If you wouldn't mind sharing, what did the sellers in your case care most about, and how did your realtor find that out?

No advice, but congratulations to your daughter! Wow! What an amazing accomplishment!

Totally wouldn't be a problem for us. We would definitely defer to your preference and expertise. :thumbup: FWIW, my DS15 is going to skip chem this coming year as planned, doing physics instead, in hopes your chem class will be up and running for Fall 2018. :D

My son just finished taking LToW1 with Circe (2016-17). Renee Mathis was his instructor. I'd definitely recommend her based on our experience. (Camille Goldston is another instructor who has had positive reviews here on the board.) Mrs. Mathis is kind and encouraging, with excellent control of her classroom, high standards for her students to meet, and a gift for imparting appropriate tools to her students so they can meet those standards. Her students base their essays on "should" questions derived from books they've read, i.e., should X have done Y? She requires the books be good, classic books, from a list that she provides or other books that are approved by her in advance. (anything by Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Jack London,Shakespeare, Hemingway, etc.; books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Red Badge of Courage, The Hiding Place, Redwall series, Scarlett Letter, etc.) I'm going to copy here some info that I posted on another thread a few months ago - parts of it won't apply to your situation though so just skip those (http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/643577-time-required-for-lost-tools-of-writing-or-writing-with-skill-level-3/): My 9th grade son is taking Lost Tools of Writing 1 online in a live class through Circe Institute this year. The live class is one day per week for 60 minutes. For about the first half of the first semester, he spent an average of around 45 minutes to 60 minutes per week on the assignments outside of class. It was not very time-intensive. By December, the time required went up to around 60-90 minutes outside of class, most weeks, but sometimes less depending on where they were at in the essay-writing "cycle". Now that the second semester is almost over, he's spending around 2.5 hours per week on the assignments. He typically does the assignments over one to two days per week. So it has been a very gradual ramping up in time spent, and not overly taxing at all. (Granted, I'm not the one teaching it, but I don't see why it would take a high schooler longer than a year to get through LTOW1.) FWIW, DS is doing well in the class - his teacher has consistently provided meaningful and positive feedback about his work, so even though he still doesn't spend more than 3 to 3.5 hours per week (including the live lectures) at this point in the year, I don't think he's slacking. : ) After the first semester, realizing that DS could easily handle more writing instruction/practice, we enrolled him in an additional composition class that covers other types of academic writing and he's had no problem at all keeping up with both writing classes, plus a lit class, during his scheduled block of time for "English" each week. So I think if you wanted to supplement LTOW1 with parts of another writing program in the same year that would be do-able. LTOW1 teaches persuasive writing, of the writer's own thoughts (as opposed to researching and paraphrasing or quoting another author's thoughts). And it really is just as much a system for teaching deep thinking, and constructing and defending an argument, as it is a writing program. We'll be moving on next year and not taking LTOW level 2, but I'm happy with the deep thinking and writing invention skills he's learned with LTOW1. Next year we'll be focusing more on polishing his essay skills (because they can always be improved) and writing research papers. Literary analysis will also be another area to continue to work on. Also, some other pertinent details that I gleaned and saved during my research prior to enrolling, that I found to be accurate in our experience: Post #65 in this thread: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/515067-the-aops-of-writing/page-2 From your signature, it appears your son is 17 . . . would it bother him to be in a classroom of mostly 9th and 10th graders? (My son said that kids' ages didn't really come up much, but still.) And what writing program/curricula has he done in the past? LToW can seem overly simplistic until you get further into it. So I wonder if LToW might seem too basic to him at his age? Just something to think about. I do feel it is a great curriculum for teaching how to generate ideas of what to write about, which can be applied to any type of writing, which seems to be what you're looking for. HTH.

You're getting great suggestions already, and I don't have much to add, but I wanted to mention this website for online reading and math assessments, which they call DORA and ADAM/DOMA. I've used them in the past and was pleased with the feedback reports we received. These might help you pinpoint your daughter's current level in these subjects, see what she's mastered already and where to focus next. https://www.letsgolearn.com/lglsite/assessments/

Awesome finds! Thank you for taking the time to link and share all of these. Saving to look at these later.

:hurray: :hurray: :hurray: :party:

Yes, it is hard to decide. And German classes can be harder to find than some other languages. Big River Academy is one of the new online schools that was born out of the Landry closure. And Frau Cruz is one of the instructors who taught German previously at Landry. Good luck with your decision!

Adding this updated info here on this older thread in case anyone comes in here looking for online German class options: Frau Faith Cruz (who previously taught with Landry Academy before it closed) will be teaching German with both HSLDA Online Academy and Big River Academy for 2017-18. After reading lots of feedback here on the forum and also via PM, we've decided to enroll DS in Frau Cruz's German 1 class at HSLDA Online Academy, which meets on Mondays. (Her Big River class on Thursdays just didn't fit our schedule.) So glad to have finally reached a decision. Many thanks to all who helped.

In light of another thread currently going on the HS board re: German curriculum/classes, and the bolded above, I just wanted to bump up this thread . . . . . . and give an FYI to anyone who may be interested to know that Frau Cruz will be teaching German with HSLDA Online Academy and also with Big River Academy for 2017-18. After reading lots of feedback here on the forum and also via PM, we've decided to enroll DS in Frau Cruz's German 1 class at HSLDA Online Academy, which meets on Mondays. (Her Big River class on Thursdays just didn't fit our schedule.) So glad to have finally reached a decision. Many thanks to all who helped.

Oklahoma State University offers self-paced online high-school level German courses. I haven't personally used it, but it has been mentioned a lot here on the forum, so maybe you could search and see what you think of the feedback. https://germanonline.okstate.edu/

Thanks for sharing your experience! I had looked into signing up my son for her summer session, but unfortunately the schedule didn't work for us. The instructor seemed extremely organized and was very responsive to my questions, though. I'm glad it worked out so well for your daughter.

We used and liked Galore Park's So You Really Want to Learn Science series for middle school grades. There's level 1 and level 2. I found the student and teacher books used on Amazon. Completely secular and they touch on all the main fields of science.

Gishy Goo worked better for my son than wax. Pricey but so worth it. It's silicone. Ortho gave him one tube that lasted a long time. When he eventually needed more we ordered it from Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Gishy-Goo-One-Patient-Kit/dp/B002EA8RH2/ref=sr_1_1_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1497296500&sr=8-1&keywords=Gishy+goo

In my experience, Pearson can and will sell you any or all of the Miller-Levine books - student, teacher, labs, assessments (tests), etc. - just not the digital access subscription. I personally didn't feel like we could have used anything digital in addition to the books. Because it's such a full program with just the books, we wouldn't have had time to do it all with the digital stuff too.

My son just finished Computer Applications with FundaFunda Academy. We thought it was excellent - relevant and current content, well-organized, great feedback/corrections, and reasonably priced. https://www.fundafundaacademy.com/product/computer-fundamentals/

Thank you for this.

Sue, if I may ask, what did you use with your son for Algebra 2 and beyond? I appreciate you sharing your BTDT experience with all of us!

I was curious, so I just now looked at the course description for the bio class at AIM Academy at the link above . . . to see what it covers that other standard bio courses don't. I couldn't find anywhere that said it prepares a student for SAT2 and CLEP . . . unless I'm totally blind . . . or the course description has been changed since this was posted. Anyone know? I don't think having "Pre-AP" in the title necessarily equates automatically to SAT2/CLEP-readiness. It just says "This course is designed to prepare students for the rigor of college biology and/or AP Biology." I.e., this course could be taken with the intent of college bio or AP bio as the next step, i.e. this is a typical college-prep biology course. Unless I am misunderstanding, which is entirely possible.

No, but I think he could at this point with a little self-prep.

My 9th grade son just finished the second semester of Dr. Underwood's biology class with FundaFunda Academy, so I wanted to chime in with our experience. :) DS has had a terrific time in the class, has learned so much, and he loves Dr. Underwood. He switched into her class at the beginning of the second semester, after a series of events that caused us to have to find a different provider than the one we had used for the first semester. It turned out to be a fantastic opportunity. Dr. Underwood's class is of a higher quality (IMHO) than the other provider's bio class, so I'm glad he got to switch! Dr. Underwood truly is a gifted instructor and DS enjoyed her video lectures a lot. Although there isn't a live face-to-face component to the online course, Dr. Underwood comes across as having a friendly, warm personality and she was always prompt and helpful in responding to any emails. She also gave DS detailed and specific feedback on his work. Everything mentioned up-thread about this class and how it works was in line with our experience, so I won't repeat those details. Bottom line, it was a very positive experience for us and I hope my son will have the opportunity to take another class with Dr. Underwood in the future.

Wow, amazingly talented! Way to go!!! And Happy Birthday! Thanks for sharing this with us.

We're using Derek Owens. It is self-paced, though, with no set schedule, no live class. I can see why some families may prefer the structure, deadlines, and "peer pressure" or "competitive" (for lack of a better word) nature of a live class. There are times when math falls to the side here because of competing priorities. (DS has been slow to get his DO geometry course finished. :glare: ) Have you looked at Wilson Hill Academy? That's live classes and probably what we'd be using if we weren't using DO. BJU should be fine though too. And if that fits your schedule that's something also.

I have no experience with either of them, but I will share, in case you aren't aware already, a tidbit I learned when I was looking into CLRC's math program a couple of years ago. The math instructor at CLRC (Lisa Angle) at one time wrote material for Math-U-See. FWIW. We ended up not using CLRC for math, but I had the impression that the text used in the Alg 2 course was less a source of the instruction and more just a source for assignments, if that makes sense. (Although Bittinger isn't an unknown author. I believe that book is fairly widely used in schools.) You might want to contact her directly to clarify.

My 9th grade son is taking Lost Tools of Writing 1 online in a live class through Circe Institute this year. The live class is one day per week for 60 minutes. For about the first half of the first semester, he spent an average of around 45 minutes to 60 minutes per week on the assignments outside of class. It was not very time-intensive. By December, the time required went up to around 60-90 minutes outside of class, most weeks, but sometimes less depending on where they were at in the essay-writing "cycle". Now that the second semester is almost over, he's spending around 2.5 hours per week on the assignments. He typically does the assignments over one to two days per week. So it has been a very gradual ramping up in time spent, and not overly taxing at all. (Granted, I'm not the one teaching it, but I don't see why it would take a high schooler longer than a year to get through LTOW1.) FWIW, DS is doing well in the class - his teacher has consistently provided meaningful and positive feedback about his work, so even though he still doesn't spend more than 3 to 3.5 hours per week (including the live lectures) at this point in the year, I don't think he's slacking. : ) After the first semester, realizing that DS could easily handle more writing instruction/practice, we enrolled him in an additional composition class that covers other types of academic writing and he's had no problem at all keeping up with both writing classes, plus a lit class, during his scheduled block of time for "English" each week. So I think if you wanted to supplement LTOW1 with parts of another writing program in the same year that would be do-able. LTOW1 teaches persuasive writing, of the writer's own thoughts (as opposed to researching and paraphrasing or quoting another author's thoughts). And it really is just as much a system for teaching deep thinking, and constructing and defending an argument, as it is a writing program. We'll be moving on next year and not taking LTOW level 2, but I'm happy with the deep thinking and writing invention skills he's learned with LTOW1. Next year we'll be focusing more on polishing his essay skills (because they can always be improved) and writing research papers. Literary analysis will also be another area to continue to work on.