This is a little more structured that what you may be looking for but for career exploration in middle school, we use Glencoe's Exploring Careers. The text itself is pretty basic and not as useful as it could be. But at the end of each chapter there is a career cluster that lists a lot of different jobs in one area. We have ds13 choose one and research its salary, education requirements, working conditions etc. It helped ds17 figure out what he may like or may not like to do when he did it. An example of a career cluster and careers:Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources - Agricultural Scientist, Aquaculturist, Deckhand,Ecologist, Farmer, Forester, Game Warden, Geologist

One tradition that has always been a hit at our house is to dispense with the traditional meal. Instead each family member picks one food they like (just about anything goes) and we fix those foods for Thanksgiving dinner. One year we had: ice cream, jello, fish sticks and tacos. The next it was BBQ meatballs, shepherds pie, salad and fish sticks. I wonder what we'll have this year? :lol:

My boys loved playing with nuts and bolts at this age. Screwing the nut on was a great fine motor exercise.

I don't see why it wouldn't work. But I wouldn't have the younger skip the first 10 lessons. I'd let the older sit out until they were done. Give it a try and if it doesn't work you can move the older to WWE2. I don't think there's been a year yet that I didn't change something mid-stream...

I checked the book out at AMS and it looks pretty cool. Could be a fun way to approach geometry.

I think a lot of it is what people want to teach and what people want to take. But there are also issues like how academic the classes should be (Biology can be all fun and experimenty or it can be more meaty). I'd also ask about the teachers. Some are better at some subjects than others and some can take negative feedback and use it to improve but that can be tricky. You don't want to tick off someone so they leave. It depends a lot on the culture in your group. You also might ask about logistics: timliness, organization, communication, etc. Some of us (not mentioning any names here) are greatly affected by those areas. Good luck!

Is an outside course an option? We reached a point, when my boys were in 5th and 9th grades, when math at home just didn't work any more and we put them each in a math class at a university style school. It was a life saver for us.

I put my 8th grader in Cursive Writing in the Handwriting Without Tears series. He never really got to cursive (how did we miss that?!?!) and needs to at least be able to read it. It's working well for us.