Since I regularly get graduation announcements from extended family, I will send one also. It's more a way to stay in touch with my family. It will be a simple announcement, probably with a picture. It may or may not have future college information on it. We are not trolling for gifts, but I know some will send.

My box-checker has liked Derek Owens online classes - we do it as half-price with me doing all the support/grading. He has also liked watching Teaching Company videos. I basically have told him to watch a video a day - it doesn't matter too much about which subject. He has requested that I by everything from certain lecturers. I don't assign anything more to the task other than watch the video - it's amazing how much he picks up. edited to say - he really does it at double pace (not half-pace); it's my daughter that moves slowly.

I wouldn't put anything on it at all. There are people that want to give graduation gifts - that's fine and you can use it toward the trip if you want. There are others that specifically want to donate toward a mission trip. Some will do both, others neither. Let them choose. You are simply inviting them to a graduation celebration, not soliciting gifts.

Thanks everyone. Looking through all the courses makes me excited to start adding them to our studies. Bonus - I picked up the 84 lecture History of United States dvd set for about $5 last year at out homeschool sale.

I realize you haven't skipped trig and the is why you can move on to calculus. However, AoPS does go much more in depth and this would be "helpful" for calculus. If you are going at your own pace rather than with a class, you can always back off and learn more trig if needed along the way. (Not sure if you are committed to another's schedule or not).

I agree that level 4 is tough. For better or worse, I separated out the spelling and the reading in Barton with my child. I move along in Barton and teach all the spelling and reading, but keep moving as long as they can do the reading. I started using AAS for spelling. Everytime we get to a new rule, I pull out Barton and review it with the Barton tiles and the Barton specific rules. I know it's not designed this way, but has worked at my home. My daughter went through all the levels once, my son needs lots of extra review and goes through them a second time. I think it is hard to get down all the level 4 spelling rules for a long time.

Sorry, I was thinking of the logarithm chapter in the Intermediate Algebra book. In other words, make sure you know the trig (of precalc) and logarithms, which I think she's already done. I thought the precalc book was an excellent book, by the way.

If you want to move on to calculus, I'd spend the three months doing as much of the AoPS precalc book as you can. Concentrate on the trig and logarithm chapters.

Thanks everyone. This gives me a lot to look over and think about. I'll have to pick through the information and courses and then I can come back and ask more questions.

At some point, you have to determine what your priorities/goals are. I think it is important to not exhaust him and make sure he still has fun. How do you build in fun? Don't know - maybe schedule it. At this hour or this afternoon, the priority is this fun event. At some point it become very important to prioritize the fun stuff as well, especially when they struggle with a slow pace. Some kids can just get it all done and move on to the fun, others work and work and need to be told that it's okay to stop and have fun now. Also, at some point, it is beneficial to decide that it's not worth keeping up with the pace of "one year's worth" in one year. Some pacing you might have control of and other pacing may be set by outside sources. I have to let go of how long it takes and just remember to simply keep taking the next step.

Yes, it's been a constant struggle. As you think you are just getting past one hurdle another appears. The "2E-ness" doesn't go away. As the kids learn to deal with accommodations, it presents a new set of challenges. While I tend to push and then back off with my oldest, my daughter tolerates a more constant push. At the moment, my struggle with her is more figuring out how best to accommodate her as I think I'm teaching her as well as can be done. My little guy is getting pushed hard right now, but if anything he's driving that as he wants to learn to read and is working really hard. It's a constant battle to break it down into small enough steps for him as he just doesn't learn as others do. The NP said the same thing - that is raw scores in certain areas were "normal", watching the process of how he got there was very much not the way "typical" people got to the same point. It's a struggle to figure out how best to teach him.

I don't think their is one right answer. I mostly teach to their strengths. This keeps them learning. At some points in life, I've felt like we can work on weaknesses a little everyday and make progress. Sometimes I go in bigger chunks of time like work hard on something specific for a week, or weeks, or months and then back off. At some point, I always back off for a period of time, just to give them a break as well as sometimes time matures their brains. This year, I've pushed my oldest (11th grade) hard all year and really challenged him is his areas of learning disabilities. It's been worthwhile in that he has leaned that he CAN do it, but it's been challenging. Next year, I'm going to intentionally back off and let him learn to his strengths and topics he wants to study (more math). I will push intermittently on some writing projects, but mostly plan to teach to his strengths.

I already own a lot of Great Courses, but they are all math, science, engineering and some of Vandivier's lectures. What are some of the best history courses out there? Also do you have a preference between audio and video?

I started thinking of my 2E kids as having specific strengths after reading the Dyslexic Advantage. When they process the information differently from others it makes certain academic tasks more difficult, but they often shine in another area compared to average. My kids are certainly this way.

I hear you. :confused1: With my 16 yo highly gifted, severely dysgraphic son I go back and forth. Same with my other kids that are younger. I struggle with what is best. I tend to go back and forth, usually intentionally. I'll push for awhile and then I'll back off and just let him learn however and whatever he wants. Certain details I've just given up on saying it's no longer worth the effort when he doesn't really need that piece (like writing lower case letters). This year (11th grade) I intentionally pushed and it's been a struggle (but I'd do it again). He needed to learn that he could do certain workloads and overcome certain struggles. At the same time, I don't think it's worthwhile to always push - it just leads to frustration and stress. I am going to let his senior year be more to his learning style - push some, but mostly just let him learn how he learns best (not on paper). I'll continue to push some, but all my instincts say that I need to just let him learn his way for awhile again. It's a hard juggling act as I try to prepare him for college. I'm also trying to teach him how to get/use the accommodations he needs as he'll continue to need them in college. As my 16 yo has dramatically improved in areas of weakness, I thought his schoolwork would become easier. However, if anything it's been harder as he's ready for the higher challenge but has to work everyday to work around is learning difficulties. I'm afraid my 12 yo is going down the same path of it becoming harder as she gets older. She is dyslexic/dysgraphic and listens to all her books rather than reading them. She is capable of reading so that doesn't limit her paperwork. I thought as she got older the reading and writing would improve, but it remains a great challenge. She reads for fun, but listens to all her schoolwork. She's a very gifted writer, but as the quantity of writing increases it's become much more difficult for her and she wants me to scribe. I sigh. I think it will be a tough road into high school with her. If I had to make a guess, I'd say she's headed toward an English major which will be very interesting to navigate with her challenges. I just had a long discussion with the psych about my 9 yo. He said, no matter how good they get at reading it will always be a disability since their brains simply process it differently. It's a tough road, but it gives them strengths that others don't have. As I like to say, I think following your instincts as a mom is always good even though we tend to question ourselves especially when comparing to others.

... long response about math specifics in your other thread, but here's some general thoughts. I have four kids, three of them are 2E - my 16yo, 12yo, and 9yo. Keep teaching. Separate out the pieces of their learning as much as you can. For instance, just because my son couldn't write his numbers (at all) didn't mean that I couldn't teach him multiplication. I know part of math is learning to write it out, but they became very different skills at my home. Keep a balance - spend time just teaching in the way they learn; also spend time teaching skills they NEED to learn. Follow your instincts and realize that when they are getting frustrated it is often for a good reason - like you are pushing too hard for something they are just not ready for. Accommodate as needed and separate out that component that needs to be worked on to do separately. I talk very openly with my kids about how each child is created individually. Their brains are wired differently than many other people. This makes them highly gifted in some areas, but makes it more difficult to learn in a traditional way in other areas. This generally will always be a problem for them, but often can learn to work around these "weaknesses". It causes them to look at the world differently which often brings a much needed different perspective into the mix.

I'm a big proponent of using what works for you no matter what others say. I know you know how to teach math and can tell if your son understands it. Go with your instinct on what is best for him. You can go back and fill in later if you missed something or need to go deeper. I'd ease into the higher level problem solving if you are hesitant about that - you're usually hesitant for good reason. With learning disabilities, I've learned that sometimes I need to push and other times, I need to back off. If your son is getting frustrated, it's probably for good reason. I so much understand the slow to learn keyboarding as well. Everyone want to just say that if your son is dysgraphic, he just needs to learn to type. It's not that easy. Learning to keyboard was incredibly hard. Now my son can type as fast as he can think in words so at least it's not his typing ability holding him back anymore - just the language ability. Graphing calculator might be very helpful. I'm now going through this process with my next 2E child. My daughter is severely dyslexic, dysgraphic and has been very slow to learn arithmetic skills of order, but she has great math logic. It's interesting how much she in now learning with AoPS. Again we are doing it all orally, with me scribing some of her answers. She then has to do alcumus independent of me to prove that she can do the math. Her disabilities are with reading and writing, but she is a natural at language and has no trouble dictating to me - very different from my oldest. My fourth is also 2E - 9 year old struggling to learn to read while above grade level in math (doing all the word problems orally). It'll be interesting to see where everyone goes. Hope you find your path with your son.

Thoughts especially about the bolded... Yes to do the challenging math, you must learn how to think exactly. However, I'd argue the intertwining of the process is complicated especially in the 2E kids. My son could do all the AoPS math in his head and did not write any math until calculus. It was very difficult for him to "tell" me step by step the process of the math by dictation. He was getting all the problems correct so obviously he could "see" the math in his head, but translating that to word/figures was hard. For him, the process gelled as he began to write out proofs for USAMTS as well as number theory proofs. Initially he'd be given the feedback that he was not showing all the steps or all the cases, but that quickly improved. IF your son can do the math accurately, I'm not sure it's a problem to continue to accelerate him in math while working at an easier level (or harder) to learn how to show every step of the problem. The combination of my son's writing ability having improved and his mathematics getting harder has forced him to learn how to write it out. On a day to day homework level, his math looks like chicken scratch and he only writes enough to keep it straight in his head, but he regularly has to write out specific problems with all the steps for a few assignments and tests. It takes a tremendous amount more effort for him to write it out compared to just learning the theory, but his written explanations are spot-on. Therefore, I'd argue that you MIGHT be able to separate the speed at which you teach the components of math.

Ruth, Your son sounds a lot like mine. I haven't read all the responses so I'm going to give some first thoughts - mostly my story and come back later and reread the rest of this thread. My son is now 16 and has struggled with 2E difficulties - highly gifted in math, severely dysgraphic. In middle school, he tested >99.9% in math, >99.9% in reading comprehension, and 1st percentile in writing components, also slow processing speed. At the time he did not know all his lower case letters and had a hard time writing anything - had to think about how to form every letter of his name. We were spending every day practicing how to write your name and address small enough to fit on a line to be able to fill out a form. He did a lot of copywork in very small chunks. He learned tons of grammar through copywork and reading. At the same time he won a four year full tuition scholarship for college based on his math. I did math orally with him for years. Who says math can't be a sit on the couch and discuss type of subject. I would read every problem to him, he'd do it in his head and the tell me the answer. Later we figured out that he had difficulty reading textbook style books (slow down and read every single word), but I didn't know it at the time. We were just doing what worked since he needed to learn it orally. I would work separately on the skills of "showing your work". We mostly started doing this through math competitions in which he needed to write out proofs and specify each step. I would encourage you to separate out the components of his learning - the visual spacial skills of geometry, the step by step skills of algebra, the written component of math. How much can he do in his head? When does it become necessary for him to have a scribe or some other accommodation? Push the teaching at every single level, but it might be at widely discrepant levels. My son would say he couldn't translate his ideas/image into words. This made it difficult for him to dictate to me as well. It was incredibly hard for him to come up with the language to write a simple paper even when I was the scribe.. If he tried to write anything, it was obviously difficult. In the process, we figured out that my daughter needed vision therapy for convergence insufficiency. I started talking to the COVD doc about which of my other kids might need to be evaluated. His short answer was. that any kid that is not meeting their potential ought to be screened for vision problems. I talked and asked questions for hours over several meetings, but eventually became convinced that he might be able to help my son with his dysgraphia. He described my son as "lost in space:, meaning that no way to transcribe his abstract visual spacial world to the concrete. It was fascinating. We discovered that my highly intelligent kid who had phenomenal visual spacial skills in testing didn't translate to real-world visual spacial skills. If you asked him to guess with a string how wide the microwave was, he was grossly off in his estimation. He couldn't guess how many steps it'd take to walk across the room with any accuracy. If you gave him a block picture and asked him to recreate it with real blocks, he'd do the exact picture but on a different scale (and run out of blocks). He said my son probably didn't have a good feel for how far away the paper was so he made all the letters different sizes and with different pressure on the pen. We started vision therapy and did it for 30 weeks. My son did a lot of traditional VT exercises - but he also did a lot of visual spacial exercises in the real world. Take a string and guess how big the microwave, doorway, book, etc is and then go measure it and see how close your are. Do step counting - first guess how many steps to walk across the room, then how many steps to walk across the street. Lots of throw a bean bag at an object. Explaining to a teenager why he has to do all this was lots of fun! About 20 weeks into the therapy, my son picked up a pen and started writing on his own for the first time in his life. All of a sudden he no longer was having to think about how to form every letter and his writing was becoming more automatic. I credit VT for this change. My hope was that everything else would start to fall into place more easily, but the reality is that it's been a huge struggle to figure out how to overcome learning disabilities while working at a high level academically. I still scribe some, but he is doing much more of his writing now. We try to limit the amount of writing necessary because it is such a struggle. He has great difficulty writing any papers from the language side of things. He just doesn't think in words. His output has gone from sounding like an elementary kid to a college level kid in a few short years so I'm hoping it will continue to become easier. While the output is now on par of a college student, it is a huge effort to do it. He has accommodations for school at home, some accommodations for online AP classes, college board testing and will continue to need them in college. Choose the writing instrument that works for him. Decide how much math is reasonable for him to write (without too much frustration) and then scribe or do the rest orally. ... more in a bit.

Aw, I certainly understand your frustration. I'd make the time to read or listen to the book in it's entirety at some point. The problem with giving others authority to make decisions for our kids is that too often they don't make the same decisions we'd make. This can be school teachers, sports coaches, church leaders, club leaders, etc. It is both productive to learn how to deal with opinions other than those of our family as well as make the parental decision that we don't want our kids exposed to x, y, and z anymore. The homeschool mindset gives us as parents that attitude that we can/should manage what our kids are exposed to more than most other parents who feel like they have no control of what their kids are exposed to in school. I, for one, carefully choose what my kids are exposed to, often "protecting" my kids more than others, but we do have to expose them to other ideas along the way.

It's a hard to place to be when you know you need to push independence, yet they still need mom's organization. My 14 year old (freshman) is great. I can tell him do x, y, and z and do it in the next month. He can plan it out, schedule it and get it done. No problem. My 16 year old (junior) on the other hand needs lots of help managing his schedule. It's somewhat scary knowing that he needs to be more independent for college. He's becoming more independent by leaps and bounds so I hope it all comes together. I'd say follow your instincts and push the independence - choose what you want to him to sink or swim in, but choose other things that you will help manage so that he doesn't utterly fail. Push independence in smaller obtainable goals that he is allowed to fail at. Teach him there are consequences for not meeting those goals. Extracurricular decisions are a great place to definitely let them fail. I would not back off on helping him manage at the expense of failing at schoolwork, college applications, scholarship applications, etc. Rather than giving him the plan, ask what is your plan for this? Initially, I'd make them verbalize/write down the plan, but as they get better just mention that I hope you have a plan for this and back off. Ask him if he'd like to make the plan or if he needs help. Help him become more independent. For the first time in his academic career, I AM actually giving rewards for managing his time wisely enough to finish in a timely manner. I've said if you can manage your schedule and get it done in a timely manner you get rewarded, otherwise I will step in and help micromanage his time somewhat. He can ask for help as much as he wants, but this has been the push he needed to manage his time better. Overall, follow your instincts; push independence, but know some kids just need more help getting there than others. Pick areas that you allow him to fail in if he doesn't get it all together - this might be academic, extra-curricular, job, sleep, etc.Offer to support him whenever he asks. What works for one family or another child may not be the best for you and your son.

If she's in public high school, the exams may have already been ordered for the whole class. Worth asking.

I'm now teaching my third dyslexic with Barton and I've used both IEW and Brave Writer. They are on opposite ends of the spectrum as they take very different approaches. IEW feels more like Barton in that it is very systematic and structured. You have checklists and know exactly what is expected of you. For my household, this was more of a help for mom than my student. My oldest (dyslexic, severely dysgraphic) used IEW for several years. He's very analytical and liked knowing exactly what was expected, but neither of us felt he was going anywhere with it. He started to do lots of basic freewrites with Brave Writer and then taking classes through them and we saw his writing take off. He still doesn't like to write at all, but Brave Writer has brought out HIS writing voice and taught him structure along the way. My daughter is in Barton level 8 now. I started her with IEW about level 4 of Barton and she hated it. She is my word-loving, dysgraphic daughter and she felt totally stifled by IEW. She has blossomed with BW techniques and she takes her writing everywhere she goes. It's kind of fascinating since she wants me to scribe everything, but loves to write. My youngest is at the end of Barton level 4. I will do a lot of copywork, narration, dictation, freewrites, etc with him. I don't plan on trying out IEW with him as I've become a lover of Brave Writer. I do think IEW is a good program for many people and it gave me an invaluable start to teaching writing. "I" needed the structure of IEW and "I" learned a lot through the teacher and student videos about how to teach. I would have had a much harder time starting with child one in Brave Writer as I needed more structure. Hope you find your path in teaching writing.

Get someone to sit down and talk with you. Maybe go without your dd. Palate expanders are great IF you need them, but there are ways to also expand the palate somewhat with braces. Are you getting braces now, just to have to do it again later? or is this the final treatment? Yes, there are good reasons to put braces on younger kids - but not just for the asthetics at a young age and repeating when older. I think you need to take a step back and talk again about treatment options before actually starting so that everyone is on the same page.

I'd call both the high school and college board. Once you have information officially from the college board on what is allowed and deadlines, then it might be easier to get the school to do something. Good luck.