LOL! No, I suspect you're just smarter and better organized!

DS7 has a year of HSing under his belt now, so I'm hoping to push for a lot more independent work from him this year. I think it was hard enough last year to make the transition from public school to homeschool mid-year, so I didn't think much about independent work. No time to think!

This year, I'm expecting the boys to entertain/teach themselves for 2 hours each morning so I can write. Some of that time will be educational videos and educational computer time. But it will be independent, regardless.

I think fostering that sense of independence early is wonderful! So kudos to you! I'm behind, but hopefully I'm catching up this year...

Same here. We don't have textbooks for most of the books but I got textbooks for the higher levels simply to see what they are looking for and also because the math notation I was taught at school (abroad) isn't always the same they use here.

We also use the Challenging Word Problems workbooks.