I have and use and like Visual Link (all 3 levels) ... but yes they are a pain to work with. I bought it all back before they had the online version so mine are all software downloads with authorization codes and every time I get a new computer it's a lot of time and hassle to get codes for switching it to the new system. But it's a really great program so I have persevered. I have to make this laptop last for 7 more years to avoid switching again 😂

We did the low tech solution and put door knob covers on the interior doors so that the toddler can't get outside without help opening the door. So if she's outside, I know it. People can get in the doors just fine (including the 3 year old) but she can't twist the knobs and get out herself. Honestly, some of the older kids/adults have trouble too 😊

My oldest just graduated college with a combined BS/MS in 4 years. He says never could have finished that quickly without hs'ing and he's right. During high school he was able to teach himself several programming languages and move at his own pace in math and he knows he would never have had time or been able to do all that at our ps. He is very very pro hs'ing to the point where I hope he doesn't put too much pressure on his future wife 😂 2nd DS is also in favor of hs'ing, but maybe not as gung ho about it as the oldest. He very much benefitted from having time to pursue his ec's and develop the leadership experience that landed him a big scholarship and he's aware of that. He is the most social and the most curious, so he does wonder from time to time what it would have been like to be around friends all day long. But he definitely doesn't wish we'd done something different. I have no idea if he'll hs his kids or not - so much of that depends on who he marries. Oldest DD who just graduated is very pro hs'ing as well. Depending on her future husband's opinions, I would guess she would hs her kids someday. She loves the deeper connections/relationships she was able to form with siblings and in speech/debate and drama and is skeptical of what she sees as shallow "friendships" in most of her ps peers. She watched her ps friends at church deal with "mean girls" as well as watched them sometimes behave as mean girls themselves and wants no part of it. She hates the whole toxic environment just from watching it play out from the periphery, and she is glad she didn't have to go through any of that herself. DD who is just beginning to start high school has let me know adamantly that she never wants me to put her in ps. I would be very very very surprised if she ever changes her mind. She is very practical and has no tolerance for busy work of any kind and would be very openly disdainful of any teacher who dared to impose on her idea of what is important to spend her time on 🤪 DD who is in 5th would possibly be interested in school at some point because her BFF is in a private school and the thought of spending all day with her is very exciting. But she also likes having her free time. Youngest DD is just 3 so she has no opinions yet lol It's not that they don't think there are any cons to hs'ing. They are realistic and recognize that we aren't anywhere close to perfect. But the pros for us have been so overwhelming that it really makes the cons insignificant, even to the kids. Neither of the 2 in college so far had any trouble adjusting to college life and expectations. If anything, most of their first year courses were easier than mine here at home (except the CS and math). They were already used to figuring out their own schedules and scheduling their own time. They all have missed out a bunch of pop culture stuff because they only watched G rated movies growing up, but that isn't actually related to hs'ing at all so they would have been clueless on that score anyway. Socially none of them have had issues because we have a very vital social life at church with hs and ps kids alike and because of finding their "tribe" in the hs drama troupe. I hear many of you saying that the ps provided so many more opportunities for your kids than you could have provided at home, and it's not that I don't believe you, but that has not been our experience. At. All. Even in our extremely rural area, I am able to find hs speech and debate and theater and sports and prom and graduation services. Our local ps doesn't offer speech and debate and our local ps drama is kind of a joke. Whereas our hs drama troupe offered the kids a legit almost professional experience using lights and the soundboard and the mics at an actual professional theater. And as far as academic courses go, I was able to find and provide way more variety of coursework for my kids' interests than they could have taken at the ps. YMMV.

We started hs'ing when oldest was in 8th grade because I hated how much time school seemed to be taking away from our family time (getting worse every year) and we wanted more family time. One of the best decisions we ever made! High school for us was not WTM or anywhere close to the level of rigor that many on these boards attain to ... but reading WTM and posts on here has given me much inspiration and confidence over the years. We did a mix of videos and books and discussion with me. Two of my current three graduates chose to self study for a few AP exams, the other did not do any APs at all and focused his time on extracurriculars. All 3 took one DE course at the local CC in an area of strength as an elective during senior year. We all do speech and debate club and drama club and both have been tremendously beneficial in so so so many ways. Oldest DS just graduated from Purdue with a combined BS/MS in CS after just 4 years. He got a job with Google and will start next month in their Chicago office. 2nd DS got a full tuition scholarship to Purdue and just finished up his sophomore year in business communications/management. He also works part time as the co-manager/owner of an ag safety training company. He lives in an apt on campus with a few friends. Oldest DD just graduated from HS and will start Purdue in the fall in developmental and family science. She got a $4000 per year scholarship and hopes to work with troubled children after graduation, perhaps at our church's children's home. She works part time at a local bakery/restaurant and will live at home and commute for at least the first year of college. We'll see after that.

It has taken both of my good at math but not mathy kids 1.5 years to get through pre-calc. We used whatever text Chalkdust uses, it might be Larson but I'm not sure. I'm glad we started Alg 1 in 8th because they were kind of slow in Alg 2 and Geometry too but not as slow as pre-calc. They got through 4 credits but it took them 5 years. I didn't push to get through anything in a certain time frame and they would have melted if forced to do math for more than an hour or so per day. Oldest who is mathy did AoPS pre-calc in a year. But he didn't mind spending lots of time (2 hrs and sometimes more) on math a day, in fact he preferred it.

Exploration Education fits perfectly everything but #5. It's physical science

Lots of little towns in Indiana! Maybe not a dance hall/dance marathon and maybe not hunky single men. There are lots of hunky good ole boy farmers but many of them are taken 😉 On the con side, we also have a meth problem and many broken homes and people who don't know what a healthy family dynamic looks like. So yes there are towns like that, but not the whole town is like that.

I have everything I've used and liked for K-12 and no plans to purge. I've graduated 3 but my youngest is just 3. I've seen things go out of print or be printed in new editions such that the new workbooks don't work anymore with my older edition texts, so if I find something I like I buy a workbook for it to keep on hand just in case. I like to call it being prudent 😉

DD took Psych and she's not sure how she did. She did well on the practice exams but felt like she didn't pace herself well with timing during the actual exam. So we shall see. I agree that the only way to really know which exams to take depends on your goals. My oldest took 3 - CS, Eng Lang, and Calc BC. He wanted to get a jump start on college and not have to take a bunch of introductory courses and instead go straight into the meatier stuff freshman year. My 2nd didn't take any APs because he doesn't like standardized tests and he preferred to spend his free time on extracurriculars and leadership opportunities. This psych exam was DD's first and only and she mostly just wanted to see what an AP course was like and not have to take it at uni.

The Girl Who Drank the Moon

Exploration education is fun for physical science! My DD really liked the kits a lot. Ellen McHenry's The Elements is good for chemistry.

The most important thing for me has been to adjust to the reality that this is my full time job. I am not getting paid, but I need to put in the work and the hours as if I was. I am a mom first and foremost, and sometimes relationships need to take precedence during our day, which is all well and good and definitely part of why we started hs'ing in the first place. But at the end of the day I'm still responsible for making sure academic education happens too.

My son ate a huge bite of horseradish as a joke to gross us all out when he had covid since he couldn't taste anything anyway. As he ate it he realized he could taste it - just a bit, but it was there. So every day for a week or so he ate horseradish and he did regain his sense of taste.

I am enjoying Good Ideas from Questionable Christians and Outright Pagans by Wilkens. It is accessible and straightforward and (obviously) from a Christian perspective. We've also read through DK's The Philosophy Book together. None of this is a course per se but it does give a good overview. We do it during morning meeting.

Thank you so much for this. My son recently lost a dear friend (we wondered if she might have become more than a friend in time) and I haven't really felt like I have permission to grieve since I haven't lost my own child or my own friend. But in a small not comparable way, I have, and I really appreciate you verbalizing what I've been feeling ❤️ Your son's trauma was so much more than my son's, but I feel the exact same way. @Soror I don't know what to say except I'm so sorry.

Yes, if they do all the labs and dissections and microscope sketches.

We didn't do the actual class, but loosely used Funda Funda's syllabus and it was great!

My oldest who came from ps (so a mishmash of disorganized writing instruction) did Wordsmith Craftsman in 8th grade and he was ready for high school level writing after that.

Well, IME, doing something over the summer that they don't like and aren't good at wouldn't produce good results 😜 8th and 9th graders are really good at not bringing all the skills together consistently and being all over the place with writing and making their hs moms despair. It really is amazing what consistent work during the next few years of high school can do.

If she's happy with the amount of social interaction she currently has, I'd leave it alone. I certainly wouldn't be pushing a young teen to use their phone more often! 🤪 My 13 year old doesn't have a phone. She emails and occasionally uses discord for debate research with her assigned partner and that's enough for her.

We use VCR like @cintinative does.

I just did title and author for all books - novels and textbooks alike. I might have put which edition for some textbooks, but never a publisher or a year or anything. I had a short paragraphy (like 5-10 lines max) desciption of the course and then put authors and titles underneath in a list. We weren't shooting for top tier universities, but Purdue and Rose Hulman and Indiana University all thought ours were sufficient 🙂

We finish the book in science. With math we just keep going slowly through Alg and Geometry and Precalc from 8th-12th til it's done and then I give them 4 math credits. At the end of each school year I try to find a reasonable stopping point where we can pick it up again easily (so not in the middle of a chapter) the following fall. All my kids except the 1st one are slow in math so we do an hour each day and then call it good and that's why we've taken 5 years to do 4 credits. With English and history and electives, as long as we've covered a reasonable amount of material I just stop and call it good and write the course descriptions according to what we accomplished.

The Martian is amazing but there is an F bomb about every 2 sentences if I remember correctly lol! Although I think in that context I would probably use the F word more than I'd like to admit 😉 The same author also wrote Project Hail Mary which I enjoyed too. That one was excessively clean because it's about a middle school teacher who has to watch his mouth all the time around his students so instead of swearing he says weird funny convoluted stuff instead which is pretty funny imo. Ender's Game is one of my favorites. I recently read Dune and the first one is excellent. The others become a little more sexy and weird, but I think the first one might be good for an advanced young reader. I, Robot is good and provides lots to discuss. Maze Runner series - not a high reading level but we all really liked the story. The Earth Sea series is excellently written! I liked the first 3 but the last 3 were just meh.

Odyssey and Aeneid take us 6 weeks because they're long and somewhat difficult to read. Beowulf is relatively easy and short if you get the Seamus Heaney translation, so 3-4 weeks. Probably the same for Romeo and Juliet. Pilgrim's Progress is not long but it's a slog and can be kind of boring so it took us longer, 4-5 weeks probably. We don't read Canterbury Tales so I don't know about that one.