8 - do you have any recommendations for other writing curriculum? Finding curriculum for a subject I am not vastly knowledgeable about is a challenge for me. I am not worried about the amount of assignments, as his writing is incorporated into the rest of our homeschool. Creative writing is okay, but since he is wanting to go into the Classics or linguistics I feel like the academic writing needs to be addressed. Anyone else's know of good ones? IEW did not work for us.

The math computation/writing thing makes me wonder if it is dyslexic/dysgraphia. I have very little experience others than working within alternative high schoolers who all fell into the categories of being called lazy, or bad, or broken, etc and mainly they had glitchy issues that were unidentified. The dyslexic/dysgraphia one always amazed me at how far reaching it was. Often times it showed up much like your are describing with test results since very little was ever oral and always required reading. The frustration often left the kid appearing unmotivated or motivation quickly waned because of the struggle. Again, I am no expert. It was just sounding similar.

Thanks quark!

Scheduling himself and handling independence is something my son has always been good at. At this point we are working on the idea of outside interactions. He needs to be able to communicate his schedule with the family and create a cohesive plan with the other people in his sphere of influence. Secondly, middle school is portfolio and transcript time around here. We need to have it wired tight by high school, so we are practicing now to get the kinks worked out. Here is our list for 5th and 6th grades. Personally deciding to do undesirable things in small amounts (15-20 min a day) rather than putting them off till the last minute crisis time. Setting up and managing his own meetings with mentors (me included along with his outside mentors) Learning strategies for struggling through rather than avoiding (both scholastic and emotionally) Developing his own system of paperwork and documentation so it is out of my hands other than "prettying it up" for a critical adult audience.

As a family we give up all extra curricular activities other than school and church. It is a time to focus on one another, our household, and strengthen our family. Every year the number of activities we find ourselves wanting to return to diminishes. It is as though we agree to do things out of obligation rather than joy.

I was curious if any of you have your kids take the specific subject tests or if you just do the overall. My SAT 's were for JHU talent search, but the subject tests weren't even an option then. I don't know how it works now.

I have been sucked into MCT. I must honestly thank the forum for this because it looks great and is much needed around here. My issue becomes where to start. As much as I tried to find information online, it seems to elude me. The samples at MCT won't seem to come up correctly. I figured y'all have a ton of experience and could help. My son is a humanities kid. Like many kids on this forum are ahead in math, he is ahead in literature and language. Writing had never been of much interest to him, however. He can write very well when required, he just fussed about it so we kept it to a minimum. Now, he is actually choosing to write so I am looking for curriculum. He has had to do essay work for school since he was quite young because Dh is a high school English teacher. If our son wanted to participate in my husband's high school book discussions, he had to write the essays just like the high school kids (graded with the same rubric, revised, turned back in, whole deal). My husband does not have time to directly teach my son about writing. He tried this last summer and it was a disaster. The authoritarian school teacher clashed quite dramatically with the gifted homeschooler. My husband mainly wants to edit, grade, and provide feedback. I am the cheerleader and curriculum wench. At this point my son can write a thesis (though rather formulaic at times); outline a five paragraph essay; complete an introduction, supporting paragraphs, and conclusion; use parenthetical footnotes; and site texted based evidence to support his points. He has persuasive down, but not expository or compare/contrast. Transition statements still give him some trouble, and fleshing out his ideas so they do not sound repetitive is still part of his revising process. He has a list of citation phrases like, "According to" or "as shown in the text" or "the author stated" that my husband gave him to use and he still pulls heavily from that list. Does this put him in Essay Voyage or in Advanced Academic Writing? Maybe it puts him somewhere else entirely - I was a STEM major, this isn't my area! We will be using Word Within A Word and Magic Lens (both volume 1) next year if that helps. Poetry is probably going to wait one more year as the interest is just beginning to intensify.

I am a total planner too. I also love a good list. That makes sense about finding the books. I am leaning this way as well due to the price. Omnibus is SO expensive and I have found a couple of Strobaugh for much cheaper.

My husband teaches in our districts alternative high school. I am not privy to much, since that would be total violation, but I have a soft spot for spectrum kids and often become better acquainted with their situations. My husband also doesn't have the greatest empathy and will ask for advice sometimes. Anyway, long story short, in his school the written and spoken program is very different from what happens in class. If a kid is trying and parents are on board, much more help and freedom are given. It shouldn't legally be this way, but it is in reality. Districts talk and so do teachers. If your daughter has a reputation for being a handful, you might have to fight a lot harder for services. I am not saying that is what is happening, just that I know from experience it can happen.

A child the age of yours is beginning to learn very complex social dynamics. The level of information he is being asked to assimilate and connect is massive. There could be glitches in any number of places. Assumptions can be very dangerous. As I have posted before, I am not technically on spectrum, but I was raised around family who are (one severely, one moderately). I have a stack of learned behaviors that look very much like Aspergers. Growing up in a family is like growing up in a micro culture. My micro culture only had people who weren't "normal" (for lack of a better term). Thus, I learned the idea of normal incorrectly. As far as I was concerned, my family was normal. If your child is mimicking behavior or translating learned behavior inappropriately, then he might appear to have something going on that isn't even there. My brother needed heavy intervention. I needed occupational therapy for maybe two intensive years to show me what real normalcy was and give me some basic skills as a jumping off point. These two situations are very different. Secondly, I had a giant stack of therapy from the age of 8 onward till 16. None of them really addressed the real problems occurring for me because I was unable to give the the right information to help. I was depressed, because of my messed up family situation. I was having trouble in school, because of my lack of social skills due to my family situation. I had anxiety, because I really didn't want any one to know how embarrassed I was of my home life. Treating the depression, social skills, and anxiety didn't do much other than make me feel like a basket case. It wasn't the real problem. Therapy is not all the same. You have to know what is going on so that help can be given and when you are dealing with children who often times cannot adequately explain themselves it is even more complicated. You offended people because many individuals are going through - or have been through - situations with massive complexity level which you appeared to blow off. If either your child or your husband is an Aspie, it gets messy. Like tear your house apart messy. It is downright debilitating to not understand general culture. Moreover it is beyond frustrating for both parties to try and communicate culture. My brother is a 32 year old hermit who has never lived anywhere but home and can't hold a job. My husband and I have gotten so close to divorce that my son had a bag permanently packed. My mother and I are still fragile after not speaking to each other for quite some time because she literally doesn't know how to love me (or anyone). That is being Aspergers. That is Autism. It is not something that you just sort of can tell or that an Internet resource and the library can talk you through. It is worth so much more than that. This undermines the legitimacy of your claim that you know much of anything about the disorder (and I hate calling it that because it is prejudicial.)

We use the workbook pages with my son as just quick practice. If your children do not have a fairly strong grammar foundation, I would that first. It is not that the Visual Latin requires it, but more that Latin language in general works much smoother with it. My son found the retention from Visual Latin to work well for him since it was based on Bible stories and he knew them already. The approach is extremely gentle compared to many other curriculum and could be heavily sped up if your kids were into it.

We used to live in Portland and have since moved about an hour and a half away. If you are outdoorsy the hikes of Oneonta Gorge and Eagle Creek are beautiful and not something available most anywhere else. Powells bookstore is the largest independent bookstore in the U.S. and possibly the world now. The Pied Cow on Belmont is a fun place for drinks and dinner. House of Vintage on Hawthorn can be very enjoyable and silly (Macklemore's a Thrift Shop was filmed in parts of the store). Voodoo doughnuts is a kick and definitely not an appropriate place for kids (they have adult shaped eclairs, if you get me). You can also renew your vows there as all the staff are ordained for the purpose of marrying guests. Brought on beach is a nice walk along the Columbia in the sand, and has quite a lot of beach glass if you go down about half a mile. The only other place I can think of is the Hotcake House on Powell. It is just a truck stop diner with great food, totally Portland, and good prices. They are open 24 hours and the staff all wear tye dye. I am sure there are lots of others, but I am blanking right now.

We did Literary Lessons from the Lord of the Rings a bit ago. It was not the most in depth curriculum, but it was pretty interesting at wrangling in all the rabbit trails which could be found. If you would like me to, I can look through the table of contents to list them all out. Let me know. I remember Beowulf (Tolkien is actually the main reason this is seen as a scholarly classic), MacBeth, King Arthur, and the Song of Roland. I would be more than willing to pull it out later this evening if it would help.

There is this really great video game add which came out about 15 years ago that I still have tapped up, though it is totally mangled at this point. It has a kid with a backpack staring out as the road splits into about 8 different paths. The caption at the bottom says, "The hardest part is the choice of where to go when you could go anywhere." Sometimes choices can be a bit debilitating. I'm glad you are letting him be involved in the choice. It is so difficult to know sometimes where to guide our kids. I significantly wish my parents had taken a more informed approach like you are. College is a pretty great place for sorting out all the directions and finding you can enjoy many things before having to choose. I ditched my math major for a stint as a fencing and medieval weaponry major. A quarter or two later, I realized that wasn't going to go very far. It sure was pretty darn great while I did it, though. :)

Just out of curiosity, what does he want? I mean, if the kid is doing this well with direction that you are having to consider the idea of allowing specialization shouldn't he be a major decision maker. I completely understand the need for parental oversight and the importance of age experience, but if you are doubting his maturity to make such decision that might be an indicator of a place to explore. I was a math freak in school, only I had an experience much like Demetler spoke of. My parents just kept me in school expecting brilliance everywhere till I lost it completely and transferred into an independent study program. No one was interested in the least about my opinions. It really bothered me that I was told and could show my aptitude, but then was discounted.

Even the NYU SCPS tests don't cover Attic Greek. It is a bummer because my son also wants to take multiple years of the language.

I am very interested on your choice of Strobaugh. I keep going back and forth between him and Omnibus. What was your deciding factor. My son is not there yet, but we often purchase curriculum a little here a little there and I like to have things on the radar in case they come up somewhere as a steal.

Here are a few ideas my husband and I have thrown around for the future. We study literature in the context of geography/history/cultural studies. Beowulf and The Vikings Great Course Robin Hood, Le Morte d'Arthur, Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Macbeth all work for Britain and the surrounding Empire. There is a British Lit Great Course as well Don Quixote is Spanish There are some really great Chinese Myths like Yi and the Nine Sons. Confucius or the Communist Manifesto are also really interesting. Animal Farm is a great study of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. There is a lot of great material about it online. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is pretty amazing. The Ramayana is interesting for India (there are numerous graphic novels and other translations of this that are not exceedingly lengthy) The Epic of Gilgamesh does some very interesting things with the goddess worship which show the merging of the Greek empires with the Mesopotamian areas in cultural significance. Ishtar and Aphrodite are strikingly similar. There is a lot of good material on the comparisons of The Odyssey and Gilgamesh as a similar representation expressed through the different cultures.

I think some of it might also depend on if your child really has a direction. Though my son is young and it very much could change, he is fairly strongly not math. He is language, culture, and humanities. We still do math (AoPS), but it is a much smaller part of our curriculum. I like the depth portion of AoPS for this reason. The focus is on problem solving and less about the computation. His focus is much more on the thought side than the answer side (if that makes any sense). He still needs challenging math, because let's be real, he's nine. For now, however, a program heavy in math would be a slog for him. Give him three or four languages (which would have wrecked me in school) and he is so happy. It was important for me to realize that this year. Every kid doesn't need to be a STEM kid. Feel out where your son might want to go.

We are listening to the Great Course on the Vikings right now as a family. They did some amazing things with construction of their boats as well. The "V" shape of the boat was designed at the right angle to really cut the rough water, and the boats are sort of squatty to handle the high waves and rough seas better. You could probably find stuff on that with buoyancy or about friction resistance with the cutting of the water. It is the same reason that geese fly in a V. At least, I think it is really cool. I had no idea how innovative the Vikings were before. They were also master craftsman with their houses if the Ocean/water thing doesn't work out. They did crazy things with building without nails.

My son is in 4th grade, age 9, and we just finished studying Beowulf. He loved it. Man Lit with a classic version Chuck Norris he called it. If you have iTunes, you can search Beowulf and find a classics scholar who reads the text in English, but with the same cadence as old English. We listened to it and then I used these other resources: Study Guides from here: http://www.vhinkle.com/lit/beowulf.html#Q_1-4 The numbered lines work with the classic Seamus Heanley Translation. Which we used for him to be able to do texted based evidence for his answers in preparation for essay work The YouTube animated epic to compare and contrast work here: Each "Chapter" we stopped and would discuss one literary device. Biblical allusions in the first and second documenting the Norman invasions. In Chapter 3 referencing Beowulf as the "almighty" showing the Christian conversions of the Vikings and the building of monarchies versus the previous clan like state. The contrasting alliterations between chapter 3 (B words on the water to show the choppy, versus the H words when first arriving with Hrothgar to provide a depressive mood, rather than aggressive). That sort of thing. It was fantastic. He got so much from it and really enjoyed the story. We would do 3 chapters a day, so it took us just over 2 weeks.

Jenney's Latin is what we use. It is highly grammatical and directly assumes knowledge of the English grammar in order to use the text. The translations are of ancient works, only reworked so that they use simpler sentence structure and vocabulary you have already learned. They are by Pearson, and my son LOVES them. It is a high school course, so we take it slowly, but they have cemented his knowledge of the English grammar so completely that I cannot imagine what we would have done without them.

Visual Latin was a great one to ease into with my son. There are free translation/worksheet like things online so you do not have to purchase the videos. I don't think they went hardcore on the grammar, but I could be wrong as my son was strong in grammar when we started Latin. I think there might be a demo or a couple free videos on YouTube for you to check it out. We didn't purchase, just used the worksheets. They are Bible passages however. If this bothers you, you might not want to use them. My son knew the bible stories and that really helped him remember the words. It was a strong foundation to build off of because it stuck in his memory. Now we use Jenney's Latin, but it is a highly grammatical approach.

Whenworking with middle school boys, I found that if I wanted them to talk I needed to be doing something with them that was physical. It doesn't have to be some big event. Going on a walk, washing the car, playing soccer or basketball...it could have him actually talk.

My son wants to graduate early from homeschool and do dual enrollment. We live in the middle of nowhere and have only 2 real options for dual enrollment - A.A. at technical community college used for ESOL and worker retraining OR a long commute each day to a 4 year university, but no degree. The community college means he would graduate with a degree; the university means close to 3 years of college (if you include CLEP credits) but no degree. Who knows which one he will chose. We currently have plans for both. Either way, my last time with him as any kind of instructor will occur after 10th grade. 4th - Pre-algebra and 1/2 Intro to Counting/Prob 5th - Geometry and 1/2 Intro to Counting/Prob 6th - Intro to Algebra and 1/2 Intro to Number Theory 7th - Intermediate Algebra and 1/2 Intro to Number Theory 8th - Intermediate Counting and Probability 9th - PreCalculus 10th - Calculus If 4 year university 11th - Multi-Variable Calculus and Differential Equations 12th - Non-Euclidean Geometry My son is highly spacial with math. He intitively gets geometry, but algebra is very difficult for him conceptually. This is why Counting/Prob and Geometry are out of order. We are going to try it and see. He has done the pre-tests and scores very well, so it is looking likely.