Our district's average SAT score is 815. Our previous district 1006. The highest in WNY (out of about 80 districts) is 1109, but that district had only 35 test takers in 2016 (and is a place I'd never even heard of). There are a couple of other districts that are just over 1100 with more students. Our current district has an IB program, AP courses, DE at various local colleges, etc, whereas our previous district, despite being a decent size, had fewer such options, iirc. So, average score doesn't necessarily mean all that much, if you're talking about a big district. Though I'm sure there are districts with more options still.

There is a 2nd grade planning thread and a 4th grade planning thread, but no 3rd grade planning thread. Therefore, Broccoli is going to be in 3rd grade next year, since I'm not ready to plan anything yet. Lucky me, there is no 6th grade planning thread yet either.

We did not go see the moon. We should've been able to see about a 3/4 eclipse here before it dropping below the horizon, and we have a lake to our NW, so, no trees or hills, BUT, there was supposed to be about 90% cloud coverage, and the lake is usually a big source of those clouds, so, I figured our odds of actually seeing it were too slim to bother with the COLD and EARLY. Next super blood moon will be on Jan 20 (it won't be blue, but, the blue part is pretty meaningless anyway). I'm not holding my breath for better weather though. We have seen a blood moon before, a few years ago, though I don't think the kids really remember. I remember that it was warm enough to lie on a blanket in the back yard, so, that was vastly better. Yes, but NL is very much a first world country, and while they sort of get that they're lucky that they're Dutch/Americans, any comparisons with third world countries are the same as historical comparisons to them (they also sort of get that they're lucky they weren't born 100+ years ago, but they just don't see it as relevant, because, well, they weren't born ages ago, or elsewhere). We've talked a bit about how we were poor when they were little. I don't know, they're young, and maybe it's a psychological defense to just be like that - like you said, it's not exactly fun to contemplate how lucky we are, because that requires thinking about how horrible things could've been, just through random chance. I don't want to hammer it in too much. Maybe more registers than it seems, I don't know, or more will register as they get older. Yeah, I didn't really mean literature, though we'll have to work on that as well. I was mostly thinking that I need to be able to trust him to read 0.5-2 pages or w/e for grammar, or art, or history, or science, or w/e, when I give him stuff to read. And not just trying to find answers to questions, but actually read the entire thing, and to ask questions if he doesn't understand something. Instead, if I ask him stuff, he says he doesn't remember, and if I push it, he melts down. If I'm lucky, I can get him to sit down and look for the answer, but he easily becomes frustrated, and starts guessing by pointing at random things. Sporadically I can get him to actually thoroughly read the thing - when he does, he does very well. Outlining and/or summarizing probably is the best option for this, since he'd kind of have to read closely. And yes, I get that this is something that may be hard from a maturity perspective - but, it's not something I can just ignore and hope he'll magically be able to do in 9th grade. It's just that when he says he's read something but then can't answer a single question about it, no matter how simple, well, I don't want him to say he's read it in that case. He may have skimmed it, or moved his eyes over it while zoning out. Sigh. Now I'm having a flashback to high school Dutch literature oral exam, where I struggled to answer questions and was accused of not having read the books, despite having read all of them (I even had a classmate who confessed to me that he got a 7 (like, a B) having read less than half the books). But, that was over a dozen books read over the course of most of a year, and literary analysis, not concrete questions over 0.5-2 pages of text read 5 min earlier. But, it does remind me that once you get lost on the first questions, the brain shuts down and the rest becomes an automatic "I don't know". I have no objections to giving failing grades. It's just that that requires giving grades in the first place. Like I said, we don't do "school-at-home". We do "do this, now fix your mistakes" for things like math and writing, and books and documentaries with discussions for most of the other stuff. The discussion is the 'test' - if I get the impression they don't get it, I explain more, or I let it go if I think it's not important at the moment. The whole schoolish "here's a test, oh, you failed it, here, you get an F, let's move on anyway"... yeah, that's not me (and honestly, I doubt the kid would care if he got an A or an F). I don't know. I think tests with grades are more useful in a group setting than in a homeschool.

Yeah, I sometimes do stuff like that, but then they whine that that's ages ago, or abroad, or whatnot, so that it doesn't matter. They are certainly too ungrateful.

I asked DW what she learned in middle school: "Diagramming, reverse polish notation, algebra.... and a whole lot of nothing, I guess".

The way I've seen it explained is that middle school is usually 6th-8th, while junior high usually starts in 7th grade, and that junior high used to be more common but that for the past couple of decades middle school has become more common. Our local school district made 5th grade middle school last year, and 8th grade high school, because of school closings and space usage. But, they're not actually middle school and high school - that's just the buildings they're in. In NL, elementary school is group 1-8, with group 1 being pre-k, basically, so group 8 is 6th grade. Then secondary school is class 1-6, i.e. 7th-12th grade. Well, if you do the pre-university track. Otherwise it's either class 1-4 or 1-5, i.e. through 10th or 11th grade.

Oh, and for a speech in English class I decided to talk about bacteriophages, and I thought I'd made it simple enough, but everybody was completely lost, and the teacher criticized me for not keeping my audience in mind. So, I learned that if I think I've dumbed things down a lot, I probably need to dumb them down a bunch more.

I had elementary school through 6th grade, secondary school from 7th-12th grade. I actually remember quite a bunch of the academics. Also, those grades would not have been optional - unlike the US, where I hear a lot of schools don't teach much new stuff in middle school, we learned a lot of new things in those grades, and you would've been lost without it in high school. I mean, in all fairness, I skipped 9th grade, so I can't be 100% sure what that was like (though I read most of the books during the summer between 8th and 10th grade). 8th grade was the last year I had geography. I would've liked to continue it, but it just didn't fit into my high school schedule. I remember being confused about the difference between weathering and erosion, and I still easily get confused, but other than that, my geography knowledge is from middle school, and it doesn't seem to be worse than the average American's knowledge of geography (actually, pretty sure my middle school geography recollection beats the average American's high school geography recollection). In middle school geography we covered a bunch of earth science stuff and a bunch of human geography stuff, and had some quizzes on countries and their capitals, one continent at a time. I don't remember *all* of them, but I do okay with locating things on a map. 8th grade was also the last year I had Latin (same reason as above). I've forgotten a bunch of it, but I do remember some. The textbook was about Marcus and Lucius who were 12yo or so students. For history I had a group project about Egypt. For my part (about agriculture), I tried to go in depth too much, ran out of time, and so half of my part was plagiarized by translating Encarta by translating it into Dutch (I think I did list Encarta as one of the sources I used, but, uh, yeah... I translated more than I should have verbatim). On the other hand though, I'd also borrowed a book (maybe more than one?) from the local university library, and read some stuff about the salinization of the soil, etc, so, half of my contribution was pretty good. The others in my group basically didn't contribute anything, and got a failing grade. Despite the fact that the teacher had previously said that everybody in the group would get the same grade, I got a 7 (which is an okay grade - like, a B). I'm pretty sure she never realized that half of my part was translated from an Encarta CD-ROM. For biology, we had to do an experiment and write a paper about our hypothesis, methods, results, conclusion, etc. The experiment had to be about growing some sort of plant, bean sprouts or something. We could either do it about water, or about light/darkness. The teacher lectured me for doing it wrong because instead of having either one group of plants in the light and one in the dark, or one group of plants wet and one dry, I'd actually done one group of plants wet and dark, one wet and light, one dry and light, and one dry and dark, and he was telling me that I'd confounded stuff by not having a control group. I'm still not sure what on earth he was on about to this day, as I see no problem with what I did. I tried to explain myself to him, but I don't know if he was having a bad day or what. It's not like real scientists always only have two groups...??? I also remember that our 8th grade biology textbook was spiral bound with a neon green cover and that it was a community college textbook. I don't recall the title though. I do recall that after one of the first exams that year my teacher was super excited I'd gotten a 10 on it (like, an A++), something to do with that most others had failed it or something. It was about the organelles in a cell, like mitochondria, etc, and the differences between plant, animal, fungi, etc cells. I also remember that on the final of the year, the last question was a bonus question where we got to draw an 'alien' species that might live on another planet. I sort of remember what I drew, but I'm not sure how to describe it here... basically, a plant, but instead of having separate leaves, it had a ring-shaped leaf all around it, and then lower out the ring would be further out from the plant, basically in a cone-shaped form, more or less. For art, I remember using an old-fashioned pen you had to dip in an ink jar and making patterns on paper by drawing lines, or squiggly lines, or dots, or little circles, or other shapes, etc... as many different things as possible, to see the different effects. Also, a color wheel with water paints, and learning perspective drawing for the first time. In shop class, we learned to use a bunch of power tools for cutting, drilling, bending, etc various materials, as well as some basic technical drawing. Also, we made a radio from scratch... sort of, winding copper wire around a tube etc, and we made some electrical circuit with a light, etc. In gym, I learned that the instructor won't believe you're really trying, until you freak him out by giving 110% and going into a major asthma or w/e attack. I also learned that middle school kids are dumb and don't think they need to block the short kid while playing basketball (those middle school boys really shot up in height, so, I was super short in co-ed PE in NL), so that being short is actually an advantage, allowing me to score a fair number of times once I learned to actually throw that ball through the hoop. Mostly, the PE teacher still wouldn't give me more than a 6 (like, a C). Because he just didn't think I tried hard enough. Oh well. I seem to remember the stuff I learned in middle school English... either that, or I'm just pretending to write in English, and y'all have been good sports. Likewise, middle school French and German were definitely a pre-req for high school French and German, where we were expected to read full-size books, write page-long essays, and give 5-10 min long speeches in those languages. That would've been tricky to do without learning anything in middle school. Music... not sure I learned much in middle school music, since I'd played violin since 3rd grade. I basically don't remember middle school music. I played in the school orchestra though. Physics... I don't remember much, but it was probably good to have as a prereq for calculus-based physics in high school. I did not like Dutch. I wasn't good at book reports. This became much, much worse in high school, where my literary analysis skills were bad enough that the teacher accused me of not having read the books. Not sure how that happened, because on the entrance exam for the bilingual program (so, at the end of 6th grade), we had to analyze a (Dutch) poem, and I was one of very few kids who realized the birds in the poem represented people. In the health and study skills miscellaneous class, one time we had to practice taking notes. I managed to write down pretty much everything the teacher said. That was not what you were supposed to do. It was fun though. Also, we were told the standard don't do drugs kind of stuff, and about some drug dealer that got caught because he used so much electricity to grow weed in his attack, and how he lost a ton of money because the Dutch version of the IRS then really got him for tax evasion (bigger offense than growing weed, iiuc). Allegedly the Dutch IRS doesn't care how you get the money, and won't report you to the police if you file you taxes and say you got the money by growing drugs. Not sure if that's true, fwiw. It might be. Also, in the same class, I learned that relaxation exercises stress me out. Apparently lying on the floor doing deep breathing exercises with all your classmates is not my thing. Anyway, I could probably go on a while longer, but I'm probably boring y'all. But, long story short, I actually do remember a fair amount of middle school academics, and/or it was a prereq for high school academics (e.g. 9th grade math was stuff like logarithms and trigonometry, and 10th grade math included limits and basic derivatives and integrals - we obviously learned algebra in middle school, though I don't really remember learning it - I mostly remember showing up to tests and being like "huh, this is interesting... let me see if I can figure it out"... occasionally I'd think "hm, maybe I should've done some of the homework" (tbh, I think I did sometimes do my math homework, but, not super consistent)). Maybe I remember middle school academics because I remember almost nothing else from that time period. I don't know.

Oh, and when is this "will stop talking" thing supposed to kick in? Because when he was almost non-verbal and I wished for him to talk, they told me I'd probably regret that at some point, and they weren't entirely wrong, lol. ETA: he's quite the chatterbox.

Because I could get on board with that.

Okay, so, what's the recommendation? Send the kid to herd sheep until the beginning of 9th grade, at which point he'll magically be ready for high school?

Let me guess... the high school freshman?

But how many times does he need to be told he did it wrong before it will sink in that when I tell him to read the instructions, he should read the instructions? Anyhow, where can I sign him up to go herd sheep?

This conversation is reminding me of adult men who can't put together something because they're refusing to read the instructions. It's one thing to try to put something together without reading the instructions, but if you fail, read the flipping instructions. Or, if it's an assignment and somebody tells you to read the flipping instructions, read the instructions. Don't blame it on your gender. Grrr.

ETA: those would be either attention or attitude problems, imo.

I'm also not entirely sure what the argument you're making is. He has the ability to read. But because he's a 5th grade boy he's incapable of complying with the instruction to read a few lines of text? Because that's what happened with the art book. A few lines of simple, easy to understand text, but he didn't read them, despite being told to do so. He either: a) didn't pay attention and missed my instruction to READ the text (quite possible - like I said, I often have to repeat instructions 3+ times), or b) he heard me, but decided that I must be an idiot so he'd just ignore my instruction and just do what he thought he need to be doing (also quite possible), or c) he read the text but zoned out or w/e, or d) other. But either way, I just don't see how it's related to his verbal ability, since it wasn't above his reading ability, nor a huge overwhelming mountain of text.

10yo - he's currently in 5th grade, but, thinking ahead to next year, which will be middle school. I really don't like blaming stuff like this on gender, especially since my 7yo boy does a better job at this stuff, so, it's not like boys are just incapable of this. I never said to not review before a test. You asked if I use study guides, and the answer is that *I* usually don't when *I* have to take a test (but I do review), and that I don't really give many tests in my homeschool (thus far), other than a standardized test every year. We're just not a very "school-at-home" kind of family.

I'm predictable. :)

Right, maybe I should treat it 100% like a compliance issue... it's just that because he's got an ASD etc, I didn't just want to jump to the conclusion that he's non-complying just for the sake of non-complying... that it isn't a disability issue. Would *I* use a study guide before a test? Uh, no, not usually. Should I have him use a study guide before a test? Maybe, probably, I don't know? I haven't really been into tests etc (we do do one standardized test every year), but beyond that, I'm not big on tests.

Anyone got any recs for secular middle school curricula with lots of questions, other than the obvious public school text books?

Maybe I should find some curricula with lots of questions... they always feel like busywork to me, but maybe that's what this kid needs in order to move on to middle school level stuff.

Btw, I'm not saying that skimming and reading the questions and looking back to find the answer isn't a useful skill - it is. It's just that thoroughly reading a text without some assigned questions to help you is a useful skill too.

Of course, I also often need to tell him 3 times what he needs to do before it registers with him, so, there's that... but reading the assigned pages before doing the exercises etc should be a given.

As a side note, I'm a terrible student on paper, because I usually just read assigned texts in high school/college twice, and took barely any notes whatsoever, so, reading texts thoroughly is how I absorbed most of the material (and would get As). So, maybe he's the kind of kid who'd really benefit from taking notes, if only he didn't struggle with writing. I know one of the ideas behind taking notes is that it helps students focus on what the key points in a text are, and to not just zone out. The main thing is that we're at a point where he should start to do more independent work, including stuff that requires him to read to learn stuff. I'm not going to sit and read middle school+ level books to him in entirety and then discuss them. Even if I wanted to, that's not practical, nor doing him any favors. But if I say "read x", and he doesn't, or only skims it, that won't work. And quite frankly, it makes me kind of angry - like, the thing with the art book, there was barely any text in there (almost the entire page was just pictures), so it's not much, so when I specifically tell him he needs to READ it before starting to draw and he doesn't... I'm not amused.

I mentioned this to DW, and she says that the above is the reason she doesn't read books. She can however thoroughly read 1-2 page texts if assigned to her. Um, because not reading things at all is an issue. Like, I gave him the art book today, and told him to do two pages, and to READ them first. He didn't read them, and just drew what he thought he was supposed to draw. It doesn't seem to matter how often this happens (and I do make him redo stuff). Likewise, if I were to give him a text in order to learn something, and he skims it and there are no questions at the end so he doesn't go back to find answers, he isn't going to learn the stuff he needs to learn from it. Think e.g. high school texts for, I don't know, biology. In my experience (from when I was in high school), those have a very limited number of questions in each chapter, but you're expected to learn and memorize most of the stuff in them, including stuff that's not covered in the questions. Now, I know he isn't in high school yet, but we need to get from here to there, preferably in about 3.5 years or less. You can't just wait until someone throws a test at you to read the text, because if you do that, you'll find out that you didn't learn what you needed to learn, and most tests aren't open book, and even if they are, you might not have enough time to complete the test if you didn't read it thoroughly when you were supposed to read it. It's partially a compliance issue. If I need you to read x, I need you to read x, not skim x, or zone out over x. Just because he *can* get questions correct about x if given questions and given time to look up the answers, doesn't mean that it's okay to *only* read x when there are questions.