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Exciting High School Electives

I fell down a rabbit hole last night. Does that ever happen to you? You're innocently poking around the internet and the next thing you know you're hours deep with 15 browser tabs open researching something. 

What was I researching, you ask? 

High school electives. 

Yes, my eldest is only in sixth grade this year, but I've been working on making some curriculum choices for her for next year. Since next year will be her seventh grade year, and seventh grade leads to eight grade which leads to high school, you begin to see how this all happened.  High school is a whole different ball game where each year is tied to the others with a whole progressive course of study to be plotted out!

So, down the rabbit hole I went.

And I made some exciting discoveries! Not only did I sketch out a basic plan for my kids' high school years -- an endeavor made supremely easy by My Father's World -- but I discovered some really fun elective programs available to homeschoolers. At this point, I have absolutely no idea what my kids will be interested in for electives, so my gleanings are purely inspired by things I, myself, think are interesting or would like to present as options to my kids. Whether or not some of them are practical options from a financial standpoint remains to be seen as well. But, I figured since I was already meandering down that path, I might as well throw some links together and share my findings.

To start off, HSLDA has a list of 84 elective courses to consider. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it has some good ideas to get you thinking.

Foreign language is, in my opinion, one of the most important electives. So I looked at a lot of Spanish programs suitable for high school. Most of them, especially the ones involving a live video chat, are far beyond my budget for a single class, but Breaking the Spanish Barrier looks very promising.

As much as I think Spanish would be the most useful foreign language for my kids to learn, I'm not sure they are as interested in that option themselves. In fact, I'm pretty sure at this point they'd rather study Japanese. For that, I discovered Japanese I at Georgia Virtual Learning. If Japanese isn't your thing, maybe look at their Chinese, Spanish, German, French, or Latin courses.

Boys and girls both could benefit from this Auto Upkeep course. Maybe I'll even rope Hubby into taking this one with us!

It would be a blast offering Forensic Science as an elective in our homeschool! Or maybe in a co-op setting using something like the Mystery of Lyle and Louise.

In my youth I had no idea how fascinated I would be by psychology as an adult. I'm quite enthralled by the idea of offering Sonlight's AP Psychology class. I want my kids to take this one just so I can take it too!

Other than designing your own program, because obviously that's a fabulous option too, have you run into any exciting elective courses out there?









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