Brenda nailed it. The issue, as far as the colleges are concerned, is whether the EFC for your family is being split across two kids. The EFC formula comes up with how much (they think) you can afford to pay for college, irrespective of whether it is spread across 1 kid or multiple kids. If it is for multiple kids, your aid is bumped up. Therefore, if you are NOT filing a FAFSA for the kid in CC then the answer is "No," you don't have another kid in college. But, you could list her tuition expenses in "private school tuition costs" and add a note.

My motto: Ask for forgiveness, not for permission.

We have our interviews in a couple of weeks. The online app was completely painless - easier than a mortgage app! I believe Global Entry also gets you access to the "Pre" entry lanes at the airport. My elite status on Delta gets me into the Pre lane, and it's a dream. Shoes stay on, liquids stay packed, coat stays on. So much faster, especially for the kids, who inevitably mess something up in the standard line (water in the backpack, large pile of coins in pocket...).

Second Khan Academy.

DS 12 told me he wanted to do chemistry this semester, so we are doing ACS Middle School Chemistry. It's a great program, but it is not what he expected - he wants fizz and bubble and explosions. I would therefore like to supplement ACS with some fun experiments that he and his dad can do together once a week or so. I don't have the time to shop for the supplies for experiments described in books like Fizz, Bubble and Flash. I need complete materials and instructions to hand to DH and DS and let them rip. If there is text or an online module to provide the formal "science" part, all the better. DS is a great reader. Thoughts so far: -PLATO Physical Science is science but no fizz, so that does not make sense given our needs. -Supercharged Mastery Kits are too much (in terms of time & $) given that we need a supplement, not a full program. Suggestions? Experiences? Reviews? Warnings? I am in an endless loop of surfing through websites and need to just make a choice!

The Lively Latin website has a nice audio on "Why Latin?" aimed at the kids. Have her listen! One fact she provides: 95% of Italian words come from Latin. So she will be learning both if she does Latin! And I agree - let her learn both. I did Spanish and Latin in high school. I would suggest you do a formal Latin, parts-to-whole curriculum. I like Lively Latin a lot. And she could do Rosetta Stone Italian, which is fun for her and not much work for you.

If you just need a few pages, use your phone or iPad to take pictures and convert to PDF. You can email the PDF to your kindle, if you want. I do this for math and Latin exercises, so that my son can do his work even if he does not have his textbook.

Search has not been working for weeks. This is a workaround, posted by the admin in a sticky: Open google.com paste in site:forums.welltrainedmind.com/classifieds/ {YOUR KEYWORDS YOU ARE SEARCHING}

Studs Terkel's Hard Times is wonderful: oral histories as told by people who lived through the GD. Workers, parents, children, politicians, ministers. You could select chapters for him or just let him have at it.

Try downloading the file to a computer then emailing it to your kindle. Every Kindle has its own email address, under settings. The "mobi" format is the Kindle format, if that helps.

This looks like a great set of books! My ears are open, too. Where did you hear about these three?

12-year-old boy in this house. He fights doing anything - schoolwork, chores. I have been Googling "boarding schools" as a way to vent my frustration. Is there a form of shock therapy that will help us out of our nag-resist-nag-whine-nag-stomp cycle? I am going crazy here. He has a list of school tasks to get done by the end of each week. It is his choice which to do on which day, but he is supposed to keep up a pace of getting 1/5th done Monday, 1/5th Tuesday, etc. Should I just let him fall hopelessly behind, so he is stuck working on the weekend?

If you have a perfect child who reads directions perfectly and never resists writing, you will not need it. We need it! It provides very useful coaching scripts.

Logic was not a hit with DS 12 - reading aloud may do the trick! Can you tell me (or link to) the book you are using? Thank you!

Khan Academy has good drills. No ads! My kids (9, 12) like the site.

It sounds like a task manager (a powerful to-do list) would work fine. Remember the Milk is a good one that syncs across devices. You could use tags to categorize assignments into classes, you can set due dates, and you can include extensive notes.

I could easily use the instructor book as a pdf, but my kids focuses better with the book. The tablet/kindle is associated with other books and games for him. There are several great iPad apps for annotating PDFs. I have my (college) students submit pdfs, which I annotate and return. You can also use them in instruction - by say, marking up a map while you show it to the kids. My favorite is iAnnotate PDF, but Penultimate is also very good. There are probably other good ones but I stopped looking when I found one that worked for me.

I can't speak to the scheduling, but I can provide a warning. The first few chapters of AofA are pretty abstract, much more so than the rest of the book. You may want to have them skip reading these at first, instead diving straight into the much more concrete and interesting chapters. You could backtrack to the first chapters once you have caught their interest. I learned this from hard experience - DS 12 HATED the first few chapters and I have not yet been able to lure him back into the book.

DS 12 in is his first year of homeschooling.Changing: Science: We are adding chemistry, using the middle-school curriculum provided by the American Chemistry Society. We will supplement with McHenry's Elements. We will continue reading The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way for fun, but we won't do the workbook any longer. Except for a few exceptions (e.g., squaring the circle) it felt like busywork. Ancient History: We will be finishing up Roman history, having used Famous Men of Rome and Heritage History as our spines. We are then moving backward in time, to Greek mythology (D'Aulaire) and history (K12 Human Odyssey and Heritage History). Latin: We flamed out on Cambridge Latin, having finished a respectable half-year of Unit 1 (6 of 12 chapters). CL is a whole-to-parts curriculum, which SWB warns against. Whole to parts worked wonderfully as an introduction to Latin, since it got him reading immediately. It fell apart once we moved into multiple past tenses (past imperfect, anyone?) in Stage 6. We are starting next week on Lively Latin Big Book 1, with a goal of completing by summer. Stay the Course: Writing: We are continuing with Writing with Skill Level 1, which is working well for us. We started it six weeks into fall, after he lost interest in One-Year Adventure Novel. We still have 30 lessons left, which at our current pace would take us into summer. DS has agreed we need to finish and pledged to either work into summer or do more than one week of lessons each week. Math: We are continuing with Life of Fred Elementary Physics, having completed Decimals and Fractions. We plan to finish Pre-Algebra Biology, and hope to at least start Pre-Algebra Econ. We will also do Zaccaro's Real World Algebra. Vocabulary: We will continue with Vocabulary from Latin and Greek Roots. This is not at all challenging for him, since his vocabulary is so strong from his voracious reading. But it is a nice connection to his Latin studies. Logic: We occasionally do Mind Benders. Art of Argument was a total bust - the first few chapters are abstract and dry, and that poisoned him against it. I may try to lure into him reading the later, more concrete chapters, but this is a low priority. Literature: He free-reads constantly, and with his dad he is reading some classics. Fall included Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Great Expectations. They will choose the books for next semester - it's their thing and I (try to) keep out of it.

My 12-year-old son (started homeschooling this year, after 6th grade) likes Fred a lot. So do I, which is good, since I work through the books with him! We started this fall by going through Fractions and Decimals, topics he already covered in school but which he said he hated. I wonder when he will figure out that anytime he says he "hates" a math topic, I will promptly find a (sneaky) way for him to do more of it? When LOF taught these topics, the kid loved them! We are now on Elementary Physics, and will do Pre-Algebra Bio next. The only "flaw" of LOF is that it lacks drill that ds needs. I am a firm believer in learning math by doing lots of it. It's a language, after all! We supplement LOF with two resources: 1) We use Khan Academy if he gets stuck on a concept. I pick videos for him to watch and tell him to practice til the site says he has mastered it. This works really well for us, since when he is frustrated he gets testy with me and shuts down on my explanations. He never gets snarky with Khan. :glare: 2) I assign chapters from Saxon 7/8 each week, so he can read about concepts in another "language" and work through practice problems. Saxon 7/8 has very short chapters that teach a single method, but then drills on all the previous chapters. Getting challenged on his cumulative knowledge is what he needs, and Saxon provides it. This combo is working well for us. We are also going to throw Zaccaro's Real World Algebra into the mix starting next week.