Been there with my super unorganized wait til the last min daughter. I always woke her up. If I could -- usually she didn't start things until 10 at night and I was already going to bed. Starting before dinner is definitely over achieving, lol. She had a very rough time working towards organization throughout high school but I knew her executive functioning was pretty low so I was always willing to give her a hand. She seems to have figured it out at college- mostly due to maturity and not having school 30 hours a week. Fewer class hours has helped her organize her time more efficiently even accounting for not having a parent there. But every path is different for every kid!

The amount looks great -- I'm assuming they are not overly sensitive? I read Lord of the Flies in 12th and it was still pretty tough. I think it was the hardest book for me that year and we also covered Beloved and Heart of Darkness! Lots of tears and sadness for awhile. :-(

I would ask anyway. My daughter just got a blood panel and someone there actually misread the results (hard to believe! A simple google check worked for me) and they told my my daughter's blood test indicated Celiac. So referral to pediatric GI specialist, long drive to Richmond, and lo and behold she is fine- she tested near the high end of the range while low does indicate Celiac. Long story short, I would call and ask for a referral to get further information from a GI.

We did WWS 1 in fifth. They are both avid readers but my son struggles more with comprehension when he's not interested in the subject matter. He just gets distracted and it becomes a battle in his mind. So any tough passage I read aloud, checking for comprehension every paragraph. Worked so much better. I noticed he was fine with the science, or history of science. Straight history made him snooze.

I bought this from Amazon: Great Literature Copywork: Practice Cursive Handwriting with Excerpts from the Great Books (Classic Copywork: Cursive) (Volume 1) There is also an Inspirational quotes book and presidential quotes. I might just use one of those next year!

From what I understand (and I am not getting off the couch to look at my copy!) Jacobs has a very long section at the beginning that is review of Pre-Algebra. I wouldn't hesitate going straight in from Singapore if they were good at math (not necessarily gifted, but strong). My daughter is not super strong in math. She is good, and does well in concepts once she's practiced them, but would never do well with the discovery method and math is not her passion. We are using Aops Pre-A, but not quite as intended, and it is still totally worth while. She really does enjoy it. We don't do any of the challenge problems, she always watches the videos first to understand the concepts, and we rely heavily on alcumus to balance out skipping all the challenge problems. And I sit next to her to socratically help. My caveat of course is that we are just finishing up chapter 3 so who knows what might happen. And we are planning to take a full calendar year to get through it. I was planning on doing Jacobs after Aops but I probably will skim most of the concepts that are already covered. For instance, I compared the exponents chapter and Aops goes into much greater depth and covers more types of exponents than Jacobs.

Glad you found a solution! I have the philosophy that my output for the kids extracurriculars is commensurate with their passion. So my son, who enjoyed baseball but wasn't super passionate about it, we made him quit -- it was too much for the family to balance it and my dd's extracurriculars came first. She was passionate and still is -- she is driven when it comes to ballet. So I drive her five times a week to ballet and it often takes 45 minutes or even an hour to get there (with traffic) though its 25 min back. My son does ju-jitsu and drama class now -- enjoys it but isn't passionate. We juggle car pooling and make it happen. My husband teaches once a week at night and takes class once a week. So we are all coming and going. I cook twice a month so kids can eat in the car, but they do get down time when they can and we always meet together around 9 at night to watch a little tv and then read together. If I had little ones, it would be much harder. But these guys are 12 and they NEED to be busy or else they get lonely and sad. I couldn't imagine doing it differently, though I will say I dream of the day we live somewhere that a good ballet studio is 5-10 minutes away. The only ones near us don't have the level of training my dd is looking for, and it's her only passion so....

My dd (18 years old at college) went to the doctor and got put on Claritin. Aack. Weepy (which is totally out of character) brain fog, anxiety, especially since she couldn't think straight and had finals. She went off of it and immediately felt better. And we stay away from Zyrtec because it makes EVERYONE flip out. My dh said it made his skin crawl and he was sooo irritable. My dd uses flonase and supplements with a small dose of Allegra. It seems to be working.

And understanding the differences in applying to engineering vs applying humanities when it comes to UC's is very important. My dd's two closest friends with higher stats and better extra-curriculars got rejected by UCLA and Berkeley - both applied engineering. (Both female, almost straight A's, straight 5's on their 12 AP's, awards and honors in diverse extra curriculars, 1560 and 1580 SAT, to give some specifics!) Also within engineering if you apply undeclared engineering - just in general to the engineering school, the acceptance rate drops down to like 5 percent. It's crazy, and that's probably the source of a lot of frustration. The stated SAT ranges and gpas for the whole school are different than for the engineering. Luckily her friends applied widely and landed on their feet. It's so important to have a good solid range of choices you would be happy with!

We use Alcumus a lot. My son is in an online class, and 40 percent is alcumus. When he hit a week that he had not paid attention in class as well as he should have (we were complicit in this -- too much fun going on in the house!) he started the week's work not knowing any of the concepts. He slogged away in Alcumus getting problems wrong, reading the solutions, and steadily working his way back up. By the end of it (and it took a LONG time) he knew the material inside and out. If a student gets the answers wrong frequently in the topic, the next problems carry fewer points, making it much harder to get into the green or blue. It really makes sure that they truly understand it. If they get them all right, there are fewer questions to get into the blue since the assumption is they understand the material already. Once you get past Geometry, there is no alcumus. :-(

We have a friend that did the same thing -- with slightly less disastrous consequences but still not a great match for him. He had slightly lower stats than my dd, pretty equal extracurriculars (one good leadership position) but nothing to write home about. I think the aggressive marketing of the Ivies combined with his and his mom's over-confidence really led them into bad decision making. He applied to MIT, Princeton, Harvard, our state flagship, the engineering program at another school, and one other high performing but very small and quirky, non- sports focused school here in our state. He was rejected by all except the latter, which has typically had a harder time recruiting males. It is not a good fit for this extroverted, sports crazy kid, but that's where he will be going! I feel so bad for him. Just some basic time doing research on stats, a little time on College Confidential, might have saved them some huge disappointment.

Sounds just like my daughter. She is slowly getting better and I have been hands off since she went away to college, but I do give her advice and help when she asks or seems receptive. She can only work on one area at a time it seems, so she got her academic house in order first, then at college got her personal hygiene, laundry, etc in order, and is now working on exercise and healthy eating. All of those areas were a complete disaster until around 16 when she pulled the academic side around first. She will always lose things though. I never lose anything, but my husband, an very organized successful person in his professional life, loses keys, wallet, ID, sunglasses, and recently his apple pencil. My dd lost her wallet last quarter for five days -- tore her room apart, asked downtown where she had eaten, never found it. Then after a week she found an old email from her dorm office that it had been found and turned in. She has lost her earbuds four times this year (always found them, once actually on the hook that she had bought to hang them on! She assumed they wouldn't be there and tore her room apart). She has lost her ID two or three times. But to be fair the FB page constantly has students posting ID's they found on campus - she is definitely not the only one! The hook for the earbuds was our suggestion. Always putting wallet, keys, etc in a particular pouch in the backpack, ditto. Little tidbits that have to be given at the right time:-) I remember my parents doing the same for me, such as always put your purse next to you on the bench in a booth at a restaurant so that you will hit it when you leave. I never left my purse in a restaurant again!

My dd is on the opposite coast. She's a pretty independent spirit and it's still been a tough transition for her. She is slowly making friends and she's focused on the education and her job on the newspaper, so there's no question of leaving. But there was some depression and when she was sick for an entire month and had a huge workload and was barely functioning I really wished she could just come home for the weekend! On the other hand, she is a lot more confident in herself. We will be moving halfway through her college years. Hopefully to the same state that she's in now. She's never really had a home base per se. Military life.

Def visit during session. That decided by daughter for one school because she saw how small the student population felt spread over a huge campus and it felt so lonely to her. She visited a school that was the same size acreage but larger population and decided she wanted a large school. We looked all over the US and she was able to see the difference between a large southern school and a large west coast school. It made a big impact on her in deciding where she fit, culturally:-)

My son did the PreA and Intro A on his own, and started with the online classes for Intro B when he was 11. It was a good age -- fast enough typer and attention span was long enough to sit through 90 minutes of text based class. Also he spends a lot of time on latex and now asymptote making diagrams and writing solutions to the writing problems. I think that would have been too big a leap for him the the earlier years but he enjoys it now. The intro geometry class is tough. He sailed through the Alg B and this one is really throwing him for a loop. I'm glad he's got some maturity to deal with it now.

I bought this in November of 2017: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QUSD9N6/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1. It was two cartridges for 20 dollars. I'm still working on the first one.

Your son sounds very similar to my son! He is a great perfectionist in his writing, expecting everything to come out needing no revision. He usually hates creative writing because of the stress of coming up with something completely original. I thought he would love WWS since it is so structured, but he can only take so much of it before he needs a break. His favorite resource is Unjournaling -- little exercises that allow him to be creative but within a framework of a funny prompt -- his favorite for instance was to write a sentence where every word begins with the next consecutive letter of the alphabet, backwards. He also likes Kilgallon. However neither is a full writing curriculum, so I don't have a lot of advice. I am debating between two very different online writing classes and for each one I can totally see him falling apart. I think it's the anxiety and perfectionism I have to work on with mine, as opposed to finding the perfect fit.

DD is a Poli Sci Major in the College of Letters and Sciences (Or whatever it's called). She needs four sciences, she tested out of Math with her AP Calc, she needs a foreign Language through 3 years (allowing you to start anywhere in the sequence as long as you have completed through the 3rd level), and a few social sciences and humanities classes. The four science requirement surprised me -- I only had to take one science as an English Major.

Woo hoo!!!

Thank you! I appreciate it! I will keep mulling until the boards are back up:-)

My daughter struggled with the EF issues, but not the critical thinking part in school. I asked her whether they had critical thinking questions and she says yes.... however they always had socratic discussions before so I think they covered the material ahead of time. And the books they studied? Only three for the year (which was actually a semester since it was the block schedule). They did Romeo and Juliet (most kids used the No Fear Shakespeare), Of Mice and Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The last two are definitely a lower lexile than C.S. Lewis! She wrote at least one or two essays (usually about symbolism), and a narrative (I recall she didn't like the assignment and purposefully did it wrong and got a D, and got a B- for the whole class). I hate to say it but we gave up on her actually and she pulled herself out of the hole. Ninth grade we were actually calling the school trying to get them to give her a suspension or detention or send a truant officer out to our house, because she refused to go to school more often than not. She hated school, she did not see the point, and to be honest I don't know how she managed to only get two C's that first year, with the little amount of effort she put in. She says now in college that the only thing that helped her write essays was reading lots of them. They never read many academic essays in high school, which she always found quite silly as they were supposed to write them. My son is somewhat similar to her -- he just cried two days in a row over an essay I gave him to do even though we worked through the prompt and I helped him write the thesis and outline. He literally thought he couldn't do it. He says he just can't concentrate and his brain shuts down when the subject is uninteresting. He just literally couldn't care less about the prompt. But this is a kid who works 2 or 2 1/2 hours a day on Art of Problem Solving Math 3 grade levels ahead. My kids are most likely neurotypical so please don't take our experience as reason not to seek a diagnosis. Some of the issues do sound like ASD. and while my dd was never diagnosed ADHD, maybe a diagnosis would have made our lives easier! She might have just compensated or outgrown the EF issues. She's doing stellar now -- very organized and getting great grades. She has worked on her EF issues herself (she has NEVER let us help her with anything actually) and she takes great pride in her planner. But ninth grade almost killed us.

No advice on the diagnosis, but just agreeing with some of the previous posters -- that writing is excessive and excessively hard for ninth grade. My dd had EF issues and possibly undiagnosed Inattentive ADD (looking back at some of the signs, which she share shares 80 percent of with your son!). She still did reasonably well in school, but only starting around 10- 11th grade. She spent most of her middle school lying on the floor sobbing over any project (always the projects, never the regular assignments, which to be honest she mostly just didn't do anyway), She didn't have to do any extensive research project until 12th grade, AP Lit. She would not have had the skills or the EF ability in ninth. My daughter actually loves to write (though she was really quite terrible at essay writing until she got to college and started reading other essays and getting better guidance from the TA's). My daughter hated math and thought she was terrible at it. Until she got herself out of her funk (10th-11th grade) she just barely passed every year. It is really hard to do something well if you hate the subject and find it pointless.

Unfortunately the rudest words on a phone call were both spoken by my parents! I called them to let them know that I was pregnant (unexpectedly, a little bit BEFORE our wedding, though we had been dating for 8 years:-)) . My dad: How could two such intelligent people do something so stupid! My mom: Is this some kind of horrible, sick joke? My parents were never very good with surprises. My husband's parents, on the other hand, merely said "congratulations, honey that's wonderful" and kept their opinions to themselves. My parents have long since apologized and love all their grandkids.

Or how about when Kayla Meyers taught Exp 2? I'm assuming she will take a similar approach to Exp 3. Was the workload manageable? My son will have Aops Intermediate Algebra and Clover Creek and I don't want it to be an overwhelming week!

Or how about when Kayla Meyers taught Exp 2? I'm assuming she will take a similar approach to Exp 3. Was the workload manageable? My son will have Aops Intermediate Algebra and Clover Creek and I don't want it to be an overwhelming week!