HS for High School in Texas

[Jonesfam3]

I need some suggestions on some good curriculum for high school grades. My sister is 16 and will be HS soon. My parents have never HS before and do not know where to start. The curriculum needs to be fairly easy to learn. My sister is not in public school anymore because she was doing so poorly.

[Theodore]

Is she visual, auditory, or kinesthetic-tactile (learning through doing things with her hands)? Where is she at in each subject?

[Jonesfam3]

Thank you so much for your reply. I hope you can help me out. She is currently getting tutoring at Sylvan and they have tested her using the California Achievement Test. Reading she is at a 5th grade level, vocabulary she is at a 7th grade level and Algebra she needs to start completely over. I am not sure if these make sense or not. Pretty much she is suppose to be a 10th grader but she is at a 7th-8th grade level. They said she was a tactile and auditory learner. Visual was last.

[Theodore]

Hmm. Reading and vocabulary will pick up on its own - she just needs to do a lot of reading. Find her some good book series to go through, such as Chronicles of Narnia, and move on from there. Ideally, she should be reading at least a couple books a week. If you want to speed things up, she can read a couple pages of her current book out loud every day while you correct, but the emphasis should be that reading is fun, not work. In the long run, a more casual approach is probably best. Just keep her supplied with interesting books.

The algebra will be a bit more difficult, given that she's not visual. She needs the concepts explained out loud, and if possible, illustrated with objects, but the former method is limited and the latter is difficult for some concepts. You may have to just stick with the tried and true "practice, practice, practice". I'd recommend maybe a math DVD series (Standard Deviants?) and Saxon, the former for audio / illustration of concepts and the latter for the practice part. Math will probably never be fun, but there's no reason why she can't at least get through Alg. II or pre-Calc.

If she's still weak on basic things like her multiplication and division tables, it may also help to play games involving math, such as Yahtzee or Muggins, or have her do math drills in something fun like Barnum Quartermile. These are all quite addictive ways to learn math.

[Mark]