Thames and Kosmos kits are spendy (get the largest, not the smaller which tend to be cutesy) but they were well worth it for us. Their Chem 3000 has kids doing actual chemistry, not kitchen science. The Great Courses also has a lot of worthwhile Chem and Organic Chem lectures. Molymods are another incredibly helpful too in the pursuit of playing with chemical knowledge. Mine turned away from STEM early, but really enjoys chemistry.

Yeah, it is a lot. I am a bit uncomfortable with how much. The timeline of going abroad makes things in fast foward a bit. Ds is also becoming increasingly interested in high end boarding schools which filter into Ivy League colleges as a route of high school. Ugh. There is so much that seems to go into the resume for these schools in order to get a scholarship and it all has to be outside verified. We will persevere, but there might be a bit of sleeping in and wine drinking on the weekends!

Ds (Age 12) - Continuing online honors/AP high school coursework. Annual goal of 3+ verifiable transcript credits - Further develop written response essays with speed and depth of thought. (SAT and AP prep, shooting for 45 minute essay) - Executive function skills of time management, note taking, asking for help, developing personal studying style - Begin classroom presentations/trainings encouraging youth to use their civil liberties for enacting political change - Begin learning either the violin or the cello - Pass his music syllabus exams, the National Latin Exam, and the National Spanish Exam - Continue learning to code Family Goals We are still up in the air about going abroad, though it is less than a month away that Dh goes to the job fair. The online classes are a big part if this so we do not qualify as "homeschoolers" internationally. Personal Goals I am joining the "going back to school" crowd. More than anything this next few months is taking a stack of CLEP tests to show I still know how to do things from the way back, ancient times of the first college go around. Apparently, a stack of classes no longer count. I will be brushing up on my math from Algebra to Calculus and a nice little pile of sciences as well. After as many opt-outs as possible, I will be plowing through coursework to recertify myself to teach middle school. Gracious, so much has changed!

I would turn him lose on Great Courses Plus and just ask fir either notes or a short summary of the content he watches. Perhaps once every two weeks a longer or deeper piece on something interesting, a connection he has made, integrating knowledge from a few sources, or perhaps how something he has learned relates to today. You can keep track of where specialization might be happening either in region, or languages, or art, or whatever. The extent of their history selections is quite broad and very interesting.

I used the term gifted denial above becasue the root of not asking more from my son was my denial, which might not be your case. I did not want him to be gifted since my childhood was so painful due to the PG label. Anyway, testing made me have to realize that I needed to teach the kid in front of me and ask a whole lot more. Well, I needed to ask what he wanted to learn and get out of the way! The concrete analysis of scores made it very apparent that it was time to pull out curriculum and get a bit serious with allowing my son to really grow into his brain to the fullest.

Any of the travel ones are full of pictures and highly engaging. 30 Geological Wonders is neat and very visual. We LOVED How to Look at and Understand Great Art. Ds really liked Great Pharohs. The new heiroglyphlcs one is by the same Egyptologist and would probably be very engaging. World's Best Voyages is another visually interesting one. Initially, we had only courses from the library on audio. So we would listen while Ds and I did other things. If watching doesn't hold his attention, just turn the screen off while he plays with Legos, colors, uses clay, whatever. I got a lot of knitting done the first year.

MAP created a significant amount of test anxiety in my Ds. Crying, nosebleeds, nausea. The format just plain made him a basketcase and if the kid maxes out the test they just have them keep answering questions until they time it out (1:45 or 1:30). MAP was the only thing offered K-3rd with our state, so twice a year, every year. If your kiddo was super stressed, I might take a bit of time off. EXPLORE gave us out of level results. None of the other testing we did allowed my son to be ranked with other gifted kids or ranked with such a large grade spectrum. That helped with anyone questioning the idea of extremely gifted. MAP just showed that he maxed out the test every year. We waited until Ds was ready to take high school level courses for online providers. This was mainly due to the cost. By this point, he is getting executive function practice as well as transcript grades which come from someone other than me. It also shushes any lingering naysayers, since he is integrated with high schoolers. Before online providers, we used Great Courses and MOOCs. Same high level education, same instruction coming from someone other than Mom, but not the major output of money or stress on the line.

At 10, I found group projects with age peers fun. They were my ideas, my work, and great results for the most part. I was very much so leading the show. By 12 to 13, that was no longer fun. Peers began to get snide, mean, or just expect me to do it. It was no longer feeling accomplishment and thrill. It was feeling "other." If he is still at fun, let it be. He appears to be getting a lot out of it. Just monitor carefully if his attitude changes.

Well, actually it was not the botany book that provoked the idea the man was a moron. It was that he had no backup plan, did not adequately use the resources around him in terms of identifying people to learn the skills from, and in general had such an entitled attitude about what he was doing as if it was easily obtained. This is the exact behavior he was trying to run from, but due to not fully examining himself, he did not succeed. The outburst was due to the man not realizing there was a bridge very, very close to him which could have resulted in him receiving medical attention (even self administered). It was arrogant. It was ridiculous. It wasn't that the boundary pushing was ridiculous. We are voluntary simplicity folks. My son was not judging the motives of the person. He has grown up with them and might understand them far better than most adults. As in no running or hot water for a time, building fires in our house for heat since and chopping chords of firewood since he was 6, growing our own food, etc. Ds walked across the country at 7 as a long distance backpacker. He gets pushing boundaries. During that time he passd out due to not recieving enough calories since we couldn't physically carry enough and had to withstand gale force winds in the middle of a desert, he gets tragic consequences. Again, possibly more than many adults. My young person was very much in a place where this book was approriate.

Look into your state laws. I live in a fairly open state (WA) and it nicely lays out just what I need to show. If it seems litigious, this would be my first stop. Yes, it is legal to homeschool, but like state above that doesn't mean culturally it is okay in court. Next, if you know any public school teachers, ask them to help you take whatever curriculum you are using and buzzword the living snot out of it. You can Common Core darn near anything (I have done this with my son's stuff when Dh was getting fussy about being a public school teacher and not liking the homeschooling). If the current trend in your state are Power Standards, standard away. If it is RTI's, knock yourself out getting all happy with it. Essentially this makes you look very professional and thought out in a court of law. You do not have to change anything you are doing. You just have to fancy up what you are doing to resemble the current public school "norm." It gives you magical legitimacy. I made a syllabus for each of our subjects as well. Not difficult. You can google one easily and tweek it. This was all packaged together with a few beginning, middle, and end of year work samples in the major subjects. Flashy pictures were taken if Ds did a flashy looking thing, that was in there. Lastly test scores from the beginning of the year and the end to show growth (quick tests like you listed above, nothing long or drawn out). Mainly that made me not look like "Mommy", but educator.

We are a mountaineering family, so a lot of the content is something I am well aware of, and it even bothers me. Capitalizing on the experience in the form of a book makes it even worse in my opinion. However, we are also long distance backpackers and my son greatly enjoyed Into the Wild which was listed above by a PP. That did not traumatize either of us in the least. We live in a tiny cabin, in a National Forest, deliberately leaving society, and dropping our inner city house in exchange for voluntary simplicity. Both Ds and I found the actions of Alexander SuperTramp wholly ridiculous. My son read it in 5th grade and openly declared "Of course he died! He was a moron!" So, the whole deal is very person specific. My question would be why? With the multitude of books, why this one? If the kid is really all about it, I would let them read it. Just discuss with them the ability to put it away for a day, month, year, forever, what have them if they want with no second thought.

The Da Vinci Code is a great one for long drives. Regardless of it extremely fiction based historical fiction, Dan Brown really paced it well. You just get sucked in! I am trying to remember any cussing, sexual content, or otherwise questionable stuff. There is one sexual-ish scene where it is discussed that a cultish gathering involved sex between two individuals. The person describing is talking in flashback because at the time she was young and stumbled upon something she was not supposed to see. I do not remember anything graphic, but it is sex that is mentioned. It does directly challenge much of the traditional Bible story. I do not know if that is a problem.

🤓 Listening.

There was a very large disparity between my older brother and I. Brother is autistic and I am PG, but that didn't mean anything years ago (and I definitely do not mean to imply anything about your son). It was very difficult around ages 10-15. By high school I would tutor Brother and he has said it was the only way he made it through. By 16 I was out of the general system. Now that we are older, no one even discusses that stuff. My parents definitely needed to put more energy in allow Brother to discover himself. They were so busy trying to keep me back so Brother would not feel badly, they never even considered fostering him and letting me go.

Ds did this on and off when new independence was gained. I handled it much like you did, by giving him the chance to come clean. When he was younger he wouldn't, I would shiw him I knew, we would have to discuss lying. There are no consequences with me if he is honest. It just allows me to help him succeed. If he lies, then consequences for lying. I followed up the conversation with "How can I help you?" It was important that he knew why I was asking him to do the things on the list and that he knew if he did not do them, someone else had to assume the responsibility. That wasn't okay. So we would discuss how we could work together for the tasks to get done. Just punishing did not work. I never want him to comply out of fear. I want him to understand himself, how to get things managed, and how working together as a community means we all do our assigned bit. As he has gotten older, the conversations have grown into more depth, but initially it was just him getting the idea of how family helped on another. None of us can do it all alone, and we all make mistakes. That is not something to be ashamed of, but to come together about. I find it is a process. Now, he might initially panic and lie, but about five minutes later he shows up with honesty. Most of the time he does not lie about it, he feels badly but is honest. My parents were highly reactive. If I was honest, they would go overboard and freak out. It is important to me that Ds knows that is not the case with me. I do not want him living with shame and hiding because of it. As he gets bigger, the consequences grow so much if he lies and tries to hide things.

At the very end of the notes for each lecture, there are questions. They are called further thinking questions in some, comprehension questions in others, but they are the last thing before the "Recommended Reading." We use these as discussion questions A LOT. They help me measure if Ds got any of the deeper stuff or was able to link the bits together for a larger picture. There are usually only 2 or 3, so we just talk and I sneak one in and then we talk some more, sneak it in, talk. It wasn't until Ds was taking notes and really working on short answer comprehension stuff for standardized testing that we started giving them as prompts. I still like them better as just discussion questions.

We use Great Courses a TON! Ds really responds to the audio/visual component of the teaching, then they are incorporated into other subjects. We use Great Courses Plus to stream and for the guidebooks. We started in earnest in 5th grade when my very humanities oriented Ds maxed out his very STEM major mother! Here are the ones I can remember. It has been a few years now. English/Languages Iliad Odyssey Aeneid Building Great Sentences Writing Great Essays Latin 101 (This was for me to remember from years ago in school, though we use it if Ds needs another explanation) Greek 101 (I am SLOWLY going through this one) Learning and Understanding Spanish (Ds and I watch it together as grammar instruction) History Holy Land Revealed Famous Greeks Famous Romans Classical Mythology Great Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt Ancient Civilizations: A Global Perspective Science World's Greatest Geological Wonders Understanding Chemistry Science of Extreme Weather Exoplanets (this one I do not know how much he understood, but it was neat) Technology of the Greeks and Romans Others Understanding Great Art Visualizing Mathematics Next Year (as of now, but might change) Modern Political Tradition: Hobbs to Habemas The entire Middle Ages run Understanding Great Music Just about any of the travel section we watch as a family during dinner or in the evenings in the winter. They are delightful and very neat to talk about together.

We just did PreA as well. Beast was not out at the time, but by 9 Ds would have been done anyway. Go slow. Stop when needed and fill in. But at 9 it can take as long as you need it to.

We are up the Gorge. We had over 18 inches by Tuesday. Already have 8 more on the ground with no sign of it letting up. We just hunker down with the pets and have soup for dinner :) Three of our school districts don't even close. They just ask kids to come to school with snow stuff for outdoor recess. It is a totally different world!

The major benefit of testing for us was that family (mainly Dh and my father) had to lay off. They were very sure that I was just pushing WAY too hard. When results were in, they promptly stopped. For me, it helped me to be able to find resources about mental health issues and talk to Ds about them. There are some common mental health issues for gifted kids. Ds definitely has a few (OCD, perfectionism, extreme empathy) though they have minimized significantly as we have been working on them. This also helped me see some of my own. Working on them as an adult has been slower (they are so ingrained), but it has been a bonding experience between us. He helps me, I help him. The negative was me gettiing over my gifted denial. Not fun. Necessary, but difficult.

Ds and I have similar hair as your daught it sounds. We call it Hermoine Granger hair. It will dreadlock easily if we let it. For us, we have to comb it out directly after towel drying. Letting it dry even a little allows it yo start curling and getting wavy. If we set it straight right away, it tends to not tangle up so badly. Then sleep on it with up in a high bun, or braided. We use Costco shampoo and conditioner.

My son was humanities, not writing so much. He would do poetry. He wanted to learn languages from a young age. However until recently, writing was like pulling nostril hairs from a rhino. So I do not know how much help I can be. We began giving him really high quality books and read alouds. Nathaniel Hawthore's Tangelwood and Wonderbook, Rudyard Kiplings Puck series and Just So Stories, E. Nesbit's Five Children series, children's tales of Shakespeare, children's tellings of Odyssey & Iliad, children's tellings of Moby Dick, anything I could find that was actual literature on a kid level without dumbing anything down. There were other books as well which were much more modern, but the bulk of our read alouds were classical sources. We started grammar instruction at 6 with a really quick workbook style curriculum (Easy Grammar Grade 3, teacher's only with a piece of paper taped over the answers). It was less than ten minutes a day, but often he wanted to do three or four pages. He also started Latin around this age, but that was due to his extreme interest in languages. MCT is delightful and amazing. It is much more involved. This was down and dirty so that I knew it would get done. YMMV Killgallon has a great writing series that has an elementary book. I think knowing basic grammar would help, but it is another one that can be done in little bits of only a few minutes a day, or stretched out if she just loves it. The point is to decode and imitate great writing. She gets to play around with words while reading and seeing how great writer's wrote. It begins with sentences and goes up in complexity in other books from there. We did copywork as both writing instruction and handwriting. Initially he made up his own silly sentences. Then we switched to classical poetry so there could be a bit more depth in our discussion. Many, many poems are really only a couple of sentences so it worked well. It also exposed him to Robert Frost, Tennyson, Larkin and the like adding to that whole quality literature, enjoying words, and thinking about language much differently than before. Many of his Christmas or holiday presents given to others were his illustrations of other people's writing, or in your daughter's case her own stories with illustrations. It meant formallizing the whole thing to be gift worthy. Many of the extended family still have them and really like them. Ds' nature journal started around that age. He loves animals and art, so we got a stack of the cheapest Moleskin-like notebooks and he drew various discoveries on each page, labeled them, drew different views, etc. Our library had lots of naturalist journals from the famous guys (Lewis & Clark, Audobon, David Douglas). Those were the majority of our science work at that age until around 8ish. Combined with kid's "how to draw" books about bugs or mammels or amphibians, he actually did some really cool stuff. Hopefully some of that helps at all. Mine is not STEMy, but not exactly the same bent as your Dd.

Thanks for the heads up, my ignorance is definitely showing :) . I can never tell what he is going to find overwhelming. He was reading - and loving - Ayn Rand and Fahrenheit 451 around 7ish, but then had to put away Call of the Wild because it was "too intense." I'll preread it for sure.

To the library!