Maybe average 45 minutes daily. We school pretty much year round though. Math happens almost every day over here. I haven't used AOPS yet. I have JA on deck right now. I rotate through the various other math resources based on whatever is going on.

Forgot to add as you can see in my siggy that we are completing BA 5 as we poke along in pre-A. We are one of those whose use BA a level after SM. It's useful to tandem it for us and makes things not so heavy all the time since BA. He's plugging along but the workload is not overwhelming.

We are doing Jousting Armadillos over here before AOPS as a way to ease in to things. AOPS text is very dense to jump into straight away. We are meandering through...as time is not an issue.

Schole is pretty Christian. This is from their handbook about thie philosophy of liturgical learning: 2. Liturgical Learning “Liturgical learning†is a phrase that describes the use of the embodied patterns from church worship and tradition for shaping the way we order time, space, and language in our schools and home schools. We believe that using elements of a liturgical pattern within our classes is an effective way to recover reflection and contemplation as part of learning. We think that it is one faithful application of the classical tradition, and it differentiates us from other online schools. For example, one could use the following “order of worship†as a pattern for ordering a lesson. This pattern or template is intended as a guide that is not “followed to the letter†but nonetheless shapes the “learning liturgy†of Scholé Academy classes to distinguish them as “scholé†courses. Our faculty embraces and loves incorporating this approach, and we believe our students will too. Please note, the pattern of a class is determined by the course instructor. Many of our teachers incorporate elements of the following pattern, but the embodiment of “liturgical learning†will vary from teacher to teacher and class to class. Welcome/Greeting: Students are greeted by beautiful image(s) and music, perhaps with a inspirational quotation or key question, which they are asked to contemplate for several minutes. Grateful Acknowledgement: The students and the teacher express gratefulness for the art, one another, the opportunity study some aspect of God’s creation, mind, nature, humanity, etc. Confess What We Need: The students and the teacher confess a need for a disposition, a frame of mind, virtue, a heart that seeks and calls out for wisdom, etc. A written confession may be read and/or prayer offered (Key Scripture: Proverbs 2:1-7). Teach/Present/Discuss: The teacher leads a traditional lesson, ensuring that students are engaged and participating. Confess What We Know/Have Learned: The teacher leads a summary and review, sometimes taking the form of “creedal†confession that edifies. Expression of Thanksgiving: The teacher (or a mature student) leads the class in expressing gratitude to God, the teacher, and/or other students. Benediction/Dismissal: The teacher gives a prepared benediction written by the teacher or from traditional sources. Processional: The students return to beautiful music and images. Students are free to leave immediately or remain for quiet contemplation. As we seek to recover and renew the scholé tradition of education, we know that we will misstep and veer from this path—after all we don’t know the path nearly as well as we would like. Still, we believe that finding and walking that path will be enriching to students, parents, and teachers. As we seek to recover the classical tradition of scholé, we welcome parental feedback and ideas about how we can better embody scholé in our online classes.

Prodigy is free. The subscription gets your other features in game play like leveling up, pets, etc. The math practice is free to all users. Prodigy is math practice and is not intended to teach math if that makes sense. So if Math Seeds has lessons, it is distinctly going to be different from that perspecitve.

A little OT, but Schole has a series of Great Books courses for high school. It's 2 hours twice a week with a college profressor. http://www.scholeacademy.com/by-subject/great-books/

I think the class maximums can be bigger at Schole. I would venture to guess that Latin Readings may be smaller because there are less students continuing to study Latin at that point? My son says that there are 13 kids in his class. I can't say how accurate his count is. For some reason, my impression was there were more kids in there at the beginning of the year. Schole has a far more generous cancellation policy. Q. What is your refund policy? A. There is a $75 deposit built into the cost of each course. Withdrawals requested before May 1 are granted a full refund, including the deposit. After May 1, withdrawals are granted a full course refund, less the $75 deposit. Students may withdraw from a course through the second week of classes. After the second week of classes, no refund is given.

The problem is that the survey was targeted to the existing population. They aren't capturing the potential population who live in later time zones but don't choose them because the times are not ideal. Case in point, I opted to go with Schole for Latin because the time was better because no way I could pull off a 1 1/2 hour Latin class at 8 AM PST for my son.

I'm the one who keeps posting the PST questions every single time WHA has one of these events. Squeaky wheel you know. There is no way on God's green earth that my son will be doing a class at WHA unless it is 12:30 PM EST or later. He is not at all pleasant in the morning and then asking him to engage thoughtfully in a class! My husband would say...have you lost your mind?!?! I'm sure it will surely only get worse the older he gets with the normal teen circadian rhythm issues.

WHA = Wilson Hill Academy My son is enrolled in Latin for Children at Schole this year. I was waffling between WHA and Schole because the instructor was brand new this year. I decided the better time of day for class was more important and took a chance. My son looks forward to Latin and truly enjoys it. He readily completes his assignments and has responded well to the teacher who majored in classics. You can tell she enjoys Latin. Whereas me, I would be muddling through with my son on our own with the material. For foreign language, I think having an instructor who is passionate about the language is so important.

Math Kangaroo has old test materials that you can buy on their website.

You can buy books of past MOEMS problems. There are three volumes available through the website and on Amazon.

While not totally focused on it, Howard Zinn's A Young People's History of the United States. Reading level is junior high. https://zinnedproject.org/materials/a-young-peoples-history-of-the-united-states/

So, this is my dilemma. I've caught my son a few times reading books while simultaneously practicing the piano. He has this ability to memorize the pieces that have been assigned by is piano teacher. Somehow he can play the pieces while reading a book in his lap. The pieces are completely accurate which is why this is driving me nuts. I suppose he's bored, but he didn't have the song mastered at the beginning of the week when he has his lesson, but somehow towards the end of the week this happens. Part of me hopes that maybe this is because the pieces are not complex enough yet, and that this will be a temporary temptation. He's probably around the beginning of intermediate level for piano. Is my kid the only one that does this?

I'm in my fourth year teaching at our co-op. I find that it takes me 2-3 class meetings for me to get the class to settle into a rhythm. I spend time the first class talking about my expectations for behavior. Then I observe and correct in the first class. Sometimes, I see the ones I need to deal with right away, others by the second class. I usually approach the moms first and let them know that I observed x,y,z and I am letting them know how I going to approach helping the kids to focus and be more effective in their behavior. I use a sticker/stamp method. I meet with the kids and I will talk to them about the class and how I think I need to help them focus better. When I come around and put a sticker on their hand (or stamp it - I have stamping markers), then it's me telling them that what is happening in that moment is not helpful. That I need them to stop and focus on quieting their body and their behavior without calling attention to them in class. Sometimes I have to stamp the other hand. I've told them that if it is a 3rd time, I will send them to their mom (who are well aware of what I am going to do) because today they aren't ready to be in class that day. Kids generally don't want to miss class because I incorporate teams and competition and we do a lot of interesting and fun things in my science classes. What I wrote about is addressing disruptive behavior.

Consider using the Intensive Practice and Challenging Word Problem books for SM.

Google Docs, Word and Apple IOS all have talk to text features if those are an option.

Well, Math Olympiad is more focused on problem solving. They compete against other teams across the US, but this is strictly based on the scoring of the contests. There are only 5 questions. The local elementary school we would normally attend allowed my son to join their Math Olympiad team. We don't go to any of the practices/team meetings though. They are allowing him to just sit for the contest. There are 5. The last one was earlier this week. We just work through the MOEMS sample problems on our own. He is readily able to solve most of the problems so he is doing pretty well. You can find sample questions here: http://www.moems.org/sample.htm HOE is simply a manipulative based/visual intro to algebra thinking. We do both. Completely different and totally depends on what your goals are.

If you have the older version, it's not like that. It doesn't have that stuff going on. I actually had both. I sold the old version to someone else who was taking a class using the old version. If that's the one you have, you could use it just fine. It's the less "fun" version. It would move a slower pace than LA. A lot of people do CAP A & B and then go straight into LA. Others have said C is not necessary since LA starts from ground zero. LFC B has not been revamped to be colorful and more fun. I was told that revisions are taking them two years to complete...so that likely won't change as the new version rolled out this year.

I do LFC A with my 3rd grader. I would not use if for a 7th grader. Definitely go with Latin Alive! They revamped the material this year, so there is an ongoing story about children that you follow throughout the textbook. This would be way to young for a 7th grader as it is clearly targeted to upper elementary.

You can't technically tell, but it's true IME. I used CC to get easy A's for credits that I didn't want to work that hard for at Cal. Why take a weeder Biology class with pre-meds when I can do it at CC for an easy A? I worked much harder in my AP courses than I ever did for my CC courses. The students in AP courses will tend to be of similar level academically and generally speaking with similar long term goals. CC is a far broader population of students. That being said, CC is by far and way, the most affordable route. If you are going to do online AP courses, that's usually running about 800 to 2,000+ per course.

If you don't have a background in Chinese, I would suggest you sign up for a class. For example, there's a teacher (last name Hong) who homeschooled her kids who offers classes online on outschool and currclick. That might fit the bill. This would solve the issue of getting a tutor. As to whether to use My First Chinese Readers, I actually would suggest you look at My First Chinese Words series from Better Chinese instead first. I know they list it as pre-K/K, but it is fine for a 7 year old. There are quite a few apps that you can get that demonstrate writing Chinese characters and the correct stroke order. You can print out Chinese "guideline" paper. I would suggest using the rice template here. It will help with figuring out how to position where to start and finish a stroke. Though if you signed up for a class, you wouldn't have to get a curricula...the instructor will have their own selection. http://chineseprintables.com/

I would set it aside for now and come back to it later if you think it is too frustrating right now. I would say in my own experience that my child did not always remember, but when we got to the end of the questions, I would got back and repeat the questions that he missed and ask him to listen carefully again for that when the passage was read again. Perhaps even just read a smaller portion of the passage. It's also totally okay for you not to know the words in the passage. Modeling looking up words in the dictionary is a good thing. Doing it together means you are modeling that learning happens at any age. I don't think it's a secret in your family that English isn't your first language. That being said, lots of people use WWE a year later. WWE1 = 2nd, WWE2 = 3rd, WWE 3 = 4th. There's nothing wrong with doing that either.

SSL2 is not a pre-requisite. We did SSL2 which is about 3x as thick as SSL1. It is a step up and introduces some grammar in there. If you do SSL2, it gives you a step up going into LFC as you will have a lot of the beginning vocab. I have the whole program for LFC, but I opted to do the LFC class with Schole Academy. He loves that class. Wilson Hill also offers LFC, but it didn't work for our time zone. So if you are thinking about outsourcing it, that's an option as well. I could have taught it to him, but I just didn't see myself inspiring him to love Latin. His teacher's love for Latin comes through, and he says it is one of his favorite subjects.

I don't know Quark IRL, but I wanted to give her a shout out today! This lovely article about her son was in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle. I asked her if it is okay to share with all of you on the AL board because we all rejoice in each other's joys and empathize with each other's struggles. Quark has been such an amazing resource on the board. I wish her son all the best at Berkeley and hope he loves it there as much as I did. I know from her posts here that she must have shed blood, sweat and tears over the years on this wild ride nurturing and homeschooling her gifted son. http://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/Life-adding-up-for-Cal-s-15-year-old-math-whiz-12458319.php?utm_campaign=twitter-premium&utm_source=CMS+Sharing+Button&utm_medium=social#photo-14759164