Well, we have a really nice Science Museum and a really nice zoo in our city. So even though my kids have grown up going to those, I would consider those the best in our city and pretty close to our neighborhood. If we just attend the different exhibits, the different seasons, the special events and such at each of these (and we have a lot,) there is so much to learn . For my 3rd it would be tough. I love our city art museum. They get traveling exhibits that are amazing, even though it is a small museum. Over the years, we have seen amazing exhibits from all historical periods and modern and different movements. But I would think a top 3 should be something out of doors and natural, so even the smallish botanical gardens in our city should make the list. We have two favorites, but I would go with the one in our neighborhood, just for ease of access. It has been easy to be involved and to volunteer with it so close.

I can't wait. I talked to them on the phone about their educational shows for the coming year. Sounds like they didn't fare well during the pandemic, so they are looking forward to booking more this year. Have so much fun! I know I loved it when I went a long time ago!

Oh, here are my three for this upcoming year: 1.Medieval Times Restaurant. Not a lifetime top, lol, but we are excited to do it for a medieval year. 2. The big Aquararium and Zoo in Atlanta, whatever the name of that one is. That is going to be mdd's senior trip. She has always wanted to go there. My sister may end up flying her there, so if she does that, I won't get to go, but if we do a road trip, we will all go. 3. Our biggest in state aquarium. This is because we might not all get to do the senior trip, so we are planning this aquarium so that ydd has a chance to pet sharks and stingrays too! Those plus a weekend camping with my grandparents by their little state park lake and seeing the wildlife there like we do most autumns, and seeing the upcoming Pompeii exhibit in our art museum, plus whatever field trips co-op has planned are our big ones in the next 12 months.

Our biggest trips so far were Washington D.C. and another to Boston. Once we drove almost cross country, one we flew to. On the drive, we stopped at several stops along the way too across the country. When around D.C. we also went to Mount Vernon for a day, and that really stuck with us all. In Boston we did the Freedom Trail over a couple of days and toured Harvard, and just saw as much as we could. For smaller trips, we do lots of nature reserves in whatever we are going to, but especially ones that are within a day of our house that we can go to once a year or more to see in different times of the year. In New Mexico we really liked Bandalier National Monument. We just love history anywhere we go. We do art museums wherever we can, see the changing exhibits in our area. Also, we don't live anywhere near the ocean, so we have driven twice to take the kids to the nearest beach (and saw the reserves and such while there.) So our three so far have been 1. History sites (Bandalier, Boston, D.C, whatever is around and available...) 2. art museums and history museums wherever you can, living history when possible. 3. The ocean, lakes, nature reserves of all kinds.

preschool: months of the year, days of the week, the poem that tells how many days in each month phone number and address, parents' names nursery rhymes and songs Bible verses elementary: math facts english definitions, phonics rules, etc. books of the Bible for ancients list of Kings of England for middle ages the Fifty states in alphabetical order, and the capitals etc for American history getting older, we added major wars science definitions for whatever we are on poetry and Bible verses Latin conjugation and declension endings, model verbs, poems and songs in Latin, sayings from First Form lessons, colors, etc.

Definitely R&S ABC series. I used it with two of my three and a niece. The only reason we didn't use it with the first is because we hadn't discovered them yet. Cut/paste, manipulatives that they cut out and use for numbers and things, writing, etc.

I'll have to work, buy I am hoping it will be part time. I had my last child going at 39.5, so I will be older by the time she graduates. In a perfect world, I will get to house projects, continue volunteering in a position or two that I am in now, but will be able to devote more time and energy to them, and can find the perfect part time job that allows all of my wants above to be accomplished. I also, may go back to school to finish a degree that I wanted to but never did.

yay! That should still be celebrated!

I am so behind. That is all I am saying on this. 🙂

We did the R&S full curric including writing plus the WTM writing of narration, summaries, outlining, dictation across the curriculum through middle school, and around 8-9th grade started WWS. My girls did WWS later than WTM suggests, but it worked well for us, then they continued WTM writing assignments in Lit and History and did the suggested Rhetoric/writing after logic.

The Well Trained Mind, Rod and Staff, Memoria Press Latin, and the public library have been our main sources for homeschool. First one is in college, the other is heading there in a year or two, and the baby is in elementary school and is using all of their old books.

or As You Like It

#2 or #3, depending on which is better liked by the person who will be working through it with him. If you can't get him ready by the time school starts, then you go with Lori's advice, and just hold him back in math.

I think everyone, teens everywhere, have had a rough year, not just mine. My oldest missed a graduation ceremony. She spent her first year in the dorms without a roommate and with very little campus activity with most of her classes on zoom and part of that time was quarantined in another dorm away from her own stuff. My next at home had one co-op close down and we had to find a new place that was meeting. (Luckily it worked out for us, and we found a group where she really fit in well.) Our neighbor's kid was in public school all year, which in our city was completely virtual until March, then was only a couple of days a week in person, which meant as an only child she spent her days completely alone while her mom worked doing cyber school at age 10-11. It has just been tough for everyone. I wouldn't judge the rest of schooling by this one year. And sorry about your know it all. I have one of those too, lol. She did better to explore ideas without being lectured to. Books or classes served as her teacher, writing as her way of communicating, if that makes sense. If she was getting too much against anything I would have to say on a subject, I found feeding her full of good books from multiple sides was enough for her to explore different ideas on her own, instead of me talking to her about them. I tried to stay very neutral on things that I knew she would choose the opposite side on simply to choose the opposite side. It was better for her to just hear things, and not think that I was trying to convince her of anything. I would often take a different side when she brought up a view on something, like a devil's advocate type of talking about it, but not where I was trying to convince her, just letting her know that there are other ways to look at things. But I had to stay very neutral. I think teaching logic and rhetoric and giving that space to come up with arguments and to support them is what we are supposed to do. And the teen ages are when they like to argue and think through all of that. Some are just really good at it, lol. Good luck in whatever you decide. It has been a rough year, but rebuilding everything will be happening for everyone.

And yes, like everyone said, read the Well Trained Mind. I don't know how many on here actually follow it anymore, but I have all of the way through school. It will give you that framework, that guideline of how to organize what you want to do, step by step, along with the booklists and how tos to use all of the way through high school.

I was going to say R&S! I am using the textbooks for the core subjects, math and LA for all of my kiddos that I bought 15 years ago. And the copyright on them is like 85.

I got everything pulled from college dd's high school homeschool shelf. I got things into a few notebooks of things to keep (artwork, papers she wrote, a state history scrapbook we made throughout school years...) threw away all of the papers and emptied all of the comp books and such. I still have her actual records folder to go through- the one where I threw everything important and that we would just dig through when we needed something... awards, college letters, ACTs and SAT paperwork and scores, transcripts, etc. I need to declutter down to the necessities and figure out the long term storage of this stuff. I got dd7's desk cleaned out and a basket of summer learning stuffs and to do posters made for her. I got her 2nd grade books all out neatly on the shelf that formerly held dd18's stuff. So two things on my list done.

Yes, I will have a bit more time... not a lot, but a bit more. I fill it with organizing/decluttering/house projects that I don't have time for in the school year. So even minor things like relining shelves and such. I work on the garden and I try to walk outside more. I usually have some project or other that I teach myself and learn fully over the months before school starts, like a new habit or something. One summer I did Flylady.net in full. That has really helped me to set schedules for the home, even years later. One summer I decided to cloth diaper the baby, so when I ran out of the diapers from her baby shower at 3 months and summer was coming on, I mastered that over the summer months and fully cloth diapered her until potty training after that. Last summer I really expanded my garden and dabbled in canning. I may do a little canning, though I am not super interested. I just want to have some core knowledge of it. And this summer I have decided on making junk journals for my summer project. I always read more and do the summer reading program at the library with my kids since adults can enter ours too. But that is mostly educational reading- Bible, homeschool magazines, books, catalogs, and educational books/history, or textbooks and curriculum for the upcoming year. So it isn't just for me, though I only do things I enjoy and want to learn more about, obviously, so it is a little for me, as in it is a necessary part of my chosen vocation.

I do not remember it from Oklahoma History class, just from museums now, as I have homeschooled my kids. But I do not remember anything about my high school state history class to be honest. Like I can't even remember which of the two high schools I attended I took it at, so it could have been taught... I of course did not realize until I was an adult what was meant by civilized tribes, when we learned them, and have been sure to teach to my kids what was meant by that.

If so, I am right there with you!! Making lists of the lists we need to make is step one to getting it done for me!! I am planning a giant whiteboard broken down into lists of things I need to do to the house, for church, for scouts, for school paperwork, and for school planning and checking off parts of each daily!! Todays physical school area to do: 15 min on dd7's desk! Then 15 minutes of cleaning floors- starting with my room because I had a spider this morning and I want to clean out any dark hiding spots behind furniture for webs. 15 min of driver's ed planning which should be making an appointment for dd16's driving test and finding the teacher's book to schedule her AAA parent taught test date online which has to come before the driving test. 15 minutes of sending a text for church curriculum ordering if the lady doesn't answer my email. no scout work today. Then an hour or more of Latin answer key writing tonight when dh is on kid duty. Dinner is take out on Tuesdays, so I am off the hook there! I had to work my part time job this morning, then took dd7 to the library, so we are just getting started on to dos after lunch before the teens get home from work today.

pulling this back up because there wasn't a newer craft thread!!! I have discovered my new craft- junk journaling. I have kept journals since I could write. I have written diaries going back to high school. I have baby books, scrapbooks, and random art and paper crafts that I have loved over the years. I have been using Funschooling Mom journals for about five years now, and have gotten into making them more and more crafty, and junky. With all of the art and paper crafting supplies I have recently acquired I have been looking for new ideas, and came across junk journals, right up my alley. So for all of you other crafty people that were talking during January are you setting any craft goals for the summer? I just collected several older books and one newer one from the Dollar Store that I don't mind tearing out of to use book pages and covers from. Today I panted and coffee stained book pages froma falling apart YA book that was a library discard and that we already have a good copy of. I will use the pages to create embellishments. I am starting with an altered book, then I am going to bind my own. I actually signed up to teach a high school art class on book binding next semester, so I have to get mine put together so I can plan the best projects for class. Part of my challenge will be that there are boys in the class, and I want to keep them interested. I am thinking faux leather covers for one of our projects, plus I have some wallpaper that we could use for either inside covers or for a second project with them. But I want to have pretty ideas for the girls who want them too. So anyway, I have a lot of have tos over the summer, but I am also going to have fun with this for me. (and it counts as school planning because of the class I signed up for!)

I HATED the early Apologia books until my mdd was about 5th grade and she could read it on her own. But co-op always chose those, so we did several of them. One year in middle school they chose from the newer Science in the Beginning Series (I think that year we were in the Science in the Age of Reason,) and I really liked that compared to the Apologia books. Mine could do it on her own, as she was at the upper end of it, but I would have enjoyed doing it in the younger ages. So if you want a text series, and something different from Apologia, you might look at that series. I much more enjoy doing Well Trained Mind style science with a scheduled topic per year or semester with a children's encyclopedia or nice subject books as the spines and doing some activities and notebooking around that, doing a little CM style nature journaling some years and following interests and opportunities as they came up from other places. We made many a great science year around things that started out from a girl scout camp or badge and from there we took off from it for the year. We gained life long interests in things this way too, things we carried on an interest in outside of "school" for years. My kids have done years around birds, astronomy, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Robotics, Weather, and other topics from having flexibility to follow up and research their own interests for our projects all year. These things happened more starting around 5th grade and up when they could really research and had more opportunities to work with the public and meet mentors in real clubs and to volunteer alongside adults who were working in the field or in community non profits. Then they chose their own scout badges and projects and wrote papers on the topic for a year. If co-op assigned a presentation, we would find a way to make the chosen topics fit the requirements for that. If a girl scout badge required them to teach younger scouts on a safety topic, and dd was into learning about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that year, she researched ways to help with less plastic use and taught them. She attended and taught at an event for adults at the zoo on the topic when they had a night on the subject that year. This all started because of learning something at scout camp early that year. She researched, wrote, and watched documentaries on it all year after that. To start teaching them to follow up their interests like this, and to research deeper, we started with doing a homeschool science fair competition when they were in elementary school. They worked on a variety of skills including speech and presentations from an early age to do those competitions on their chosen topic. In 3rd grade we did the WTM's scheduled chemistry experiment book. They could choose an experiment from that book to expand on, or anything else that had come up, but that was a starting point that year. I think the book for 3rd grade WTM science was from Adventures with Atoms? It cost me like $8 back then, and had all of the same experiments as an Apologia book. That little book of activities and a science fair and library books and videos was all we needed for that year.

Off the top of my head, I have 180 days as the requirement in my state, but after many state homeschool convention workshops on the subject, I am ok with counting field trip days, teacher planning days (like convention workshop days, etc.) and sick days. I mean a school doesn't shut down and not count days if my kid is out sick. They don't add on to the end of the year. So I note throughout the year sick days and dr. appts, and anything slightly educational we do those days (like a sick kid at home from public school who still does some homework and make up work the following days.) And I count those in my educational count. When the electricity went out for FIVE DAYS in a freak ice storm in the fall, we were really living like Little House on the Prairie in freezing temps here. We had maintenance work around the yard. Cooking was fun for a few days because we kept the coolers outside in the freezing rain to keep the fridge contents cold and cooked inside on a caterer's butane burner. We kept warm around a small fire in one room. That took up a lot of our days just to get through the daily living. But we had a lot of outdoor exploration, life skills, craft times to use things we had been putting off while I was busy working, and did what school we could. DD16's school is a lot online, and there wasn't a lot she could do when she couldn't access her digital textbook even when the power was up, but the internet was still down for another week. Because of Covid, the things we usually would have done like go to the library and do school there or a fast food restaurant that had regained power weren't possible because everything was closed. So we just went with it. I noted what we did each day, and I counted those for my school days for my little one. We still read lots of books, did crafts, and ddi her workbooks when we had time and energy. The older one of course, just picked up her lessons where she was once the power was on. Her work is more about finishing a set amount of work/projects than days. But she did the things offline that she could. I finished our 180 days this past week. Now I stop officially recording in our record books. But dd16 is still working on a few of her things after work to finish up her requirements, if that makes sense. And dd7 is just stepping into summer learning mode. After a couple of weeks of regrouping the house and school areas, we will make summer learning goals lists (summer camps, summer library reading programs, museum children's days and storytimes and activities, swim lessons, tennis practice, etc. We will just pick a day that we do some math practice and read SOTW's last few chapters, and add a summer bridge book or a summer camp journal or something for some summer writing.) I don't count those days. But I don't worry if one of my 180 days wasn't as full as I thought it would be due to life, because we keep working on our own goals.

Well, I have had two examples that I may just be lazy this week, lol. Example no. 1: I have wanted to try a chip drop for free mulch for a while now. Dh was against it because it will be so much that we have to use (lots of projects around the yard and/or getting rid of it when we are done.) But last year we hauled two truck loads from somebody's else's chip drop to our house, plus two truck loads to a garden dd16 built at another location. So I figured we might as well get the drop here, since we use that much anyway. Never having done it and not knowing the average wait time, I signed up for one as one of my computer to do's on Monday morning, thinking in the next couple of weeks sometimes I would have a giant pile of mulch dropped off, during the two weeks I have designated for house work. The truck showed up within the hour while I was still doing school with dd7 on our last week of school. So all bets were off. The pile was huge, and dh and I immediately began digging up the front overgrown weedy flower bed that I have been wanting him to dig up for the last two years. We had that bed dug up in an hour, and then dh had to go to work, and the girls and I ended up laying down the bed liner, digging up the brick border, and putting it back and mulching it ourselves. All in all another couple of hours. Then I worked for days hauling mulch all around the house and yard to all of the places I envisioned it. Projects that we had been putting off forever took just a few days. Then I found a box of dress up clothes under dd7's bed that the new kitten had decided was as good as a litter box, and I had to really deep clean her room, tossed bags of things, cleaned every surface, washed all bedding and toys, etc. And I did that in one day. My spring cleaning doesn't take that long if I would just do it, lol! So I am keeping that in mind. Tomorrow's job is to clean off dd7's desk and toss and file and separate things for a book sale. Her area is easier and more fun than high school stuff and records, so I start with her area! Monday is Memorial Day and we have plans, so I won't do a lot, but Tuesday I start the to do list hard and swiftly! I hope. 🙂

Funny about the chocolate!! And I understand the ADHD issues. We live in a small, small house that has never really been purged- 20 years of living here, 15 of homeschooling all levels, three kids living here, one with ADHD, one young one, and a dh with ADHD. I constantly look for stuff that they rearrange. And shut the cabinet doors and put up the cooking oil they got out and didn't return, and call them back to finish the kitchen that they thought they tidied, etc. etc. For reference, we just dug up a flower bed that we haven't touched since we moved in, 20 years ago that was beautifully landscaped at the time, and that I have fought the weeds in for the last ten years or so... It is just one project after another and survival as far as house stuff here. So adding to my to do list: Clean off the desk in my room so that I can use it for my crafts and teacher books instead of storing boxes of unused books!! If I can clean off enough other places so that I can store the boxes of books from that desk, clean out the board books in dd7's room so that I can move the chapter books onto her shelf and out of my room, I can move the desk books there, and I can have my craft stuff in one place instead of repacking it into a storage tub everyday after I use it.