Oy, we will be moving from CA to VA. The district we will live in scored lower than the one in CA. I would not have expected that. Of all the ones we have lived in, RI had the lowest scores (I believe that, our kids had to catch up coming to CA) and MA the highest ( this is where they started they school career). Yes, they thought RI was ridiculously easy when we moved there.

Hm, I grew up in (West) Germany and we learned it this way. 426:3 = 142 - 3 ------ 12 - 12 ------- 06 - 6 -------- 0

Well, I do a sort of precarious mix of unschooling and project based learning with my youngest son after any attempt by anybody to school him in any sort of structured way has failed. He is a highly gifted visual-spatial learner with a good measure of kinesthetic thrown in to make it interesting. How he learns is currently beyond my understanding. That said, something must be working because he actually has a wide range of skills and knowledge he can apply when he wants to.

I attended a boarding school for a period of time after a move when there was no appropriate school near us. One of my friends went because his father was a diplomat and he did not want to put his children through the constant moves and place them in often precarious countries. Our oldest son is profoundly gifted and had some health issues. We could not find a school here in the US that would have accepted him at his age (6) and homeschooling was not an option. We were just about to send him overseas when a school near my mother lifted residence restrictions and we had him stay with grandma instead. My brother went to a boarding school due to behavior issues.

We are a military family and the frequent moves have played a role in our decision to homeschool. We pulled our youngest son out of PS in 5th grade for academic reasons and his behavior "problems" We simply had enough. We pulled our 2nd oldest son out after 7th grade as none of the schools had accomodated his documented vision and executive function issues. He was denied any accelerated classes based on grades which were due to seating arrangements, other students rather than teachers grading work and lack of support from teachers (they told us since he was passing classes there was no problem, he could not sit up front because that's where the troublemakers sit. No, he could not have written notes of the class lectures because that would be unfair to other students, and no he cannot hand in typed work as this would be unfair to students who could not afford a computer at home. No, they cannot accommodate his documented dysgraphia. Again, we had enough. Our oldest son we pulled out in 3rd grade due to academics (he is profoundly gifted) and sent him to school overseas and our daughter in 3rd grade as well due to academics. For our two middle boys the transition was bumpy in some ways but overall I am very pleased. We have seen profound changes in our youngest son. He is once again, the happy and very inquisitive child we have known during the toddler years. He turned out to be a visual-spatial-kinesthetic learner and we will have him assessed because we would like to access certain programs that require that piece of paper. He is doing college level physics just fine, has a strong interest in chemistry and his hate of math has turned into seeing it as fun thanks to AoPS. For our daughter the change was easy, I reset the academic standard to a higher achievement level and she is loving it. I am happy because they are all doing so much better and I am actually enjoying the teaching experience. I also love the flexibility homeschooling gives us. Until we made the decision homeschooling was not really an idea we entertained. It took a very acerbic meeting with our youngest son's principal that made us disenroll them on the way out of her office. We would absolutely do it again in this situation and our only regret is not having done so earlier. All four of our children had experiences in PS they should not have had by a longshot, but it was really detrimental to our youngest son. He will repeat 6th grade because this year has mostly been spent in letting him de-stress and dealing with his depression. He simply wasn't ready to learn and I wasn't ready to teach a child who learns in a very different manner than the other three. We may let our 2nd oldest son repeat 8th grade because we had to correct or eradicate many bad routines/habits and instill new ones. For an Asperger's child that is a huge accomplishment but it meant we neglected some subjects (social studies, science, art/music). However, we think that the ability to organize his time, space and work, to set priorities and achievable goals will serve him well for the rest of his life. On the other hand has a vast knowledge thanks to his love of reading. We may just as well let him go on and add a 5th year of high school if necessary. If there were other options (i.e. an affordable all boys school for gifted, spatial-visual-kinesthetic learners ) we probably would have gone that route. Our oldest and youngest son as well as our daughter are very competitive and social people, they [would] benefit from being with other likeminded children for prolonged periods of time and miss that group feeling. Our second oldest son is much happier by not having to be with other people all day long.

What a great supplement to AoPS :thumbup1:

My husband is a military brat, I am from another country, our children are military brats and have no association with any one state. My current 8th grader managed to have three years of state history in different states and is tired of it, the other two are not interested at all to begin with. When we will move to Virginia in the summer we will definitely do a lot of field trips but it will be tied into American history rather than state history.

Rhode Island is a very bureaucratic state in various aspects. Our children were in public schools and we had many problems (one of them being that they were going to haul us into court for truancy 6 months after we had moved to CA. Yes, we had told the district we were moving in writing, records had been transferred by the schools but they kept insisting our kids show up for classes). I am assuming you are going to Newport, otherwise I would suggest to move to CT. In response to the other poster, as dependents you must adhere to the schooling laws of the state you reside in.

We do not use any curriculum per se. I have a 6th grader who is highly motivated in chemistry, a kinesthetic and visual-spatial learner. I bought the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, pilfered ideas from various posters on how to teach chemistry and simplify certain labs and set up shop. For a whole-to-parts learner who likes to discover things by himself this method is working very well. However, it is time consuming and can be expensive. I need to do the experiments with him as we handle actual lab equipment and chemicals. Since he does not have the math and is lacking some basic knowledge we have to go down a good number of rabbit trails. For my son this is great because he learns the math in context, he is physically engaged and is beginning to understand why details are often more than bothersome extras one has to slog through. This learning has carried over into other subjects. While it takes a lot of time now, once he understands something it usually goes into permanent memory so when high school comes along time spent on chemistry will be much less since he will already know much of the material of a typical high school course. This will allow him to either delve deeper into chemistry or dedicated more time to other subjects I happen to like chemistry very much so I am having as much fun with this method as he has. As far as textbooks are concerned I pull material from different sources such as BFSU, Conceptual Chemistry by Suchocki and Chang or Zumdahl when he asks for something way beyond middle school level. He is not much of an online fan so we do not use many videos or other online resources.

If you refer to 1763 we would be talking about Prussia which then was a state/kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire, only one of many. In 1815 Prussia became part of the German Confederation which was a league of 39 sovereign states. All states had their own laws. It wasn't until 1871 when the German Empire was formed under Bismarck that we can speak about something resembling a "German" state. I personally don't think that the years between 1933 and 1945 are a good measure of what could be done to people. My personal experiences are only anecdotal but they have left me with the impression that the state was more interested in keeping people out of the educational system than dragging people into it. If they had to force you to go, chances were you had greater problems than attending school. One of the reasons that the educational system under the western allies didn't change much that they could not agree on a model. All three wanted something based on their own systems. Since there were more pressing issues, they agreed to rid the schools of Nazis and move on. I do not know how things were worked out in East Germany but they had a different system. "Germany" has a long history of trying to form a national identity and a cohesive society, a public school system was/is one way to do that. Sometimes I am not sure if this has ever been truly accomplished. I don't see why Germans need help to understand. They weigh the pros and cons and come to the conclusion that the cons outweigh the pros. It is a perfectly rational choice.

Not quite, the actual prohibition of homeschooling is rooted in the 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic. The 1938 "Reichsschulpflichtgesetz" the HSDL refers to only regulated the "Schulpflicht" which was established in 1919. The "Reichsschulpflichtgesetz" was changed in 1941 and cancelled in 1949 when the "Grundgesetz" (German Basic Law) came into being.

My oldest wants to study law and go into politics :scared: . #2 wants to study computer science, youngest boy is going to open his own restaurant and our daughter has her mind set on marine biology and swimming with sharks.

My son is currently in the class and it is the first time that I see my live-in-tech-support display the deer-in the headlight-look. He said the most difficult part for him is to truly think a problem through from beginning to end before he does anything. That said, he very much enjoyed the class and it is at just the right level for him, difficult but not so difficult that he cannot see his way through the problem when he breaks it into several steps. He has two problems left on the homework, feel free to e-mail me through my profile if you have anymore questions.

This coming summer will be our third trip across country in a minivan (3 children). We stay ay hotels (1 room) that serve breakfast and have a pool. Lunch is out of the cooler. In our younger years we threw up the tents at a KOA overnight. Lunch and breakfast came out of the cooler. As to DC, downtown DC is the only place we ever hit a deer. I bet it would have thought twice about jumping out in front of us if we had been driving an RV :tongue_smilie:

Thank you so much for posting this. I am in search of secular history materials and come up short.

It may well be a cultural difference. I am from Germany and follow that model more so than the WTM method. My children did nothing "academic" prior to starting school. We have always read a lot, and investigated their environment. It is amazing what they learned during those years from "playing". We pulled them out of PS in 3rd, 5th and 7th grade last year and I dare say their bad habits and gaps resulted from PS and moving every two years, not from starting academics later. We have changed a lot of things and now a year later, they have found their groove and are moving ahead at a very rapid pace. Learning a foreign language now will free up time later on. Being bilingual, German is a cheesy high school credit for my kids :thumbup1: . In addition to that, we school year round (about 220-240 days, Germany has 220 days of instruction). Compared to PS, we have much more time to spend on academics.

Yes, it is the online classes that are now accredited. They do advise those who are enrolled in "schools" and wish to replace their classes with the AOPS classes to ascertain that the school will accept the credit. It will not change anything for us other than that I don't have to fret over math on the transcript (which I wouldn't have, it's English and social studies that cause me sleepless nights :tongue_smilie:)

I just received an e-mail saying that AOPS courses are now accredited by the WASC.

Not important at all. We prefer spending our "outside" time in public areas with other people.

Buy it, dry it and make bread crumbs.

It is a required class for 6th grade in CA

Listening in because I was going to sign up my son. I have read an earlier thread with a positive review but I was wondering if there are any more posters with experience.

We currently live just north of Los Angeles and homeschooling is very accepted here. People homeschool for any and all reasons so it was easy for us to find a group. There is a lot to do, the rec department and other groups/institutions offer a wide variety of activities for all ages. We will be moving to the Norfolk,VA area in the summer so if anybody knows of a secular, academically oriented group, here is the opportunity to shine with you knowledge :hurray:

I never disliked chemistry or physics itself, I mostly had teachers who themselves did not understand the subject they taught, were not interested in teaching and in two cases did not think that girls were capable of anything more than a D regardless of test scores. However, I also had teachers whose lives revolved around science in a positive way and even though I only had them for a few months, they made me think that there had to be something more to science than what I was seeing and all I had to do was to discover what that something was. I finally did in college when I took mineralogy and hydrology and began to understand how chemistry/physics were the sciences that put the universe in order and how really systematic it was. Up to that point biology was my favorite science probably because it was more applied. Like you said, chemistry/physics as a subject were always presented in a fragmented manner and until college I never managed to put the pieces together to make sense. When we pulled our children out of school last year I vowed to not make the mistake of presenting sciences in a vacuum. It has a different meaning for each of my children but so far so good. They not only enjoy the sciences (well, the boys prefer physics and chemistry while my daughter has a greater interest in biology and chemistry), they have realized how much bigger the world is with a thorough understanding of them.

What Regentrude said.