I know I'm a couple of weeks late, but I wanted to share a first quarter update for our homeschool year. I know resources for middle and high school are few and far between (although it's becoming more common), and I hope that our journey of homeschooling through the high school years will be helpful for other families.
My 11th grader just finished her first college course. She was taking an introductory course for the culinary arts program called Sanitation and Safety. It was a shortened course that only took 9 weeks and ended with an in-person certification final. She paced with flying colors. So proud that she's stepping into bigger and more challenging arenas.
Her other DE course is Eng 1A. This course has definitely been a challenge as we didn't do a lot of writing in our homeschool last year. That's been a learning curve for sure. It's not that she incapable. Rather, it's combining one of her weaker subjects with some firm deadlines, and has required her to put in some effort. The other thing that's been difficult is that she's very low-tech. So with both of these courses being online, she's really had to learn to navigate the internet in completing and submitting assignments. We've had to work through some technical difficulties, but all in all, she's doing great.
She's only taking a few classes from me this year. I talked her into adding Physics to her course load and I'm sort of regretting that. I do think she may have needed it eventually to build a strong transcript, but this may not have been the right year. Looking at her DE courses and her dancing, she's had a lot to accomplish. However, because she is so strong in math, Physics was definitely the route to go over Chemistry.
My eighth grader is doing pretty well. We hit a few snags in Math that we're having to work through. He was factoring polynomials and that slowed us down for awhile. This week we entered into the world of slope and I'm the one slowing us down. As much as I love Sadlier-Oxford, I've always personally struggled with the slope chapter. So I'm laying down my teacher hat, and we're using IXL to make sure he learns it correctly the first time. I love having a handful of resources like IXL or Khan Academy to step in and teach it the right way when I'm struggling with a concept. Definitely helps.
One thing that's worked amazingly well this year is writing narrations for our missionary books. I pulled 12 different Christian Heroes books from YWAM for us to read this year. While I was looking for writing ideas, we decided that writing about our missionaries would be a good way to incorporate something we're already studying. So every other book, he's writing a 5 paragraph essay about what he read. I've really had to scale back our Rod and Staff curriculum to accommodate the writing, but I'm already seeing HUGE improvement.
That's been some of our strengths and weaknesses over the past quarter. I can't believe we're already well into October. Seems crazy. So much growth with these two this quarter and I'm excited to see where it leads.
How is your homeschool year going?
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