[Finished homeschooling, best place to sell all this wonderful stuff?]

Do you live in an urban/suburban area?  If so, you might consider Craigslist.  It's like an ongoing garage sale.   :001_smile:

 

If you do this, I would recommend setting a certain day and time (perhaps once or twice a week?) and meeting buyers in a public location (McDonald's parking lot or wherever there are lots of people around...) to swap your stuff for cash.

 

 

[I feel like I'm only making to-do lists...]

Hello all:  I have a daughter who is in ninth grade.  We had a difficult summer, relationship-wise, and are still in a bit of conflict over, well, a lot of things.  I have been homeschooling her since third grade and everything has gone pretty well (I thought) up to this last six months or so.

 

Anyway, she doesn’t really want to discuss literature or anything with me (though we do some discussion anyway – I persist a bit), so she does quite a lot of her school on her own.  I check her work, talk to her some about the things she is supposed to be learning, and make suggestions in a way that I hope won’t rile her. 

 

She takes a writing class and a world geography class outside the home, and she wants to take more.  That was not my original plan for her, and I don’t think it’s best, but I am willing to bend to her wishes so long as she keeps up with the workload.

 

I have adjusted her curriculum a bit with her input, and her workload to fit the way that works best for her and our family.  I don’t have that option on the outsourced classes, obviously, but that is fine because she needs to learn to work on someone else’s schedule.

 

I am discouraged because I had hoped for so much more – probably after reading too many homeschooling blogs!  I am trying to adjust my expectations and let go of those hopes I had, but now our school day feels reduced to a list of “stuff to do†that doesn’t seem like authentic learning. 

 

I’m wondering whether anyone else feels that schoolwork is sort of “disjointed†from the rest of your life... something their students just “do†so they can get on with the day.

 

Thank you,

Dora

[Afraid of making mistake in choosing math curriculum...]

I have a son who is in 6^th grade.  He loves math and wants to be an engineer (right now, anyway…).  He is just about to finish Singapore Primary (6B) and MUS Pre-Algebra.  MUS is very easy for him, and he has also flown through Singapore.  I want to challenge him, but he may not be as advanced as I think, and I don’t want to overwhelm him.

 

I feel shaky about making this choice because I think I made a mistake with his sister, who used the same curriculums when she was younger.  Following MUS Pre-Algebra and Singapore 6B, I placed her in Foerster’s Algebra using the Math Without Borders companion DVD.  It didn’t go well.  In fact, it was a beating.  I am not terribly strong in math, but my husband is an Electrical Engineer, so I had a little help when he was not traveling on business.  We had to work through almost every exercise several times and she was still making B’s and C’s, so I switched to Videotext.  It has worked well for her, but I feel badly about the whole thing because I think I messed her up.

 

Anyway, I don’t want to make a similar mistake with my son by placing him in a curriculum that’s too hard for him, but I want him to be well prepared for engineering school if that’s what he still wants.  If he could still love math when it's all said and done, that would be a bonus.

 

I have been looking at Art of Problem Solving.  Does anyone know how long most of the courses in AoPS take for reasonably strong math students?  Do each of them take one year?  If so, how do most users plug in the Number Theory and Counting and Probability curriculums?   Are those “extras†(nice, but not really necessary for high school)?  Do students work on those while also completing another course (Geometry or Pre-Calculus)?  How do you know what to work on and what to leave out?  Is there any way to know in advance if I am on the wrong track?

 

Thank you for any insight you are willing to share…

[Recommendations for Economics]

I've been thinking ahead, too, and I'm toying with the idea of using John Stossel's (of 20/20 fame) DVD curriculum. 

 

http://www.stosselintheclassroom.org/economics/

 

It's inexpensive, has a printable teacher guide/tests and could be supplemented with all kinds of living books.   Hope this helps...   :001_smile: