Super loose outlines for law and marine biology that spans as long as you want for homeschoolies

• home education

This is primarily for my boys (14yo is currently interested in law, 10yo in marine biology). We use Khan Academy because that was what was freely available when I started looking into homeschooling resources.

First and foremost

Everything requires basic literacy and numeracy. So get through the high school maths on KA (start at your grade level, if it’s too hard, play down, if it’s too easy, play up, if you’re in high school/over grade 8 and it’s too hard, keep dropping til you can do it, then work back up).

Literacy is reasonably easy to cover by simply reading, writing, actively paying attention to things that you’re watching and discussing/debating things with other people (online is fine but try to get some face time as well). Just like your diet, make sure you’re consuming a wide range of media (more quality, less crap) and check your sources for non-fiction.

And obviously feel free to do any of the other KA courses that look interesting. I recommend world history.

Law

Practise research, writing and debating skills. You’ll need them. Hate writing? Perhaps this is the wrong career choice then. Typing counts as writing though actual writing will be helpful. The grammar course is probably a good idea.

When you’re 18, apply to one of the unis using one of the “uni-enabling” courses and use that to get in. Murdoch has “pre-law” courses that may be worth checking out.

Alternately do one of the degrees from Open Universities Australia as if you’re feeling particularly motivated, it seems you can do them from 16.

There’s a law museum in Perth that we can go check out, and we’ll also see if there’s any public court cases we can sit in on to watch lawyers at work. And there is also the library for books, and I have been informed that there are apparently some decent Australian law dramas.

Marine Biology

Optionally in addition to doing high school maths, do high school biology. This is optional because while I needed high school biology to get into the BSc of the same name at uni, it didn’t seem necessary given what they were teaching in the first year units. Otherwise just hit these ones after finishing the high school maths course. I’m doing a tree where further indented dot points need to be done after the one above them. Dot points on the same level can be done at the same time (finishing the prerequisite point is strongly recommended).

• biology
• chemistry
  • organic chemistry
• statistics and probability
• physics (optional, helpful)
• algebra (optional, useful especially if you decide to do physics)
  • algebra 2 (optional, if the first one was fun)

You’ll probably have to wait til 18 and do a uni-enabling course to get in, but that’s probably the best option for 10yo anyway.

We’ve done AQWA and may go again, they have done marine biology excursions previously but we missed them so will be keeping an eye out to see if they come up again. The weather has been fining up so I’m going to try to do more beach and river trips (though 10yo is much less interested in rivers than he is in the ocean). And there is also the library and there’ll be in theme documentaries on Netflix and Youtube.

I know it looks pretty short on paper…er…screen but so does a 4 year uni course. The courses in the links are kind of big. Just take it at a comfortable pace as burning out is bad.

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License