Speech therapists can help with social skills--they call it "pragmatics." Your local school district might be able to direct you to someone, or you might look at a website that provides materials (games, etc.) to speech therapists. Good luck!

My kids and I are loving Robert Greenberg's course, "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music." He's very funny and engaging, and weaves in lots of historical/social/cultural context. Today, for example, in "Intro to the Baroque Era," we got not only Bach, Handel, et al., but also Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Louis IV and the architecture of Versailles, and other illustrations of contemporary thought and artistic expression. Two thumbs up!

"Ruritania" is the setting of The Prisoner of Zenda.

The Udacity course worked well as a one-semester intro physics course for my science-y 8th grader. The video presentations are a few minutes each, followed up with short quizzes. They give a certificate based upon the final exam score, which is nice if you're looking for independent evaluations to stick in the transcript.

How much of Algebra 2 is covered in the Intro to Algebra book? i.e., how much of the Intermediate Algebra book do we need to get to in order to complete an Alg. 2 course? Thanks!

You might take a look at Udacity's Intro to Physics. It requires understanding of algebra, and teaches all the trig that's necessary for the concepts presented. My science-y 8th grader did it in a semester and loved it.

ItIt's true that CSU schools are inexpensive, but they're also a mess at the moment: underfunded, overenrolled to the point that students can't get into the classes they need. Investigate carefully before making this move.

We use RS as the listening/pronunciation component of a broader program. I think that someone who has previously learned a foreign language well, with a solid grasp of grammar, would be able to piece together the framework behind the lessons; but a kid starting to learn a 2nd language would be completely at sea without systematic grammar instruction besides.