Homeschool Curriculum: 9th Grade Curriculum Choices

This has been a hard year to nail down 9th grade curriculum choices for my high schooler. However, I think that I have finally come up with some good options for her this year. This will be the first year that we do not have a core level from Sonlight to use for our history. And that is a big change for us starting our twelfth year homeschooling.

Obviously, you can pick and choose whatever curriculum and resources you would like to use for your own homeschool. You want to make sure that you are fulfilling your own state’s homeschool law and requirements for graduation. In my state, we do not have specific graduation requirements for high school. Instead, I have contacted some local colleges to see their admissions requirements, as well as using the requirements at our local public school to make sure I touch on all the important subjects as we plan to homeschool high school.

9th Grade Curriculum Choices: History

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Let’s start with history since we are not using a normal Sonlight level this year. Instead, what I have chosen to do is American Government. Typically American Government is a half credit class, however the curriculum we decided on is for a full credit. We will be using Constitutional Literacy with the accompanying workbook from Apologia. It looks like a really robust curriculum for American Government. If, as we are going through the course, I find that it does not meet my requirements for a full credit course, we will either re-evaluate and have it be a half-credit. Or, most likely, we will add some extra projects and/or papers into the program in order to have it be a full credit.

In addition to American Government, we will also be doing a full credit of geography. We will be using North Star Geography. It seems like a great program, and very in depth. One of the things we lose out on by not having a Sonlight history core level this year is the geography portion. So, instead, I decided to have her take an actual geography course for credit. These 2 credits will comprise our 9th grade curriculum choices for History.

English & Language Arts

Our 9th grade curriculum choices for English & Language Arts are very similar to what we have done in the past. This year we will be using Sonlight level 230, Classical Literature. I have been so excited to do this level with Emma because it contains some of my favorite books! We will be pairing classical literature with Worldly Wise Book 9, as well as Help for High School from Brave Writer, and Analogies 2. We will also have some Brave Writer Boomerangs and Slingshots, but I have not chosen those books as of yet. I will have a separate post with our Brave Writer Choices for this year. You can see our Brave Writer Choices from 2020-2021 HERE. You can also see last year’s Brave Writer Choices here.

Classical Literature Selections

• The Best of Father Brown
• Robinson Crusoe
• Romeo and Juliet
• Twelfth Night
• Oliver Twist
• Till We Have Faces
• The Screwtape Letters
• Pilgrim’s Progress in Today’s English
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Wise Woman and Other Stories
• A Child’s Anthology of Poetry
• What Hearts
• A Parcel of Patterns
• The Ramsay Scallop
• The Hawk and the Dove
• The Wounds of God
• The Shining Company
• Moon over Manifest
• A Solitary Blue

9th Grade Curriculum Choices: Science

This year we will be returning to Apologia for Science for Emma. She will be doing Apologia Biology with Lab. I decided that we would also purchase the microscope and dissection kit from Sonlight to go with this program. We also purchased the student notebook and I am also getting the textbook on audible.

Foreign Language Elective

We will be continuing on with Spanish 2 from BJUPress Online. Emma really enjoyed Spanish 1 last year, and did awesome with the program. She is excited to move forward into Spanish 2 this year, and I am happy to have her continue with a very solid and strong program. This course, as well as the other foreign language courses, are honors level courses and can be treated that way on the transcript. However, we are not going to be weighting grades on transcripts unless a specific college Emma is looking at finds value in that. If you are looking for resources to help create your transcript, I recommend the book Setting the Records Straight by Lee Binz. It was super helpful for me in starting the process of creating transcripts and keeping track of courses for after graduation.

Entrepreneurship Elective

The final part of our 9th grade curriculum choices is a half-credit entrepreneurship elective. We are using the Entrepreneurship Unit from Gather Round Homeschool. We are pairing this unit with Dave Ramsey’s Foundations in Personal Finance for High School as well as their Entrepreneurship self-study. I think this will be a great elective for Emma.

What’s next?

You may have noticed that I do not have math listed. We are still up in the air as to which math curriculum we are going to use with Emma for next year. Also, there are some extra subjects that Maine requires that I didn’t go over here – fine arts, PE, Health. Primarily because we do not use specific curriculum for these classes. Emma runs and does yoga daily, and she is continuing her cooking and learning about nutrition. For fine arts she continues to work on animation and other art with Adobe Creative Cloud. She sings, plays music, and draws just about every day as well.

I will have all of our other curriculum choice videos and posts up over the next few weeks so stay tuned!

Have you chosen all of your resources and curriculum for next year?