I use Arithmetic for Parents by Ron Aharoni.

I like Signs and Seasons. It is just right for middle school IMO.

A few creeks in my area have hit flood stage but we are okay (other than a leak in the roof). Looks like the Cosumnes River might go over the bank tonight, too, and flood parts of Wilton.

Pioneer Cabin Tree fell :-(

I have a big berkey too... filtering rain water is exactly what I plan to do, if needs be!

I took the school crates off the floor of our school room today, which is a converted garage and has flooded before. We have a sump to move water to the street, but if the power goes out we might have a problem. I did a few other standard emergency prep things today but I am assuming everything will be okay. Emergency prep and meteorology terms like "atmospheric river" are interesting things to teach the kids, too. Your city or county should have free sandbags and there are videos online to learn how to fill and stack them if you have never done it before.

You can get a PDF of the first book for $5. I would look at that first to see what concepts they might be missing. Vol. 2 assumes some specific prior knowledge. But each lesson lists exactly which previous lessons are prerequisites, so it is pretty easy to move forward without having to do all of Vol 1 first.

I have used the AL Abacus with Singapore for all my kids. I love it. No little pieces to get lost, and so easy to teach place value, visualizing math facts, regrouping etc.

Webster's Speller (free and typed nicely at Don Potter's website) and WISE OWL Polysyllables by Don Potter (you can get it on Amazon).

I have assigned my kids daily Bible reading on their own when they are about 10. Sometimes we all just listen to it on BibleGateway instead of reading. When my oldest was about first grade I used a workbook from Christian Liberty Press. Now we use God's Great Covenant from CAP Just the teachers manuals, not the student books...we do it all orally. We have devotions every day but they aren't specifically geared toward the little ones. I guess I rely on our church Sunday School for my youngest, mostly.

Frugalmamatx, have you looked at Evan Moor workbooks? If I had to do middle school on roughly $100, I would think I could get a science encyclopedia, some literature, and a history book of some sort at the thrift store, as those are the most common school items I see there. I would spend most of my money on Evan Moor Daily Science, Daily Language Review, and Daily Geography. And then I would probably get Mastering Essential Math Skills book 2, or a used copy of some other middle school math textbook. I'd probably require a written essay once a week about something she learned in her literature or history book, and that's about it.

Plenty of colleges don't require half of what you listed as college prep, especially not community colleges. Here in California, at least, you can start at a community college without a "real" high school credit to your name, and still get a guaranteed transfer to a UC, which is not small potatoes. I believe learning to self-teach from textbooks is one of the reasons the vast majority of poor working homeschooled kids in the 80s became strong, independent, creative adults. Next time you go to a thrift store, check out the book section. You might be surprised how many school-related books you can find. Curriculum swaps are still pretty common in my area (among families who don't use charters). I remember my younger brothers doing science with a microscope that went around from family to family. My brother brought it home in a backpack on his bike one day. I think he biked a few miles to get it. He never did a foreign language or formal science lab, or even two years of math in high school. He is a mechanical engineer. Seems to have worked out okay for him. Poverty schooling with bare bones resources, no parent teaching, no internet, and no lab or foreign languages worked fine for my brother in law, too, who is in law school and is an Army captain. One of the professors I know who was full-on poverty-homeschooled never had a science lab. He knew Latin though. And you can self-teach Latin pretty easily from a 50-year old book that cost 50 cents because nobody cares if you have bad pronunciation.

Before the internet it used to be done all the time. I was homeschooled that way in the 80s and mid-90s, and I have a lot of friends who were homeschooled that way. Some missionary families I know homeschooled that way overseas, too. Most of them now own their own highly successful businesses, some are teachers, and two are professors.

The Goodwill near me always has a lot of textbooks for the upper grades, along with lots of literature. I have snagged a ton from there. Last week I got Spielvogel's Western Civ for $2. For the younger kids I like Alpha Phonics and Climbing to Good English. Schoolaid materials are fairly inexpensive and can be done without a lot of teacher time. When I was a kid we mostly learned math from a set of dominoes until we were ready to tackle Saxon 54 on our own. In the old days of homeschooling before the internet was so common, many kids self-taught from Saxon math books and encyclopedia-related books, like the World Book of Word Power. I had a nice middle school English textbook that my mom got out of a high school dumpster at the end of the school year.

She will eventually remember their names as she uses them. If she wants to move on, I would let her. Kids at that age are pretty hit and miss with what they can master.

I like Climbing to Good English for independent language arts/grammar. Cursive definitely can be independent, with pretty much any handwriting workbook out there.

We use the LFC readers. My DD finished reader A and just started reader B, and she is in the middle of Lively Latin book 2. We use the readers once a week. I found it to be very helpful. The first reader is Roman and early Church history, and the second is medieval history. The answer keys for the readers are free online, so you should be able to look at those and see how difficult/interesting they are. I also have Fabulae Mirabiles, but my DD isn't quite ready for that yet. I think we will start it next year though when we are using Latin Alive.

I use the Archaeological Study Bible for that purpose, along with a basic Bible timeline. I am not sure about other books out there. https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Time-Line-Genesis-Revelation/dp/9901983517/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1480706912&sr=8-2&keywords=bible+timeline https://www.amazon.com/NIV-Archaeological-Study-Bible-Hardcover/dp/031092605X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480706957&sr=8-1&keywords=archaeological+study+bible

The books include some selections from ancient religious writings, such as Greek mythology and Hebrew/Christian scripture. You should be able to get an idea of the "religiousness" of the books from the samples on their website. It is not like Rod and Staff, for example, which might tell the student that Christians study grammar for this Christian reason. But it uses some scriptures as examples of literature. I start my kids in the series in fourth grade, and we do a lot of it orally. We do all the "sentence play" and comprehension exercises aloud rather than writing answers. I think the exercises in the series are good for kids who don't talk a whole lot. I have a kid like that (she can't talk if she is stressed, and sometimes speaks very slowly) and while it is challenging for her to give an oral narration, it is exactly what she needs to practice. I stretched the first book out for a year with that kid because she is a bit dyslexic too. It is helping her a lot and she enjoys it.

UC Scout has online statistics courses. It is apparently $19 per semester for a basic course, either regular statistics or AP. I don't know anything about their courses though.

I just hand my kids the book and let them have at it. They draw one map a week, spending about half and hour on it. They put their maps in a binder and that's it. They enjoy it and have learned a lot.

Just FYI, my big-city public library gives teacher's library cards to homeschoolers, which are exempt from all overdue fines. The checkout period is longer, too. If you are a big library user you might want to see if your library has special teacher's cards.

David Mulroy makes the point that grammar instruction helps with better reading, not just writing. ETA: I think if you already know a second language you already pick up on the ideas and logic that grammar instruction would teach. Grammar as a separate subject can be redundant for some families. Just my observation.

Thinking Blocks on the Math Playground website. Free and easy!

"The War Against Grammar" by David Mulroy is worth reading for this topic.