I have some thoughts after having used TOG for years. First off, as you have mentioned, you need to pick and choose from all the work suggested. So my first impulse was to say that perhaps you were still picking and choosing too much. BUT, I now have a different perspective of workload for my 9th grader (I'm not sure what grade your child is in, but you said rhetoric level so I am assuming high school age.) My dd, 9th grade, is taking her first online course this year. She is taking AP World History and the workload is huge. Just huge. For example, last week she had to read a chapter, define 20 terms (not just quick sentences, but whole paragraphs defining the 5 W's), answer 7 questions about the chapter (again, loooong answers. One of the questions was a "compare/contrast 2 civilizations" question - the answer was at least 3 paragraphs), read an article about migration patterns and write a 500 word essay, read another article about Confucius and answer 8 questions, write another 500 word paper on lifestyles of the civilization she was studying, create a power point presentation, and do a map. This was all due in one week. On my own, doing TOG, I never would have assigned that much work. I never would have thought it could have all been done. Now, however, she is doing it. Looking back I was just not assigning enough time for the level of work that she should have been doing. I thought 1 hour a day for history was a lot. At the high school level it isn't. So instead of telling you to limit what you are picking, I would suggest adjusting your expectations and up the amount of time your student spends on history. It will get done if the time is put in.

Maybe not every day life, but certainly topics that come up ever day. Department of Homeland Security Debate about National ID cards Guatanamo Bay Prison Debate about waterboarding/torture - should U.S. use it?

My daughter has a horrible softball coach. I say "has" because he is the only game in town for her age group and we are stuck with him. We've had him for 3 years now, both for rec. and travel team. (My daughter is now 11.) I posted once about him .... he's arrogant, plays favorites, rude and lazy. She has also learned a grand total of ZERO from him. Great, huh? We have to go outside the team for proper coaching, and we view it as playing time only. She wanted to quit last year after an especially bad time. We decided to stick it out and complete the season inspite of him. I didn't want her to quit when she was down, or because someone was being a jerk. There will *always* be jerks, and if you quit your path every time you run into one you will never get anywhere! Best decision we have made in a long time. She now is less intimidated by people because she knows there can be a path made around them. As far as the practice going long ...... perhaps he did forget he looked at his phone. I know when I get busy enough and people ask me a question that requires a routine response I don't even register I've said it. He could have lost track again in the following 15 minutes. Also, I would have loved some practices to go long for my daughter. Her practices, which were 2 hours long, were a joke. I would have appreciated a coach who worked to make them a better team, even if it went long. Sometimes that can show a dedicated coach. As an aside, I was telling someone once how much sports has been a positive influence in my daughter's life. He responded with "Depends completely on whether you get a good coach or not." In my experience that is not true. A bad coach can teach you a lot about character, it just takes a lot of intervention by the parent to teach it.

During the school year they are up at 6:30. During the summer .... 8:00 at the latest but usually closer to 7:30. Don't get sucked into the fact that some (a lot) of kids sleep until noon in the summer. That's just unnecessarly lazy. My daughters two best friends both do this and it makes making plans very annoying. We'll call around 11:00 to go to the beach/pool whatever when it is a gorgeous day and the mothers will say they are still sleeping! And then they stay up until late late late because they aren't tired. My daughter will get text messages from them at 1:00 a.m. Blech. Not a good precedent to set.

My daughter is 13, and is about a quarter of the way through Saxon 2. She has always done well with math. I started to actually track her grades in a spreadsheet formula, which has been a motivation for her. She decided she was tired of getting 1 or 2 wrong each time and just missing an A+, so she set a goal of 100%. Since that goal, she has gotten 100% correct for 12 lessons in a row. She does the lesson completely on her own. I am not strong in math, and with her have never had to help out, so basically she is teaching herself (we also do not use the Dive cd's). She says some of the questions are "kinda hard" but mostly easy. Should I bump up her math to something that is more of a challenge? Or should I add a science that has a strong math component to round things out? I don't want to speed things up too fast because math is so cumulative, but I feel I should look into ways of accelerating her math to keep her challenged.

That's it! Thank you!!

There was a really good website for learning to read notes. It was called (if I am remembering correctly!) "Note ... something-or-other" I used to use if for my daughter all the time, but haven't used it in years because she (finally) learned the notes, but now she is teaching a younger child and would love to have her student use this site to drill notes. Thanks!

Okay, I knew as soon as I posted this question I would find some info:glare: The case involved the father (age 43) and the 19 year old babysitter. She was staying over because of bad weather, and she says he raped her. He says it was consensual. He waived a jury trial and was sentenced and served 3 years with 3 years probation. Any opinions on how to handle this? Do I not socialize at all with this family? Or do I just make sure that I am always there if my daughter goes over? So far I have me the mother and the two daughters, and they are very sweet and nice. Do I tell my daughter what the deal is?

thanks for all the suggestions --- I have checked the court records, and it confirms all the factual details (dates of appeals, date of conviction, etc.) I guess I was looking for some story details. A lot of times a newspaper account will carry both sides of what happened. I find it odd that there aren't any actual newspaper accounts. Pamela in TX --- I get what you are saying. Just the bare facts makes it something you want to stay far away from. I'm just not sure how I am going to explain this all to my daugher (she is 11).

My daughter played softball on a travel team all last summer, and got kind of friendly with one of the girls on the team. The mother and I spent a lot of time chatting, and we even went over their house twice to swim. The husband was never around, so I just assumed they were divorced. The family seemed really nice and fun to be around. Very average, middle-class family. Turns out that the husband was actually in jail for "rape and indecent assault on a person over 14". He was a pretty well-known anesthesiologist, but was, according to local gossip, caught fooling around with the nanny, and, again according to gossip, was completely framed (!??!) He just got out, and the wife is taking him back. They all went away on vacation to reconnect as a family. I haven't told my daughter any of this, and I know she will be on the same team again this summer and will want to hang out with the girl again. Obviously going over to their house without me is completely out of the question, but I felt I needed to get some more info on the story, without the gossip factor. Not to sound cold, but I wanted more information so I could make a decision about how much to hang around with this family. I don't want to cut off my daughters relationship with her friend because her friend is innocent in all this, but then again, I need to make a responsible decision for my daughter. I could just have her over to our house all the time, but we don't have a pool, and it will seem odd to always insist sitting around our house when they have the whole pool/outside bbq/flat-screen t.v/hot tub party set up. They are always having pool parties. I tried to google it. I can't find anything online about it! All I find is a notice from the medical board where his license to practice medicine was revoked. It seems odd that there wouldn't be any story online from either our local paper or our more main paper. There is literally nothing but a little blurb from our main newspaper that says he was found guilty and was sent away. It was about 7 lines long. Is there a way I can find out more information? I know that even newspaper accounts can be biased, but I would like some background on what happened. (I was just reading my post over and I realize I sound like a big ole gossip hound and snoop, and believe me, I can be ... but this time I do just want to get some more info because I know I am going to have to make some decisions in the next few months and I just want to know what I am dealing with.)

This is the way I do it: For the first lesson, we do all of the practice set, and all of the problem set. For the next lesson, we do the practice set only. Then for the third, all of the practice set and all of the problem set. And so on. This assumes that my dd gets no more than 2 wrong when she is doing the whole lesson. More than 2 wrong, and she has to do the whole lesson the next day. Benefits= I don't have to pick and choose which problems to do. She is motivated to do a good job because a good score = less work!

We have been using Saxon since the very beginning, and now my daughter is in 8th grade doing Saxon 2. We have had zero problems with it and I feel she has learned a lot from it. I have seen this comment before, but my experienc with Saxon is that it presents a lesson, gives anywhere from 5-10 practice problems pertaining to that lesson, and then about another 5 similiar problems within the 30 question problem set. So you do get more than just what they ask in the practice set. And you will get more from that lesson the next day, and the next, and the next....... We have just started to prep for SAT, so I wanted to address that issue also. After getting 100% correct on almost all her Saxon lessons, my daughter and I approached SAT math like it would be easy. WRONG!! SAT math is a whole 'nuther animal. SAT math covers a very basic level of math, but in order to keep the playing field even, they specifically write the questions so it takes a lot of ingenuity to find what is usually a very simple solution. This way kids who are concentrating on math and science majors don't have an unfair advantage over ones who are concentrating on English and humanities. The purpose of the SAT math is to test how good you are at finding the simple solutions. The test writers pride themselves on changing very simple math concepts into questions that are barely recognizable. Once we figured that out, we realized we had to approach SAT math in a completely different way. First my daugher reads the problem 3-4 times (it always looks like a concept she has never even seen before), then try to identify what TYPE of problem it is. What are they asking for?? Once you identify the type (which is the hard part), then you can have a plan for solving it. If you remember that a lot of SAT problems put you in a situation that you have never seen before, and you know the tricks, you will be fine. Even if you have the best traditional math curriculum, don't assume you will find SAT a breeze. It is a different ball game.

Honk if you love Uranus

Wow! that was fast! Thanks for the advice. They are considering going to the police, they just didn't want to take it to that level if they didn't have to. I'm hoping the kid eventually confesses, but the level of premediation that went into this, as well as the violent nature of the email, leads me to believe that this kid has a hard skin and won't crack under a mother's glare.

We have a small but (I thought) closely knit homeschool group of kids ages 10 - 15. Friday night somebody from the group opened a Facebook account, sent out a few very nasty emails (lots of swearing, insults, and a few references to "I hope you die") to 3 kids who also have Facebook accounts, and then deactivated the account. I know it was someone from our small group of kids because the emails mentioned a few details that only kids in this group would know about. The person who sent them signed the name of a kid that had absolutely nothing to do with this. They just wanted to make him look bad. The named child's mother, though, is obviously upset that her son's name is being attached to this. The mother of one of the girls who received a very nasty email is also upset that her daughter would receive such a nasty and intimidating message. Is there a way to find out who sent them? I know you have to provide Facebook with a valid email address to activate your account, and I know when you deactivate your account they do not erase your info. Does the receiving computer have a way to find out the address of the computer that sent the info? The whole group is shaken up by this, and I feel it is a real trust issue with the kids going forward. I also feel that the innocent kid will never really have his name cleared until we find out who actually did it.

Thanks for all your suggestions. I love the internet for all the educational stuff (I don't think I could homeschool without it!), but I HATE the nasty stuff that is so prevelant.

We held a dance for the teens/tweens in our homeschool group, and my daughter, age 13, was especially excited. About half the group were kids we didn't know, so there were lots of new friends made. The best part, though, was when one boy (quite cute, btw!) that my daughter didn't know walked up to her and said, as his opening line, "So, do you watch the Discovery Channel?" This type of thing could only happen at a homeschool dance! Kinda along the lines of "Seen any good documentaries lately?"

Because the website "was" for an educational institution before it switched, would K-9 still block it?

Okay, I figured out how to edit the website so you can't click on it. Sorry for the confusion

Sorry! I didn't mean to make the bad website clickable. I just wanted to list it so you could see that it was supposed to be a normal website, but somehow it switches while loading to a bad website. DO NOT CLICK ON THE WEBSITE!

My daugher, who was having a sleepover, wanted to know if they could rent a certain movie. I typed into google "family movie reviews" to search for it. The first website listed was fine, but didn't give enough detail. The second website listed an address, (www.nelsamp.neu.edu --middleschool ....) but when I clicked on it, it switched addresses and up popped a p*rn review website, complete with disgustingly graphic pictures!!! There was a grid of about 9 pictures. I had 4 girls crowded around the screen! I shut the computer, but I am sure they saw at least a glimpse. HOW do you avoid something like this happening!!!

My daughter will be entering 9th grade next year and I was looking into having her do an online class for this course. Any recommendations?