Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments 12yo homeschooling curriculum

What about lab requirements when teaching high school chemistry, biology, physics? I have spoken to high schools about accepting my DD13 into advanced classes if she has learned these topics at home. They usually 'natter on about how important their coursework/ their lab work is to a student. Several high schools refused to accept online science courses at all (like CTY).

I would love to pull DD13 out of her current middle school, which seems to be becoming anti-intellectual; they recently pulled their academic awards because "it was always the same kids getting the awards". Instead they profusely award, with many hundreds of citations, citizenship and sports and leadership - but no academic awards until the very end of the year. No substituting academics for leadership either - "trust falls" for all, regardless of academic ability.

Back to the question - will high schools, and eventually colleges, accept your homeschooled adolescent if they haven't had laboratory based science?

Are most middle school classes lab based? I never had a lab class in middle school. I did take labs in high school.

There are ways to get lab experience when homeschooled. Most notably, many homeschooled high schoolers form co-ops to do lab work, or they arrange to take lab classes with college profs.

You can buy dissection kits for home use, slides, microscope, etc. I don't really think it's a big issue for middle school or high school. Online courses are very popular now and my son has taken several of the sciences without lab. I know he would enjoy the lab work, but I don't think his learning in those subjects has suffered without it.

Dissection is easy... in fact biology in general isn't too bad for home labs. Physics can be pricy and sometimes prohibitively so, but frequently they can be adapted (try www.topscience.org for some good home-friendly labs). The hardest ones to cover are the chemistry labs. Not just price and safety, but disposal of chemicals. That's quite a trick... Actually it can be a serious issue with public schools too, but presumably they have a disposal policy or a hazardous waste contractor...

If you just wanted "labs" and nevermind which ones, I'd go with biology. But for chemistry you might have a harder time. We're currently arranging something with a grad student at the local univ. to do some labs at the college as a group, and one of our moms is also arranging for a homeschool AP class to partner up with one of the local private schools after hours, to do their labs at the school with their teacher (paid of course). It's not the easiest thing in the world, but depending on what's around, you might find something good.

We had a series of geology hikes that beat out any in-school or in-home lab ever a couple years ago, led by a public school geology teacher and covering three counties over several weekends... We paid him rather well for that... actually I hate to even add up how much it cost! but it was worth every penny.

There is a middle school near us that has labs for Physical Science, but mostly, I am looking forward to high school science and worrying about that. Thank you for the replies - I can see that I can't do this all on my own and I will look for a local homeschooling group. There is a university nearby and I hope we can partner up with them for the labs.

It's hard to get the labs for a young child. I've been trying to find someone to teach science to DS8 in a real lab, but all the teachers have balked so far citing insurance reasons. However, there are a lot of resources for courses.

Open courseware is a great option. You can find a list of schools offering courses by going to wikipedia. Schools include MIT, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Tufts (all schools, including med. and vet schools), Utah, and more.

Of interest to those of you looking for credit, you might want to check out http://ocw.uci.edu/courses/highschool/courses.aspx (and I believe they have virtual labs - not the same thing, but still...).

Also, http://web.austin.utexas.edu/wlh/browse.cfm

DS is intersted in chemistry and there's good supplemental stuff here: http://cengagesites.com/newtexts/techcentral.cfm?cluster_id=1477&section=1&#head_1 and here http://owl.thomsonlearning.com/owl-c/register/owlmgr.cgi?Mode=4&BookGroupID=6QuickPrep The latter are general chemistry and organic chemistry reviews. We've looked at the gen. chem. prep, which is intended to ensure that the enrolled students all have the minimum chemistry background.

We've watched some of the Berkeley lectures here: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2008-D-11003&semesterid=2008-D They're 50 minute classes, but probably 20-30 minutes are announcements.

Oxford also has open courseware and virtual labs. You can find it by going from here: http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/vrchemistry/webcast/cartwright.htm

http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/it/ - (we've just been looking at chemistry, but you get the idea that if you search for open courseware, you can find full curriculum, sometimes with tests and quizzes online for practice and/or lecture notes.)

As for regular curriculum, we haven't used it but I looked at www.k12.com. Here's the yahoo group for k12 gifted: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/K12Gifted/?yguid=354504176

We're not using K12, but I was tempted.