How Will I Teach. . . Homeschool High School Biology?

Disclosure: I get commissions for purchases made through affiliate links in this post.

Today I’m joining a group of other homeschool high school bloggers in answering the question: “How Will I Teach. . . ?” We are hoping to give you some confidence and ideas on how to teach some of the more difficult subjects in homeschool high school.

I’m answering How will I teach homeschool high school biology? It was the one that stumped me the most this year and caused me the most stress until I got it answered.

There were 2 possibilities for us. Doing the dissections here at home wasn’t one of them. 🙂 The first idea was to join a local class and have an experienced teacher teach my boys. We were going to do this, but then the teacher wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to teach it. So, I started looking for another solution and found out about College Prep Science.

What is College Prep Science?

College Prep Science does a number of different things: online classes, trips, retreats, and intensives. I signed my boys up for a 2-day biology intensive, which they did last month. It was only about half an hour from us and had 15 kids in the class. The boys loved the teacher, who was very experienced in biology. They learned a TON in those two days and were able to complete all the labs they needed for the full year of biology! When they came home, they worked on writing all the lab reports for a couple of weeks. Now, I will just have them work through the textbook (we used Apologia’s Biology Textbook and Notebooking Journal) and take the tests to complete the course.

Here are the labs and activities they did:

• Autopsy style dissections (similar to human):
  -Pregnant sheep uterus (usually done in college-level anatomy labs)
  -fetal pig dissection
  -cow eye
• Diffusion and osmosis
• Acid / base assessments will be performed
• Metric applications to Biology and medicine
• DNA extraction and isolation
• Enzymes
• Blood typing Rh Factor determination
• Hematocrit level
• Comparison of healthy and smoker’s lungs to investigate anatomical and physiological differences
• Students will eat ice cream, candy, etc. for breakfast to produce a “glucose load challenge” to help them understand the pancreas, glucose absorption, diabetes, normal and abnormal glucose response curves, and the production and function of insulin (usually done in college-level anatomy labs)
• Microscope use, preparation of a wet mount, and simple staining
• Phenylthiocarbamide to study genetics
• Pulmonary (lung) function tests on each student (usually done in college-level anatomy labs)
• Preparation of college-quality lab reports
• Graphing

I asked my sons to take pictures while they were in class. Here is what they brought me.

The Cow’s Eye:

Fetal Pig:

I was very pleased with the high quality of work they did there. All materials were provided in the cost. The class was a bit expensive, but if you get on the College Prep Science email mailing list, you’ll receive notifications of sales.

Here are the other posts in my Homeschooling High School Series:

• The How-To Book for homeschool high school
• Choosing the Coursework–What classes should my student take in order to graduate from homeschool high school?
• Using a 4-Year High School Planner for homeschool high school
• Our Curriculum Choices for homeschool high school
• The Top Tip for Planning Homeschool High School
• Homeschool High School Public Speaking, Drama, Speech, and Debate
• Why We Changed our History Curriculum for Homeschool High School to Tapestry of Grace
• Homeschool High School: Using Socratic Discussion for Literature Studies

(Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.)