2nd DS is like this and always has been. It's who he is, it's how he's wired - to desire attention and crave a reaction. I love this aspect of his personality most of the time, it means he's creative and witty and actually very perceptive to people's feelings now at almost 17. But at age 10 it was really hard to teach him when he was getting close to crossing the line between funny and annoying because he was enjoying the positive response so much he didn't realize he was getting close to the line til he'd crossed it and usually left it far behind in the dust and got a negative response. And that sudden switch from positive to negative (at least it seemed sudden in his mind) left him confused. We had the best luck with having conversations with him about this and then listening for the warning signs and reminding him with a simple, "Where's the line?" remark. But it was a loooooooong learning process.

This is pretty much what we do. I like to have them read The Odyssey and Beowulf and Julius Caesar when we do ancients, and also the Eagle of the Ninth trilogy by Rosemary Sutcliffe (not EiL). Sometimes in 9th that's all we read lit wise because mine are often still working a lot on composition/essay writing and spending a lot of time on that.

I would do a vacation for sure ... YOLO 😊 Plus the chance to have my DH be with us for an entire month is not something I would ever pass up! But we are the type of people who aren't really concerned about the looks of our house either, as long as it functions, so there's that.

I would check with the colleges she's interested in. I can't remember if my son's U required it or not, but I doubt it. We called it a class on his transcript because it's required for an IN ps diploma and I wanted his to be as comparable as possible (while still retaining our hs flexibility about how to cover all that stuff).

No, ours was just Economics 3rd edition, we own it on dvd so maybe It's not part of their subscription service? But it was by the same guy, Tim Taylor, who was great so it's probably a good one. No idea about the Spanish ...

We did this and it was the most valuable course we've ever done! I think everyone should have to watch them before they are able to vote LOL They were interesting and provided lots of fodder for discussion.

We had our oldest DS do some career/aptitude testing with a center in Indianapolis and it was totally worthwhile! But they specified that the student needed to be at least 16 and a junior in high school or they wouldn't test them because the results were not likely to be accurate, so you might want to look into that. Also, the student needs to be able to hear some potentially tough things about themselves - they don't pull punches with your weaknesses and what you're *not* suited for as well as telling you what your strengths are and what you are suited for - which a less mature student might have difficulty with. Nothing they told him would have changed our hs'ing at all. I require what I require and he would have spent his free time on his interests regardless. But it did open him up to some career possibilities he had never considered, which was great.

I graduated one already and he's doing exceptionally well and I still have all those thoughts about this one 🙃

Agreeing that ite and ight words for a 1st grader are totally not age appropriate! My 1st grader is a pretty fluent reader (currently reading simple chapter books like Magic Tree House) and she's still working on consonant blends and plural words for spelling. We use AAS and I really agree with the philosophy that reading and spelling are two very separate skill sets. We usually start AAS when they are able to fluently read simple words without laboriously sounding out every.single.letter. Reading a lot does eventually help with proper spelling, but in my experience that doesn't usually click until much, much older, like the teen years. So explicit spelling instruction in the elementary years is pretty crucial.

Our state doesn't require anything except attendance. I roughly follow our public school diploma requirements (and then add to it with more rigorous requirements of my own) because I want my students' transcripts to be roughly comparable alongside other students from our state when it comes to an admissions officer who spends about 10 minutes with each application. BUT ... the way we fulfill those transcript hours doesn't always look anything like the public school students' hours. For instance, a course may be listed as "Speech Communication" on their transcript, which sounds pretty standard, but we fulfilled it by joining a speech and debate club.

I have found that "planning fun" quickly turns into one more thing on my to do list that I have to check off. Which quickly becomes distinctly un-fun. It's been more helpful to think about what things/events/expectations of myself in my day are keeping me from feeling like I have no margin and working to eliminate those things and the fun/joy then has more time to naturally happen.

We started out with big plans and then I got pregnant and puked for 4 months straight, so we got a little sidetracked LOL I did manage to keep up with LA and Math for the 5th and 1st grader and the 9th and 11th grader kept plugging away and didn't have much interaction with me, which I felt bad about but it was a season. Now that I'm feeling better we're closer to being on track, but still a few shakeups happened during that period. 5th grader switched from Mr Q to God's Design for science. She always liked God's Design better, it was me that wanted the switch, but it didn't end up working out, so we went back. It's not my favorite, but she likes it and it's getting done consistently. Switched from MOH to SotW for the 5th & 1st grader together for history, which I'm much happier with. I also added in some Human Odyssey reading for the 5th grader, and she liked that book a lot. I completely dropped La Clase Divertida for the 5th and 1st grader and haven't got back to it. Maybe next year 😉 The high schoolers are primarily doing what I had planned, although for a while I dilly dallied over whether Destinos was still a good fit for DS for Spanish III. He struggled for a while, but seems to have settled into it ok now.

If she's got 3 cc classes/semester + 1 in the summer, that's 7 full high school courses in one year. I can't imagine any college looking down on that!

My DS self studied Calculus with AoPS (just the books, not the online class) and loved it, but he loves math in general. I'm not sure if that would be a good option for a non-math lover. He also did some of their Counting & Probability and Number Theory books as part of his high school math education and really liked those. I didn't want him to take Calc at the CC because he was heading into a math heavy major (comp sci) and I thought the AoPS books would lay a better foundation for further math courses than a standard CC Calc class, and from what he has since told me about math at U that was the right choice. If she was a bit older and for sure not going into a math heavy major, then I'd say go to the CC for sure. But maybe at her age it would be better to explore some other math topics like stats and/or C&P and NT before doing Calc at the CC. She's got plenty of time for it before graduation.

Well, my ideal children would have a 3 year cycle of World Ancient & Medieval and US in World Context followed by a year of Gov/Econ. However, none of my kids have been ideal yet 😉 and have all chosen a different path because history wasn't their passion and they wanted a get 'er done approach so they could concentrate their time elsewhere. I looooove to plan, and it's definitely worthwhile to have a goal in mind for high school, but keep in mind your individual kids might have a different idea 🙂

I agree. DS was NMF and had Alg 1 and 2, Geom, Precalc, and AoPS Intro to C&P and Number Theory by junior year, and he still used a good prep book to review PSAT math.

I love GC as the spine for history alongside a good text! We use part of K12's Our Human Story for Ancient & Medieval and K12's American Odyssey for US but there are many other good ones. Ideally, when I've been able to talk them into doing history this way, we watch a 2 or 3 lectures a week while they take notes. We stop frequently and discuss, and they do some reading from the text. Then twice a year they write a research paper on a topic of interest. The ones we've used and liked are History of the Ancient World, Foundations of Western Civ, and History of the US, and we take 3 years to do all of it. We also did this for a half credit Economics course (but with no text) and it was one of the most worthwhile classes we've ever done! But my kids would often rather be boring and choose to just read the text and write. They enjoy the GC lectures, but often prefer a get "er done approach to history. They are such party poopers ...

Me too! I love to eat out alone, I bring a book and it's Mommy time. I do not need a teddy bear pity party during my delicious alone time!

Am I the only person who got really jealous for like a split second that goldberry's daughter was marrying Richard Gere before I realized it was just an example???

Yes and while I like many aspects of it and it's a good program I don't recommend it quite as heartily as I do the Algebra. Pros: GREAT at presenting concepts (I love Tom Clark) and very rigorous as far as proofs go Cons: It takes for.ev.er to get through it even though I don't have them do nearly as many proofs as are in the worktext This 3rd time through VT Geometry will be the first time that VT has actually had the trig units available. So with the 1st 2 kids they had to do a separate precalc program after Geometry - and I think I actually like that better because most of them typically cover functions more completely than VT and they get more practice with both Alg and Geom concepts. So I might have my 3rd not do the trig portions of VT and go on to Chalkdust for precalc like my 1st 2 kids did. We'll see ... she's still finishing up the Alg so it will be a while before we get to that point with her.

We've been through VT 3 times and I don't really remember anything like that really tripping us up. I do remember sometimes that they have had to look at the examples in the worktext to figure something out that wasn't explicitly stated in the video. Do you watch the videos with them? Sometimes my kids have insisted they didn't know how to do something but because I was watching the videos with them I knew they had all the info they needed and could complete the problems with just a little extra thinking.

We did brats for a group of 150-175 and did it similar to what you described. Grilled them ahead of time and warmed them in big electric roasters with apple juice in the bottom. They were still juicy and delicious as long as we warmed them slowly. I think baked beans would be fine in roasters too. A friend of mine did Mac n cheese for a graduation open house and she made the cheese sauce right before guests arrived and just kept it on the stove on low in a huge pot or two to keep it from getting gloppy and then just cooked the noodles on the spot as needed to refill.

I have a big L shaped corner desk with bookshelves on each side that I found at a garage sale that I keep all my curricula in. Curricula is grouped by subject and then lined up by age range. Each kid also has a shelf for the stuff they are currently using. The kids use the center desk part sometimes for school and I do a lot of grading there since everything is close to hand. I puffy heart love it, but not everybody has room for a furniture piece like that. This is separate from our 3 home library bookshelf units, which are part of our family room decor. It's possible I may have a small book/curriculum hoarding problem, but I don't care 🙂

All my 6 have bdays between March and May. Apparently DH and I tend to go a little crazy in mid to late summer lol I like spring because I don't have to be pregnant in summer and I don't have to worry about a teeny baby in the fall/winter months or giving birth at home or in the car because I couldn't get to the hospital on snowy roads.

Yes! Me too! Also MM and Video Text because although I knew how to do the math, I didn't know why we were doing the math that way. I learned so much that first year (with an 8th grader as well as elementary students) about why math works the way it works! It didn't really teach me how to teach necessarily, but it gave me the conceptual understanding I was lacking to be able to figure out on my own how to teach the concepts to them and how to help them when they got stuck.