Selecting homeschool high school electives can be stressful. When you add the idea of how many classes, which ones, and how you are going to complete those, it can become even more stressful.
If you haven’t read the first post with suggestions for typical electives such as physical education, art, language, and music, you will want to read Homeschool High School Electives Options Part One.
There is a large variety of topic areas and ways in which to study these additional subjects available to homeschoolers. Textbooks and online classes are available, but hands-on opportunities are widely available as well.
Online Homeschool Electives Options
Here are some online options to look into for electives for your high schooler –
- Khan Academy – Has free Life Skill courses, finance, and economics classes to choose from.
- The Great Courses – Has reasonably priced courses in a variety of formats on DVD, download or streamed in a number of ways with a long list to choose from. They have sales quite frequently.
- Coursera – Here is a list of the free options considered Electives at Coursera.
- Edx – Here are free courses with an extensive list of subject areas from which to choose.
- There is a long list of online homeschools you can find that offer elective type classes for a charge. You will find them if you do a search for “online homeschool elective courses”.
- YouTube is your friend.
One of the elective classes my son took in high school consisted of a series of food preparation and cooking video lessons I found on YouTube. He took them in order starting with Knife Skills, Different Food Preparation Techniques (boiling, parboiling, roasting, sauteeing, steaming etc) to different kinds of food he found appetizing.
It also included a nutrition component with food groups and ingredient labels and fats, proteins, carbohydrates. He was also responsible for making grocery lists of ingredients needed for recipes and cooking dinner for the family a few times per week. A win for me too!
It was very useful and practical and cost effective. He now shops and cooks for himself at his apartment at school.
Classroom Options for Homeschool High School Electives
Another option is to take non-credit classes in the evenings at the local public community college or adult evening non-credit classes at different high school locations in your local public school system.
These are non-credit classes because they are not part of the regular curriculum offered in these schools, but that also means they are cheaper for you. They can count as credit for your student on your high school transcript.
A look through our local public school system reveals adult evening classes taught at different high school locations for nominal fees with classes lasting a few weeks to three months depending on the class, usually once per week.
Some examples of these classes are photography, cooking, painting, and calligraphy.
At our local community college, non-credit evening classes include many languages with different levels of abilities and interests from Italian to Arabic to Russian and Korean to Chinese, Spanish, and French.
There are also Public Speaking, Jewelry Design and Photography, Sewing and Interior Design, and Cooking and Cake Decorating classes.
I encourage you to do an internet search or call up your local school system or community college and ask them how you can view the catalog of courses they have available.
Hands-on and Experiential Homeschool High School Electives Options
Along with the online courses my son took, he and my older son took advantage of local programs for hands-on experiences that we applied toward their electives.
Some of these experiences were shorter than others, so they were combined with online classes to add up to the required number of hours to be able to count it as a 1/2 credit or semester long elective class.
Other experiences took a great deal of time and added up to the required number of hours to be able to assign it 1/2 credit on the transcript all on its own.
Boy Scout Merit Badge Booklets and Worksheets
There are number of merit badge booklet titles with worksheets you can print off and fill out to use as a foundation for an elective course. The merit badge booklet can be found at a local or online scout store or the library and serves as the meat or information component.
There are printable worksheets available for each merit badge booklet where your student can enter answers to key questions about the topic of study and document activities completed in conjunction with the research component of the subject. Here is the website to print out these worksheets – Merit Badge Worksheets.
Depending on what other materials you are using for specific electives, you might want to include some or all of the material in these booklets. You might want to combine some of these booklets for one elective as well. We have a done a combination of things between online classes and these booklets.
Topic areas include everything from American Business, entrepreneurship, Game Design, Programming, Gardening, Landscape Architecture and Plumbing to Animation, Moviemaking, and Auto Maintenance.
Explorer’s Program
I mentioned in another post that the Explorer’s Program offers extensive opportunities for electives and future career exploration and extra curricular activities. You can use this program as part of an elective or as the elective itself if enough time is put into it.
Check with your local area online for searches of the Explorer’s Program or your local Boy Scout office (the Explorer’s program is an outreach of Boy Scouts). I had another son involved in the Police Explorer’s program and loved it. He was considering a career in law, military or government having to do with criminology or public safety.
He enjoyed what he learned in the program but also the hands-on opportunities such as police car ride-alongs, assisting in training at the local police academy (he role played as a criminal or a citizen as needed), worked at teen alcohol and drug awareness programs, and participated in a regional competition using skills he had learned against other Explorer Posts.
The Explorer’s Program website has an Activity Library with activity ideas and printable Career Opportunity Worksheets centered around topics related to career exploration areas. You can find a button for the Activity Library at the Explorer’s Program Home Page with a list of Career Fields and subtopics to explore on the left side of the page. Within each Career Field will subtopics with activity ideas and a Career Opportunity Worksheet.
Here is a list of available fields to explore:
- Arts and Humanities – everything from photography and visual arts to music to animation
- Aviation – anything to do with aviation
- Business – anything to do with conducting business
- Communications – everything to do with media, journalism, web design, broadcasting
- Engineering and Technology – all kinds of engineering
- Fire and EMS – fire, EMS, search and rescue
- Healthcare – medical and veterinary care
- Law and Government – still working on this page
- Law Enforcement – police enforcement and criminology
- Science – includes engineering and other science areas
- Skilled Trades – these are your vocational areas of study
- Social Services – Mostly education with a focus on instruction and learning styles
- A Separate Life Skills Section with its own subtopic areas
If you missed the first post about other Elective options, read Homeschool High School Electives Options Part One.
If you wish to keep track of time and other information dedicated to completing any activity based electives, I have a High School Activity Record Worksheet you can download.
Also, to read the rest of the Homeschool High School series of posts, click here to start at the beginning of our series with Why Homeschool High School? Each post is connected with a link to the next post in the series at the bottom of the post.
And as always, if you find these tips and ideas helpful, please share with the buttons below or leave any questions, comments, or resources you have found to assist you in studying electives!
