Love it!!!

I'm not sure you can know without trying. We've outsourced a TON of classes, online or in person, and it's been great. Another kid might not have the same experience. It will depend on the kid, but also on the choice of classes. One of the complications that could come up is that outside classes frequently have immovable deadlines... and too many of those (especially from teachers that won't be communicating with each other) can challenge even the best organizational skills. Our first year with lots of outsourcing was "the year of staying up late to meet deadlines"... and the second was "the year of planning ahead". :) So while I don't think that there's really a maximum, I would start with a couple classes and work up slowly. I don't regret the lessons learned, but a little less of a "thrown in the deep end" approach might be more pleasant.

Absolutely. The only thing I'd add is that we need to recognize that there are real risks to making choices that don't fit the kid -- too fast or too slow. If I ever come across as stridently in favor of radical acceleration, I certainly don't mean that it's the right approach for everyone... only that I really bristle when faced with the "what's the harm in waiting" argument. For some kids there is harm in waiting. Real, serious, more-important-than-everything-else harm. It's why some of us will call radical acceleration a "least worst" option. There are certainly downsides too, but sometimes those downsides pale in comparison to the effects of not accelerating. Whether that's true for your kid or not has to be something you figure out for yourself, and I have to trust that a mom who is even asking this question is paying attention and can make the call for her own child. But there is no "safe" choice that can be applied across the board.

That was us many many years ago, and we haven't run out yet. ;) DS plowed through early curricula (and yes, it was challenging problem-solving, etc.) and ended up at Algebra ridiculously young. Shakespeare too.... and languages.... and science. History has been fair to middling, but he holds his own there. I have always aimed to keep his work challenging, and to a great extent that meant letting him run with it. Absolutely go deeper when you can, but don't count on it slowing him down. Really, when a kid seriously gets it, all the depth in the world won't actually slow him down. It will keep it interesting though. What has worked out for us is to add in new topics -- the ones that aren't even in the regular scope and sequence. That includes Art of Problem Solving math (discrete math and problem solving) and extra cryptography and computer programming, independent research in science, extra languages, lots and lots and lots of literature. In math, for instance, as soon as we hit Algebra we started alternating "regular" years with "extra" years. It didn't really slow him down, but as I said above... it kept things interesting. So we've done Algebra, Statistics, Computer Programming, Geometry, Discrete Math, Cryptography, Algebra 2, Precalculus.... We could still do another year of Discrete Math, another pass through more advanced Geometry, and whatever else AoPS is offering these days... Graph Theory, Game Theory, I don't even know what else. I've been holding off on Calculus, just because there's still good stuff we can do with Algebra, and because he wants to finish up at a private high school... so I'd like him to have at least one "normal" math class they could teach him before we have to look at independent study. But also... what worries you as a parent of a five year old might not be the same things that worry you as a parent of a teenager. You may find that at some age, he really is ready for college. Or you may find that he's ready to take advantage of opportunities that you don't know about yet, or that don't yet exist. Keep it interesting now, keep it challenging, don't let him coast... and give him opportunities to pursue larger projects that give him skills in managing his own work and in following a question through to its end.

It's a good basic high school language course. It covers reading, writing, speaking (with the weekly tutor calls in particular) and plenty of listening. There are a couple little quirks with the program that are mostly solved by switching to Mozilla, but we've found it to be a good, solid program that DS can do independently.

The description that it's "similar to division" sounds like this method: http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/math/sqrt.htm I honestly wouldn't bother with it at this point. He could learn it as a rote algorithm, but without a fair bit of algebra under his belt I think it would just be a parlor trick. Better than that is to be able to estimate (like the AoPS videos show), or to factor out what you can and reduce the radical expression.

It's meant to line up with NEM 3 and 4, which would be something like geometry and algebra 2, and I think there's trig in it... but I don't have it right here to look. I'll go find it in a bit and let you know.... PM me if I forget!

I know of two methods, but before algebra they'd only be taught as rote algorithms. As long as he knows his squares up to 10^2 (or better yet to 20^2), and how to simplify a radical expression, I would save extracting more complicated roots for after algebra. The method I prefer relies on being able to manipulate a series of (a + b)^2 = a&2 + 2ab + b^2 equations... and I wouldn't expect that until after a year of algebra.

When we were 30 minutes away it was fine. Still a little far, but worth a once-a-month trip. When we moved a little farther away, maybe 45 minutes each way, I never got out there. Basically if you could end up there once a month without adding a ton of miles to your usual routine, then sure. If you go every other month, you may find there's a storage issue... two months of toilet paper and frozen chicken take up some room. I personally like an every-two-weeks routine. Our current Costco is right by DH's work, so I do the major shopping trip once a month and DH drops by two weeks later for a few more things.

But we had a LOT of books... I wouldn't have packed up all of them anyway -- we actually read them pretty often! :tongue_smilie: But we left two large bookcases in the living room, the built-in bookcases in the den and the kitchen (of course), moved the DVDs to the guest room where they weren't so obvious, and left two bookcases in DS's room. Everything else was boxed up and stuffed in the attic, and we gave away nine tall bookcases before we left. The bookcases we kept had plenty of books, but no single shelf was entirely full, so they didn't look stuffed... and I really did arrange the books to look good - general color groupings and heights together (not like rainbow order here, just a bunch of warm colors on one shelf, a bunch of blues and greens on another, neutrals on a third...) And then in the spaces left around the books, we had something decorative or a photograph. Not a ton, just a couple per bookcase. Visually very open and airy, without looking sterile. It was completely ridiculous of course, but the house did sell, so who am I to complain....

(sorry - it got really really long! LOL) DS has done a major project every year since he was five... and entered science fairs with each one (competitive since he was seven). I had several posts on science fairs years and years ago.... back to the old boards I think, but the one I turned up is here. In the early years he needed some help with logistics and deadlines, but starting with the first competitive fair he had to do it entirely himself unless it was unsafe or just required a second pair of hands (although I've encouraged him to enlist friends instead of me when he can). He always comes up with his own topic, and his interests have been primarily engineering-related all along. Even the year he was testing sugar candy for how cooking temperature affected its strength... it was engineering! :lol: Basically the way it works in our house is that DS comes up with a question (or several, from which he narrows it down to one). He does a quick google/ wiki run through to get oriented to the topic and help develop his question, and then he uses my old university library access to do a proper review of literature. From the very beginning he maintains a notebook of ideas and questions, and notes from what he has read. He talks to anyone he can find - professionals in the field, or hobbyists, and notes their opinions. From the scholarly literature he has learned how to follow a source backwards through its bibliography to previous sources, and use a citation index to follow a source forward through time. He generally ends up with something like 20-30 scholarly articles to wade through, and from those he refines his question to something novel, useful, and as-yet-untested, and he proposes a testable hypothesis that is reasonable in light of the previous research. This is the point, too, where he considers what kind of math he might need in his analysis. Sometimes it's something he has never done before, and we add it to the schedule... or sometimes it's something he needs to consider in developing his procedure (making sure assumptions are met, or that he has sufficient range to get a good equation). This is a point where early on I needed to be involved, making sure he really did have a testable hypothesis. It's easy for a kid to get sidetracked at this point, and everything else is based on the hypothesis... so it's worthwhile to make sure they've considered it carefully. I would not interfere in what the hypothesis is, but I would make sure they could say why they proposed it, how they were going to test it, and when they would know they were satisfied with the answer. From the hypothesis comes a list of variables - which are to be altered, which are to be measured, and which are to be controlled (and how). And then he writes a draft procedure and starts a lab notebook. The preliminary testing of things is key in our house - as much time could be spent on the "little" side issues as on the main experiment, to make sure the main experiment isn't hampered by a dozen little annoyances. So his lab notebook will include testing ideas for apparatus, and different options for materials, and the ranges of values he might want to include in his main experiment. The candy experiment, for instance, had several preliminary runs of different recipes, based on his reading, so he could choose the one he would use for his testing. He tweaked ingredients and ran through a wide range of cooking temperatures to decide both what range was reasonable to test and what interval between test values. During the preliminary tests he realized, too, that our candy thermometer wasn't calibrated properly, so he recalibrated it before running the main experiment. We discuss budget here, and any issues of material disposal or cleanup that need to be addressed, as well as permissions if he needs something from someone (use of their parking lot, for instance, or a county burning permit). He keeps every piece of paper in a binder -- emails from people, receipts from purchases, safety and approval forms for the science fairs, etc. Sometimes preliminary tests lead back to more literature review, or more questions, or a minor change in direction. The actual main experiment can be a very small part of the whole process, or it can be huge. Depends on what he's testing and whether it requires anything out of the ordinary. One year we had to sit in an empty parking lot every day for a week waiting for algae to photosynthesize. Another year he blasted through 120 runs of a hydrology experiment in four hours (having spent a month in developing that procedure!) Analysis is generally a fair chunk of time. In the first few years he would consult with a friend of ours (a biostatistician), but we did Statistics as a math course very early on so he could figure it out himself, too. The write up is big too... He always does a formal paper with the whole introduction-hypothesis-procedure-analysis-conclusion thing and every bit of detail he needs to explain it all. That has gotten to be around the 25-page mark lately. It's huge. But it's also based on everything he's already done by then. The introduction draws heavily from his notes on the literature review. The hypothesis and procedure were decided before he started the main experiment. The analysis is a lot of copy and paste from whatever software or spreadsheets he used to do the analysis. So it's not sitting down and writing 25 pages from start to finish as much as it is compiling all the notes from all the different places he has them and adding in whatever it needs to read well. He re-works it as a display board for the science fair, a slide show for another competition, etc. Sometimes the paper goes through a few editions to suit it to different "niche" competitions. One year he had to translate it into answers to specific short essay questions for one competition and a 90-second video for another. But basically once the paper is written he can cut and paste and adapt for whatever other purpose he needs. The project is a huge amount of time and energy, but he learns so much more real science from this than he could from any curriculum. Lately it has tended to turn into a summer project, just because our regular school year is getting so peppered with deadlines that we don't have the luxury of a week to sit in a parking lot (or whatever uninterrupted block of time is necessary for the experiment) the rest of the year. The most important thing about the project is that he gets to answer his own questions, which is ultimately what science is there for. And it serves him well in practical terms, preparing him for the science he'll do in college and making a nice transcript and portfolio... It's absolutely worth the effort.

We keep it pretty low key... I get to sleep in, they buy me chocolate, and we go out to dinner. I don't like crowds so we never go anywhere super-popular... Tonight is Thai food at a little hole-in-the-wall. Sometimes it's sushi, or Indian. Nowhere that needs a reservation.

http://www.bitesizephysics.com/ -- both the book and the online classes.

I don't really have time to answer this right now, but I tagged the thread so you can read the older reviews. We have used Singapore straight through from MPH to the high school books with a science-and-math kid, and been uniformly happy with it. If you PM me later I can go on and on.

I would think it would be up to the publisher. It really is just an achievement test, and for that much you could very nearly fly to NC and have it done.

A testing company - teachers or retired teachers, generally. But honestly for a Woodcock Johnson alone I don't think I need a psychologist. We had a psychologist for the WISC, and that was worth the money (still not $500!), but even he didn't think we needed him to do the Woodcock Johnson.

That's seriously shocking.... in NC you could get a Woodcock Johnson done for not more than $65-75.

If everyone who knows me thinks I'm a big awful jerk, they're going to have to tell me to my face. Or stop calling or stopping by or whatever. So far neither has happened. But if someone online whom I don't know from Adam thinks that someone else I don't know might have said too much or too little or spoken too loudly or with the wrong tone in a situation about which I have almost no context.... They'll have to excuse me if I don't get right on that.

Hadn't thought about it, but I would be hard pressed to stay awake for three hours without a book!

....but this thread caught my eye. I'm really happy, actually, with how the early years went for us (and most of the later years too!) and I credit that to two very straightforward rules. #1. Know Your Kid. #2. Teach The Kid You Have. It doesn't make a bit of difference that someone else is doing more, or less, or exactly the same amount. You have YOUR KID. Your kid is not a statistic. He is almost certainly not average in every regard. He (or she) will almost certainly not do all the things that "most boys" (or "most girls") do. He has strengths and weaknesses and interests, and you will be far FAR better served by finding out what those are and working with them, rather than worrying about what others do. Whatever your reasons for homeschooling, I can just about guarantee that among this is not "to turn my kid into a clone of every other kid out there". Teach the kid you have, and aim for giving him an education that lets him fly with whatever he's good at and interested in, while giving him time and support to work on the things he struggles with. He's not the next Einstein, or Beethoven, or Shakespeare, or Picasso, or anyone else -- nobody is. He's just himself, and finding out who that is and how to teach him what he needs to know to be the best "himself" he can... that's way more interesting than trying to make him into anything else.

The difference will be in the other sixteen pages. GAI is calculated without working memory or processing speed, so a difference of that much is likely shown in a lower score in one or both of those. Nothing to be sad about. It's just data. The kid is the same kid, and you already knew he was going to need something... hopefully the scores can open up some opportunities you can benefit from.

I think I'd want to approach it in a "how can you learn to self-regulate" kind of way, just as a nod to the fact that we won't always be there to enforce, but as long as it's a problem I would enforce it while I could anyhow. For DS it hasn't been a problem. He does occasionally watch or play more than he ought to, but he recognizes it, regrets it, and doesn't do it again for quite a while. And it hasn't interfered with deadlines... so I leave it to him to work that out on his own.

Thank goodness it's not this week... He's been swamped with other deadlines and I'd really like him to spend a little more time with the prep book. Just a little...

Busy day! :) Results are supposed to be available on the 24th.

There is no lower age limit for the competition, officially. We did a JFLL team the year DS was 7 and FLL when he was 8. The teams themselves, of course, can set whatever lower age cutoff they want... but it's not FIRST's doing. I think if you were going to argue the age limit, the main thing you need to address is that many teams will have had problems in the past with kids who "love Legos", but who don't understand (or whose parents don't understand) that there is almost no building with Legos involved in FLL, and practically no free building. I had two "pre-FLL" groups one year, going through the Mayan Adventure book, and of ten kids maybe three were on board with addressing a specific engineering problem without getting sidetracked by all the other things they could do that would be much more fun. In addition to that, at the FLL level (unless things have changed since we did it - it has been a few years!) there's the robot, but also a presentation to the judges about the robot, a research project and presentation, and a teamwork event. It's an all-day marathon, and honestly by lunchtime I wanted to crawl under a table and stick my fingers in my ears. I could definitly see a team hesitating about a younger kid if there was any chance that exhaustion would lead to meltdowns or silliness. And lastly... the scoring at FIRST events (at all levels, from what I can tell) is a little capricious. It's not just about the robot working - there's team spirit and wowing the judges and other more "squishy" aspects... That's going to be true in one way or another whenever there are judges involved, but with the FIRST competitions we have known, it seemed excessive, and the kids found it frustrating. We're looking for a robotics competition this year that isn't FIRST - something that really is just engineering and robot performance. There are a lot of good things about FIRST competitions - I really do see why they include all those aspects - but they can also be overwhelming in how many directions a team has to go simultaneously.