I would probably just say, "When they're ______ (insert age you plan to start hs'ing)." Most people usually aren't looking for a discourse on your educational choices, they're just making conversation.

Echoing what you've heard so far ... if you've seen visible improvements just since covid started then you're already doing a great job! The point of education is to take each person where they are and then progress to the next level, and you're doing that. Most kids need some "deschooling" time to adjust from an environment where most of their tine and energy is directed towards activities chosen by others to the freedom to pick what they want to learn. It might take some time for her to show an interest in anything. That's normal. Keep reading out loud something that interests her and is above her current level (what she's able to read to herself) everyday and don't stop til she graduates. This is the single most important thing you can ever do as a parent or a teacher, period. Your first year is a good time to do a package like Bookshark. It's a high quality program so you will not be shortchanging her one bit. But over the year of using it you will almost certainly find things you don't like about it or don't fit your teaching or her learning style. Most of us aren't using what we started off with, and that's normal too. It doesn't mean you picked a bad program, it means you're getting more confident in your choices. This board can be intimidating, but It's also full of a lot more normal people than you think LOL It's also full of incredibly helpful, kind, and intelligent people with a lot of experience under their belts and who will inspire you with confidence that you can do it too! And psssst ... we don't do Latin either 😉

Bathing in tomato juice will get rid of the smell if you're sprayed (or at least it did with my dog ... eventually) As far as getting rid of it, we had a mama and babies under the porch and DH set a trap and planned to shoot it from a distance if it got trapped. Dog got to it first and DH shot it then but not before it sprayed the dog. That's how I know about the tomato juice 🙄 The smell lingered for a loooooooong time. A couple years later when it was hot and humid we'd still get a whiff now and then 😛

Whittling, leather engraving, wood burning? Those are all crafty things from 4H that my boys thought weren't "too girly" and had easily found supplies at Hobby Lobby.

Yeah, I looked into doing it myself too before going ahead and biting the bullet and spending the money. But it would have taken hours and hours and hours, and that was after I'd taught myself how to do it on throwaway files that I didn't care if they got messed up while I was figuring it out.

https://legacybox.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjwiMj2BRBFEiwAYfTbChSbm2LWIlXIjfsSoegpHmdf_nYvu0Di2mTZLJnP582AJzzp90uokhoCsQIQAvD_BwE Worth every penny!

We usually take summers of completely, except for phonics in the early grades. We keep going steadily with AAR til it's done. Other than that and read alouds, we don't do any school at all. This year we are doing Reflex Math for math facts and some Spanish just for fun because we have so much extra free time.

Over the years I have had months of wonky no ovulation/periods at all interspersed with years of clockwork 28 day normal to light cycles interspersed with 35-40 day heavy oh my word I'm going to bleed out cycles. According to the doctor, this is all totally normal and a big yawn. Being a woman is weird.

I won't watch the video. I have no desire to see a human being loved by God murdered. I'm scared to click on any links I see because I don't want to see that video. The pictures are bad enough 😢 Does anybody have a link to just the story? Obviously I know the gist of it because I haven't been living under a rock. But I would like to read about facts such as: Was he just walking down the street or was he pulled over for driving while black? How did it escalate to have 4 officers present? Who called 911? How long did he lie there dying until the EMTs got there? Etc.

I agree. I don't outsource much at all. I do create course descriptions and I make a note of what resources we used on there, outsourced or otherwise. But other than DE the transcript just lists the name of the course and that's it.

I usually start them in typing in about 4th grade I think. Before that they randomly will ask to type things out on my laptop (stories and whatnot) and I let them but they don't really learn proper keyboarding technique before that. My DD just finished 6th grade and just this past year I had her type some of her vocabulary and history assignments now that she's mostly proficient at keyboarding. I didn't see much point in it before that. Next year in 7th grade I plan to have her do a couple power points on something from history, then in 8th grade they usually have a science fair type project where I have them do some simple stuff in excel with their data. I don't do anything formal to teach it - just let them loose to explore the program and click buttons and see what stuff does and they usually figure it out more quickly than I do 🙂 I'm not sure what you mean by digital citizenship ... I teach them about safe and reliable searches in the moment when it comes up while we're searching for things ... and what to do if they come across anything inappropriate ... and that they are not under any circumstances to give any information to anyone online or create any accounts anywhere without my say so.

Another vote for Video Text. We used it as J-rap and mlktwins described. It's worked well for both my mathy and my non-mathy kids.

We might have this one in storage soon too ... it's hard to learn and she's getting frustrated! 🙄

Ad usual, regentrude is more eloquent than me. But this is what I fear too. I still have people reaching out and our church family has somewhat maintained a feeling of community, although skewed because it's all virtual. But it's not the same. And it's not good.

This makes me sad. I don't want to lose those types of interactions, indoor or outdoor. I realize not everyone feels the same way.