Yes, exactly. They are not the same and are not equivalent.

I second this. I would add to this list: a plant kit to grow plants and do simple activities like look at light effects, a model of the solar system to build, some atom models to play around with, a simple inclined plane to study projectile motion, build electrical circuits to light up light bulbs. My son will be in 4th grade next year, and we are doing mainly interest-led science, with a few basic things that I think he should be familiar with to set him on a more formal course starting in 5th grade.

You don't convince them; assuming they are of sound mind, they have the right to make their own medical calls and live with the consequences. He might not be all that crazy, you know. In my experience, the medical establishment has a habit of medicalizing every trivial thing, pushing unnecessary medications and procedures that sometimes are as bad as the malady, practicing defensive medicine, and not listening to the wishes of the patient. Perhaps your FIL has had experiences like mine and distrusts the medical community.

Ohhhh!

My does not like math (she does well in it, but does not like it), and she loves LOF. I am not sure how much value it adds to our day, but she loves it.

For all the reasons Ellie mentioned, legible handwriting is important. I don't think it needs to be beautiful or perfect, but it does need to be legible. I think a formal handwriting program with is the easiest way to do that, and nips poor penmanship habits in the bud. My daughter attended public school through 5th grade, and trying to fix her poor penmanship habits at that late age was torture for both of us. I am teaching my son formal handwriting in third grade, and I have no bad habits to break with him, so it is much easier on both of us. I think if he practices formal handwriting a few minutes per day, by the time he has to crank out paragraphs and compositions in 5th grade he won't have to think about letter formation, he can concentrate on honing the skill you are teaching instead. Much like basketball players don't think about how to dribble and can instead concentrate on where their opponents are on the court. For all the flap about computers replacing pens (and that flap has been going on for years now), everyone I know still carries and uses a pen, so it is important.

For what it's worth, I think the Van Cleeve books are close to useless. I bought them in hopes of using them with my daughter, but the experiments were simplistic and didn't teach much about any particular unified scientific principle. I think they are popular with homeschools because they are simple, but that doesn't mean they're good. This year for my 6th grade daughter, I put together my own biology curriculum, drawing readings from texts I own, the internet, and a few encyclopedias; I also called on videos and Bozeman Science. For experiments, I drew off my own teaching materials and online resources from University of Utah Genetics and elsewhere. I also have a lot of science equipment and specimens that I've collected, and drew heavily off a $20 DNA kit I bought off Amazon. Man, it was exhausting; but, oh, it was good, LOL! Then I found Ellen McHenry's website and ordered her botany curriculum because I was so exhausted I couldn't go on anymore! I added a few slides on plants, living plants, a plant flower dissection, and a few photosynthesis experiments and we had a ball; it's been awesome! Go check out her website; she has free stuff, as well as curriculum for bio and chem. It is meaningful and complete and can cover a wide range of ages (from about 4th grade - 8th grade). So far, it's the only purchased science curriculum I've found that I am satisfied with. Best of all is that most kids can do it independently. Anyway, I plan to use McHenry's stuff next year for chemistry, along with some ACS stuff, and of course, my own favorite science projects ('cause I just can't seem to keep my dang hands off the darned science!) ETA: I always called them "lab activities" unless they were actual experiments where my daughter had to draw a hypothesis and challenge the hypothesis. But otherwise, just "activities". Activities get no lab write-ups. In fact, in elementary school, I think quality lab write-ups are beyond the scope of what can reasonably be expected of a elementary student.

We love this book and are using it as our spine for these time periods.

I can see where all sorts of configurations for history would work well, depending on the kid and what they had already done with history. I am a bit uncomfortable with basically skimming through history and not going very deep, but my kid had no world history and I wanted her to have some background on world affairs from historical beginnings to the end, as well as an internal timeline of history, before she hit high school. We are taking deeper side trips into certain things (like Greek mythology, Roman culture, and the plague), but mostly, we are in overview mode. The plan for American history is to take side trips at the appropriate time in history, and we are using Hakim's History of the US for that; I have the study guide that accompanies it and it has lots of potential activities to flesh out the reading. We're still on medieval, so we're just getting to Viking explorers, so I'm not sure how this will look in practice, but we're giving it a try. I hope it does not become to disjointed and "jumping around" to do this; if it does, we'll have to re-group and look at the early American era in one chunk, rather than as each event occurs, but we'll see. It means a *lot* of history, but my daughter loves history and she particularly likes reading history, so hopefully this pans out.

I would say something, but not directly, nor would I tell her she is making a bad choice because it's really not my decision to make or to judge. That's not to say I wouldn't have concerns (I also see the red flags you do, and potentially dangerous ones at that). I would say something in a very indirect way by asking questions and by trying to lead her into making her own more careful and wiser decisions. If she refused to be lead, refused to entertain the questions, or disagreed, I would not say any more.

Can you tell me more about the bolded? Are these supplements instead the full-on AoPS curricula you're referring to? More stuff on certain topics, in order to enrich the current curriculum? How does that work if/when the currently curriculum uses an entirely different style? This may be an option for my daughter; I'll have to look into it.

We're kind of history-heavy here, so I'm not sure that's what you would be looking for. My daughter (now finishing up 6th grade in homeschool) came from public school and I felt I had a lot of holes to fill in, so she works pretty hard at doing that and preparing herself for high school. So, our history plan is 4 years of world history crammed into 3 years (so roughly, 7 months each of ancient, medieval, early modern, recent modern). During this time, we also plan to take side trips into major events in American history at the appropriate time in our history cycle. So finishing up this 6th grade year, we have now moved into medieval history. We are skimming American in middle school because they buried the kids in early American history in elementary, so she is pretty competent with that. I also did a separate year of world geography this year, and will do a separate year of American geography next year.

My daughter has been doing conversational French for 4 years now and has just moved to a more formal French program with grammar (she has a private tutor for that). We just started Latin this year also and it is the priority in our homeschool, and we are both very much enjoying it and it's also going well. Any reason you don't want to do both at once?

It depends on the nature of the job. If it involved teaching aspects of a religion I didn't agree with or wasn't knowledgeable of, I would not. But an administrative job, yeah. Anyway, I say go interview for it and be prepared for, but do not expect, discrimination. Worst case scenario is that it's a practice interview for a future job.

No, it's not "Where do you go to church", but more like "What denomination are you?". I've gotten that one.

You could get financial POA perhaps. But just be aware that if she is lucid enough, she may be angry and cut ties with you (at least temporarily) for doing such a thing. A tough call, no question.

In college, I worked for a survey company for a few years. It was a nice company to work for and I loved chatting to people, LOL! But I would hate selling anything and wouldn't last 5 minutes if the job was sales.

Your oldest must have been in my oldest's 5th grade class! These are one of many reasons we pulled her out to homeschool.

I don't disagree with anything you've said. But given human nature, I don't think it's possible to level the playing field completely; parents will always be looking for a leg up for their kids. I think the best we can shoot for is to make the playing field *more* level, not by ringing down advantaged kids, but by bringing up disadvantage ones. 'Course, we all disagree on the best way to do that, and that would be a politically-charged thread for sure!

I gave and still give the SAT thought; standardized testing is a reality, whether I like it or not, and I will do my best to help my children be competitive. That *does not* exclude other real and deeper learning. That being said, the SAT was an *example* of anticipating the future, not *the reason*. Anyway, a study may very well have shown that kids who start later learn less, but 1) how on Earth was that quantified, 2) how are other factors that affect learning teased out of the equation so that only late or earliness is tested, and 3) what constitutes learning for the sake of that study? I can not imagine a human study that removed all variables from analysis so that just late/earliness was evaluated, simply because we can not experiment on human subjects in that way and still have an ethical study. I would be curious to see how "learning" was quantified, also, as I don't see how that could even be done when there are so many kinds of learning. I get that you are the best judge of when to send your child to school, and that the choice you made was right for your child, and I wouldn't question that because you know your kid and your school situation better than I do, better than your school district does, and better than other professionals in his/her life. So why question other parents at all? Those other parents are also considering their kids and their kid's school when making a choice. That includes not just a child's emotional, social, and academic status at Kindergarten time, but also what goes on in their district. I mentioned how in my district the only middle school program worth beans is the very competitive magnet program, which requires high grades and test scores in 4-5th grades. It's ridiculous, but it's reality and parents are responding to that. It's not about seeing an "A" on a report card for the sake of pride, it's about getting a decent middle school education. That simply will not change until the district starts to see children at all ends of the educational spectrum as being worthy of a top-notch education. So, if you were in my district and you paid no mind to those things, and didn't think forward to test scores, your child would have a much lower chance of entry into a decent middle school program and would be relegated to a second-rate education because of his/her placement. This is why people pay mind to test scores, age at Kindy entry, etc; it's not pride, it's practicality. I still maintain that if schools want to end extensive red-shirting, they need to address educational quality, methods, and policies up through high school. If they don't do that, parents will do what they need to do to give their child a competitive edge. If red-shirting were unavailable, my kid would not have gone to public school; he would have gone to a private school that would have accommodated him instead. In my district, the schools know this, and they have accepted red-shirting as a way to keep involved, middle class families in their schools, in order that their schools not devolve into warehouses for kids who have uninvolved parents. I get that this option is not open to those who are financially unable, and that's why I think current school/educational policies will only serve to widen the already wide gulf between haves and have-nots and needs to be changed. I agree with you wholeheartedly that it would be best for the schools to experience the consequences of their actions. But I just am not willing to sit by and sacrifice my child's prospects so that the school district can (maybe) learn their lesson long after my son is grown with kids of his own. My business is to give my kids the best I can offer, and I think most others try to do the same for their kids. It's not fair, but that's how it rolls.

Yes, I considered Montessori schools for my kids when they left pre-K, but there were no Montessori schools past 8th grade here and I wondered about their merging into a traditional classroom at that point, after having been in Montessori for so long. Ideally, this model could one day be the model of public education from pre-K through 12, although the way our education is heading, I doubt this will ever occur.

I agree with this too. But it will take a wholesale re-ordering of how the United States thinks about education, and a re-modeling of our educational system, to make a later start and an earlier end a reality. So in the meantime, I think parents are just working with within the system they have.

Absolutely, a bright child would be bored to death in a younger class, if the class was being run in a developmentally-appropriate way. But developmentally-appropriate classes don't happen that often in the younger grades in public schools these days (at least not in my district); I don't look at test-prep, pushing writing on children before the read fluently, and expecting every child to read fluently by the end of second grade as developmentally-appropriate. I think it's these factors that cause parents to say "whoa, nope, you're not imposing those inappropriate standards on my kid". I assume you sent your kids on time because you felt that they could handle the work, and that makes sense also (you're kids are different from my son and other kids who were reds-shirted). Schools want kids to fit into one box per grade, and that's not realistic, and they need to trust parents who have spend the last 4-5 years raising their kids and trust that they know them well. Another option for a kid who was red-shirted and undergoes great mental and spiritual growth during the year would be enrichment at home. But that's a far cry from more seat time in a higher grade. My son, while held back one year, also had home enrichment, including summer camps that gave him the opportunity to grow in sports, academics, and socially; but again, that was not seat time and test prep. I may be jaded because of my experience with our district; your district may operate differently. Also, I *always* look ahead to see what opportunities and problems may lie in my child's path. I am not a seer and can't predict with 100% accuracy what will be going down in 2, 5, or 10 years, but I certainly can look ahead and try to avoid pitfalls. I don't know who *wouldn't* try and do that. You prepare your child for the SATs in a number of ways throughout school, even though in 10 years, no school may accept the SATs. But you know that there is a high *probability* that being able to do well on the SATs will be necessary skill, so you plan for it, even though you can't foresee everything. Anticipating pitfalls and trying to avoid them is just common sense for a parent, and I am happy with how I have guided my son thus far; my predictions and judgment of his future has been spot-on up until now, and I trust myself to make those choices for him more than I trust the school. For the school, my son is not an individual, but a data point, and they do not have *his* welfare first and foremost in their minds because they need to consider more than just him. ETA: Perhaps a better model for our educational system would be classrooms that were not age-graded within a certain range and where students could progress at their own pace within the class framework and then move on to the next age-range class. The US probably needs to discard the strict age-graded classroom, but I get the impression the classrooms are set up more for crowd control than education anyway, so that's probably why that doesn't happen. Guess that's why we homeschool our daughter and plan the same for our son next year.

To the bolded: I've got one like this, but she just cranks the stuff out while kvetching about it non-stop. I've offered up other possibilities for math as far as curriculum goes (figuring maybe she is aggravated by the constant incremental review), but she doesn't want to part with Saxon. It's like she has this weird love-hate relationship with those dang math books. My daughter will be going to 8/7 from 7/6 this year, and based on her 7/6 grades (nearly all in the 90s) and what I see of 8/7 it will be quite manageable. I'm tempted to skip her to algebra, but I am afraid she'll miss something important and bomb algebra. I want to feed her some AoPS pre-algebra but she is resistant and wants to keep those Saxon books. So, what I've decided to do with her next year is keep the Saxon books and use AoPS as a fun supplement, to work through very leisurely and with no pressure to finish a certain amount or get a certain grade. If your daughter is competent in 8/7 yet still takes forever to do her work, I'd consider she may be bored with the curriculum. So although Algebra 1/2 would be a possible next step, if she really is good at math, consider something more deep and challenging (like AoPS pre-algebra); it might give her the attitude adjustment she needs. Worst thing that could happen would be AoPS isn't her style, you lose a few months, and then you just buzz through Algebra 1/2 a bit faster to complete it by the time she's due for algebra.