Eh, dd17 was already accepted into college, but it's not going to sound as spectacular as everyone else's. My senior is graduating early - in a couple of weeks -and is starting at the community college in January. We already went through the whole process. Application...she did her placement tests at the college (which she scored so high that she only has to take one math class for her Bachelor's and she's taking it in January)....we did all the advising appointments, the New Student Group Advising...she registered for all her classes.... I'm going to start buying her textbooks this weekend. Next week sometime, we're going to walk around campus and find all of her classes. She gets lost every time she goes on campus for something. The only thing we have left is to pay the bill. We have another month to pay it and the college has a payment plan - we're not taking out student loans. Her first semester classes are: English 1, US History 1, Statistics, Art, and Kinesiology. She's VERY excited. The campus is only 10 miles away, so she can keep doing all the stuff she normally does (volunteer work, etc) and live at home.

After watching my oldest go through the SAT, I'm making my high schoolers continue grammar until the very end. And we use the Easy Grammar series, where they probably spend 5 minutes a day on it. So, yes, for high school: Literature, Writing, Grammar.

If you look at the samples, you can tell she doesn't have any experience with high schoolers yet. Also, you probably wouldn't put General Science on your transcript, either. Eh...someone out there might do it, but I wouldn't.

I don't know how old your kids are, but if your kids are younger (elementary-middle school), I think it could be a lot of fun! But, high school... it's not enough for high school (IMO). You would have to really add to it. And seeing Mr. Popper's Penguins on the high school reading list just cracks me up.

Honestly, I looked through the high school sample and the language arts is on an elementary/middle school level. We use Easy Grammar and looking at her high school samples - my kids would be bored.

I looked through the sample week for the Birds unit. So, my thoughts: 1. She's very artistic. The notebooking pages are very pretty. 2. I didn't see any labs...she does list General Science as the credit you could receive if you do a year of the unit studies. There is a big Earth Science theme in her first year of planned unit studies. Unfortunately, my high schoolers don't need any more Earth Science. 3. If you look in the Teacher's Guide, there are recommended reading lists for each grade level. She has middle school/high school reading grouped together and the reading is way too easy for high school. She has Mr. Popper's Penguins and Hoot on there... 4. I can tell she has middle schoolers - the whole thing would be very fun and appropriate for middle school. 5. The unit studies I put together are much more rigorous (lol).

It's been years since I listened to these, but somewhere on one of SWB's audio lectures - I think it's the one of teaching writing - she talks about spelling and writing being two different developmental tasks when they're little. Their brains have to develop more before their spelling abilities translate into their writing.

Yeah, I would really want to see a list of labs before I bought it. A couple of things that bug me... It says her oldest is only in 7th grade. She also says it's an entirely new way to homeschool - Lol! No, unit studies have been around forever. We were doing unit studies 11 years ago. She says she doesn't like being a "ping pong ball" while working with multiple ages. Well...I mean, that's going to happen anyway - even with a unit study. My 16 year-old is not going to be doing the exact same thing as my 12 year-old at all times. You'll still feel like a ping pong ball, at least a little. Even so, I might try the birds unit. At the least, I'm going to look around more on her website. There's a couple of typos on her website, but overall, she did a really good job designing the website (or whoever put it together for her).

My printer is going to start smoking if I try to print all that out.

Oh, no, why did you show me this?? 😂 I'm going to end up buying it! They have a unit on birds, Asia, space... If you buy the Full Bundle, it just includes everything, right? I wonder what kind of labs or hands-on science projects there are...

We are unit study homeschoolers who use a lot of the CM method. First, wow, $50 a month is expensive. You would still need to buy whatever books you're using for the unit study, I'm guessing. That could really add up. Also, one month for a unit study is really short. I can't pull one off in less than 6 weeks. It says the student notebooks are 100+ pages per unit study!! Oh, my goodness!! My kids would mutiny. That could be some seriously expensive printing. I'm actually tempted to try it, but 100 pages per kid...I have 5 kids, but would be using this for 3...that's 300 pages I would have to print out every month. Is there a booklist on their website? I'm tempted to try a unit. If we do, I'll report back. LOL.

This sums up our entire homeschool. And I noticed this when she was taking the test. I watched her for awhile and noticed she could answer a lot of the questions without searching for the answer. For example...she already knew that igneous rocks are volcanic...she didn't have to scan the passage for that.

Yeah, I'm definitely adding spelling and vocabulary back in when we start back up again in January. She keeps saying that she doesn't feel like she's a very good speller. I've been doing a lot of dictation with her this year....and she seems to be fine with it, but after seeing the test scores, I'm adding a spelling program back in.

She missed the cut-off, so if she went to school, she would be in 6th. Last year, after agonizing all year about it, we did a grade skip. So, we are officially calling her a 7th grader.

Thanks in advance for any replies/suggestions. I decided to give my daughter, who just turned 12 a couple of weeks ago, the CAT test. The results were...let me just say...really bizarre. I would like a plan on what I need to work on with her when we start our new school year in January. I have to add that I always suspected that she has either some kind of dyslexia or speech issue. She tested as grade 9 average in math, so I'm not going to list those. The scores were all around the same level. Language Mechanics - grade level 13.6 Language Usage and Structure - grade level 10.5 Language spelling - grade level 6.4 Reading vocabulary - grade level 6.6 Reading comprehension - grade level 10.2 What the heck?? Is this a developmental thing? How could there be such a big discrepancy with her vocabulary versus reading comprehension? Should we pick up spelling again?? Is there a spelling program for older/middle school kids?? Am I just panicking for no reason?

I completely agree with you. And speaking from experience, a low 5% down payment can come back to haunt you and trash your finances later (*insert scary music*) when the market suddenly doesn't do well. I know there are special circumstances where you can get a mortgage for more than 30 years, but I think it will someday be more common on average-priced houses, too. I wonder if anyone knows anything about this...an older person told me (and I think it might've been my grandfather) that a long time ago, there were no 30 year mortgages. There were only 15 or 20 year mortgages. Then, when they introduced 30 year mortgages, everyone was shocked. Just out of curiosity, I googled median household income for Texas (that's where we live) and it's $59,000. If you follow the "your mortgage should be no more than 2-3x your annual salary" rule, that puts you in a house for $120,000-$180,000. And people mentioned dual-income households in Seattle where both spouses are lawyers, etc and make $200,000 a year. Yeah, that's great, but there are only so many of those. Where do us Average Joe people live?? Like teachers, cops, the dude that works at Costco, dental hygienists, receptionists at the doctor's office, day care workers... ??

Disclaimer: I *really* like money/numbers. I should've gone into finance, because it is so interesting to me. So, if this is annoying, just ignore my post. 🤪 We're actually looking to buy a bigger house right now (there are 7 of us, but - it's a long story - there may be 8-9 of us in the next couple of years). When we were going over the mortgage calculator (and talking to the sales rep - we're thinking about a new build), it says for a gross income of $100,000 a year (in our area - with our property taxes), you can only afford a house that is between $250,000-$300,000 (considering a normal down payment - not some huge windfall). My husband got excited about a $360,000 house and after running it through the calculator, there was no way we could make that payment every month. To afford a $750,000 house, you would need to make an enormous amount of money - like over $200,000 a year. We don't want a mortgage to exceed a quarter of our take-home pay. So, I have no idea how people afford houses like that, either. I can't even figure out how they get approved for the mortgage on it. You would need an enormous down payment, too. 20% is $150,000. *laughing hysterically like I got THAT laying around* I have a $165,000 house. I'm guessing the insurance payment + taxes every month on a $750,000 is close to my entire mortgage payment. In other words, no, we can't afford that, either, but it's interesting trying to figure out the math! lol I'm expecting mortgages to lengthen from 30 years at some point - like car loans did. You used to not be able to find a car loan for more than 4 years. Now, they have car loans for 6, 7 years. I think housing prices have exceeded everyone's income and the same thing will happen to mortgages - they'll eventually lengthen. (which is not a good sign). Just a theory of mine.

We ended up doing Statistics. It seemed much more useful (dd is going into medicine).

That actually was my first thought. You're doing titrations, but on a tiny scale. What the heck does that look like?? Lol! My main goal for chemistry is for them to understand everything conceptually - like why are these molecules behaving the way they do...what's actually happening in these reactions, etc. We also cover a ton of history of chemistry. No one ever covered that in school and it's a big deal. You learn a lot of actual chemistry by reading about the history of it.

So, I emailed HST and they said there is "no specific shelf life for these chemicals". Hope that helps, klmama.

Is it worth the 150 bucks? Do all the experiments work ok?

I'm thinking 5 years or less is probably ok?? I'm going to try to email them and ask how long the kit stays good in storage.

Has anyone used the Microchem Kit from Home Science Tools? https://www.homesciencetools.com/product/microchem-kit/ Is it worth the $150? We've been doing chemistry all year and I'd like to do some advanced chemistry after Christmas. I'm thinking about buying this, but it's only 17 labs. We're almost finished with another kit that had almost 30 labs, but the labs are a little basic. I don't regret doing the labs, but I wanted to do some more difficult ones. The Microchem Kit looks just like the labs we did in college chemistry. Also, I'm wondering how long these chemicals would last in storage...

My high schoolers all use MUS. I'm actually getting ready to buy the precalculus. If you like it, you feel like they're getting a good math education and it gets math done, I woulduse it. If you're doing the review pages, honors pages and tests, I don't see how you could get through the algebra courses in one semester - you probably could get through the geometry course pretty quick. The geometry is probably the lightest out of all the high school courses. The algebra 2 is hard...as in, yesterday, even I couldn't figure out one of the problems and we had to just cross that problem off. It is our favorite high school math program out of everything we have used (we tried Saxon and Life of Fred). My kids have been the most consistent with MUS. The videos where he teaches the lesson really makes the program. Oh, we didn't use the blocks for Algebra 1 (I know they say it's required, but my kids didn't need them). My oldest starts college in January and had to take the math placement test at the college. She tested into the highest math possible. The advisor said the only math class she has to take is Statistics - which she's taking in January. *shrug*

If it's Seattle, I wouldn't bother going. My cousin, sister and BIL just fled from there. It's so expensive to live there that they couldn't actually live IN Seattle, they had to live outside the city and drive two hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic to get into Seattle. They said traffic is really, really bad. Gardenmom5 mentioned small houses for $800,000....yep, that's what my family members said, too. I don't know how anyone could even begin to afford a mortgage for $800,000. I have mostly teenagers, so I refuse to move somewhere where I don't think my kids will thrive as young adults. I don't want them to get frustrated and move away.