Here are the lesson plan I’ve been putting together for next year, for one of my high school students. While I’ve called this ‘Year 9 Lesson Plans’, they are suitable for any high school student of average ability, and could even suit a more advanced Year 8 student.

To create the spreadsheets, I’ve used a programme that’s been around for a while called Homeschool Tracker. This is something I tried out years ago, but didn’t spend enough time learning how it worked so I didn’t stick with it for long. (As I recall, I’d just had baby #7 at the time …. and then we moved house …..and then #8 came along….)

The plans are set out in the form of daily goals. When I set out a curriculum in the past, I tried to organise the entire year by weeks, only to find everything disrupted as soon as a child was sick or we had some other interruption.

In recent years, I’ve worked more spontaneously, but that has its own drawbacks. So this time, I have split up the texts according to days so that if there is a break, the student can simply pick up where he or she left off.

We are in Australia, so our school year is 40 weeks/200 days. The lesson plans are for roughly 180 – 200 days: it’s simple to add another writing assignment or schedule some relevant videos if some time needs to be made up.

Year 9 Overview

• Religion = 3 lessons/week
  • Catechism x 2
  • Mass video x 1
• Math = 5 lessons/week
• English = 5 lessons/week
  • Language Arts course x 5
• History = 3 lessons/week
• Science = 2 lessons/week
• Latin = 3 lessons/week

Year 9 Religion

As you could imagine, religion is the most important subject in our home. Our year 9 curriculum includes 2 lessons per week of catechism and a video course on the Mass. Students are also expected to read the Bible for 15 minutes daily.

Catechism

For Catechism, we will be using Our Goal and our Guides, which is a traditional Catholic text from the Our Quest for Happiness series by Lepanto Press. To cover it in one year, I’ve suggested taking two lessons to complete each of the first four sections, then four lessons for each of the following sections. At 80 lessons in total, it should take around 40 weeks to complete.

Video Course on Holy Mass

Year 9 Math

I haven’t included lesson plans for math. This is one subject that my children know they have to simply work through steadily. We use Saxon Math and they often move to the next text in the series partway through the year.

Year 9 English

Our suggested English course uses Learning Language Arts Through Literature (Gold level = British Literature). We have the eBook version.

Year 9 History

Our course includes 40 lessons of Australian history which should take around 13 weeks. The text is Australian History 1901-1945 from the Australian Homeschooling Series, written by Valerie Marett. This is followed by Christ and the Americas – a Tan book written by Anne W. Carroll. I’ve split this one into 78 lessons, which at 3 lessons per week, should take around 26 weeks. We’ll add some mapwork from Heritage History.

Year 9 Science

We worked through the first half of Life Science this year, so for Year 9 science in 2025, we’ll complete the book. Our particular text is the Catholic Heritage Edition and it includes quite a few experiments, not all of which we will be doing. The text is split into 46 lessons, which will take around 23 weeks.

After that will come Chemistry. Our text is Exploring the World of Chemistry by John Hudson Tiner and it comes from Master Books. This book doesn’t contain a lot of written work: we may need to supplement it with another resource. (Memoria Press offers a supplement for this text.) At one Chapter per week, this should take around 16 weeks to complete.

Year 9 Latin

The classic text by Fr. Henle makes a good addition to our Year 9 curriculum. The first half of the book is scheduled: this will take around 38 weeks, but it will depend how students are going – it might be necessary to slow things down. Students with some knowledge of Latin might be able to progress more quickly through the first few chapters.

IMAGE CREDIT: Esther and Mordecai by Arent de Gelder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons