This is really just a rough first draft; a place to put all my notes for our plans. Usually, I keep a "draft" in my inbox with all these links, but I thought I'd take a stab at the blogging thing one more time; and what better place to keep track of it all for me? Especially since I can go back and look at it later, and see how far off course we've become. So, this is for Ms. Artsy for next year, Ninth Grade. High School, EEP!!
So, without further ado:
History -
As stated previously, Ms. Artsy has chosen to start over with her history studies, so that she gets the full 4-year cycle in her high school career. So, we'll be starting off with the Ancients. Truthfully, I think this is her favorite time period, especially those
of the Greeks and Romans. She's big into the mythology. For our spine for History, we'll be using Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Ancient World and the Study Guide that goes with it. A link I have saved that may become useful is from the Khan Academy. Part of history includes reading Great Books, and this is kind of where the line between history and English blurs. She'll be reading the Great Books that correspond to her history time frame, but she'll be analyzing the literature and writing notes and compositions based on her reading. The list includes books of the bible, the epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad and Odyssey, Oedipus the King, Agamemnon, Medea, The History of the Peloponnesian War, The Republic, On Poetics, Rhetoric, Aeneid, and more. We will get through what we get through.
To further enhance her history studies, beyond just reading, we'll be looking into getting most if not all of these Great Courses lectures:
The Other Side of History: Daily life in the Ancient world
History of the Ancient World: A global perspective
History of Ancient Egypt
Great Pharaoh's of Ancient Egypt
Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor
Foundations of Eastern Civilization
Ancient Greek Civilization
History of Ancient Rome
And a class from the Open Yale Courses -
Introduction to Ancient Greek History
Obviously, plenty of resources to provide a thorough and engaging year in Ancient History.
English -
Following the recommendations in The Well Trained Mind (TWTM), high school English is a lot of literature study, and the literature we're studying corresponds to the time in history we are studying. Ms. Artsy has chosen to start over with her history, instead of continuing on, so we will be back at the beginning with the Ancients. So, Here are my links that I have saved for English; maybe going through them for this post will remind me why I have them all saved.
First, Susan Wise Bauer has a great list of books in The Well Trained Mind, as well as The Well Educated Mind. And really, I'm viewing The Well Educated Mind as a sort of outline for high school, or the high school you wish you had if you had had a classical education. So the majority of our choices will be based off of these two books.
There's also The Great Books, Ancient Course. Now, this is from a "christian worldview" which we do not partake in, so it will require some tweaking. But, it gives me a sort of an outline to follow as far as hitting the books that we should be reading over the course of the year, and maybe give me an opportunity to find tests and essay questions pertaining to the books we chose to read.
The Great Courses:
Masterpieces of Ancient Greek Literature
Greek Tragedy
The Iliad of Homer & Odyssey of Homer
Aeneid of Virgil
Herodotus
Classical Mythology
Great Authors - This one can be used to span all 4 years, picking and choosing which authors we watch the lectures on.
History of World Literature - Same as above, can pick and choose lectures that apply
Human Myths - Fine line between history and language arts
These are a collection of lecture series by professors who are wild about their courses. They have a wealth of information to share, and even if just watching and getting a shallow bit of it, I believe she'll be better off than without them. These are a few of the books we'll be reading, so what better way than to have her go through the literature analysis with college professors?
Science -
Science in TWTM is, once again, based on period reading. Lots and lots of reading. I'm not trying to completely bombard her with all the reading all the time, so we will have a "typical" science class, with an actual high school text book, and piecemeal lab that we can purchase and do ourselves at home. In this instance, I wish so much that we could find a local co-op or group of equally aged children going through the same thing, but for the most part around here everyone is of a christian worldview and use Apologia texts, and I'm just not going to do it. So I am going to do the best that I can with online virtual labs, any and all field trips we can manage, and of course, labs at home.
TWTM recommends "source reading" based on subject matter and, of course, history time period. For Ancients/Biology, the recommendations include Hippocrates, Euclid, and Aristotle. These may be interspersed throughout the year, we'll take time off of science principle learning to do a bit of reading and a paper on the reading, and then go back to the principles.
For the book; I still haven't made my decision as to which Biology book I'm going to use. I have it narrowed down, and I just have to make the sticking decision (or buy both. I'm sure my husband would love that). This is the immensity of the links that I have saved for Biology for next year.
First, there is this thread on TWTM forums that has a huge plethora of information that I gleaned a lot of my links from. As far as the rest of it, I'm going to try to remember why I saved the link, and try to put them in some kind of order that makes sense. I'm 99.9% sure that nobody reads this anyway, so we'll just pretend like it's all for my benefit.
Books that are being considered:
Campbell's Concepts and Connections
Miller and Levine "Dragonfly book"
More Miller and Levine
Science for High School - I'm not even sure this one is in the running, but it's a complete kit, with lab and everything, so I'll have to look at it more.
Resources:
This blog post using Campbell
The Home Scientist Main Page
Experiences in Biology - I'm not sure why I saved this one now lol. I think it was supposed to be a great lab book...
The Home Scientist Lab corresponding to the "dragonfly" book
Campbell's other Biology Book
MIT Open Courseware Fundamentals of Biology
HippoCampus Biology
Bozeman Biology Videos
Khan Academy
Online Honor's Biology Syllabus using Campbell
Biology Podcasts
Biology Videos
Boseman Videos
Video lectures
Another resource using Campbell
Biology Corner
What a Plant Knows
And of course, we can't forget The Great Courses -
Biology: Science of Life
Understanding Genetics
Understanding the Human Body
Understanding the Brain
Biology and Human Behavior
Origins of Life
Obviously, there is way more here than could possibly fit into a 9-month, 9th grade Biology course. However, I like the idea of exposing her to some of the more "out there" stuff, just so she knows that this science thing is infinite, the possibilities are endless as to what she could go on to study. She may even rabbit-trail into something off course from just "biology", and that's ok.
We could add in a "health and nutrition" class to be half a
credit to go along with Biology when it comes to human body systems. A
few I've looked at in the past for that are
Real Food Nutrition and Real Food Nutrition for Kids
This one is
completely new to me, I just ran across it the other day. I'll have to
look into it more, but it definitely looks like something we'd be into.
The HBD one follows along with The Unhealthy Truth so it seems promising. And, they have a health 101 for teens!
It seems like I had come across one that had The Omnivore's Dilemma for Kids as required reading; I'll have to do some searching and see if I can find it again.
Math -
Fairly simply, math is Algebra this year. We'll be using the Saxon Algebra 1 text, and I'm going to have to decide if I want to get the videos again this year (we used them in Algebra 1/2 this past year). Another option, other than purchasing the videos, are the videos on Khan Academy site and also HippoCampus.
Foreign Language -
She's a little ambitious with what she thinks she's going to do in the Foreign Language department for high school. She's mentioned Latin, Greek, French, and of course, Japanese. I've told her that we can just pick one to focus on for our "credits" and the rest can be at a slower pace, not necessarily anything she'd get full credit for, but maybe could work out as elective credits or something. So far, what I've got saved for links for a foreign language are -
Visual Latin 2 - We're doing Visual Latin 1 right now. I love the guy, the kids love the guy; I'm not 100% sure it's enough as a stand alone for a credit. We may have to find something to supplement it with. The problem with that, once again, is finding something with a non-Christian bias.
For Japanese, I've saved a few courses from the MIT Open Courseware. This may just be a little side-fun, I'm not sure how much of a foreign language you can learn from books and worksheets. Seems to me like a full immersion is needed to be able to get any kind of fluency. But we'll take it one step at a time.
Japanese I
Linguistic Theory and the Japanese Language
Beginning Japanese II
Genki
Irasshai
As far as electives go, we have to figure something out for PE. I'm wanting to put them back into Kung Fu, so they are moving their bodies on a daily basis and also learning the disciple that comes with that. Also, my littles are old enough for it now, as well, and that would just be fantastic to be able to put everyone into something.
She's always liked art (obviously, hence the nickname) and has always taken an art class outside of the home until recently. Our latest art teacher has retired, so we'll have to figure something else out. There are a few things that her dad and I have up our sleeve for her upcoming birthday that might be something we could expand upon, definitely worth looking into for an elective for high school.
I would like it if she were interested in photography, but that hasn't come up as of yet.
Something too that would be fabulous for high school is a debate class; however, she's so painfully introverted (no idea where she gets that from lol) that it might literally kill her to get up in front of other people and talk.
Let's see, we've got history, english, math, science, foreign language... it feels like I wrote out so much but at the same time it feels like I'm missing something. Not sure what though, lol.
No comments:
Post a Comment