The difficulty with that is I measure a school year based on how much content is taught, while the schools measure by how many minutes the kids are present. No way to balance that out! Maybe I can give up trying.

Interestingly, we disliked Rosetta Stone. Can you believe it? The older boys had Spanish and tried it for several months but didn’t feel like they were learning anything. They do better with more structure. I’ve thought about PowerGlide, but they switched to an online class format and we want to go at a slower speed. The boys are doing Latin and Spanish and we’re going through one level in each over two years. So, we just bumble along on our own.

I had never intended to homeschool honestly. It just wasn’t something that I had thought about. But when my son ended up repeating second grade three times I started to get worried. He was bright, brilliant even in math and music but had a very hard time with words. He was finally diagnosed as a gifted dyslexic and there was just no place for him to thrive in the public school system. I tried putting him in a very well known private school for learning disabilities but I’m pretty sure they are heavily subsidized by a pharmaceutical company. They INSISTED I put my child on Ritalin even tho he isn’t ADD or ADHD. When I found out over 98% percent of the children there were on some kind of drug for learning, I knew I had to get radical.

So enter homeschooling. I started out buying a curriclulum, and a white board and a school desk and and and. Over the last ten years and four boys what I have learned is: Teach them reading, writing and math and let them teach themselves the rest! We still use Saxon for math but the writing assignments change per child depending on their needs and learning styles. And READ READ READ. No Tv or cable in our home (yes I hear the gasps) but I do allow movies on occasion. Every six months we look at their progress and they pick three electives to go with basic math and language arts. My nine year old is learning classical guitar, art history and polish (I really like the rosetta stone software) My six year old chose cooking, recorder and Russian. My just turned two year old insists on getting out his crayons and paper and doing his ‘work’ also.

How did things turn out with the problem gifted dyslexic?

He graduated high school at age 14 (despite three years in second grade in public school) and is now 18 and finishing his last year in college.