (jr. high or high school) lead flag ceremonies, decide and even lead their own badges, MC for campfire, make recruiting speeches, etc. We've also done 4-H and I find that their progression of junior and teen leadership for projects plus in-club and county level leadership leading to even (if you want) state leadership is well planned. You have to do recordbooks, compete at fairs, and really invest in the program if you want to get the most out of it.

Eric Sloane's Diary of an American Boy. He has lots and lots of books with drawings of manual tools for farming, weather predictions, etc.

We like Derwent. We found that all too often the prismacolor leads were broken inside the pencil and it led to endless frustrations, even with handsharpening.

The poster can be very simple, but it's supposed to hang for two full weeks before BoR. We were able to hang ours @ charter school; some kids do it @ church. PenPal - they're supposed to exchange 5 letters....over a year, counting from when they got their girl's name, so it's a bit off-synch with the regular program. Congrats to you and your girls!