We do ACT here, not SATs, but my odd had a perfect English and a one point from perfect reading or the other way around. I think it is from studying Latin and using Rod and Staff English, and of course reading a lot. But those are very thorough programs that really taught grammar and comprehension deeply. (by programs for Latin I mean just the study of Latin. We mostly used Memoria Press, but used a lot of supplementary materials along the way too.)

yes, chanting, sing songy memorization of charts and lists works for Latin and just about anything else. My sister and I can still sing the list of English helping verbs our teacher had us memorize in middle school. I sing english verbs to the tune of the old song, Sara Sponda the way my English teacher taught us back then. She had classes of middle schoolers singing loudly, "Sara Sponda, Sara Sponda, Sara Sponda Lie, Lay, Lain..." day after day all year long to memorize irregular verb forms. It worked for us and it worked for my kids. I love Rod and Staff English because if you follow the daily oral lessons it has you have the kids memorize lists of all kinds. I just used the tunes in my head that my amazing middle school teacher used with us. I came up with my own tunes for teaching Latin or other lists in other subjects for my kids. A certain chanty pattern came to us as we memorized English kings or the books of the Old Testament that I now use a decade later with my youngest because they are cemented in my head after doing them for a year or two each with the olders. I don't know what tunes that particular curriculum gives you, but use them or borrow others, or make up your own tunes. But it will help them memorize it. I think about it like the ABCs. I still sing the ABC song partially to myself in my head if I am looking something up in the dictionary to find the right page as I look at the letters to decide if I flip backwards or forwards in the book, lol. Having that tune in my head is instant recall for alphabetical order that I have had since I was perschool aged.

I would homeschool her. High school is very rewarding, and they get to begin their lives in the real world, managing their own time, jobs, passions, and friends around their homeschool work, not the other way around as in school. We recently were on a college tour day and coincidentally got seated with another homeschool family for lunch. The young girl who planned on becoming a dental assistant was already working days in a dental office getting experience, doing her schoolwork at night. My current senior in high school works during the days some days of the week also and has dance classes during the day during the week, and then does her schoolwork in the evenings on those days. Mine plans on pursuing art, so at home, she can spend time entering different art contests and pursuing art projects and media of her choice. For social, mine is so busy with her jobs, her dance classes, and her extra curriculars, plus we attend a co-op, that she often doesn't have a lot of time to look for extra just hang out time, but she sees her friends at those activities. We just camped out for the weekend with our girl scout troop. She has long time scout friends in our troop that are all busy, and don't get together very often anymore. They don't do weekly meetings like when they were younger. but they had lots of hangout time over the weekend to stay up late and talk. Plus my dd actually works at the camp that we were camping at, and they had an event for all troops one night that we were there, so she actually left our troop, got to clock in, and worked a few hours at the camp, so she had her work scout friends to see at that time too. I don't worry that she didn't have free time at the movies or mall just to hang out. She had plenty of interactions. Our weeks are just as busy. She doesn't do a lot outside of dance with her dance friends, but they spend a lot of time at the studio together a week, year in and year out. And a few times a semester they get together for something extra. Every once in awhile they will just stay late to talk or something. The same at co-op and so forth. She stays busy in her activities that are meaningful to her and has friends and acquaintances at each place that are into the same things that she is there for. Some she is closer to than others, but her life is full. She is looking forward to college and dorm life and meeting a roommate and other friends there. I love the hours we do have together schooling, reading together, planning her art projects, etc. She does several online classes now that I am not highly involved in except for helping her manage her schedule, studying for an exam or whatever, but the time we do still have working together is so awesome at this age, to be able to have funny moments, deeper conversations about what she is reading and so on is very rewarding.

So for my kids, their pediatrician's office can potentially get them in if you call before 7:30 am for a same day sick visit, otherwise you wait until the next day. For emergencies or something I am worried about after 7:30 am, we go to an urgent care office that is near us and not even related to their dr, then call the pediatrician and get in there for a follow up the next day or whenever possible. This has worked for us for years. That way we can get antibiotics started in emergencies or Tamiflu started in the first 48 hours of flu or checked for strep throat or whatever immediately. Then we can double check with a doctor who knows their history better the next day. Obviously we have very good insurance to be able to go this route. For me, I don't even have a primary doctor. I have an OBgyn, a dentist, an eye dr, etc. but don't have any ongoing medical issues, so I haven't ever chosen one, though as I am getting older, I think it is about time. If I have something come up like the kids, I will go to the urgent care. If my kids have a staph infection and I get the same symptoms, and we are following up with their pediatrician for a 2nd opinion on what the urgent care prescribed for the kids, I am usually good with assuming that is what I have too, and that what I got was ok too. Same goes for flu, strep, etc. So far even when I had bronchitis, I was ok following up with the urgent care for treatment for that after strep at one point.

I love a series called Arty Facts for art projects related to science topics. There is a weather one, a bugs one, a space one, a human body one, inventions and maybe more I am not remembering. I do not think these are in print anymore, but you could find at libraries or used. These are great for open ended art projects on science topics.

I used the Rod and Staff very inexpensive paper planners all the way up to high school for both of my older kids, one per kid. I used the last row to record weekend events and learning. I just repurposed some of the teacher planning pages at the front to keep lists of things I needed them for. For my current elementary aged student I have used a different planner every year. My favorite by far was the Christian Light planner. It is designed to be used with their curriculum, but there were so many things I loved about it. 1. affordable. I think it was like $12. 2. It is year round, not just 36 weeks. 3. It has a section to journal about the week on every week. LOVED this feature. I would write about things we were doing and events we attended and dd's progress. It has a self evaluation section at the end of each week for the child to rate how they are doing in behaviour areas. I really liked this. The only reason I did not continue using that planner is because our state convention shut down, and I don't like to pay for shipping, lol. If I had enough orders for Rainbow Resource to get the free shipping I would have thrown it in. I always end up getting free planners in Michael's Grab boxes and don't like to waste, so I am adapting random planners to use for her since that first year with the Christian Light. 🙂 I can make any paper planner work, but that one was really nice. *** sorry, I meant to say that it was designed to be used with their curriculum, but it was easy enough to use with my own materials. I don't use any CLE materials except for one random weather workbook

Wow, I haven't read my copy of WTM that in depth in awhile. I don't remember that suggestion. I am sure when my older kids were little and I followed WTM faithfully, spending extra was not an option. I know we only used Crayola. We bought them each Prisma when they were older, and now that is all they use. I still don't even have a set of Prisma for myself, and I want them badly. My 2nd grader is definitely not getting any yet. So as much as I would love to get them for all of us, it is just too expensive for something we use so much and that would likely get lost by a little one.

So this is something nobody on here seems to use or mention, but I find a lot on Schoolhouseteachers dot com. They can pay one family fee which isn't super cheap, but everyone can do as many classes or use as many resources as they may want. They say there is a class for every grade, every subject on there. I can't vouch for a lot of them, because I have just used specific courses, but they ones I have used and liked, I do really recommend. One thing they have is math. I used their Algebra I with my high schooler and then you get access to Mr.D's math self paced course for geometry. I will say, the course they have for Algebra is using free online texts, but it is broken up and really easily done. I liked the simple pages so much better for my mdd... so much better than Lial's which we used for my odd. I would choose that Algebra over any current textbook I have looked through. And Mr. D's works well for both of mine for geometry. (I can't say anything about any other levels of math that they have, because both of mine moved into Mr. D's for the rest of their high school math after that that we had to pay for. But having access to the one included with our SHT subscription is good. There is foreign language, art, history, and all kinds of things on there. I really liked the Understanding Modern History course for high school, and I really liked the History of Fashion unit study, both of which we used in full. There are Drive Thru History videos which can supplement your Great Courses because it is nice to see the areas you are learning about. One of mine used their Spanish which I did supplement with a cd course that I had from the library, but it taught some basics. It is easy to print off a full year lesson plan in check list form for these classes for each kid too which is nice if you need it. We have used other odds and ends. I am using the music from their school in a box sets with my 2nd grader, just supplementing with library materials- books, CDs, movies, etc. to go with.

We went straight through them with the exception of B. With B, the Bible coloring book and stories, we did it like once or twice a week in addition to the regular ABC workbooks, which ever we were on. We always started with A, sometime after age 4, as well as doing some sort of Letter of the Week, so we would do LOTW activities one day (either at home or with a co-op,) and reinforce that letter throughout the week. Other days we would do a page or two of the ABC workbooks. We averaged only two-three days of doing the workbooks and usually got through the first series only by halfway through K. Then the 2nd semester of K, we always start the 1st grade reading and phonics. (At the beginning of K, I add in the R&S 1st grade math daily on top of the ABC workbooks and some BOB book reading.) I think stretch the reading and phonics over the 2nd half of k and 1st grade, and start 2nd grade with the 2nd grade materials for phonics and english and spelling. With math, it just depends on where they are by then. My current 2nd grader is halfway through the 2nd grade book. One of mine kept up with the math at a full grade level ahead, and one of mine worked solidly in their grade levels all of the way through. I have the other books, a few of the other letter books that come after the initial set. Those are just for whenever, like if we are busy and don't have time for other things, or for handwriting practice or reinforcement. My ydd is now in 2nd grade, and just did some of the Rainforest activities from the Hearing and Helping book that we have had sitting around forever because she did an online rainforest class on Zoom, and I found that book had some crafty things she could do alongside the class making it relevant.

Most homeschooling books and conferences will address these issues, because we all have to make this work. Like others said, you include the 4.5 year old. My first two are only two years apart. Whatever I did with the older, the younger thought she was doing it with us since for years it was just the two of them at home with me. So if we were doing a foreign language workbook, the little one had a coloring book that we pulled out for her "Latin" workbook. As we counted aloud and did vocabulary or whatever, she did it with us orally. When it was workbook time, she colored and did stamps and markers in her "schoolwork." When we read aloud, she was right there. When we did science and art projects, she did them too. When we added more to the family, later, a niece that homeschooled for preschool while the olders were in upper elem and early middle school and then a newborn, we did as others said... started with the preschooler. We did preschool songs together, read her little stories, did some hands on learning and games to work on whatever skills we were working on, then she got out a basket of toys and I got the others started on their work. I bounced between kids. THey have to all learn to work together around each other. For the lesson time, the 10-15 min of showing them the new material and reviewing, you have to get the others occupied. So I spent that 15-20 min with the preschooler. Then she was happy to get out a basket of blocks and Barbie dolls for a few which gave me a window to introduce the lesson to the middle schooler and elem. schooler on their math for the day. Then they worked on their problems and I changed the baby and the preschooler helped me with that. As I walked around everybody doing whatever needed to be done, I could check in and see how they are each doing. Preschooler was required to take an after noon rest period in her room, which also gave me some one on one time with the olders in the afternoons, but that was after lunch, outside time for all, and stories read aloud for all.

I guess I should make it clear... I didn't muddy it up. She actually got a 1/2 credit for the college class and a 1/2 credit for my lit semester, so that equaled a full credit. But the grades and transcript for her DE credit came from the college and her grades from my semester came from me. Sorry to be unclear. I have read that you can use a 1 semester college course for a full credit, but then have heard other places not to. I decided for us, for as few as my dd took that we didn't need to. It didn't hurt her at all. She got nice recognitions, scholarships, and was not hurt at all by it. I am definitely no expert. I did no weighting on her transcript at all, and kept it all very simple. Edited 19 hours ago by Farrar

I believe we used The New Oxford Guide to Writing or a title similar to that that was a WTM recomendation for high school writing. Have you looked at the rhetoric section of WTM for the writing info? My current senior will be doing some lit, some remedial spelling (dyslexic student,) and a lot of writing this year. This semester her writing will look like essays and college and scholarship essays and apps. Second semester she will do her large research paper. For Lit we will do some short stories and a novel this semester and a little poetry, mostly British Lit, but not all.

I just did a half credit for ours. My dd did a semester of English at college and a semester of lit at home with me for English 4. One credit. She did a computer app class. I gave it a half credit. For us, that worked fine. But that's all we did. I suppose if she'd taken math or science I might have decided on a credit per 3 credit hour college class. But for us, for all she took, I didn't.

After the initial understanding of the alphabet and letter sounds we moved on to Bob books (a couple of mine did these in preschool, but for sure in early kindergarten with all of them,) After early sets of Bob books, most of mine were moving on to other books, and we added serious phonics study work in later kindergarten/1st grade. I used Rod and Staff 1st grade phonics. We did the reading program too, but this was less to teach reading than to practice it. The phonics study and just reading of lots of books together after the Bob books and similar library readers is what made them good readers.

If this consists though, you can get her evaluated for speech. It could be an indicator of some issues. We went through speech with one of mine, and that was one of the things they were looking for.

I got my 7th grader a Funschooling core journal for that year, and we set up a set of documentaries and a couple of resource books that she used. So she would open up the funschooling book to whatever the page of the day was and did what it said. The core journals are set up to be used as a full curriculum (or a set of notebooking pages that can be used with any curriculum,) so there is a math page too. We had curriculum for everything else, so on the math page day, we had a math game we would do, so it was something different from her regular math. But on the reading pages, she read from her books and wrote short summaries and drew diagrams. On the film study pages, she watched an episode of her documentaries. There are specific science journals that won't have math pages, daily journal pages, or whatever, but we liked the variety. So she just did an hour of her journal each day, which created a little unit study around her science that year. Another one she did well with as a middle schooler was the Berean Builder series, just using the older student journal prompts. She could do all of the little experiments on her own with that, all from the house usually. Don't think I bought anything special.

We needed nothing here either, just school curriculum here and there (very little of that either was needed.) So the day before we started school I took the girls out to lunch and to an outlet mall to spend bday money. My teens each got a new pair of boots and socks and that was about it. For my 7 yr old, who already got new shoes for the year, has plenty of clothes and underthings, and needs no new supplies, I didn't get any clothes. We also don't need crayons, pencils, binders, anything. What I ended up getting for "fun" was at Five Below. I got a $5 set of erasers that dd7 was drooling over and a game called Puppy Yoga that my 17 and 7 year old both had fun with on our first day. I also ordered Rummy Roots from Rainbow Resource that we will all play when it gets here. My dd7 was plenty happy for school to start with new schoolwork and new erasers and the Puppy game.

Art supplies of all kinds were always a hit here: gel pens, art markers, pastels, glitter glue, crafty sets made for kids, anything and everything for my ydd are the "fun" things. I just get new things like that. This year for 2nd, we have so many actual supplies, but I saw she fell in love with a set of erasers at FiveBelow, so I got that set of 35 erasers for her and plan to dole them out a little at a time. She got one for finishing her first day back to school and one for remembering her coins and amounts on the first day. I plan to dole them out for prizes.

I agree with what was said about public school credits. I would check with your private school to see if they accept nonaccredited homeschool credits as part of their transcripts towards a diploma. Likely it depends on rules to do with whatever association they are accredited with. It is good to know that. I have seen many homeschoolers decide to enroll kids into public or public charter schools here who had done a year or more of homeschool highschool and the schools only took their PE credits. All kids had to start over and retake all high school credits from the beginning in the public schools. But beyond that, I am different from what everyone else has said. I would jump in and start at the beginning of the WTM high school cycle and do ancients. It is what her school would be doing. It gets you started on the full four year cycle of WTM history a year early. That has the benefit of not mattering too much if your school doesn't accept it should you decide to enroll her, because ancients isn't usually required in high school anyway. If you continue to homeschool you have five years to get through the four year cycle for some wiggle room, or get it done in four years and be done before senior year, which is good, because since it is required to graduate most places, it will already be done when you are applying to colleges. I don't see that she will have any gaps because the WTM cycle is a four year cycle. You do geography along with history if you are following WTM, so it doesn't have to be separate. I nave gave mine a credit for geography, they just did mapwork throughout high school with history, and mine did do a a couple of reports for a geography co-op class (that wasn't enough for any credits towards geography, but definitely enhanced her history credits.) Good luck!

Haven't read everyone's responses, but quick answers off of the top of my head. Foreign languages just take a lot of time. Latin was high priority for us starting around 4th/5th grade. It was along the same lines as math with regards to the intensity and time we took on it with one exception. Math was always daily, 4x a week from the time they started school until graduation. Latin was rarely daily. We did longer sessions a couple of times a week. What worked best for me was a co-op day where I taught it for 45 min plus a scheduled Latin club day with members from the class where we did additional study and review. Then the workbook pages in between classes were done whenever. If a kid got the whole week's work done in one day, fine. If they worked on it over a couple of days between class times, also fine. The years we put in of dedicated time once a week reviewing and working aloud together coupled with written work on their own sometime during the week gave plenty of retention. I took this model from my own experience. I grew up with a Spanish tutor once a week. She spoke to us in Spanish once a week for an hour or so, and we maybe had a few projects in elementary school on top of that. Then in middle school in that one time period a week she began teaching us grammar with the speaking practice. By the time I had high school Spanish it was a breeze. That once a week over the years really added up and I retained a lot. Even though I never tried for fluency or anything, I can still easily read and pronounce to teach my daughters from those years of hearing it properly spoken, even if only once a week.

Home Science Tools or Amazon.

I never had a program for history in the 5th-well, through high school really, lol. I loosely followed WTM some years. But I ventured into more of what you are describing as we got further into it. I know for our 8th and 6th grade Am. History in Modern World History context/State history year, I very much chunked our studies into a basic topic a month. I did not have a cohesive plan. I used the methods we had previously used with WTM style logic stage history for output, but used that in my plans. So month 1 was the Revolution with a Jackdaws portfolio as our spine. Month 2 was on the Constitution. Can't remember what I used besides the constitution and library books for that, then each month had its own theme that moved through time. We never got to everything this way, but we really learned the topics we were in. Since we were doing state history with co-op and we always do it in our modern history years, we just added readings and museum trips and whatever else we could as went through modern history... so when we were discussing the 1841 Indian Removal Acts, we stopped and dived deep into how that affected our areas. During black history month, we spent time in our city exploring different exhibits that were relevant and added readings from African American biographies and a book on black towns in our state, etc. We just tried to stay in the time period we were in in our overall Am./World history and found what was happening in our state at the time of each broader event we were learning. I do not remember how much literature we did each year. I used the blog, The Classical House of Learning Literature's book lists for the first 3 years of the logic stage history rotation, which had about 13 books a year. That was too much for us, so we narrowed the lists some, and if I remember correctly, the blog never completed through to that fourth year of modern history anyway, so I had to come up with our own readings. I probably picked a few from the WTM suggestions.

I would suggest starting with reading through the logic section of The Well Trained Mind. It will walk you through how to use your spine and what kind of output to require of a 7th grader. Each edition of the book has changed the recomendations slightly depending on what newer books are available. I used the 2nd edition which suggested the Kingfisher Encyclopedia as our spine for history, but I definitely pulled in chapters from SOTW as we went, sometimes starting with that as our read aloud, then having them move into the logic level work of reading, outlining, doing a timeline book, and choosing a topic to further read and write on. And no, we didn't outline every spread nor do a further research piece for every page spread from Kingfisher, but we did do them regularly, once to twice a month. They did add all of the dates to their timelines and we read SOtW and other books on the topics, keeping a library basket of everything from picture books aimed at tween to longer biographies and primary source books likes diaries and such when we could find them.

Mine like this is now a senior. I kept her at grade level. I didn't worry about standardized tests, because testing doesn't work well for her. It doesn't indicate what she knows and is capable of. For mine, I am fine that we kept her at her grade level by name, worked at her level otherwise. In LA and sciences she could always work fine (except spelling,) with the proper accommodations that everyone has already listed: audio books, spellcheck, vision therapy, etc. Math was a different story. We just moved slowly through it, taking much more than a year on most levels. At this point, she is about to be a senior and is planning on college. I suggested to her that she take two years on her senior year, because she is going to have a heavy load to get in all of the college prep classes to finish them all by graduation. But she is determined to do it, and is moving at regular speed through math now. But because it took her awhile to get to that place, she will be doing two math courses at once this year- not ideal, but her choice. I am currently working on documentation to get her accommodations on her college entrance tests. And she will need some accommodations in college likely, but we have the documentation, so that none of that should be difficult. An extra year would have benefitted her this year, but it hasn't hurt her a lot to keep her in her grade at all. And even now, she is choosing her heavy load because of her own goals. She could graduate with less than what she is aiming for and not do two maths at once this year. I could give her credits for what she has done, but she has some specific goals in mind that require more than what she has so far, and she wants to do them. So that doesn't mean everyone who has similar issues will be stuck at the end doing a tough senior year.

We have only done it self paced and have been very happy with it. We aren't advanced mathy peoples here. My kids focuses are on the arts and humanities. We have done well with it self paced.