Credits Earned Summary - 9th Grade

For all my worrying and concern that Amber might move slowly through high school, she made fantastic progress her first official year of high school. (She does have banked credits from 8th grade, should the need arise, but we are trying to not use them.)

Basically all of Amber's 1000+ recorded school hours from her freshman year were credit worthy, meaning they were attributed to a needed credit. We know that each remaining year of school we will need to be more and more selective about courses to fit the hours into needed credits. Co-op classes will be especially difficult to manage in later years since the topics offered vary each semester. Yet this year everything was new and needed.

Fairly early on in the school year I let go of my need for Amber to earn all of her credits in a neat, tidy linear method. As you will see below, some subjects, like history, have partial credits earned in a variety of topics. A good portion of Amber's history lessons focused on ancient history because of a co-op class and a review product, even though that was not her official topic for the year. Other lessons were part of our regular curriculum which accounts for the American History and Western Civilization partial credits. Over the course of the year she did complete the hours for a full credit, yet only has partial credit for each needed history course. We will piece together the complete credits for each course eventually.

Amber also has some hours attributed to credits that are not worth listing at this point since the hours do not even total a fourth of a credit. We will just continue to plunk away at those topics until she has at least a 1/2 credit. One such course is Formal Logic for which she has earned exactly 10 hours thus far.

9th Grade Earned Credits (8 1/4 total):

Fine Arts - 3/4 credit - Through drama, art, and music. This did not include practice times, only actual instructional, project or performance time.

Practical Arts - 1/2 credit - A surprise computer skills course as a review item made this possible along with regular sewing on our weighted blankets service project.

English 1 - 1 credit - Through level appropriate literature, grammar, vocabulary, and writing.

Mathematics - 1 credit - Algebra 2.

History:

• Ancient World History - 1/2 credit
• U.S. History - 1/4 credit
• Western Civilization - 1/4 credit

Foreign Language:

• German - 1/8 credit - We were slow to get started this year. However this is one where she has banked credits from previous years. She started German in 7th grade.
• Greek - 1/4 credit - She didn't start this until late February, so I'm really impressed with the time she put forward toward it.
• Latin - 1/8 credit - Unexpectedly Amber decided to refresh her Latin and swapped it out the latter part of this year for German. Again, she showed dedication to her language lessons in completing this much of a credit in five weeks. 

Science: 

(Amber has technically completed all the required laboratory science courses. The rest do not need to be lab classes)

• Botany - 1/2 credit - First semester science at home. A laboratory course.
• Forensic Science - 1/2 credit - Another laboratory science course that I taught through our co-op at Amber's request. 

Physical Education - 1/2 credit - Mostly achieved through weekly physical therapy where she not only exercises but learns how to keep her body with her very specific needs healthy. I did not even count her time completing her at-home program.

Electives:

• Health - 1/2 credit - Completed through a year-long co-op class that I taught.
• Speech - 1/2 credit - Another co-op course I taught.
• Religion - 1/2 credit - Two different co-op courses, taught by our pastor. Included homework and tests.
• Creative Writing - 1/4 credit - Through two different projects so far. She's working more on it this summer too.
• Yearbook - 1/4 credit - Through our homeschool group, but this year it was done outside of co-op class time.