Having organized the 4 year high school course plan based on our state’s graduating requirements, we mapped out what classes to take when and had a plan for 9^th grade. 

     With English, Writing, and Literature being lumped together in high school as one course, we chose to continue with the English curriculum we have been using through Rod and Staff Publications. The high school course for Rod and Staff is set up in a two-book series for 9/10 grade and incorporates (as it always has) the grammar, the writing, the speaking, and the research skills within each chapter.  So, it is an “all-encompassing” curriculum in that regard for the English portion. Being familiar with this curriculum and how it works, we were able to navigate easily through the first of the two books.

     We chose to use Perspectives of Life in Literature for literature. This curriculum is set up to use a story for the reading (with emphasis on different styles, time periods, etc) followed by comprehension questions, vocabulary, and writing technique questions. Overall, it does a great job of challenging the student to look beyond the words of the writer to the more intentional processes used throughout the reading/writing…as well as the effectiveness (or in-effectiveness) of these approaches/processes.  What really helped was that the incorporation of the writing process requires the student to utilize aspects of the story they read in order to produce a story of their own using given techniques and topics to choose from. This approach allows the student to be challenged to incorporate specific writing skills and learn how to effectively execute this in their writing.  I loved it…and our son (who doesn’t really enjoy writing, of course) wrote some great (multipage!!!) writings as a result.  We also selected some classic literature books to read and utilized quizzes and comprehension checks available online.

      For math…we used Abeka’s Algebra 1 course. It was pretty straight forward, but we have our 2^nd son in high school using Khan Academy for Algebra 1. I have found that the video instruction with math has been helpful for each of our boys…even beyond me teaching them the math concepts verbally. I think having another voice and a visual, step by step explanation just fit their needs better. And Khan Academy does a great job in their courses of teaching and tracking the student progress. (Note: Our boys have indicated that in talking with friends at the high school, these courses via Khan Academy seem to be much “deeper” in content than the courses at the high school. So, it is likely that Khan Academy is a more intense or in-depth course than others available.)

    In science, we stuck with the same author from our elementary and JH years, Dr. Jay Wile. We used his Biology course which included lab experiments (mainly dissections) which, for our state, qualifies for the requirement of one year of science with a lab.

   For us, History consisted of re-visiting the history curriculum we did in 5^th -8^th grade with the Mystery of History. This time the work fell under her “Older Students’ workload (as opposed to her “Younger” or “Middle Students” options).  Since our boys love history, they didn’t mind re-reading the sections and learning new levels of the details.

  The foreign language our older son chose was Spanish. Having traveled for a brief trip to Honduras, he had picked up on some Spanish already. We used Easy Peasy as a guideline for the work and resources and then supplemented where needed with other resources on the internet. However, the greatest asset and resource was the foreign exchange student on our swim team who came from Mexico. She and our son traded “lessons” each day. She would check something our son wrote to see if it would be written in a way that one would actually speak it in Mexico. And then she would ask our son a question about something she was learning in English.  It proved to teach each of them much more than they expected about each language.

  We did health and PE as well. PE is pretty straight forward, but for health I used various health books that I have been reading as a means of helping our boys understand the “why” behind a lot of what I/we do when shopping for food and cooking the food. 

Throughout the year, we still volunteered weekly on Tuesday mornings at our local soup kitchen. Our son’s class fell during the same time frame every other week because of block scheduling. But, we were still able to do it by arranging the load of work on that day.

In regards to “workload”, we had to get creative once we got a feel for it all. With the high school on block scheduling, the initial plan was to block schedule our work as well and try to balance the load between the days. Reality changed that plan a bit. We found we needed to do Spanish and Algebra 1 each day for smaller amounts of time in order to benefit from repetition and the in-take of new information (not overloading on one day with a gap until the next overload). So, since our high school has “blue” days and “white” days and our son’s class at the high school was on “white” days, we made “blue” days the heavier workload day with English/Literature, Biology, Algebra 1, and Spanish…and if time, history. This left the “white” day a little less intense (Algebra 1, Spanish, and History) which balanced out the extra time for traveling to/from school for his class. One surprising aspect that our son stated early in the school year was that he didn’t mind school work taking up more of the day…because it passed the time more quickly leading up to sports practice at school in the afternoon. So, I learned to let him self-teach (and then I checked in on his understanding) and to practice his own time management. This was much different than all the other years of teaching at home. But it had its advantages and disadvantages (like when I would start doing something either with our other son or in the kitchen and suddenly he was ready for Biology help). He–on his own initiative–learned to do the stuff he needed help with at a time I would be more likely to be able to help him easily. And it did help.

Throughout the year, I recorded grades more intentionally and had to submit them to the high school (for athletic eligibility) each quarter. I also compiled his report card using a template that had  places for attendance, the grading scale, and activities in each quarter (which included musical instruments, books read, videos, projects/crafts, community service, and “other”…which is where I recorded sports and employment). This is a helpful way to keep documentation in one place that will come in handy down the road for college applications, job applications, a reference when homeschooling siblings, or a means of sharing details with other people homeschooling in high school. (Things I thought I wouldn’t forget seemed to be forgotten rather easily!)