I tutor from the Real ACT book. It's not as "tricky" a test as the SAT, so generally I only need two or three practice tests to get them ready One to pre-test, then we cover what they didn't already know (using other materials), possibly loop through that process one more time... And then take one under a reasonably facsimile of testing conditions (timed, no interruptions, etc.) just to get an feel for what pace they need to keep up. With the SAT there's more need for figuring out what kinds of tricks they throw at you and pitfalls to avoid. The ACT is remarkably straightforward in comparison.

Everything went smoothly on the drop off and pickup... and he said he finished everything, had time to check the math sections, and thinks it went well. Then he casually mentioned that he happened to notice he had brought NUMBER THREE pencils. Ack!!! I was absolutely positive we didn't even own anything but #2 pencils (much less a whole brand new box of #3 Ticonderogas!) but there they are in his backpack. Oh well! I've already looked up how to request hand-scoring if it comes to that, but we'll hope they're just overcautious in requesting the #2s..... (eek!)

Give it a try! As you said, you can always back off if it's too much!

The contest posted might be as close as you're going to get... but science as a discipline really is based more on reasoning ability rather than facts... and for placement I'd match it to math level.

Depending on your location, a state ID might be very easy to get. When we were in NC we got one for DS, and it took about 20 minutes and $10 or so. We've since moved to OH, and got him a new card when I got my drivers license. It took maybe ten minutes and $8.50 I've heard of places where it's a 4-6 week wait for the thing to be mailed, but it may be worth checking whether it's not so bad where you are. People are always surprised that DS has a real ID (he has had it since he was nine, and a nine year old with ID is quite a novelty! LOL) but it has seriously come in handy many many times - not just for exams, but for travel, proof of address for a new library card, proof of age for reduced bus fare, checking into federal buildings for tours.... it comes out about once a month for something or other!

We moved this winter, 500 miles across the country. Lots of good reasons for it and we really love our new home, but any change of that magnitude is difficult at best. I'd really like to wake up and find that it's February again and summer isn't looming! That said... Some things went really well. We got here in time for the local science fair, and it was a great success. He's taking the SAT Saturday and feels very well prepared. AP Stats is in two weeks and he's on track to be well-prepared for that too (I want a couple more rounds of practice free response questions out of him before I'm entirely happy about it).... He has a new flute teacher already and she's optomistic about his chances for making the cut for the youth orchestra. Also there are a ton of opportunities here for his other hobbies - film, theater, robotics, etc. Trials... Just not having enough time for everything. We didn't get anywhere close to finishing our reading list (which was long by any measure), and we didn't finish Spanish 3. Both of those can slop over into summer, but I'd have been happier if we had gotten closer to done. Next year is our last homeschooling year, and I'm feeling a bit hemmed in by that solid deadline, as well as the added work of finding a good high school for him to apply to for 2013-14. But on the plus side... looking back at our years of homeschooling... we have the makings of a really nice portfolio of work, test scores and awards, extracurricular activities, and hobbies. I'm looking forward to finally putting that all together as a package and seeing how much we really have accomplished.

I'm usually all for the hard way of whatever it is, but I've let DS use a citation builder from the start. He gets a little practice doing it by hand for anything that doesn't come out right (occasionally something is just gibberish, or is missing something, or has extra details that aren't required), but 90% of his bibliography is generated for him.

There are two parts to this being our last year of homeschooling..... First, we're tying up loose ends. That part is kind of hard... We've done bits and pieces of lots of things without feeling much urgency to finish up and put a grade on it, so this last year will be a lot of "clean up" to get everything at a neat stopping point by June. (I hope by June!) Second, the more fun part..... It's my last chance to do a great big project with DS, so we're throwing History, Literature, and parts of Science into a big Great Lakes study -- Environmental science and some geology/ hydrology/ general earth science... history of the lakes and navigation and industry and labor and pollution and the clean water act and the Edmund Fitzgerald and ghost ships... folklore and literature and memoirs.... And I hope by the end a few really well-written papers that sum up what he's learned. Along the way he needs to put some work into note-taking (he's not half bad, but it could use some polishing), smoothing out some of his writing, and a bit more editing for style. He already does outside classes (mostly online) so he has experience with deadlines and homework and keeping himself organized.

If he almost never gets one wrong, he's not learning resilience. And even worse, if he gets marked wrong for silly mistakes like a capital letter, what he's being tested for here is perfection. So it's no wonder, really, that he's so hard on himself. Getting one or two wrong in that situation is just telling him he makes silly mistakes, not giving him something of substance to aspire to. If you were homeschooling, I'd strongly suggest separating handwriting practice from spelling (because it could be much more frustrating to have something he's otherwise very good at dragged down by something unrelated). Practice handwriting with a straight handwriting book (copywork and/or letter formation depending on where he is with that, but no spelling, no grammar, no composition, etc.) Practice spelling at a level where he could actually expect to get only 80% regularly, but where he has no expectation of perfection... even if that means ramping it way up to ridiculously difficult words. Spelling Bee stuff, if he's interested in that.

Science AP Physics B with additional Electronics and an independent engineering project AP Environmental Science (building on this year's Field Ecology), focus on the Great Lakes Math Problem Solving 2/ Precalculus History and Lit Great Lakes - Folklore, Literature, Geography, Economic History, Industry, Shipping, the Environmental Movement. Literature will be supplemented by other American Lit (the stuff we didn't get to this year....) but with as much Great Lakes material as the library can supply. Greek & Roman Mythology through Coursera (UPenn) Foreign Language Latin 3 Spanish 4 (finish 3 over the summer) Extra-curricular Theater Tech Intern (I hope) Flute, with possible youth orchestra Volunteering with local film festival Animation projects Possible robotics team

A DS instead of a DD... My laptop battery is about to start flashing warning lights at me, but I'm posting so I can find the thread again and come back after it's charged!! :)

I learned a lot about cooking from my mother and grandmother, but I wasn't really good at it until I was cooking almost daily, as an adult.

Is it rare that he misses a word? Or is he constantly getting a couple wrong?

I just downloaded Evernote and used it to make a set of checklists for DS, and then "shared" them with him so he can get to them from his laptop. I am paying for the premium account, but if you shared a login I think you could do it with the free version... Only I have plans to use this in a number of different ways, not all of them with DS's collaboration so the $5 a month seems reasonable.

I haven't looked that far into it, but it doesn't tempt me at all. For resilience, I think a long term diet of challenge is going to be better than anything they could package as a workshop. Homeschooling is ideal for that - you can "tune" the challenge to the kid, ramp it up when things get easy and back off when it's overwhelming. DS has never coasted through anything here - what would be the point? And he has several experiences of disappointment and missing the cut every year. Not everything he does, of course, but plenty. Now if you just wanted a bit to reinforce what you've been doing, I think I'd get one of the articles that came out a few years ago... I think it was 2008 or 2009 when Dweck was first hitting the popular press. Maybe Newsweek? If you search for "Dweck" on this board there was a fair bit of discussion back then, and you could probably find the article for your kids to read. ETA: Okay it was NYT in 2007, not Newsweek in 2008... lol http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

They really don't want to have anything to do with you if you aren't living in NC. See http://www.ncdnpe.org/FAQs/hhh114v.aspx -- if you're gone for more than 30 days you're meant to close the school.

This is what I've heard from admissions people too. The UNC-Chapel Hill adcom that spoke to our homeschool group a few years back said they wanted to see Algebra 1 and everything that followed it, no matter when it was taken, but that if you started early and just stopped at four credits, that would look bad.

We're doing an American History/Lit course this year followed by a Great Lakes History/Lit course next year.... and I couldn't begin to say how much time was spent on each bit, beyond "plenty." :001_smile: What I do like to plan for is what sort of evidence or portfolio I'd like to be able to show from the experience. So for instance we have resources for history and resources for literature - the sort of things that would go in a course description if anyone asked, as a book list. I keep an eye on that to make sure that he's drawing from history sources as well as literary sources. Not necessarily even numbers, but a reasonable assortment of each. For the portfolio, I keep track of the assignments I give him to make sure that he has some history papers and some literature papers, and that I have a couple good samples of each. With the maths and sciences, I tend to be a little more exam-based.... we put together an environmental science and ecology course spanning a little over two years, assembled from a lot of bits and pieces (two classes, two group field research projects, a policy research project and presentation, three experimental projects of his own). I'm writing it up as two classes, one for each year: Field Ecology the first year, and AP Environmental Science the second. I added a textbook to the second year, although it's almost an after-thought given all the other stuff, and he'll study for the AP exam. From the first year we have several portfolio pieces, and for the second we'll have the exam score. I plan to throw in the Biology SAT2 (Ecology) as well, but we haven't managed to schedule it yet. With the maths and sciences, I find that there's enough of a standard already set that it's important to clarify that a course really did address those standards, and didn't just hare off in a random direction because it was more fun. That's when I'm more likely to throw in an SAT or AP exam.

I didn't have a detailed list of assignments - just topics and corresponding chapters. The only "tricky" bit (not that tricky...) is I added in little tags throughout the syllabus pointing to where each required element was addressed. Statistics requires a project, under the Curricular Requirement #2, so when I outlined the project -- all of two sentences to say the student is required to design an experiment, conduct it, analyze it, and present it -- I stuck a tag in the margin that said "CR2". I made sure that all the Curricular Requirements were addressed, and then labeled them so it was easy to see what I had intended. Everything else in the syllabus was stuff I would have done for myself anyway... Tagging the required elements only added a few minutes of work.

But my observation via my tutoring kids (in public high school) is that there's not really that much of a rush to AP even among 9th and 10th graders. Most kids really aren't ready. But if they are, I don't think age has anything to do with it! I'd much rather they threaten to cut off the schools that can't manage a good average exam result. If they're calling it AP and can't squeak out at least a mean of 3 from their students, then they can't have it on the transcript. I agree that without the test score it's not particularly meaningful to claim the designation, but that's true at any age. Really it's just a means of communication. If I put the "AP" on DS's transcript, what I'm saying is that I did go through the trouble (little trouble that it is) to make sure our syllabus complied with the College Board's guidelines, and that they approved it. If I were a college or a scholarship program, or whoever ends up seeing the transcript, I would absolutely want the score too. A well-designed syllabus does not guarantee a well-prepared student... All I really want it to communicate, though, is our intentions. And I'm still going to put it on DS's transcript. If someone complains later, I'll apologize. :glare:

Hm. I wonder why they even care!

I'll take any kind of flatbread made of any kind of grain(s) and prepared in whatever way appeals to me at the time, and stuff it with whatever we've got on hand or whatever looked good at the farmers market. Then I make up a name to go with it. It's not authentic anything, but mmmmm.... and if you get snippy about it you can't come to dinner. :D

We did get one course approved, and it really wasn't a pain at all. Like others have said, it was more a matter of my going through and planning out the lessons with the materials I wanted to use, and then submitting them... If they hadn't been approved, I probably wouldn't have bothered revising... but they were. I have really liked having the designation, because we did the course very (very!) young, and DS hasn't taken the exam yet. He's on for this May though, in just a few weeks, and after that I doubt the approval will be an issue anymore... but in the meantime it has been nice to be able to say "no, really... it was AP stats with an approved syllabus and not just a year spent averaging things" We're looking at two more next year - Environmental Science and Physics. I'll be writing up a syllabus for myself, and I'll submit it for approval again. Next year DS will be applying to private high schools to finish out his schooling, and I might rather like being able to put "AP" on the syllabus before he takes the exam. So it might be worth my while just for that. I do agree that after the exam is taken it's not so interesting whether the syllabus was approved, but the approval does come in handy in that gap between starting the course and finishing the exam. And especially if the transcript might be going anywhere (colleges?) before the exam results are available, it might be worth getting the approval.

I buy groceries once a week to make six dinners (plus sandwiches/ mac & cheese, etc. for lunches) and then intend to go out one night. Sometimes that's going to dinner as a family, and sometimes it's the night that we'll all be running around doing something and have to grab a bite on the way. And if we don't feel like going out, I have frozen ravioli from Costco in the freezer.

We've done the ACT annually because we're required to test annually with something (first for NC homeschool law and now for OH - although we could do a portfolio)... I don't know that it's all that useful to me to test every year. If I didn't have to for the homeschool records I probably wouldn't. Maybe once on the Explore and once or twice on the ACT or SAT. The other thing to keep in mind is that for the SAT, scores are kept for students taking the test in 9th grade and up.... They're purged (unless you request that they be kept) for earlier administrations. That might be a point against annual testing. Basically, if you aren't getting anything out of it, I probably wouldn't bother. If 7th grade scores qualify you for anything you need, there's probably no reason for retesting.