Yes, contact the professor politely and inquire.

Yes, VT had significant improvement in two of my kids reading ability.

I tend to do spelling after they start reading. My oldest - I did spelling because you were supposed to do spelling. Not sure it made any difference. My second - I corrected his spelling as he made mistakes; never did a spelling program and he's a great speller. My third - horrible spelling; dyslexic - doing All About Spelling very slowly as well as picking SOME of the misspelled words out of her stories, Spelling is slowly coming along. My fourth - doing very basic phonics based spelling as we try to learn to read; dyslexic If I were to start over, I'd do a lot of copywork and correct spelling as they go along. If there are a lot of spelling mistakes, especially of common words or no retention of things corrected, then I'd do a more formal program of spelling such as All About Spelling.

Yes, teenagers need socialization, but will they get it in school? Maybe. We have found social outlets in our homeschool co-op, church, boy scouts, ultimate frisbee. I'm not sure what your area offers, but school is often still not a time for socialization. It sounds like your area is lacking in other opportunities.

I've taken to buying all my sets used on amazon/ebay and have been very satisfied and saved money.

Brave Writer Expository Essay

The logic chapter.

As far as I know AoPS doesn't care if he finishes. If you have asked them for a grade then it would definitely effect this, but otherwise I can't think of anything. I'm sure they'd let you sign up for future classes if you choose. First I'd email AoPS and ask how long you have access to the problems so you don't run out of time to finish. I've had a son travel for the last few weeks of class. I simply downloaded the transcript to my computer and copied all the problems. I entered no answer and show the solution to all of the problems so that I could then copy all of the solutions. He did it later on our own timeframe. You'll miss any proof feedback this way, but you can still finish everything else on your own.

First of all take a deep breath. I'd call Home School Legal Defense Association (even if you are not a member). They will oftentimes call the school on your behalf and explain that you legally graduated your daughter under x state's laws. It is to the benefit of all homeschoolers if they deal with it rather than you jump through hoops and then this school makes every other homeschooler do the same. Even if HSLDA is working on it, I'd go ahead and see what you can do on your end so that maybe you can get a quick answer just by having a local person verify your paperwork. Many people are simply uneducated on homeschool laws and they ask for inappropriate things from us.

Agreeing with the original poster. The regular online course for the schoolyear starts about July and goes through Dec. of the next year (18 months). In Dec. they put these on sale for $99 with only 12 months access and non-traditional schoolyear timing. My 13 year old dyslexic is just finishing life science - she watches the videos. We tried doing some of the book, but dropped the book in favor of just the videos. She does the tests by her choice as I've told her she doesn't have to. She has learned a ton from just the video instruction - daily ( about 180 days) of 30 min videos. Her younger brother who is also dyslexic has also loved watching the videos with her. I just signed up for Earth and Space for her and BJU 6th grade for him to watch streaming. He started the 6th grade today and it looks very engaging.

So sorry about your diagnosis. Agreeing with others that it is hard to plan for too far in advance. I'd tend to make a generic plan - middle school covers these subjects and high school needs to do 4 credits math, English, science, etc. I'd then list multiple options per subject with some pros/cons of each and then maybe he can decide with the input of each student. It's very hard to predict how independent each child will be years from now, how fast they'll progress, where their passions will lie, etc. It's also an unknown as to what companies will still exist, what new ones will be there, and how things may change. Give some big picture advice - for instance allow each child to pick some of their own studies, allow input as to difficulty of schedule, allow student to progress through math at a rate reasonable to that student - not some predetermined rate, etc. I'd look at some online courses in which your husband or tutor can oversee, but won't have to do all the teaching. I'd also try to find some things that are more flexible so that no everything is an online class. Maybe history can be reading good books or watching Teaching Company videos. It can be very hard to keep up with multiple online courses.

I think it's useful for everyone to know some basic statistics. It's a part of all sorts of fields outside of STEM. It's also way to easy for the world to lie to you with statistics if you don't understand them.

I agree that the online classes are fantastic. It sounds as if your son already has a foundation of essay writing and therefore could move to some of the more advanced classes.

Help for High School is a great place to start. It is basically both the Kidswrite Intermediate class and the Expository Essay class in a pdf format. What you miss compared to the online class is the teacher feedback and then incentive to do the homework for an outside teacher rather than mom. At my home, this is a huge thing to miss. I actually bought Help for High School thinking I could teach it myself - it is written in a great format to easily self-teach, but I can't do justice to giving my student feedback. I find the feedback from the online BW teachers to be invaluable. After putting my first son in the online class, I thought I might be able to teach my second son - NO! I put him in the online class as well. For someone who can already write essays, you might be able to skip this and move on to something else, but I do think the skills gained here are fantastic.

Incentives are a great way to reward hard work. It's also real life (my husband works for the pay :closedeyes: ) I don't think everything in life should be rewarded for doing, but I also don't have a problem offering some rewards. I do try to be very careful about offering food rewards - occasional is fine, but too often just builds bad eating habits. At my home, my nine year old does reading for marbles. Each marble is 1 minute of computer time. I tell him for school he HAS to do x amount of reading and I'll reward him with a few marbles. In addition, he can do EXTRA reading to earn more marbles. The marbles don't add up very fast, but if he works hard he can gain quite a few. I also give some incentives such as he's been told that if he finishes his current math workbook before Christmas, he'll get a bonus of 60 marbles. He also gets one marble per math page. He'll then save up his marbles to have extra computer time some day.

I think you can join the Center for LIt classes mid-year. (Email if it's not on their website.) You can do the writing portion or opt to only do the discussion class without the writing. I have no idea how the writing portion is, buy my kids have learned a lot from the discussion classes.

The tiles serve a big purpose... and they are a hassle. As others have said, I also love the app so that the tiles are all laid out for us, we don't have to clean up each word, the tutor built words are built in. You can only buy the level you need - no need to buy prior levels.

Reefgazer. If you have questions about the Illustrated Guide after you get it, feel free to private message me. I've been teaching it to small groups (4-6 students at a time) for the past 6 years.

I use the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry. Easy to pick and choose labs. Expensive to do the entire book. You could carefully choose your labs and limit your materials to keep costs down.

HSBC has discounts on the digital BW products all the time (or most of the time). Ask your friend if you can borrow Partnership Writing or some copies of the Arrow. :closedeyes: There is a weekly blog post that you can sign up for by email. It has activities weekly that you can get in your email that can give you ideas of how to pursue writing with BW ideas. This has lots of good ideas for this age group. If you are interested in any online BW classes then I'd recommend Write for Fun (3 week class) or Just So Stories - I've had kids do both.

I'd make it simple and count any 3-5 credit college course as one credit high school course. (In real life high school, different 1 credit course take different amounts of time). I did not weight any of my grades - just listed as AP or DE on the transcript. I actually emailed the college we were most interested in and asked if I should weight my grades. They said "NO". They said the weighted grades and honors designations are most helpful in differentiating students within a single school.

By the way, for the PA homeschoolers AP Calc BC class, it starts at the beginning and does all of calculus rather than picking up at the end of calc 1. Many of the students in the class have previously taken calculus and therefore the beginning of the class is review and more struggle after Christmas with a lot of new material.

I would assume there is a big difference between the workload of Calc AB and Calc BC - BC covers more material. I've stumbled across the resources that go with the Larson text that PA homeschoolers uses for Calculus. There are worked solutions for all the odd problems in the textbook as well as videos for each section in all the chapters. Some of the videos are great, but I find many to be dull and not so helpful. There are also some online chapter tests on calcchat for the Larson text. (just google Larson calculus videos and calcchat). Between DO and PAH, I think PAH will probably do better test prep - but you can do test prep on your own. I think there are some good test prep books out there and the past years FRQ are online with solutions. I'm personally very torn as to the direction to take boy #2 for calculus. My oldest did PAH Calc BC and scored a 5. I'm leaning toward having my second son do DO calculus and then teaching the BC portion myself. The biggest thing I can't do is the calculator work, but I'm sure I can learn - I know I can do the rest.

I agree that the main things that need to be learned are calculator problems for the AP test and FRQs. I think the free response questions are not too hard in that all the past year's problems and solutions are available. I think a good test prep book will teach MCQ as well as how to use the calculator for certain problems. I can teach it by hand, but haven't ever bothered to learn to use a graphing calculator.

Agreeing with the comments about PA Homeschooling Calc BC. Felt that there was a LOT of busiwork (thought we did come from AoPS). Felt the class was inflexible. We'd ask if he could access the Monday homework on Friday so that he'd have the opportunity to do it over the weekend - NO. It must be done on Monday was the answer. The class did prepare well for the AP exam and prepared well for a teacher that had different expectations than my student. If students had questions they were expected to post them to a class email loop and another student or TA would answer them. When my son would have a question, it would be a very theoretical question, but he wanted to understand all the theory before moving on. He'd post it to the email loop and NOONE would touch it. He'd email the teacher directly (even though she'd often answer the email loop questions) and he'd get an answer that she would get back to him in about a week since she's so busy writing recommendations,etc. This happened multiple times that he'd wait about 10 days to get an answer from the teacher - very aggravating. I will say that all the other student's questions were answered quickly as they were basic calculus questions that other student could answer or the teacher could quickly answer. The teacher would "complain" in her daily messages about students cheating on FRQs, but would also say that she was not going to tell the parents. As a parent, reading this it was aggravating as I'd want to be told if my son was not doing his own work.