Plans for My High Schooler

OHere is  my high schooler's box of books.     I'll go through them in detail below.  I basically went for structure and ease of use.  My main goal is to work on college-prep study habits, so we are doing a lot of answering the actual questions in the textbooks, which in the past we haven't done so much. 

This is an artistic, thoughtful type of kid with a great sense of humor who likes to draw, write stories and talk about moral philosophy.  Oh yes, and bake cookies, and he can fix almost any computer problem that comes up.  But he doesn't particularly like to do hard, tedious things, so I am still pretty involved in planning out and following through on his courses.       

 

Didache Moral Life in Christ

 

Life of Fred Beginning Algebra

This is for an algebra review/refresher during the summer.    The kid developed a strong math aversion during the year we used K12.     California was pushing algebra for 8th graders and the book K12 used at the time was just not a good presentation -- it was more like a dumbed-down Algebra II, extremely confusing even for me, and I still remember all my high school algebra.

This is also for review.    I've used this quite a bit as you can see from the cover falling off.   Presently he is doing the chapter on Geometry.   We do a unit in Fred then a couple of sections of Geometry. 

Henle Latin. 

Another time-tested resource for my family.   We've used it 5 times to some degree or another.  
I am using Memoria Press for the syllabus and supplemental quizzes and tests.  

Exploring Creation with Chemistry

I always say I will not use Apologia, then I do it again.   The reason is that the presentation of this book is clear and readable and the format is homeschool-friendly, and since Liam used it and turned out fine in regard to college science, it seems to do what is necessary.  

History of the United States, Boorstin and Kelley

I found this at a thrift store for a dollar and liked the look and Daniel Boorstin is one of the authors.   Quite readable.  

Modern Literature:  Kolbe Academy
scroll down for the modern literature outline.  

Huckleberry Finn is the first book in the literature course.   You also get to read The Wasteland, Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, Brideshead Revisited,  A Day in the Life of Ivan Denosovich, and 1984.  I am skipping 1984 and possibly Crime and Punishment.   I'll probably add in some Chesterton and Lewis.

For English, I am also using Kolbe's course, with some tweaking.    The senior year is focused on creative writing which is my focus for Kieron as well. 

Read Japanese Today

This book teaches you 400 Kanji.   It has a cool approach in that it tells you the origin of the kanji, how the symbol evolved from an original pictograph to the stylized form of the modern day.  

Kieron is interested in all things Japanese, and Japanese was an old obsession of mine, but I never could find books like this one.   I'm not putting "Japanese" on his transcript, since I see it as more of an etymology and drawing/penmanship type course.  I just read it to him and we write down the characters in our notebooks and then review occasionally. 

In another post I will share more about how I actually am planning to work with my 3 students. 

Study/Review Resources for these books. 

•  Quizlet is a great resource for review and simple vocabulary and Q&A quizzes.  You can play games online, or print out terms, or design customized quizzes that you can print or do online.  
• Another resource that is great for math at all ages is ThatQuiz.    So easy to customize the quizzes and my kids like them. 
• VocabTest is excellent for vocabulary study for middle school/high school, including SAT prep.