My child is interested in something that isn’t covered by a traditional curriculum, what do I do now?
It’s great when students start finding things that peak their interest, but it can be frustrating as well. There are several things you can do:
- If your student is over 16 check the local colleges and community colleges and see if there is an introductory course on that subject that they can take.
OR
- Go to Amazon.com and type in the subject and see what comes up.
For example my oldest daughter was interested in food science and I was able to find several books which were written for introductory college courses. I then went to a used textbook site (Alibris was the one I used), and looked up the titles.
If you can find a previous edition of the book you can often get it for a small fraction of the full price of a new edition (colleges only use the latest edition of a textbook). There were obviously no tests so I had my daughter write summaries for each chapter she read for her grade.
She was able to get a lab credit by doing some experiments from this book, as well as a few others I discovered. She even did a presentation on it for the Rhetoric Team’s Original Oratory competition.
Be creative. That’s the great part about home schooling.