We’ve always set aside equal amounts monthly. How much varies along with our income & needs. We count “electives” (outsourced classes & lessons) as part of this expense, but “extracurriculars” separately.

DS is entering 6th grade: Language Arts: WWS I, leftover bits of MCT Voyage (1/2 of CE II, Search trilogy), misc literature & matchbook summary posters (by DS’ request) Math: Finish AOPS PreAlgebra, then either a fun extra unit or roll straight into Intro to Algebra. Science: RSO Biology 2, Sex Ed History: BookShark American History Computer Science: Intro to Microcontrollers Extracurriculars: Scouts BSA, FIRST Lego League, Violin (possibly youth orchestra), Art, Programming, Tennis, PE

They also have supplemental Puzzle Books for levels 2-4 just for fun 🙂

My 2E DS11 completed RightStart A-C, Miquon Orange, Singapore IP 2-3, & Living Math Ancients in the PK/K years, then Beast Academy 3-5 & now AOPS PreAlgebra. We’ve also enjoyed a number of mathy novels, games, & supplements along the way. BA / AOPS have been a great fit for him. He isn’t particularly fast, so we use the books at home. He appreciates the discovery method & has developed an excellent frustration tolerance. He’s definitely well-suited to fewer, more rigorous problems. I don’t know that he’ll ever move quickly enough for AOPS’ text-based classes, but after the Intro series of texts I plan to have him take the ones offered here on WTMA.

I typically assign a chapter - or multiple, if chapters are short. In the rare event of a super long chapter I might split one across two days. Something that really helps here is to have DS read in the car en route to extracurricular activities; may as well get it done then while you’d otherwise be bored! He enjoys reading, though.

.

.

Deleted for privacy

Language Arts: WWS I. Previously we’ve used IEW, MCT, Killgallon, & NaNoWriMo. Hoping to streamline for middle school. Not sure whether we’ll continue NaNo; if so, it’ll be in addition to our regularly-scheduled composition, rather than taking its place. Math: Continuing AOPS PreAlgebra + “Fun Math Fridays” (games, Orbiting with Logic, Murderous Maths, Numberphile, etc). Science: RSO Biology 2 History: Bookshark I - American History. We’ll return to BYL the following year, but neither of us is interested in a 2-year US History course. This seemed simpler than condensing BYL 5/6, & I think it’ll pair well with WWS. Electives: Intro to Microcontrollers (Arduino), possibly Creative Writing? (NaNo + poetry) Extracurriculars: Scouts, Violin, FIRST Lego League (robotics), programming, art classes, board game club, tennis, PE.

FIRST Tech Challenge uses Pitsco Tetrix kits, which can be purchased here: https://www.pitsco.com/Shop/TETRIX-Robotics/&TXredir=1 There are various competition-specific kits as well as individual pieces available, as well as the accessories you’d need for programming & control. ETA: This is an unofficial “getting started” guide for novice teams. Some aspects won’t apply to someone not participating in the competition, but a good chunk is useful basic knowledge for anyone getting started with the types of systems that are used in competition robotics. https://gm0.org/en/latest/

Ramona Quimby: She always seems to get into mischief / trouble, but she was never malicious or trying to be difficult. She just saw the world differently. Hiro Hamada (Big Hero 6): Dislikes the idea of “hard work” on academics but is very talented & when something captures his attention he totally dives in, a la “I have GOT to go to that nerd school!” Seth (FableHaven): Mischievous, curious to a fault, slightly stubborn, very caring but sometimes gullible / taken advantage of, learns from his mistakes. Tulin (Zelda): Ready, FIRE!, aim… 😅 (impulsiveness)

Chiming in to say my DS (11 in Feb) is moving at a similar pace. We exclusively homeschool, so this is his full-time curriculum. It’s likely it’ll take him 1.5 academic years to complete, so I’d say your son’s pacing as an after-schooler is excellent. It’s funny that you mention the writing, as mine has been writing quite a bit as well. His style is less verbal / conversational than your son’s, but for chapters 1-2 he wrote out every single Problem *and* every Exercise. It slowed him down quite a bit but developed good habits in regard to keeping his work organized, working systematically, & showing all steps. I think it’s a valuable process. In Chapter 3 he switched to only writing out Exercises unless he felt a particular Problem might come in handy to complete the Exercises (such as a table of the first x squares). BTW, Alcumus (mentioned by @quietgarden) does still exist & is still free. We haven’t used it yet, but I plan to have my DS work through the chapters he’s completed this year over the summer to keep things fresh, then probably finish it out next school year after completing the textbook.

Target audience & overall length. A novel contains a minimum of 50k words & has a target reading audience (not necessarily listening audience) of fluent readers. A chapter book has 5k-50k words & has a target reading audience of transitional readers - or is intended to be quick / light for fluent readers.

Thank you! These are all great ideas. Right now he’s a little bummed because he was aiming for a middle grade novel, but at 7-8k words, practically speaking it’s looking more like a chapter book. It was originally drafted as the first of a trilogy, so now he’s mulling over the idea of moving forward after this revision to create a single novel from the parts (he’s read a few structured like this). He is doing well so far with looking critically at the dialogue & not taking critique personally, so fingers crossed the process continues to go smoothly. I will be super impressed if he follows through with it!

DS participates in NaNoWriMo’s Young Writer’s Project (YWP) annually. This year he has decided that, rather than embark upon a new novel, he would like to revise his work from last year & “publish” it. This change was made on the fly & is something we’ve never attempted, so I thought I’d crowdsource ideas a bit! 🙂 We began by discussing his end goal: whether he wanted to publish only for himself, a few copies for friends & family, or for the mass market - as well as what each level of publication would entail. During that discussion we covered the different levels of revision: proofreading, copy editing, line editing, & developmental editing. His work is being proofread / copy edited while getting typed up, so we are starting our discussions from a line & developmental editing level. We worked through the YWP Workbook prior to writing, so his story does have a clear plot with reasonably fleshed-out characters and settings. He hasn’t looked at it in over a year, so he’s coming to it with fresh eyes to identify awkward or unclear areas & we are reading it aloud as we go, so he can hear the flow. Those will be covered in small bites as the full story gets typed up. We’ve started with dialogue. The YWP has a section on dialogue that outlines the differences between casual daily speech vs how authors use dialogue in writing, so we are going through each block of dialogue in his book to ensure it’s advancing the plot, revealing something about his characters, &/or building tension. Next (or maybe alternately with the dialogue) we’ll work on show, don’t tell to further draw the reader into his scenes. Eventually we’ll do a sweeping check to ensure he stuck to his plot & that loose ends are tied up. What else? ETA: We will dedicate approximately an hour per school day for 5-6wks to this project, which is what I had originally set aside for NaNoWriMo.

Apparently I got suckered into a spin-off app called AnkiApp 🤦🏻‍♀️ I’m going to see about transitioning everything over to the “real” Anki.

Is there a way to change the terminology for rating card difficulty? I would love to use this with my 5th grader & have put together a number of decks, but he’s really turned off by having to select “FAIL” for cards he doesn’t know. 😬

I have found that, for us, the MCT Writing books work better when a particular level of writing is being mastered rather than when it is being introduced. Thompson takes a very “big picture” approach, which doesn’t always work well as a starting point. We causally read through Paragraph Town when DS was first learning to write paragraphs. Here or there we completed an assignment from the back of the book, either orally or written, but held off on most of them until a good deal later, when he’d been writing simple paragraphs for about a year. Have you ever looked at the Killgallon Sentence Composing or Paragraph Composing workbooks? Those are a really excellent tool for teaching how to vary sentence length, incorporate phrases / clauses, & utilize figurative language while scaffolding the content generation aspect. It might really help bridge the gap & allow him to write in a style he would enjoy reading.

I agree with @lewelma’s suggestion. Each year DS10 participates in NaNoWriMo’s Young Writer’s Program, where he is guided through creating setting / characters / plot, then writes a story start to finish. They make a big deal about shutting down your “internal editor / critic” & just getting words on paper for one month. Once he’s done, we take our time turning it into a polished product by fixing spelling & grammatical errors, breaking it into paragraphs, discussing organizational conventions, etc. There’s ample buy-in because it’s HIS work. At the end of this NaNoWriMo season, I plan to take all of his stories from PK-5th & “publish” them into an actual paperback that he can gift to friends & family.

I haven’t used MBTP as the firsthand reviews I’ve experienced have been lukewarm, but we have a similar approach to science education & have enjoyed Real Science Odyssey. The levels are a bit light as written IMO, but that works well for families like ours who want the flexibility to expand topics of interest while still lightly touching on other aspects of a given branch of science.

We have never considered chores or outside activities part of school, & stopped counting instrument practice as school this year in 5th grade. I do still count read-alouds & assigned reading, as one of the skills DS is actively developing is how to pace himself - which includes balancing simpler & more taxing work - but we don’t incorporate much “little stuff”. He does better with fewer subjects at a depth he can really dig into. He is involved in a number of extracurricular activities (8hrs / week, excluding monthly campouts) & practices his instrument 45min/day. He still has ample free time - minimum 2hrs daily, longer on Mondays, Fridays, & the weekend. Sometimes we participate in additional activities or social gatherings during that time, but that’s by choice - he’s very extroverted.

If you have a local STEM Academy or FIRST Team (Lego League, Tech Challenge, Robotics) they’ll sometimes offer in-person classes to the community.

Could you group your daughter’s activities in such a way that you could drop her off, then you & DS go to a coffee shop or library study room to work for a solid chunk of time? I’ve encountered elite gymnastics & dance kids who practically lived at the studio - several of whom began homeschooling specifically to prioritize studio time! Their siblings either attended brick & mortar school or studied nearby with their parents while the athlete was doing their thing, then the athlete schooled in the evenings while their sibling participated in other activities. It’s an unusual dynamic but it can work!

My DS cannot refocus on lessons if we go do something else first thing in the morning, either. We schedule everything outside the home during our flex day or after lunch (2p or later for anything recurring).

DS is 2E with ADHD; balancing challenge level, lesson length, attention span, energy levels, & medication windows requires intentionality. We’ve had the privilege of living in areas with a nearly endless array of activities, cultural centers, natural areas, & community events - all of which are wonderfully enriching, but could also easily overwhelm our routine - so I have always needed to be protective of our lesson time. In early elementary we could wrap up our work early enough to still take advantage of opportunities during standard school / work hours, so I would only select morning activities if I deemed them worth “losing” a whole day, but after lunchtime we were flexible. For late elementary / middle school, we’ve shifted to a 4-day week + a flex day. Our days run 9a-1:30p on M/W & 9-2:30 T/Th/F. Any one day per week may be replaced with a field trip or educational activity outside the home. If the event begins later than 10am, we have partial lessons until time to leave. All other activities / events can start no earlier than 2p. On weeks that we have no event, this day is used for big projects, messy science experiments, board games or films related to our learning, etc. It’s been a great balance! All of this requires pre-planning, of course. I plan our full year’s calendar the preceding spring so that I know when we’ll begin & where our breaks fall. Our mom’s group gets together mid-summer to schedule parties, field trips, & events we’d like to prioritize. The FB field trip groups typically begin sign-ups in July or August. Because it doesn’t matter which day is our flex day, I simply plug in interesting things as we go. Some weeks have multiple enticing options & hard decisions must be made, but we’re able to accommodate a lot while staying “on track” which has been great! ETA: By & large, DS’ extracurriculars fall after school hours. Homeschool tennis & board game club begin at 2p but Scouts, art classes, violin lessons, & robotics are all evening activities.