One difficulty many homeschoolers encounter is how to show mastery over a subject. Ok, my child read the book. Can they find a way to show that they understood the material, digested it, made it their own? There are many ways of doing this that are NOT writing a book report!
So, let’s start with Language Arts. The goal here is for your student to be able to read and analyze a variety of texts and gain an appreciation for literature. In ninth grade, students in public school would usually read about five books over the course of the school year and learn to write the standard five paragraph essay. Some kids can breeze through books and crank out essays with little apparent effort, but for many learners, this work is terribly daunting.
Remember that the focus is on the understanding, analysis and enjoyment of literature. Audiobooks are fine, and with a great reader or full-cast, can convey wonderful nuance to a story. Many audiobooks are available free from the library, and during the COVID 19 school closures, even subscription services such as Audible are offering many titles for free. Also check out Libro.fm, a subscription service that supports the local, independent book store of your choice.
Allow your student to pick the books they want to read. I am a huge fan of Dickens, Tolstoy and Austen, but my kids would rather read Game of Thrones. This is totally fine as long as they are able to identify elements of the story such as plot, theme, metaphor, and so on.
Once your reluctant reader/writer has finished listening or reading, they can design a cover for the book using symbolism from the story. Another form of “book report” that may be more palatable to some, is to write a newspaper story about the events in the book. Students can even watch the movie version of a book and then make a list of discrepancies between the two. The ability to write a decent analysis of a text is an important skill, but your student does not have to churn out an essay per book if it is torture for them and the only lesson they learn is that they hate essays.
In tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades, students continue to hone their skills while they read a wider variety of texts, formulate responses and write their own compositions. In my family we use resources like Cliff Notes, Shmoop and Spark Notes to help us with literary analysis and deepen our understanding of literary elements. Another great resource available online and in book form is No Fear Shakespeare, which has all the bard’s plays written side-by-side in the original form and plain modern English.
The next subject that lends itself easily to homeschooling is social studies. In 9th grade, students would typically be taught health and geo-literacy. Health includes sex-ed, and while this is an embarrassing topic for many kids to cover with their parents, you do NOT want your children turning to the internet as their sole source for information. I gave my kids a couple of books and told them to ask me anything. The best time to have sex ed conversations is when you’re riding in the car together, so your child doesn’t have to ask embarrassing questions face to face.
Geo literacy is another way of saying “worldliness”. This is a sweeping subject consisting of news, information, politics, health and global issues. One of the most important lessons this subject teaches is how to analyze information sources. Being able to tell the difference between advertising, even in it’s subtlest forms, and pure information, is a key skill many American students lack. Now more than ever before, students need to be able to discern biases and underlying motivations and agendas, question sources, check their facts and apply logic to everything they read and hear. Ask your student to choose a news story and find two articles about it written from opposing points of view, or opposing news outlets. Look at a newspaper together (digital is ok) and find labels like “paid advertisement”. Have them check a FaceBook or Instagram post against Snopes.com. The weekly podcast On the Media takes a deep look at stories in the news, how they skew and why.
World and US History are rich subjects that can really come alive for a student with movies and podcasts, but those critical thinking and questioning skills really come in handy and foster deep discussions. We recently watched the movie Harriet, about the indomitable Harriet Tubman. We researched the historical record of her life and compared it to the Hollywood version, discussing the changes and how the movie distorted her story at times, but helped create suspense and drama. There are numberless movies, documentaries and podcasts that teach history. Make a list and watch them in order. Have your student keep a timeline. Watch them together and ask questions, look up sources, research and discuss. A couple of my favorites were the podcasts 1619 and 1865.
Twelfth grade students should study Government and Economics. Again, there is no shortage of free resources, including step by step curricula. An in-depth dive into the subject of American Government will really help a student’s understanding of current events. What does it mean for a Supreme Court Justice to be a “Constitutionalist?” What are the Federalist Papers, and why do lawmakers invoke them today to justify their vote on a bill? This subject at first glance might seem dry and old to students, but if they follow current events at all, and it’s hard not to these days, they will deepen their understanding of daily political news and find many aha! Moments as they learn about the three branches and their functions.
Economics can be fun! My favorite resource for this is the Planet Money podcast We are living through a time when the science of economics is relevant to all of us.
It is hard, but not impossible to conduct lab science at home. The most rudimentary ways also foster great life skills. Bake cookies. Why do you add baking soda to one recipe and baking powder to another? Make a sourdough starter and find out what kind of bacteria you are culling from the air. My son just built us a potato box. We added some dirt and some sprouting potatoes. When the plants start to grow, we can add another box and more dirt. The plants will grow lots of potatoes under the dirt.
Start some seedlings, compost your food scraps and build a container garden. Follow the directions on those seed packets; some take 45 days to be ready for planting. Some take 110! Look at the shapes of the leaves. You are doing biology and chemistry. Of course, for the die-hards, there are kits available on the internet for more advanced experiments, sometimes involving real explosions. And there is always Khan Academy for high quality instructional learning (in almost all subject areas).
My daughter is interested in health careers and is also missing her ceramics class, so we decided to study the human skeleton by making breadsticks in the shape of the major bones. Projects like this make up the backbone of our homeschool experience (pardon the pun). While we use online learning sites like Khan Academy to cover the bases, the real fun is in pursuing our hobbies and living a life of discovery and purpose.
Meridith Cook is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz, California. A homeschooling parent of three children, she delights in spending time with her family gardening, hiking, cooking, going to the beach and listening to audiobooks. She is also an avid knitter and crafter with delusions of grandeur. She has a bachelor of science degree in print journalism from Boston University and has lived in New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Thailand. Visit her website at https://melbacomms.com/ to see more of her writing.
