Electives can cover such a wide range of topics in homeschool. And electives are often where our students find the most joy – plus develop unique talents and interests. Especially in high school, electives become an important part of the homeschool curriculum. Here you will find a collection of homeschool reviews for electives.
Choosing electives for the high school years is an essential part of the homeschooling process. High School Electives offer students a chance to explore new things, as well as things they think may interest them, outside the box of their main courses.
This is an important step towards your child learning valuable life skills as well as exploring possible career interests.
To help you and your child explore possible elective options, and to help you create a plan for what electives they will complete for high school, our Managing Editor, Heidi Ciravola, created this Plan Your High School Electives FREE Printable Pack.
Now, we offer you an abundance of homeschool curriculum reviews for electives below!
Our Homeschool Curriculum Reviews for Electives
Below are some of the many electives reviews our Curriculum Choice authors have written. You’ll be amazed at all the resources available to you and your homeschoolers!
Homeschool Reviews for Electives from our Authors
The Curriculum Choice authors have active blogs where they share all kinds of homeschooling advice and experiences. Below, you’ll find links to helpful posts on electives from a few of our veteran homeschooling authors.
Heidi @ Starts At Eight
High School Electives is something I focused a lot of time on throughout my years of homeschooling. I really wanted my kids to expand their knowledge base, and explore things they hadn’t had the chance to. We included things like ASL, photography, Latin Roots, Psychology, and Equine Science in our homeschool elective plans.
I even created an entire high school electives course for Home Economics & Shop Class. Teaching Life Skills as a high school elective is a wonderful way to give your kids a solid base in these important skills AND giving them high school credit to do so!
Megan @ Education Possible
Homeschool High School with Online Psychology Course – In addition to strong course content, this program offers students an opportunity to work independently, become familiar with the format of online courses, and prepare to take the Psychology CLEP course.
How to Help Your Teen Study Smarter: Sponge Learning Skills – Learning how to study is a skill high school students must learn. The Sponge program explains how memory works and then teaches important skills including textbook reading strategies, time management, note taking, and text taking prep.
How I Teach Keyboarding to My Child With Dysgraphia – The unique finger guides available with the Keyboard Classroom have made all of the difference in teaching my child proper keyboard techniques!
Stephanie Harrington
Apologia Biblical Worldview: What We Believe Series– As a mother of two adults, I know just how hard a task we face in raising our children for Christ. It’s a mission at the very crux of my homeschool heart; a sublime task we face as parents who really want to pass along our faith to our children. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a program or curriculum we could follow as we instruct our children to be in the world but not of the world? The What We Believe Biblical Worldview Series from Apologia is such a program.
Homeschool in The Woods: Artists Hands On Activity Pak-“Hands-on” is the perfect description for this product because there really isn’t much reading and text except for what is presented when doing the activities. That makes it ideal for the tactile learner. You can first do the learning projects and activities of your choice and then later use them to build the lapbook. Lots of fun!
Heather @ Blog, She Wrote
Homeschool Foreign Language Instruction with iTalki– Learn a foreign language from a native speaker. We loved our Arabic lessons with iTalki.
The Ultimate Guide to Teaching Sewing in Your Homeschool– Our daughter is passionate about sewing and fashion design. As she begins high school in 2014-2015, sewing will be one of her electives annually as she builds a portfolio for her future.
Betsy @ BJ’s Homeschool
Our Steps to College – How Electives Help, or High School Electives – “There is so much more to homeschooling to college than just meeting the college admission requirements. Our teens want to explore the world around them, follow their interests, and delve into new subjects, as their hearts lead them. And that’s where the high school electives come in! And they can also help with getting into college.”
Video Making – Our Homemade Elective – “This post tells how we put together a homemade course in video production. It includes how to’s, equipment needed, links to the videos that my daughter made, the fun that we had, and how we went about assigning credit for it.”
Being a Legislator for the Day – Youth and Government – one of our elective courses – “In this elective, teens learn all about state government by acting as legislators, and debating their own mock bills. It is so hands on, that my teen and her friends loved it, while building self esteem and leadership skills along the way.”
Tricia @ Hodgepodge
How to Fit in All the Homeschool Extras – Well, in our house we call them the extras because they are the really fun part of homeschooling. The icing on the homeschool cake. The things we look forward to. But I feel strongly that mixing in a balance of enriching subjects makes for a happy child and a happy mama. A well educated child.
Fine Arts Plans for Art and Music Appreciation – For this mama, using these plans is easy. I just click to open the plans, click to print what we might like to complement our studies, click to print a coloring page for the younger ones.
Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett – a round up of the unit studies reviews here at The Curriculum Choice. “Unit studies encourage the use of imagination, creativity, and analytical thinking. In a typical textbook curriculum, the “facts” are simply memorized and regurgitated, only to be forgotten soon after the test. Unit studies teach children how to find the answers to their questions of how something works and why it is that way. They learn to seek the information that satisfies their need to know. They learn how to learn.” ~ Amanda Bennett
High School: Electives/Volunteer Work – in this weekly wrap up post, I share a peek at how our two high schoolers stay busy with volunteer positions besides the extracurricular drama troupe, piano and online computer courses.
Homeschool Electives and Extracurricular for Multiple Ages – Homeschooling Multiple Ages tip: group your extracurricular activities together on the same day as much as possible. It surely takes some organizing but helps so much to be HOME the majority of the week to homeschool.
Annie Kate @ Tea Time with Annie Kate
Personal finance is an important topic that many adults have not yet mastered. Dave Ramsay has put together a high school curriculum, Foundations in Personal Finance, that can save your teen from many financial mistakes. Besides being informative, this course is also wildly funny.
How to Raise your High School Grades by Half a Point in One Semester is a course my children were sad to finish. It is exceedingly opinionated and therefore funny, but it also presents many valuable concepts and generates a lot of discussion.
Traditionally-schooled teens have guidance counsellors. Homeschooled teens can benefit from The Complete Career, College, and High School Guide for Homeschoolers. Its questionnaires helps teens think about their own talents, interests, and personality in relation to their future. Also, each time one of my teens has gone through this guide, I’ve learned something new about them. This new knowledge has helped me understand them and help them structure their high school courses, their hobbies, and their volunteering.
Logic is an important topic in our homeschool. We use resources from The Critical Thinking Company, including the James Madison Critical Thinking Course for high school. The children have also enjoyed The Fallacy Detective so much that they reread it for fun.
Follow TCC’s Electives/Enrichment Board on Pinterest
Here on our Electives Pinterest board you will find tons of reviews for electives!
Review Team Group Posts For Homeschool Electives
Once a month our review team shares an ‘ultimate’ list of reviews and helps on a certain topic. Those they share are both reviews here at The Curriculum Choice and links to their personal websites.
- Homeschool PE, Fitness and Sports
- Foreign Language Curriculum Reviews for Homeschool
- Bible, Character Training and Parenting Resources
- Art in the Homeschool
- Patriotic Resources
- Holiday Fun
Five Days of Homeschool Curriculum Reviews
- Monday – Homeschool Language Arts Curriculum Reviews
- Tuesday – Homeschool Math Curriculum Reviews
- Wednesday – Homeschool History and Geography Curriculum Reviews
- Thursday – Homeschool Science, Technology and Nature Study Reviews
- Friday – This Post
~ Originally published July 2014, Hosted by Tricia Hodges of Hodgepodge
Homeschooling since 2000, Tricia faces a daily dose of chaos with five children. She has seen the fruits of home education with three grads so far! With their You ARE an artist art curriculum she, "Nana" and her family are passionate about growing a love of art. She also shares helpful homeschool habits at Your Best Homeschool and is author of the book, Help! I’m Homeschooling! She and her husband, Steve, are owners of The Curriculum Choice.
Thank you for this week of reviews! I really appreciated today’s post about electives. With elementary kids, we have mainly done art and foreign language. But the oldest is entering middle school and it is time to think about high school … Including electives. Good info to start thinking about.
Thanks for the review! My children are young, so at this point electives are based on their interests. We have lots of time after lunch to incorporate an elective, art, sign language, nature walks to find rocks to collect and study, etc.
We discuss our interests and then plan our electives with them.
What a great resource you have created here! I’m bookmarking it so I can go back and really have time to read everything!
I choose electives based in the interest of my child.
Thanks for all the great info.! We are just at the beginning of figuring out how to navigate through high school!
I would love to know how to choose elective and when to make time for them! My kids LOVE the extras, but I never seem to have time to use them.
I pick electives based on interest of the child and then needs I want to accomplish.
What a wonderful giveaway. I’m having so much fun looking through all the resources in this post!
With really young kids I try to load up on electives since they don’t see them as ‘school’ and stay motivated!
I’m trying to make our art supplies more accessible so it’s easier to do when we have time.
I don’t, but want to! I would love to win this bundle for my daughter.
I would go with my ability to teach or the child interest for electives. For example my oldest loves guitar so he would do this more while his brother is more creative in drawing and Lego building.
We try to have all our major school work and chores done by early afternoon so the children can have the rest of the day to explore whichever electives they like.
My daughter is just starting 9th grade and we will be choosing electives bases on her interests.
Thanks for all the reviews. Very helpful!
Thanks for posting all of these great resources.
So far we have chosen electives based on what my daughters have wanted to learn. We are going to focus more on different drawing techniques this year and starting to learn German.
I have been enjoying all the posts. I like reading the negatives and positives, because what might not work for one person might work for me! :o). To carve out time, you need to change your mind set. Electives aren’t really ” extras”. They are an integral part of a well rounded individual!
It is easy choosing the electives, based on the child’s interests. Working them into the daily school schedule, however, is often the challenge!
This is the first year I’m REALLY honing in on electives and being specific!
I choose electives by seeing what my kids are interested in and then deciding out of those things what we could incorporate into our lessons.
We carve out time on most Fridays for electives. The kids enjoy having the last day of their school week spent doing art, music, or fieldtrips.
I’m still trying to figure out how to choose and make time for electives!
You need the electives because if you don’t they will not want to learn. You have to make it fun for them if you want them to learn.
I let the kids share their interests and then look for courses that go with those interests. Often I have found myself creating a curriculum for their interests.
I try to get our main academic work done in the morning, before lunch, leaving the afternoon free for tackling electives. There are some electives that I choose because I feel they’re important, while others I allow to be more casual, following my sons’ interests.
I mix art with cooking, and listening to Old Time Radio (You would be surprised at some of the electives you can find when you know where to get them), My son does puzzles and we make things for our house and as gifts.
When you make the electives fun the kids enjoy them a lot more.
I ask my son what he is interested in and we decide from there what electives he will take. We chose (together) horseback riding and karate in the past. We tried violin but didn’t get too far in that area.
We do electives based on what the child is interested in and what is offered.
My daughter decides what electives we do. It’s usuall y something art-based 🙂
I choose electives based on what I think my daughter will enjoy and interest her.
We are just getting started with early elementary, so I choose electives that I think will interest them. Finding time to fit them in is the hard part.
We choose electives based on the kids’ interests as well as affordability.
The only way I’ve found to carve out time for electives is to schedule it like an appointment.