My 13 yr old daughter is also a strong reader. She is currently studying modern history; we did early modern last year. I would not recommend Story of the World 3 and 4 for a strong reader finishing middle school/starting high school. We are using the K12 series mentioned above, Human Odyssey, along with Joy Hakim's USA focused History of US series. Here's link to volume 2 of Human Odyssey, which includes the early modern period: www.amazon.com/Human-Odyssey-Vol-Holdren-Cribb/dp/1931728569 and to Hakim: www.amazon.com/History-US-Eleven-Set-Paperback/dp/0195327276/ref=la_B000APDUMU_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1512854905&sr=1-6 We also used Oxford University Press's excellent Medieval and Early Modern World series last year: global.oup.com/academic/content/series/m/medieval-and-early-modern-world-memw/?cc=us&lang=en& I have found these three series to be excellent resources at this level. My dd loves the less formal narrative tone of Hakim, but it looks like you might be outside the US so this might be of less interest to your dd. I have her also reading volume 3 of Human Odyssey this year to cover history outside the US. For early modern history last year, the 5 volumes of the Medieval and Early Modern World series were also particularly interesting for their international coverage. I love the book on the African and Middle Eastern world. (I didn't use the Primary Sources and References Volume much).

I've heard of The Help, thanks to Oprah and the movie, but I haven't read it yet. I think I'll pre-read it. Thanks for the recommendation. I looked up All the Way Home, and was thinking yes! until I saw it is 640 pages. DD 13 generally is an enthusiastic reader, but maybe not 640 pages enthusiastic. Of course if it was a slice-of-life manga like Azumanga Daioh 600 pages would be no problem. :laugh:

The Mouse that Roared looks very good. I put it in my amazon cart. I got Don Camillo a couple of days ago, but my visiting MIL got to it first. She's really enjoying the book, and I'm looking forward to my turn. DD 13 will have to wait. :laugh:

Thanks! I have a couple of these on my shelf; the rest are on the library list.

Thanks for this recommendation. This sounds excellent, and is in my amazon cart. I can't wait to read it, and hopefully dd13 will like it too.

These are all good thoughts. I do have LLfLotR sitting on my shelf. Maybe this would be a good time to start it, and put the historical fiction in a book basket for her to choose from. I have always let her veto books, but the number vetoed this year has really impacted the reading list. She read Anne of Green Gables in August, announced darkly, "She sounds just like my sister!" and rejected the sequels. :laugh:

This is great advice, thank you. DD 13 is a very kind and empathetic soul. DD 16 read To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian and learned a lot from them. DD 13 is just not emotionally ready for these heavier reads. It really bugs her that people treat other people so badly. I am thinking 12th grade will be a much better time to engage with classic 20th century literature. I really appreciate your detailed booklist, especially the annotations. Thanks too for the link to Chrysalis Academy's thread. You're the best! :001_smile:

Yes - I love Wodehouse. She has read Right Ho, Jeeves. I am thinking of giving her Code of the Woosters. I also have A Wodehouse Bestiary in my collection, which I might give her to read; it's my second favorite short story collection of all time, after Connie Willis Christmas collection. I was ready to charge forth into the second half of the 20th century, but it might be better to enjoy some more of these earlier gems. Thank you!

I am looking for help with my modern literature and history line-up. DD 13 loves to read. She’s read a lot of fantasy and graphic novels lately. Her favorite books are Brian Jacques Redwall (which she has loved for years) and Azumanga Daioh. She is finding the heavy themes of most 20th century literature/history to be depressing, and has asked me to give her more humorous or uplifting reading. She is particularly unhappy with all the “people doing horrible things to other people in the 20th century.†(For example, we did just read To Kill A Mockingbird and Anne Frank’s Diary.) We are finishing up World War 2 now, so I am looking for literature and historical fiction from 1945 to the present day. What I have already: We’ll keep using our two spines, Hakim Vol 10 All the People (she really likes this series) and Human Odyssey 3 (she tolerates this). I will still ask her to read Shetterly, Hidden Figures young readers edition and Park, A Long Walk To Water; hopefully these two books are not too depressing. Also from my list and noted as funny: Jack Gantos, Dead End in Novelt (funny 1960s) Gary Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars (1967) Firoozeh Dumas, It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel, 384 p. (funny 6th grade memoir Iranian immigrant during the 1970s Iranian hostage crisis) Any suggestions? Huge bonus points for any books that engage the themes of the cold war, the civil rights movement, colonialism, and terrorism while being uplifting and/or humorous.

It sounds like he could use some help with staying on track while working. Two things have helped here in that regard, having a consistent routine and making a daily checklist. Having a consistent routine for us is having a standard flow to school days. DD 13 likes to start her day with CNN 10 over breakfast then do her reading (typically 4 books at a time: history spine, historical fiction or non-fiction, literature, living science). After reading we sit together and make up the checklist for the day, then do math. We also have had seasons where we are out of the house a lot for activities that were valuable to us, as it sounds like your outside activities are. On a busy day, reading and math might be the only subjects completed at home. Since you have out-sourced math (I am deeply envious J) and literature with writing, your top two (or however many) things that you want to do at home every day might be different from ours. Don’t stress about covering everything on busy days though. MerryAtHope’s loop suggestion is a good way to bring in subjects that aren’t covered daily. One other suggestion for helping your ds stay on track: have him use a timer for the binder. Looking at your line-up, you have language arts and math well covered. He has two foreign languages. Latin and Spanish. If he likes one and is doing it with one or more of your other kids, I would keep it at the pace that is currently working for you, and drop the other. Is either language easier for you to teach? For me that would be Latin, so I would keep Latin, and plan to begin a modern foreign language in 9th grade. Also, it seems like your ds is a musical kid. You mentioned that maybe he should focus on one instrument for now, and that would be a good way to help lighten his load. But if he wants to continue with both instruments, consider dropping both foreign languages this year. For history you are using History Odyssey. I must say I want to love History Odyssey, but I find it really difficult to get done. I love how they have taken SWB’s vision for integrated history, geography, and literature studies and spelled it all out. But it did not work in my house to have so many different pieces to work on each day. There were reading excerpts from the history spine. There was the literature. There was the timeline. There was map work. There was outlining, summarizing, and essays, quite a lot of writing, I thought. Some assignments were short and some involved a huge amount of reading or writing. Even with their checklist, my 7th grader hated keeping track of so many different things, so I had to do it for her. (I hated doing it too. I found I much preferred to put it all together myself.) Your ds is already doing literature with writing and current events with your Bravewriter coop, and non-fiction writing with IEW. He is already doing geography with your daily binder. All you need for history is a spine to read, and to continue making a timeline if that is something he enjoys. You have The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia and Van Loon, The Story of Mankind for HO, so you could go with one of them. (Here my dd prefers more modern narrative spines. We use K12’s Human Odyssey and Hakim’s History of US.) So have ds read a history spine, and once a week, discuss it with him. Boom – history is done. Okay, science. I love RSO Biology 2, and am using it with my 8th grader this year. She needs me to scaffold it heavily for her. We have to go over the reading together and I am right there for all the labs. The content of the course is nicely challenging for middle school in my opinion. It is very comparable to the class my dd15 took at high school last year. This is a great curriculum but it needs a lot of my time as well as hers. It might be good to find another time slot for science, like evenings, weekends, or summer; or to find an easier curriculum. Hope this helps.

I think with the adjective worthwhile it would sound better to have an infinitive. So but it is still worthwhile your going on the course would become but it is still worthwhile for you to go on the course.

Seconding the recommendation for Real Science Odyssey Biology level 2. We're using it now. It's a well written, secular curriculum with 2 labs a week. Another recommendation: We're currently following a rabbit trail on animal cognition. Nancy Castaldo's Beastly Brains: Exploring How Animals Think, Talk and Feel is a great read for this middle school.

Is an active, outdoor class possible? What about playing PE games like Capture the Flag? Or make cardboard shields and foam swords for LARP - Live Action Role Playing http://www.larping.org/larp-definition/ Or Quidditch? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quidditch_(sport) Or planning and having an ancient Greek Olympic tournament?

When you talk to the math department and the guidance counselor, ask about math with support options. At dd 15's high school you can take algebra 2 with support, which means you have the regular math class one period and then a second period with your teacher to work on that class material. One of dd's friends actually had two support periods for geometry last year, so 3 of her 8 class periods were devoted to the one math credit.

Dd 15 went back to PS for 8th. Things were pretty rocky at times, but the year was excellent preparation for PS high school, where she really thrived this past year. One thing I didn't know was that "Common Core Math" was pre-algebra (taken by 25 percent of 8th graders) and "Compacted Math" was pre-a and algebra. Only Compacted tracked into 9th grade Geometry. Her school used google docs for everything, and had a detailed online assignment calendar with access for both student and parent to keep up on grades and what was due.

Also a former professor, and voting yes it is important to attend the first class. I am in a good-sized city at 99% of totality. We are advised to expect traffic apocalypse Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday for the eclipse. You may want to factor unusual congestion into your plans.

Around the time she was reading Frog and Toad All Year, my daughter read Dr Seuss titles like The Cat in the Hat, and the early Henry and Mudge books. From there she moved into the first four books of the Magic Treehouse series by Mary Pope Osbourne and the A to Z mysteries by Ron Roy, and then to the Boxcar Children.

My vote is that yes, he could go easily into Magic Lens 1 without having to complete Voyage or the new level after Voyage. It sounds like the levels you have completed have gone well. My understanding is that Magic Lens 1 where you'd start with a middle schooler, whether they have done MCT LA before or not. I taught Island through Voyage to my daughters. It didn't click for my older daughter, so part way through Town I switched her to Rod and Staff. My younger dd enjoyed it and did well with it. We moved away from MCT (mostly to try other writing programs, because I am terrible in wanting to try all the shiny things), but this year (7th) have come back to use the Magic Lens 1 level. I think there are some students for whom MCT's approach just really works. My dd loves reading and creative writing, and picks up language concepts easily. We actually joke around and laugh a lot as we do Magic Lens and the Word Within the Word, which possibly makes us weird... One other thought: MCT also works for us because I find it easy to teach. I'm a grammar nerd. Hope this helps, and good luck with 8th. I am thinking hard about our 8th grade line up too.

I've used level 1 of both Latin for Children and Spanish for Children. I liked Latin for Children for the straightforward ease of use, and the slightly goofy videos. I took a lot of Latin in college, and the flow and way the program worked was very familiar, just like how I had studied Latin, but presented fairly accessibly for young students. My two dds were 3rd and 5th when we used Latin for Children, and liked it well enough, but weren't interested in continuing to study "a dead language." They wanted something modern, so we tried Spanish for Children 1 the next year. I loved it because they teach Spanish just like it's Latin. It really made sense to me, but because I had no Spanish background, we soon found we really needed a conversation tutor. I do think Spanish for Children is the Spanish curriculum Latinists wrote.

Brian Jacques, Redwall (and sequels) - mice Erin Hunter, Into the Wild (first book in the first Warriors series) - cats. Hunter also has a series called Seekers about bears, but we didn't read that one.

I agree that trying the charter school for a year is a good idea. It was really hard to decide to send dd15 back to school after 7th grade, but she has thrived. The first year had some sizable struggles, but now she is doing really well at public high school. She loves being with all the other kids. I don't have any btdt, but I am wondering if there is an option to have your ds18 attend an adult day care or day program rather than the school-based program?

I wonder if someone like Guesthollow or Build Your Library would take you under their wing, so to speak?

What are your favorite resources - books/blogs/curriculum et c. - for someone who is considering spending a year or two homeschooling to help form strong family bonds? Many thanks!

Dd 12 is into dark fantasy. Her current favorite is Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant.

The book that really helped me learn to teach the SIngapore way was Jana Hazekamp, Why before how: Singapore Math computation strategies, grades 1-6. It goes through teaching all of the basic operations using Singapore methodology, actually scripting what you should say and do.