I did this informally with my kids when they were little - like maybe 7-9 year old. They read aloud from McGuffey Readers. I started doing this with them, because I noticed they would pronounce some words incorrectly when they were reading and I wanted to make sure I fixed that.

Here's my thoughts. We've been homeschooling about 10 years. I have gifted kids, but I was told mine are gifted in creativity/fine arts. One was never tested, but seems to be incredible with writing/language/literature. They are actually very lazy, so our homeschool probably won't look like yours. If I told them they were going to CalTech or MIT, they would probably lock themselves in their rooms and cry (and text their friends about it and then write a short story or poem about their plight). Are you sure you'll be able to get them back in high school halfway through (I read your original post)? Where we live, once you start homeschooling 9th grade, you're done. You can't dive back into high school. They won't take your homeschool credits. You end up basically starting over. Are you interested in following The Well-trained Mind? The high school plan especially is very rigorous. I wouldn't make literature/history/logic/rhetoric an afterthought in lieu of math and science. (And I have two science-oriented kids, so I get it - Lol) $99 a year for language arts is insanely expensive. By about 7th-8th grade, we really drop the idea of language arts and focus on literature and writing. High school also...literature + writing. I mean, unless the kids are just really struggling with grammar and spelling... Writing - for left-brained kids...Writing with Skill series (like already mentioned) is very good. Good luck with your search! You might get more answers on the curriculum board. I know it's scary to post on there when you have a kid who is accelerated.

I always pictured ourselves as a cross between Charlotte Mason and unit studies. But...dh described our homeschool as "like a Montessori school" to someone once. After googling what that actually entailed, I think he's right. We are very similar to Montessori, especially at the high school level.

Yep, these phones, devices and video games are ridiculous. I know this sounds like the old Body Snatchers movie, but these devices are changing people...especially kids. I'm seeing it in family members' kids who have unrestricted access to them (especially video games). We saw it firsthand when a family visited our house recently. Their preschooler has a horrible screen addiction. We were all cringing and I don't think his parents know how to stop it. And, yes, have a conversation with some older people in their 70s and then try to have a conversation with someone in their late 20s. It's obvious they grew up with completely different social skills.

I agree!!

I forgot about Senior Photos! And I have been thinking about what we're going to do for her actual graduation... We don't belong to a homeschool group or anything. We don't have family within 800 miles, either. I guess we could go out to dinner?? lol. She would LOVE to design a piece of jewelry. I never thought of that. Right now, my kitchen island is covered in little resin plant sculptures that she's creating (*sigh*), so she loves that kind of thing. Anything that's a craft... Thank-you for the idea!!

The closest thing I've found lately is podcasts. I have listened to some of Pam Barnhill's. Even though they're not classical homeschoolers, I love Sue Elvis and Stories of an Unschooling Family, but her kids are in college now and I think she's stopped blogging - however, that lady is just really encouraging with homeschooling in general. I've also listened to several podcasts from A Delectable Education - that site is more Charlotte Mason. All of the homeschooling blogs now are awful. They're very commercial, they all look the same (manufactured) and the articles have no substance. I've been very frustrated to the point where I've stopped reading anything about homeschooling online. I just put on my horse blinders and do what we want. If I find a personal, non-commercialized homeschooling blog, I'm usually excited to read those - especially if everything doesn't look perfect on their blog and they are honest when they write.

What do we need to think about? Cross off our list? We school year-round, so we should be finished with this current school year at the end of December/January. I don't know how much of a break we're going to take...or if dd is just going to want to keep going. I don't even have her last year planned out. We are going to take the SAT this spring and visit one more college...and then start applying late summer. She's only interested in two colleges, so we're putting all of our eggs in one basket. Oh well. I'm actually not worried about applying/getting into college. She's smarter than I am. I'm more interested in making her last year fun/special. I asked her if she wanted a piece of senior jewelry...necklace? class ring? Nope, she doesn't want anything. Her friends have class rings, but she says it's a waste of money. I think I am going to order from homeschooldiploma.com. They have tassels, too. Diploma and tassel? Anyone want to tell me what they did for their seniors? And for graduation?

We're not in Australia, but we are going to be finished with our school year in late December, so I guess we are on the Australian schedule. I'm going crazy trying to decide what to do next and when to start. We ended up using boxed curricula this year (due to serious burn-out), but I'm feeling better. So, I think I'm going to go back to putting everything together myself. I think we might do a year of unit studies again, but I'm not quite sure how that's going to look for my oldest (who will be a senior). I want her last year of high school to be fun, not checking off the boxes to make other people happy.

I had to work through that entire book with my kids.

No advice, but dd16 has decided to try for nursing school, so she can specifically work in the mission field overseas. We were asking around (most of my family members are either nurses or doctors) and there are lots of opportunities for that after they have some work experience (not right away after graduation). There are specific organizations for medical professionals (like Doctors without Borders), but there are also hospitals in the US that send medical teams from their staff overseas temporarily for specific missions.

We were forced to adopt a 2 year-old Swiss Shepherd (long story) this year. They were bred from German Shepherds and they look just like them, except they're completely white. Ours is really pretty. When dd takes her for walks, cars stop to look at the dog. I don't know much about the breed, but we've been trying to do some reading about them. I couldn't imagine owning this kind of dog unless you were very, very experienced with dogs, home all day, had a fenced-in backyard (with a high fence - they can jump over a 6 foot fence) and willing to work with them every day. Our Swiss Shepherd (which I think is very typical of the breed) is very in tune with human emotions and very emotional. To the point where we're telling people who come into the house to look happy to see her. She actually got depressed once, wouldn't eat and hid under my bed for 2 days, because of something bad that happened to her.

I hope your dd feels better soon.

Well, they just won't need anything else (I went to basic training, too). If we brought extra stuff, they made people store it in some storage room until basic training was over. It would just weigh you down while you were traveling and they wouldn't let you have access to it.

We just wait until the other kid is ok. Then, pick up where we left off. Edited to add: I don't add extra work for the well kid.

Liking your post wasn't enough. I need that "I agree" emoji. Yes, I was shocked when WWS1 first came out and it was supposed to be 5th grade writing. I tried it with my oldest in 5th grade (who was a stellar student and actually was labeled as gifted when she went to ps) and she was only able to make it through half the book... And that was after using the entire Writing with Ease series... In my mind, she should've been able to use WWS successfully and it was frustrating. 4-5 kids later, we don't try WWS until 7th grade.

Yeah, for a lot of the problems in the first half of the book, it felt like we were always looking for a trick to get the answer down to "1" or "0". And I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing? It was good, because my kids understand patterns really well and also the rules behind math. It's just very conceptual math. I was always calling it Puzzle Math. lol

It was! DD16 is very good at math. We actually asked her if she wanted to maybe major in math when she went to college, but she wants to go into medicine. But, yes, taking two years for one book did make us feel like slackers. I had to work on the book with her, otherwise I wouldn't have understood that they take a completely different approach to solving problems - it's not like the way we learned math in school. And Lial's is great, too. I have Lial's on my bookshelf. It's a good math, too.

We definitely need a chocolate bar...and the popcorn...and the zombie.

Oh, ok. Lol. Do you even have time for alcumus after working on the book, itself? Because we didn't. The book took us forever. My oldest spent two years working on the book.

Yeah, while it's a well-put-together program, we never had success with WWS1 until 7th grade. And my right-brained thinkers always sighed in despair when they had to work on it. It is a very linear and sequential way to teach writing. We tended to work on it for a few weeks, take a break, work on something else and then come back to it. That being said, my kids are actually pretty good writers. (They've used chunks of WWS1, 2 and 3.) I cringe when people assume homeschooled kids don't work on writing. In one of their outside classes, the teacher was using ds15's writing as an example for the rest of his class...Lol

I've taught AOPS Prealgebra 3 times now. My kids were never able to do that book on their own. I actually sat down and worked on it with them everyday. It's definitely not a self-teaching math program, especially at that age when they would be using it. Also, working through the book with them showed me the unconventional ways they use to solve the problems. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't been able to solve some of the problems, either.

I always feel weird bringing this up, but my other kids are gifted (one tested thru the ps a long time ago and another has not been tested, but is obviously gifted in one thing - as in she was 12 at a beginning college level in this subject), so after 16 years, I'm used to all of them having different issues...sensory issues, one of them had signs of autism for several years that magically disappeared (sigh...), anxiety, two of them seem to have some kind of LD that no one could ever pin down... Anyway, some support over the years would've been great, but I'm used to not having any. Let me just say, they've worn me down over the years! I feel like 10 years older than I actually am. Lol.

Do you have any idea why a verbally advanced kid would stutter?

Yeah, the stuttering isn't repeating words, it sounds like, "M-m-m-mama, c-c-c-can I go to the p-p-p-park?" He's literally stuttering the first letter of each word. And he wasn't doing it before. It just started. It's bizarre. No, and no changes or stress. The only thing that's different is he started ballet about a month ago...it's once a week for an hour. I mean, I don't think that would cause stuttering. ? He seems to like it. (?) And, no, we haven't taken him to the doctor or gotten an evaluation. I wouldn't even know where to begin. I was probably going to call the pediatrician. I'm not ruling out anxiety, because that does seem to run in my family. I just don't know what could be causing the anxiety. There's nothing new in our house. He's with me 24 hours a day. He doesn't go to preschool or daycare. Yesterday morning, I spent two hours with him at the park and then we went to look at horses. It *seems* like he has a pretty mellow life.