I remember the first time I saw polar coordinates and realized just how extremely cool they were... second only to how cool it was to then show them to the darling boy. :)

I read very early, and wore glasses early, but because of astigmatism in one eye. So... in one child, early reading, and one eye affected but the other not? Or, more likely IMO, I inherited the lazy eye tendencies that run in my dad's side of the family unrelated to reading age. One aspect of the correlation possibilities is that apparently young children tend to be far sighted, and thus have trouble focusing on close work. As they outgrow the farsightedness, they find reading easier. So one theory is that children who are more nearsighted than their peers (because they're going to be even more nearsighted later and will eventually need glasses) are more likely to read early because they can focus on close work at an earlier age. So by that theory, the nearsightedness would be the cause of the early reading, and not the other way around.

We did a handwashing project at the hospital we worked at.... and he said (I never saw the research myself) that water took care of something like 90% of the germs, soap and water took care of 99%, and antibacterial soap took care of 99.9%. But I always care wipes. DS works on a river monitoring project that takes us to a lot of public parks with really insufficient "facilities"... by which I mean no water except the river (and we just tested the river - I don't think it's going to help!) Wipes. Definitely wipes.

I have to call the local high school principal's office for something completely innocuous, and I've managed to put it off for two weeks now! I know I'm not in trouble, but there's something about the principal's office that just is never going to make it to the top of my "what I want to be doing right now" list. I'm sure your kids' teacher will be happy to deal with an involved parent. :001_smile:

It looks like transfer applicants do need the SAT.

It's not so much that you have to blindly use a formula, just that you have to take the perspective of the people from Cincinnati who are waiting for their plane to get in. All they care about is that it took way too long to get there - not where he went on the way.

It's really like you were saying the pilot needed to get from Detroit to Cincinnati, but he flew to Nashville by accident and then had to come back. The time it took to get to Cincinnati may have been ridiculously long, but he doesn't get credit for his detour. His intended route was Detroit to Cincinnati, and it took a long time to get there... so his average velocity was low even if his speed (all the way to Nashville and back to Cincinnati) was pretty high.

If you had to get from your house to the store a block away, and it took you an hour to get there, you'd have gone one block per hour. The fact that you took so long because on the way you stopped to chat with a neighbor, took a wrong turn through someone's yard, backtracked to find your keys.. whatever... doesn't change the fact that it took an hour to get to your destination a block away. Now you could have done all those things really quickly, running all over town to eventually get to the store, but your goal was just the one block distance and it took an hour to get there. Basically when you're talking about velocity and displacement as technical terms in physics, you're dealing with two points and and ideal route between them (a straight line). So the average velocity in that one direction refers to just that imaginary straight line and how long it took to get from one end of it to the other, and nevermind what circuitous route was actually taken. The math part.... it shouldn't be displacement times velocity.... Velocity is displacement/ time (like meters/ second), so if you have displacement and velocity, to find time you'd divide the displacement by the velocity, not multiply....

Singapore does lay an extremely good foundation for high school math. It might or might not be ahead at any point during K-8 (or actually K-6, since Algebra is 7th grade in Singapore texts), but it is very good preparation for what follows.

We had one year when I thought two topics might be very confusing (in our case it was running the Revolutionary War and the Civil War at the same time because of two different fabulous field trip opportunities that I really didn't want to give up!) The way I worked it was to step up the craft side of things... not because DS particularly enjoyed crafts, but because it was extremely helpful to have a tangible reminder of which topic we were talking about right then. I used the Evan Moor History Pockets, both because they had the two topics I wanted and because they had the little details (color the flags and uniforms, etc.) that I think made it easier to keep track of which was which. Basically what I wanted was for DS to make it through a weekend at Gettysburg without asking where the British were, and I got it. ;)

Basically I schedule a four-day week for most things, and then Friday is catch-up day. If DS is ahead in a subject (math, usually) he can skip it on Friday. If he's behind (Spanish...), he does double, and if he's just barely on schedule he does the usual hour or so. I think I'd enjoy a week of catch-up... but the quick turnaround of one day a week has been good. And with lots of outside classes it would be hard to get a whole week away from deadlines.

Instead of a single standard (grams or whatever) for ingredient amounts, it might be just as simple to use a standard for each one that matches how you'd use it. Like cups for flour and teaspoons for vanilla. kwim? Then when you're pricing it you can look at the cost list and say flour is .10/cup, and this recipe is 6 cups, so .60 for flour; vanilla is .25/tsp and this is a 2 tsp recipe so .50 for vanilla. There's no particular reason why they'd need to have the same standard... just a way for you to translate between shopping quantities and baking quantities.

Just add a field for the key and then proceed to ignore it. In Access you can make it an autonumber field so it just increments by 1 for each new record. I don't know if Open Office does that, but it's a pretty standard feature so it probably does. Anything you're calculating with (prices and units) should be a number, and anything else can be text. If there isn't a currency type of number there will be some kind of decimal, possibly called "single" or "double" or "float". For currency it won't really matter which one you choose - they'll all be able to manage two decimal places. I did a similar database in Access for my own grocery budgeting (and yes, it's excessive, but databases are what I do!) and I matched the base units to the USDA standard (I think it's 100g but it's been a while) so I could do nutrition information too.

I think the sequence I'd use is: Intro to Algebra (1 and 2) Intro to C&P and Number Theory Intro to Geometry Intermediate Algebra (3) Intermediate C&P and Number Theory Precalculus Calculus And I agree with the others that it's probably not feasible unless you're absolutely devoted... and the books would be easier to keep up with than the courses. The way we have done it, not with that same goal, was to do Algebra and Geometry with other curricula, C&P and Number Theory classes simultaneously (which was a LOT of work - I don't really recommend that, although the topics match up extremely well), and then we switched to the Problem Solving books, which do a very nice overview of a lot of the topics in the Intro and Intermediate serieses, but trimmed down quite a bit. DS is doing Calculus with another curriculum, but if we were continuing to homeschool after this year I'd switch him back to AoPS and maybe back him up to Precalculus. The calculus he's doing is definitely calculus in the service of engineering and not calculus for the sake of math. In the meantime he's working on the USAMTS problems to keep up his problem solving skills.

I've had DS read me the question out loud.... That almost always solves it!

Depending on where you are in the world... I like "where are you from". It worked great when we lived in an area where everyone came from somewhere else (university town, not a lot of people who grew up there and stayed), but it's still interesting where we are now with an extremely stable population... even though I was startled at first when people would give me a street name. :lol:

Sounds like a fabulous bunch!

The first time I asked about a homeschoolers card at Barnes & Noble they refused because I "could be faking." hm. Borders (back then) was much much nicer about it - they asked to see the card we had from the state, but they weren't all that interested in it anyway. I think in the end I got the Borders educators card without actually bringing in the state card... but I would have been fine with that too. (I just never carry that sort of thing.) What got me the Barnes & Noble card was showing up with a stack of books at the register... and my Borders card. And the phrase "oh my gosh, I wasn't thinking - I guess I'll have to buy these at Borders" They were pretty quick about the card then! I have to say though... when we got a new Barnes & Noble, the manager there went out of her way to encourage homeschoolers to shop there. No problem with the discount card, and they specifically invited us to their teachers appreciation events. That was much nicer.

We had three GA Tech guys (only two were engineers though....) and I didn't notice quite the level of irritation there... Now I'm going to have to ask them point-blank. LOL

:iagree: LOL!! I know we're doing too much this year... DS has two major science projects, plus other outside commitments... and then we do about 2 hours per subject for math, science, history + literature (together) and foreign languages. So about eight hours a day, 8am to 4pm or so, and a few more (2-3?) on average for projects. So really it's like 10 hours. But if he keeps up the pace during the day, he rarely has weekend homework other than reading.

And there was a 1:1 correlation between "went to Virginia Tech" and "hated MIT" :lol: It got to be kind of funny... so I had to ask. :)

He might not have understood it, honestly... but house rules here are that you only get to ask after you've done your part. If you're baffled, and you haven't done the reading, do the reading. Period. If you're baffled after you've done the reading, come talk to me. If nothing else it reduces the yelling... ;) But actually I think it's an important point too, that Mom isn't going to answer every little question until you've put in your time and done what you can with what you have first.

Did your DH go to Virginia Tech?

Oh... if it was a boarding school! And had generous financial aid! ;)

DS is at a point where academically we could claim that he's met the minimum requirements for high school graduation: Math through Calc 1, huge quantities of science, Latin and Spanish through 3rd year each, lots of Lit/Comp and History (high school level? well... depends on who you ask.) If our only choice was the local PS we'd probably either continue to homeschool or graduate him early, or both. It's not a bad school, but he'd have about one year there before he was doing all dual-enrollment classes... not all bad, but not really the "high school experience" either. So instead we're looking at some private prep schools. Some local and some boarding. In some cases the private schools don't have anything more than our local PS, but in some cases they really do look like he could get four whole years out of them without running out of classes. (Here's hoping that what's on their website and course catalog reflects what's offered and not just vague possibilities...) Plus there are semester abroad and year abroad offerings, and connections to resources I just don't have. Basically the plan as it stands right now is in lieu of early college, send him to the best high school he can get into.... probably boarding.