We have sometimes done math with a curriculum, and sometimes without, depending on our current mood and goals. We’ve found so many excellent math resources over the years, and most of them are more interesting than the vast majority of curriculum out there. We have taken long breaks from formal math programs and used math games, math puzzles, math videos, and hands-on math. Math in the early years is pretty sequential: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions/decimals, exponents. You notice pretty quickly if a major concept is missing, because the child won’t be able to apply it to the next concept. There shouldn’t be much issue of missing an essential concept.

We’ve done some books with the YRE, and some with the originals. Overall, I prefer the YREs. In the YREs, technical details not necessary to understanding the narrative are omitted, and it makes the entire book more approachable. In some cases, additional background information is added because there is less assumption that the younger readers will already have the necessary context,

The Writer’s Jungle focuses on how to support a writer’s voice, and develop their writing, but doesn’t give much how-to in the way of the transition from sentences to paragraphs to essays.

For a different perspective, elementary science is not an area where I believe “seeing progress” is the best goal. It usually means that the child has learned a certain set of predetermined facts. Science isn’t a set of facts, though. It’s a process of developing questions through curiosity, doing the research to learn what is already known, designing your own experiments, and evaluating your results. Those skills are developed through practice, and questions often come out of having read those stacks of library books on topics of interest. It isn’t linear. If you’re wanting to make sure he has sufficient breadth, you could use the book lists from something like BFSU to guide your selection of library books.

This feels like a lighthearted discussion being dragged into “you should have known what you were getting into” territory. Of course everything has its language. But there are definitely words I don’t run into outside of this board, even when I read about education or talk to homeschoolers in person or on other homeschooling boards. ”Unschooling” vs “child-led” vs everything else. Yikes. These terms are fraught, and treated extremely differently in different parts of the homeschooling community.

Thank you! Some other examples of things I have read and enjoyed and might fit into what I am looking for, in case they make anything jump to mind for someone: Hidden Figures, for another view on the space race, and focusing more on the social aspects of the women’s involvement than the technical I Am Malala, which looked both at the conflict in Pakistan in a general way and personalized it through one person’s story Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges, while I wouldn’t normally include a picture book on my list (I don’t need things this simplified!), it still comes to mind because of the excellent job it did of telling the story from multiple points of view of those involved plus including quotes from articles published at the time of the events The musical Hamilton, while it doesn’t fit the “needs to be a book so I can tote it along” requirement, also exemplifies the general nature of what I want, by focusing on the personalities and interpersonal conflict of the people involved

Rigor. Not a word I had to look up, but I only seem to encounter it on the WTM forums. It is not typically used on other homeschooling forums I am part of, nor is it part of any non-homeschooling realm I take part in.

Honestly, my answer to this depends on my mood at the time. I believe it is my responsibility to provide an education that meets my child’s needs. The reason I am homeschooling is because neither the public nor private schools where I lived would meet my child’s needs. However, I do not believe that choosing to homeschool means that I must always be the one teaching my child, nor that I must learn everything she is interested in. I can outsource. I can use resources that my child can learn from directly. There are some areas that I can teach to a fairly high level. Others, definitely not. Of those I can not, there are some that I could learn to teach with relatively little investment on my part. Others would take immense effort, hundreds or thousands of hours. There are areas that I am interested in learning for myself, and others that I have absolutely no interest in. I wrote in the “how not to suck at math” thread that I believe any subject is best taught by someone who is both knowledgeable and enjoys that subject. If that’s not going to be me, then I believe my daughter is better served by not having me as her teacher.

Socratic discussion. I would have assumed it had something to do with learning philosophy. Turns out it is another way of saying dialectic conversation.

This question is for me, not my child. My history education is sorely lacking. I (sort of) learned collections of names and dates and battles while in school, but there was no human element to it. As I’ve learned some history with my child using books written in narrative style, stories, historical fiction, I’ve seen that history can be engaging, and that it can be about actual people instead of a collection of facts. I have some reading time on my hands the next few months. It’s generally 30 minutes here, an hour there, in busy spaces that don’t lend themselves to lots of focus, so “lighter” materials would work best. Nothing video-based like Great Courses, due to the spaces I’ll be in. I generally enjoy following modern politics, social movements, and social justice issues, so narratives about those through history would especially be welcome. I have An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States for Young People on the shelf, so I’ll start there. Other suggestions?

Keeping in mind that I am *not* a Classical schooler, my objection to the five paragraph essay is that it is taught as a rule, not as a form. I think it can be a handy way to get started with essays as it gives students a format into which they can organize their thoughts. I think it is handy for teachers as a way to explain basic expectations for written work. However, once students have understood this one form, they need to move on to an understanding that an essay is meant to perform a function. People use essays to explain and persuade, and the essays should be set up in whatever way effectively accomplishes that goal, without an arbitrarily chosen number of paragraphs per essay or sentences per paragraph. If the instruction fails to move beyond the five paragraph essay, then the writing often fails to move beyond formula into an art.

It goes against everything I believe, but yes, in your case I would do test prep. Normally, testing is simply to get a measurement, and the knowledge that comes with that measurement. However, these gifted programs can be extremely competitive to get into, and test prep is the norm. Your child will be at a disadvantage without it. Keep in mind two things: test prep will only affect a WISC score by a few points, and the knowledge that *you* gain from the results will be skewed by the prep.

I’ve found the NWEA MAP to be an actually useful-to-me standardized test. It helps identify gaps, and I can see percentiles for all the grade levels, whereas percentiles for my child’s actual grade level are useless to me. It covers English and Math. I find testing for English and social studies/history to be antithetical to my homeschooling philosophy and would push back against it. I would be amenable to nearly any other form of evaluation a portfolio reviewer might want. It could also be a moot point, since the MAP scores would meet the state testing requirement.

I agree that if she’s wanting to learn to write plays, she should focus on more modern works. So, scrap my Midsummer Night’s Dream suggestion, though Cursed Child would still work. Are there any junior theater groups in your area? Perhaps they would be willing to give her a copy of the script for recent productions?

Some Shakespeare can be read at this age by someone who is motivated and able to get through the language. Midsummer Night’s Dream? Or, for a much easier read, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is an obvious choice if she’s read the HP series.

I feel like we’re in flux right now. I’m going to give this a shot, but it may all go out the window. The major issue at stake is that we’re researching private schools for DD to attend next year, which would shift our focus. So I have two sets of goals, one for if she is headed to school, and a different one if she stays home. If she is going to school, the goal is to find the most appropriate placement for her, and support the transition. In the meantime, we would hit writing skills pretty hard, both content and the actual act of writing. We suspect mild dysgraphia. I don’t know if handwriting is something that can improve if we really focus on it, or if we should put all our focus on typing. She can produce a fairly solid paragraph at this point. She can produce a good essay for her age, but it is a lot of work for her, so we would focus on making this a smoother process. And then the later part of 2020 would be supporting her through any bumps of transitioning to school. If she is staying at home, we will be focusing on social connections and exploring interests. This year, we upped the academics. She has proven herself very capable of high school level work, but she really doesn’t like the structure of it. We would be returning to our more relaxed way of doing things. I’d like to get back to what we used to do - some math, English, and Spanish most days of the week, and everything else up to her. Minimal outsourcing, just for fun stuff.

We have done a lot of interest-based studies. We used to have time every day scheduled for DD to do “something educational”. In order to limit argument over definition, we made a list of things that would always count as part of this time, and things that would count occasionally. If it wasn’t on the list, it could be put under consideration, but should not be considered part of the mandated time until approved. We haven’t used it in a while, but DIY.org was fun to spark a lot of ideas for a while. I follow local homeschooling groups on Facebook, and we try to jump on various opportunities for gatherings and field trips that come up. Sometimes, these things aren’t anything special, but are a nice way to break up our routine, like going to homeschool hours at a roller rink yesterday. I pay attention to classes offered through the libraries and parks&rec to see if something grabs my attention. I’ve tried to keep our homeschooling relatively minimal in order to accommodate schedule fluctuations so that when opportunities do come up, I don’t feel guilty using the time to take advantage of them.

My daughter is still young, so I have limited experience. I have found that I need to strictly limit how much we outsource because of the sheer time commitment involved with having someone else plan and assign the work, plus deadlines. She learned best when she is the one initiating the work, and it takes her a fraction of the time to learn the same material as it does if I’m the one initiating the topic. Free time is one of the biggest perks of homeschooling for us. DD has explored so many interests because she has the free time to do so, and committing hours to outsourced classes can cut deeply into that time. DD has always been disappointed that she doesn’t get quizzes, tests, and grades. These are things that existed only in fiction for her, and she wanted them. I never issued any form of grade for her. Even our earlier outsourcing didn’t have these things, as we used providers that were more informal, such as Athena’s. She is learning a lot from her Physics class, but I have to say it has cured her desire for quizzes and tests, lol. The deadlines and assessment have influenced her to decide not to continue forward with outsourced high school-level classes in the next couple of years. She loves learning the information, but much more on her own terms.

Beast Academy is a full curriculum, but quite a bit different than most math programs, and I’ve known of a lot of people who use it with their kids after school. It’s in depth, and uses a lot of puzzle-type problems. You could see if anywhere near you offers the Math Kangaroo test. It’s another annual math contest.

We’ve taken substantial breaks from math curriculum along the way, but often have some alternative math going. Perhaps one of the Zaccaro books? Or Art Benjamin’s Secrets of Mental Math? or maybe a change in curriculum? I loved math growing up, until I switched to a school that used Saxon. My skills took a nosedive, and I ended up rather disliking math, but with the memory of it being a favorite subject before those Saxon books. If he’s at all like that, there may be a better fit for him.

Yes. Once you sign up, you’ll have access to the list of lessons under your login.

We started with a 10-class pack. For the first 6-7 classes, we went with randomly selected teachers. Then we used the rest of the classes to do a second one with the teachers that DD liked best to figure out which ones we wanted to go with.

My kid was younger, but we did successfully use HSA to get to a conversational level of fluency. We took one immersion trip per year, but did not actively supplement during any other time of the year. She did four 30-minute lessons per week, switching between three teachers (two she loved, and one was a backup if the other two weren’t available). She continues to take Spanish once a week to maintain skills, and is thinking of bumping that up next year to go back to learning new skills instead of only maintaining the ones she has. Even though she would be old enough for 50 minute lessons, and regularly does lessons that long for other subjects, I’m likely to keep her at 30 minutes and a higher frequency of lessons.

If money were really and truly no object, I would start a teensy microschool aimed at kids working far out of level, with placement done entirely by ability and interest, hiring in specialists with a passion for each subject. DD is an extrovert and I think she would love school socially if I could find/make one that fit her academically. I’d also love to send her to all those highly specialized, several-thousand-dollar summer camps. She did one last summer, and it’s been a highlight of her life thus far. But even one is a big financial stretch for us.

We had a lot of resources around to introduce topics: several kids magazine subscriptions, a login to BrainPop, a constantly rotating selection of library books, kids reference books. None of this was ever required reading/watching, but my child enjoyed them, so she used them regularly. These triggered interest and questions that led both our science and our history. I also kept an extensive Amazon wish list of kits and science toys, and I’d look through the list with the kid on occasion when we needed some inspiration. She took a couple of fun science-related classes through Athena’s Academy, and we also used their topics to spark our own homegrown stuff. The library we were using at first was amazing, and we never struck out. The next library system, after we moved, was much less good, and I never was able to rely on it. I would ask for recommendations on this board and on Facebook groups that I’m part of, and we used more online resources. I don’t buy a lot of books, as we live in a small space, and usually used my money (and space) for hands-on materials. When DD would choose a topic that she wanted to really dig into, I would gather resources. A stack of library books (when possible), lists of kits or other hands-on options, video series, related games, whatever seemed applicable. I would then go through all that I had gathered with DD and discuss more about what she wanted to learn and how she wanted to go about it. I would take the information from that discussion to make needed purchases and get organized. I never required output from her. She is a young, very accelerated student. Input has always been at a much higher level of output. She did take notes when we would do some experiments in order to be able to compare results, but that was it.