My math advanced kid did only IP, but my on level dd is doing Textbook, Workbook and IP. I wouldn't want to add any more, and as it is I often have her do every other one in the Intensive Practice.

I agree with everyone about pulling her out. However don't necessarily discount the larger public school. All schools are different, but larger schools have more turnover, more diversity, more places for new people to find their place. It's not the same group of kids hour by hour, and there are bound to be other people in a large lunchroom that need someone to sit with. Also in my oldest daughter's middle school the band director and English teacher both let kids come eat lunch in their classrooms anytime they wanted. My kids are doing well with their activities -- one does intensive ballet and one does Brazilian Ju jitsu and math club, and they facetime their friends every day to play minecraft. We do field trips once or twice a month. They don't have a lot of friends, but they have a couple of close friends. It's working for now.

Regarding weighted GPA's, I would check what the state universities accept. E.G., when my daughter applied to CA schools, they only weighted AP classes and they only accepted 8 semesters of AP's as weighted, so the highest UC GPA one could get was a 4.25. In VA, however, they accept transcripts with .5 for honors classes and 1 point for AP, and there's no limit to weighting, as far as I know. So GPA's can go MUCH higher. And within the school, they counted an A+ (98-100) as a 4.25, and an A as 4, and A- as 3.75. So straight A's with lots of honors and AP classes meant that valedictorians are graduating with a 4.7 GPA. If the University accepts weightings for honors and AP, I would not hesitate to weight accordingly, if the class required a significant amount of work. Some of what passes for honors classes here is really not worthy of the name.

When my daughter was middle school aged, she devoured Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Those were her fallbacks when she ran out of reading material.

My college freshman has had a laptop for years. She got a new one for college and we paid for half as a graduation gift and she paid for the rest, as the apple products are more expensive. But they also last SO much longer. We will never go back -- we have an imac that's given us almost no problems for 7 years, and a macbook that's lasted for six, and it runs virtually the same. Our hp laptop and chromebooks are not even in the same league when it comes to ease of use and reliability.

I have a lot less going on (just 11 year old twins) but my ds gets anxiety if the day is not structured. He doesn't do well with self led learning, and he doesn't want to choose what to work on and is not able to prioritize himself between things that need to get done vs. things that can slide. I have tried before to give them a list of things and told them to get as much done as you can, and the thought stresses him out -- what if some are more important than others? What if its too much and I can't finish? He really likes to finish everything. We have switched to the Kanban method of scheduling -- post it notes on the wall that get moved for every subject. If I need I put numbers on the post-it notes to indicate which ones to do first, and if there are some tasks I'd like him to get to but aren't necessary for that day, they go on the border of the chart. Just the act of moving the post it notes to the completed section is very soothing to him. More so that checking things off a list. Before the year started I created all the days assignments ahead of time and put them in a list. Then I use an online teacher's program (teachers.io) to schedule out the day and I do that in two week chunks. Then I just make the post-it notes the day before. It's not easy, but it makes his day go so much better. With chaos and noise, I have no suggestions except headphones. :-( My ds often does his online class using headphones, even though it's entirely text based and there's nothing playing over the headphones! It just helps him concentrate better and reduces external noise.

Also on the topic of self moderation -- what seems "pretty much" secular to some might not seem the same to others. Case in point, I have a friend whose kids love CYT. I know, Christian Youth Theater, I probably should have known, but she said it's totally run secular, no mention or very little mention of religion. They are the biggest venue around here if you want to do drama as a homeschooler, so I signed my kid up. And lo and behold, they start off with prayer every time and discuss a bible verse halfway through. So what to her seemed secular (they put on secular plays and have a lot of fun doing it) isn't quite the same as my idea of secular.

As loaded as the term safe space has become, I interpret it, as a secular homeschooler myself, as a place where you know everything recommended will be straight up not incorporating religion whatsoever. I love using the boards for recommendations, but it is exhausting trying to track down reviews of every resource and figure out how much religiosity is incorporated into the materials. It can be frustrating. I say this as someone who owns a ton of Life of Fred based on their reviews and their ability to match my son's ability at an early age. I just handed them off to my son without pre-reading and am now regretting this -- at one point I did read with him (he was K or 1st grade) and I read a part which taught exponents (I think? I can't find it now!) through a robot that kept magnifying until it got so large the mayor called up the marines who sent an f-18 to drop an atomic bomb. I was like, woah. And Ellen Mchenry materials... some of which we love and I which I thought were secular... until her latest unit on rocks and minerals she states that it disproves plate tectonics. So, yes, I would be one who would be happy to have only secular materials discussed. Because when I think about the money I have spent on resources that are supposed to be secular or at least not necessarily promoting religion and then I find that they are, or the time I spend trying to track down information on what exactly is in the curriculum -- I would love not to have to work so hard. And I would not at all resent someone that wants to run a facebook page that only discusses religious materials. I understand that viewpoint as well and don't resent their safe space.

72 in a 65 is most likely going with traffic. I drive the interstate every day for 10 miles to bring my daughter to ballet, and the majority of traffic (in the left two lanes at least) is generally between 70 and 75, and sometimes 75-80. Unless it's bumper to bumper with cars coming to sudden stops, it's not unsafe at all. 84 in pouring rain would definitely be more concerning, but again there are a lot of variables -- traffic, whether it was to pass other cars, etc. I am not a fan of constant monitoring though. Maybe for some kids it would work, but it could foster resentment and more elaborate ways to avoid detection in order to create autonomy. Just my two cents though.

I can answer this question: It does not. It has you taking your own notes and then writing from those. Flipping through, I see no more lists of facts. (That was very difficult here as well -- it is hard to write coherently about a subject just from a list of facts!) To answer the original question of substituting your own passages... you could theoretically I suppose, but the amount of work involved would really give me pause. The support and answers in the teacher manual are all geared towards the passages provided. The lengths of passages, the very specific type of passages (for instance week 28 compares two different types of natural changes, in this instance the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and glaciers) and that's just day one. Day Two includes more paragraphs from multiple sources about Mt. St. Helens). There are so many individual passages included, it would be a LOT of substitution. That being said, there are more assignments (roughly 7 or 8 it seems) that require you to come up with your own topic and sources. And I plan to cut out a few of the weeks assignments myself and do a slightly condensed year, making sure to hit at least all of the assignments that are listed in the one year WWS crash course in WTMA (prep for Rhetoric I think it's called?) I definitely feel your pain -- some of the passages my kids do well with (anything science related they do pretty well, and definitely all the fiction). Others don't go over very well at all, especially if they are the teeny tiny photocopied pages from books. That literally made my daughter cry last year. So we will be trying our best to avoid or substitute for those specific weeks. We literally just started working through WWS 2, so who knows how it will go. I will say when we got to a long passage about the siege of Stirling castle and my kids were starting to get that glazed over look and fall off the bench in boredom, I had them grab the white boards and try to visually recreate what was being described in the passage. They doodled the entire chain of events and had no problem coming up with the outline after that. But if I had just handed it to them and told them to do the assignment, there's no way they would have comprehended and come up with a reasonable outline. We do almost all the thinking part of the assignments together.

We use a post-it note system with every assignment on post it notes and they get moved from the to do side to the in progress side to the done side. The kids have been doing very well with this system, and you can do notes for the whole week ahead. Or maybe a post-it note on the computer? My dad thinks he has ADHD (he never was diagnosed) and he had post-it notes EVERYWHERE. However it's hard when they are teens. My 17 year old still can't follow the simplest advice about sleep, headache medicine, water, caffeine. Every time she is so surprised when she almost faints from dehydration or has a pounding headache after not drinking caffeine for a day. I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall sometimes.

I haven't done these. What I do is subscribe to once a month meals and create a menu of five meals -- one difficult, one medium, and three easy prep. It has a huge database of meal recipes and once you've created the menu you print off shopping lists, prep instructions, and cooking instructions. All stuff I could do myself using outside recipes, but having them all in one place and having the chopping instructions and cooking instructions in an ordered list makes my life easier. And it automatically scales to the amount of servings. I just prep the five meals (doubled) on Sundays and the other two days we get take out or pizza. Our evening extracurriculars are crazy so even if I did blue apron or something else I wouldn't actually be home to prepare it. As it is I'm defrosting at 3 pm and leaving it for everyone else to eat on their own time frame! It's still a little pricey for what it is, but we eat SO much better than we used to.

Let me know if you have any questions about UCLA. My oldest just started there last week. She is a Poli Sci/ Econ major, so classes might be different than some of the more popular STEM majors, and of course since it's the quarter system she has a grand total of three classes right now. Two of those are lecture classes that each have a discussion later in the week led by a TA.

We used WWS 1 in fifth and are using WWS 2 now in sixth. I am not having them do every single week, because the amount can be overwhelming, and we spend extra time on longer writing assignments. They don't LOVE it, but their skills in organizing their thoughts and making outlines and producing clear writing have definitely blossomed.

Big History with a large supplemental book and documentary list. It is their history and science combined. We hope to weave in some Ellen Mchenry units (revisited) at the appropriate spots. Next year I will finally split the twins with one in physics and one in some type of ecology or environmental science.

Bumping to see if there are any others that just started school on the quarter system. We dropped off our daughter last weekend, 2300 miles away. She is trying, but it is so hard! She is a kid with high expectations of the school and a desire to make that perfect friend or two immediately, but the orientation activities are wearing her down (so much noise! So many people!) and the very first night her roommates went out to a frat party (she stayed home and started the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, lol) So its been texts back and forth throughout the day of advice and commiseration. One of my best friends wrote to her that her first few days were spent feeling "homeless", no place feeling like a safe haven, no connection with her roommates, and days just spent wandering around from cafe to cafe, library, etc, feeling existential and angsty. I think that's exactly what she's feeling like now. And that classes can't start soon enough!

We really like Singapore 6A and 6B. The textbook teaches the concept with pictures, has a few practice problems, then the workbook has more. But not overwhelming pages of problems -- my dd will do a few pages in the textbook (which is mostly pictures explaining the concept with a few problems), then a page of number problems (around 8-10) and then two pages of word problems (about 6 total). It seems like a good mix for my dd, who did BA 3-5 but struggled a lot and never really got out of it what I hoped she would. We also use the Intensive Practice after the entire lesson is finished.

My kids zoned out if the lessons were too long during elementary school. Now in sixth grade they do better with longer lessons, but only a few per day still - we have shorter lessons interspersed (piano, grammar, read for 30 min) that act as a "break" from the harder, longer subjects.

Math in the morning, but not the very first thing. We have to ease into the morning.

Then they must be in class together! My son's name is MagicMonkey (real name Andrew:-)) He loved the class and has been so excited to do the homework. I'm hoping to get him into Jetta's class next year, I have heard such great things about it! Is your son planning to do Geometry after this class is over? We are thinking of leading straight in this year, even if it will mean possibly working into the summer. Which might or might not go over well.

You can also make a cool infographic with easel.ly . They have a few templates with the free version. My son is playing with it right now!

If you don't want to wait, Alcumus is free online to play around with, and Aops has videos that start with Pre-Algebra as well. They are very well done. Second the IP books -- my son used those exclusively, and I found that we liked them for different reasons that BA. They are much more concrete for visual learners I feel -- my daughter is thriving with them where she struggled sometimes with the abstractness of BA. I feel they provide a good balance to each other.

The Bravewriter MLA Research Essay class is $400 for six weeks. I know they are supposed to be very good, with a ton of indivdualized feedback, but there's just no way that would ever be in our budget. Especially if one wanted to use Bravewriter classes all year -- that would be around $2400 for one subject! Yikes. But if we had one kid instead of three, and that kid's extracurriculars weren't quite the money drain that they are...then maybe...

DS 11 is taking Intro to Algebra B - his first Aops class. I was worried having it text based would make it difficult for him to stay focused, but he loved and and wished he had another class tonight. I might just have to enroll him in one of the AMC classes or intro to number theory. I had both twins registered for WTMA Intro to Socratic Discussion, but my husband said for that for sixth grade he'd lead them in his own socratic seminar and save 800 dollars. Since that's basically what he does every day anyway. :-) I'm hoping that at some point they will get to take it, however, has I have heard good reviews of it.