First Year of Homeschooling High School

A year ago, I was inordinately intimidated by the idea of homeschooling high school. I’m a lot more relaxed now that we’ve successfully completed P15’s 9^th grade year. (Note: P has just turned 15, she was 14 during her 9^th grade year). It actually wasn’t all that different from what we had done up to this point: the main difference was that I did more recordkeeping.

In Hawaii, a lot of people who have homeschooled their children for many years stop when high school starts. The public school system here won’t accept work done at home as being at a high school level, so if your homeschooled 11^th grader decides she wants to start attending public school, she has to enter as a 9^th grader. Our local Waianae Coast homeschool group is small, and P15 is the oldest child who regularly attends events (which are few and far between). I have one local close friend who homeschools her high schooler, but she lives over 45 minutes away and I only see her once a month or so. Contemplating high school, I felt very much on my own.

I attended the CHOH (Christian Homeschoolers of Hawaii) conference in March 2018, and dog-eared every page in the program containing the words “high school”. My biggest concerns were how to assign grades, how to create a transcript, and how to ensure P15 would look attractive to whatever college she might choose to attend. For me, the most helpful event at the conference was a panel discussion with moms who either were currently homeschooling high schoolers or had already graduated one or more students. Because our homeschool style doesn’t look much like my public school experience, I was feeling at a loss how to assign grades to subjects like history and literature. One of the moms on the panel had also used Sonlight, the literature-based curriculum we’ve used since preschool for history, Bible, and English literature. She explained how she started the school year with a booklist and assigned a certain number of books to be read in order to earn an A, B, etc. Completion of map and timeline assignments, intelligent discussion of the comprehension questions, and a few papers each made up a portion of the history grade. The papers could do double duty for English credit, with reading and discussion of literature counting for a portion as well. This sounded doable!

Armed with a plan for how I would take the work I knew P15 would do and translate it into a single number on a fancy piece of paper, I was ready to plan out the subjects she would study. P15 is in love with history, and she studied two Sonlight history programs: the second year of World History (having completed the first year in 8^th grade) and History of the Christian Church. Literature came along with World History: over 30 works which she read on her own as well as hearing me read some of them aloud to both her and E13. This was actually the first school year since she learned to read where P15 didn’t read all the literature before the beginning of the school year, because she spent the summer between 8^th and 9^th grade working with Child Evangelism Fellowship and didn’t have much free time. But that’s okay, she finished them well before they were scheduled… For math we’ve been using Core-Plus Mathematics, which is teacher-intensive but uses a discovery based approach to introduce topics in algebra, geometry, statistics, and discrete math through a three-year course that replaces the traditional Algebra I – Geometry – Algebra II sequence. We completed Course 1 in 8^th grade, and I optimistically hoped to complete all of Course 2 in 9^th. For science we used Novare Introductory Physics, an algebra-based program that was more rigorous than the conceptual physics I got in high school. (I kept thinking how much easier Caltech would have been for me if I’d had this kind of preparation!) Novare recommends a physics-first approach, since physics is foundational to understanding chemistry, and chemistry is foundational to understanding biology. For Bible, there were 9 books about apologetics and Christian faith and practice included in the 2 history programs from Sonlight, which alone would have been enough for me to assign her a year of credit, but we also studied the book of Acts with Community Bible Study. I added in a light (year-long, but semester credit) study of logical fallacies using TheAmazing Dr. Ransom’s Bestiary of Adorable Fallacies, which personifies each fallacy as a mystical creature, like the Ad Hominem as a raccoon-like beast which sneakily sprays armpit scent on its opponent, making the bystanders think the opponent was the source of the stench. P15 had also started studying Greek in 8^th grade, so I planned to continue with that for a language credit. Well, it's good to have a plan, anyway!

As is always the case, my plans didn’t all work out exactly as I intended. The main reason was the wonderful blessing of a lot of travel. Our family spent 2 weeks of September on Kauai with Ari’s parents, and another 2 weeks of April on the Big Island, also with Ari’s parents. One can’t complain about a free vacation on another island – it is certainly worth skipping or doubling up on some school in order to make it happen. Even with this, we may have been able to come nearer finishing the math book than we did, except for another once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunity exclusive to P15. Ari’s parents, who have been blessed financially, wanted to travel to Israel on a tour with their church. It was designed for couples, and they wanted to bring Ari’s grandmother, who is in her nineties and was widowed 5 years ago, so they asked if we could spare P15 to make up the couple with Grandma. P15 ended up spending a week and a half with her grandparents in Texas before the tour. Having partially overcome the 12-hour time difference between Hawaii and Israel, she then flew to Israel with her grandparents and great-Grandma, spending a week before the tour getting over jet lag and doing their own exploring. They then spent another week on tour, with a few days afterward to spend time with my brother, sister-in-law, and nieces who live in Tel Aviv. So an entire month in February/March was taken up with this marvelous opportunity. P15 found herself much more motivated to study modern Hebrew than ancient Greek given her upcoming travel, so she used the magical world of free language apps to learn the alphabet and some common words and phrases. This came in handy when she was entertaining her 3-year-old cousin who attends Hebrew nursery school: little S announced an animal in Hebrew, and P15 was able to act it out with her. I decided this was worth at least a semester’s foreign language credit.

Even with all that travel, we actually finished all the subjects I intended except math and church history. We did 6 of the 8 units in the math book, and 27 of the 36 weeks of church history, bringing us up to the early 20^th century. P15 plans to read the remainder of the books in the church history program on her own time because she is interested, and Sonlight is dense enough I felt no qualms about giving her a year’s credit for church history even though it was incomplete. As for math, we’ll just start the new school year in Unit 7 of Core-Plus Course 2, and work diligently. Since she covered a fair bit of algebra and geometry in 8^th grade, I again felt justified in giving her a year’s math credit.

It was an intense year, and I am planning a lighter load for 10^th grade. Math will be Core-Plus, finishing Course 2 and doing as much of Course 3 as we can manage (I’ll skip some of the discrete math). For science she’ll study Novare Chemistry, because completing the unit on logarithms in Core-Plus Course 2 leaves her mathematically prepared to understand pH. For history and literature, she and E13 will study US History and US Historical Literature from Sonlight. Bible is again covered by Sonlight, and we will be studying Romans in Community Bible Study. For foreign language, P15 wants to learn Arabic (which will be a little easier for her than if she hadn't studied Hebrew, as they are both Semitic languages). She has been learning the alphabet, and our library offers free Mango language courses online. Of course, my plan might not bear close resemblance to what happens, but I'll assign credit for whatever actually gets done.

On the whole, homeschooling high school has not been a significant uptick in difficulty. The actual course work is harder, but as P15 becomes more independent, the demands on me are not greater in teaching her than in teaching the younger ones. They’re just different in style – more discussion and record keeping, less direct instruction. If you’re considering homeschooling high school, take courage: you can do this!