It’s November! The leaves have changed and already fell off most of our trees here in the mountainous region of Pennsylvania. We are three months in to beginning our curriculum for 10th and 12th grades. I wanted to make a post to review how it’s going so far. What I like, what I don’t like, what they like, and what they don’t like. See my previous post where I detail what curriculum we decided to use this year. I find homeschooling highschool quite easy. I know so many parents (by what I see in homeschool groups) feel so intimidated with these years but I find it to be a lot less work for me personally as they quite literally work independently and it should be encouraged for them to do so. The only parts I am still heavily involved in is Bible study, adding curriculum as needed, and grading work and keeping my files up to date and organized. This has afforded me more time for doing basically whatever I want to. I’ve personally been teaching myself to play the ukulele since June. If, by the way, that interests you or your children, YouTube has so many very helpful people who post content on the basics of playing. Then of course there is a ton of online information as well as books you can buy. The hardest part is picking your ukulele.

Let’s start with Science – they have been using the Master Books kit called “Survey of Science”. It includes, The World of Mathematics, The World of Physics, The World of Chemistry and The World of Biology. They have completed The World of Mathematics so far. I don’t feel like they learned anything new really, but I feel like it was foundational to the rest of the curriculum. It’s math and neither teen enjoys math, so not their favorite. Master Books lists this as for grades 9-12. I think that is pretty on par. My 10th grader didn’t struggle too much and my 12th grader still had some challenging math but overall I think it’s probably best for 9th-10th grade unless your teen generally has more trouble with upper level math and better suited once they master it. It’s my opinion though that this is foundational to the rest of the series, but I may have a better idea of that as they progress. So even if it’s review it will probably be helpful. The next book is The World of Physics. No review yet as they just started. I do feel like a lot will be review for them only because they have been exposed to Physics in previous years with other curriculum that covered all areas of science. You could really consider this course a General Science course for 1 credit of Science. If it didn’t also include Biology you could call it Physical Science, but Biology is not generally included in such a course, but you’re the supervisor, call it what you like. It only matters if you’re creating a transcript that can be used to give to prospective colleges.

Next, let’s talk about what they are currently working on for English. If you read my previous post, you know they are using another Master Books curriculum for Vocabulary for 1/2 a year and than moving onto studying British Literature. They absolutely do not like learning vocabulary but I can tell you they are definitely learning new words, word roots, and definitions. Overall I am pleased with this course, although they don’t enjoy it. Expanding their vocabulary will benefit them in the long run. There are even some words in there I never encountered before, so, bonus, I’m learning too. This is meant to be a 1 year or a 1 1/2 year course but we are not following the schedule in the book. The schedule intends them to do one lesson (which is a worksheet) a day, whereas my teens do 3 a day as they are working at an accelerated pace to complete as much as possible in 1/2 a year. They will get close. I’m not worried as I don’t feel the British Literature will take as much time per day so they will have time to finish. I can’t speak of the British Literature course yet. It’s published by Alpha Omega Press. It is their Lifepac series, which I have mixed feelings on those books, but this seemed suited for our needs. It’s a 1/2 credit, 1/2 year course and knowing the series from previous experience it will contain a lot of good information and it’s from a Christian worldview which is very important to me especially when it comes to classical literature options. Things that I don’t like about LifePac’s is there is no pre-made schedule. They call them self-paced, which they are, but in my previous experience with their full year courses it’s so much work it’s impossible to finish all the worktexts, although this is remedied by not doing every extra activity that the books often contain and completely omitting any suggested ones from the teacher book, which is not how they expect the course to be given. However, you do what works for you. This course is 5 worktexts instead of the 10 you find in a year long course. There will be excerpts of literature, short stories, poems etc, along with learning literary styles and no doubt will be many worksheets to complete and hopefully also writing assignments as I expect there will be and if not, that’s easy enough to add, but even if not in the text themselves they may very well offer additional assignments in the teacher guide as has been my experience with LifePac. I will review at a later date.

Following what I said above about LifePac, my 10th grader chose to do LifePac for History this year. She is doing the 10th grade level, full year course. Again there is no schedule but she works at her own pace. Instead of driving myself mad on creating a schedule as I’ve done previously, which rarely ever works out in my experience, I just give her an allotted amount of time to work on the course and she completes whatever she can in that time. This is a lot less work for me. It’s up to you if you want to grade all the daily work assignments in the texts or stick to only making sure they are completed and grading the self-tests and unit tests instead. Self tests I consider quizzes. It’s nice for them if you grade the daily assignments so they find the correct answers when studying for the tests, if you give study time. Again, Alpha Omega gives you suggestions but you do what works for you. The teacher guide has all the answers. You could even allow them to self grade their daily work. This can be done as they study and you can record the grade or not. Again, because of how time consuming the reading portions are and all the worksheet type assignments I’m not asking for additional things to be done, although I do plan to assign some writing/research assignments.

I am going to skip a review on CTC math because I’ve already done so previously as well as our completing our study of the New Testament in Journey through the Bible from Christian Liberty Press. Once we are done with that we are moving onto a Bible course from Bob Jones Press that I am still working out how I will structure it. More on that at a future date. As far as the make-it-as-you-go interior design course, I didn’t expect my teenager to finish her 1st book so quickly and already moved on to another book. She will need to take one of the free online courses after she completes this book. I mentioned one such course in my previous post. Along with that she was reading about architectural drafting. As I expected, she does not like it. She did complete the book but she did not complete all the hand drawn floor plans as suggested to practice in the book. She did one. This is not something that interests her, she soon realized. She has decided interior design isn’t the field she is interested in, but instead, interior decorating. And yes, there is a difference. This homeschool mom did a lot of research on this subject to create a course for her. However, she is now creating floor plans with an open source (free) program called SweetHome3D. This is going much better. There are several online programs like this for free. The reason I chose this one is because it was downloadable to her computer and she can save her projects as opposed to many of the web based ones. Some offer free accounts and some do not but none of the others were downloadable programs. Perhaps one day she will decide to learn how to draw floor plans by hand, but it’s not totally needed, especially right now. This is how it goes sometimes when you create your own programs. When not sure what will work and won’t work. When you are not sure what they will like and not like. I was given an idea from her, she wanted to learn interior design, and so I looked into what is included in such a course, generally these kinds of courses are not offered in highschools. It’s not wasted effort, though, because it helps shape what she wants to focus on.

This leads me to my graduating teenager who has been focused on computer programming for many years. He is still working through the Harvard CS50x program and it’s going well. He’s moving at a slightly slower pace than I anticipated, however, I had no idea how long each of the lectures were and there is no way to predict how long it will take to work out the labs and assignments to create working programs. He is learning a lot though. He is learning a lot more than he expected to. He’s created quite a few working programs. Once those assignments are complete he uploads them to the CS50X GitHub account where it’s auto graded. I think as long as the program functions and no syntax errors you get 100, so be sure they work before you submit them. I think too they focus on how many of the assignments you actually completed. I admittedly have no understanding of what he is learning. I used to have very basic knowledge of HTML and CSS languages used for creating websites but that was many years ago. He is learning far more than that. He’s gone though learning algorithms, and learning the C program language which he said is slightly different that C++ that he’s been learning up to now. His background knowledge has helped him though. He didn’t need to learn visual studio because he taught himself that last year, for example. Learning c++ did help him although he found C to be a bit more challenging. There are many more computer languages he’s studied and will study yet. Overall, good course and he likes it.

Overall things are going well. Very thankful that I have never had to argue, much, to motivate my teenagers to get their work done. They know what is expected of them and they do it with little complaint. The biggest issue is with the 12th grader and working a job outside of the home. This has led to some tough talk from Mom about not rushing through his school work as to get to work faster. He’s been told, school first, than work. His hours have been reduced since, though, because of where he works, this time of year slows down so it all worked out. There’s been some ongoing health related issues but overall not to disruptive. The 12th grader has also began dating which brings a whole new set of challenges for Christian parents raising Christian teenagers. My advice if you find your teen dating, or wanting to…talk to them, about everything. Don’t be embarrassed, don’t assume they know, don’t stop talking to them either. Stay involved. Make sure you meet the one they are dating, keep the door open for them to hang out at your house, meet the parents and lay down the rules with your teen. Review the rules over and over. If/when they break them, be sure to give appropriate consequences. Parenting teens is hard work, especially ones that are pretty independent, much harder than homeschooling them, that’s my perspective right now. Nobody is perfect, not even your kid, no matter how much you want them to be or what your expectations are, they will make wrong choices, just like we do, but you’re still their parent. Stay involved, and keep the conversations open and honest. I can’t pretend to know everything because it’s been an interesting year with my soon-to-be adult (by what our society considers and adult) teen. This is a time of transition, not just for you the parent, but them, the teenager. Keep God close, you will need him!