11th Grade
A full junior year, American literature, Algebra II, Physics and U.S. History, with Psychology and Creative Writing alongside. Junior year is the one admissions officers read most closely, and the transcript builds itself as your child works.
Start 30 days freeFive days from the opening week of 11th grade, taken from the lessons themselves rather than written to sound good.
The week opens with a question aimed at now, not history: why do old religious arguments still show up in speeches today? That's the frame before your child ever reads a line of Winthrop's actual sermon.
Algebra II opens with two questions on the board it doesn't answer yet, how three different equations can describe one parabola, and what's gained by inventing a number whose square is negative, before a single problem gets solved.
Physics opens by drawing a hard line: this unit describes motion mathematically without asking why, and previews the three quantities, position, velocity, acceleration, that the rest of the unit is built from.
U.S. history opens with a diagnostic on federalism and citizenship left over from 8th grade, a five-minute framing and no new content yet, because what today finds determines exactly what tomorrow covers.
Psychology opens by asking what actually counts as a scientific study, a diagnostic day with no new content, before the unit gets to why so many famous psychology results haven't held up when other labs tried to repeat them.
This is an 11th-grade year of American literature and writing that runs from the Puritans to today, and it treats writers as people making arguments, not just telling stories. Your child will read Winthrop and Edwards, then Jefferson and Paine, then Douglass and Emerson, then a 20th-century novel or play, then contemporary poetry, and finally spend six weeks building their own research paper out of texts read across the whole year. The through-line is rhetoric, how writers try to move an audience, not just what they say, and by June your child should be able to pick apart an argument they've never seen before and build one of their own with real sources behind it. It's reading-heavy and writing-heavy, and it's meant to get them ready for AP-level or college-level work next year.
This is the algebra course that takes "graphing parabolas" from Algebra I and blows it out into six more families of functions, polynomials, rational expressions, radicals, exponentials/logs, trig, and finally sequences and statistics. The thread running through all eight units is one question asked over and over in new clothes: given an equation, what does the graph look like, and given a graph or a real situation, what's the equation? Your child will get a lot of practice moving between an equation, a graph, a table, and a word problem, for each of these families, and by the end they should be able to look at data or a situation and say "that's exponential, not linear" or "that needs a hole, not an asymptote" and explain why. It's a full year of building one increasingly large toolbox rather than eight unrelated topics.
This is a year of physics that uses algebra, not calculus, to answer a chain of questions: how do things move, why do they move that way, what happens when they crash, where does the energy go, how does energy travel as a wave, what is light, and how does electricity actually work. Along the way your child builds real things, rolling carts, pendulums, circuits from batteries and bulbs, a mousetrap-powered car, and uses those to test predictions they make on paper first. The point isn't memorizing formulas; it's being able to look at a situation nobody has shown them before and reason out what should happen, then check it against what actually does. By June they should be able to explain why a car crumples in a crash, why a circuit with two bulbs behaves differently in series versus parallel, and defend a design choice under pointed follow-up questions.
This is the second half of the American history story, from 1877, right after Reconstruction ends, up through today. Your child will learn how a country of robber barons and sweatshops turned into the country we live in now, and why the same fights (how much power should the federal government have? who gets counted as a full citizen? should America get involved overseas?) keep coming back in new clothes every twenty or thirty years. They'll read real documents, strike testimony, propaganda posters, Supreme Court opinions, and practice building an argument from evidence instead of just reciting what happened. By the end they should be able to look at a news story today and say "oh, this is the same argument we had in 1895" or "this is a new kind of problem."
This is a year-long walk through psychology as a real science, not a personality-quiz version of it. Your child learns how psychologists actually test claims about the mind, then uses that same skeptical toolkit on the brain, the senses, learning, memory, growing up, and mental health. By the end they should be able to read a headline like "Study Finds Coffee Rewires Your Brain" and tell you exactly what it does and doesn't prove. It's secular, evidence-based, and skips human sexuality content entirely, this is about how psychologists know things, not a health class.
This is a semester of writing workshop for 11th grade, minus the workshop full of other kids. Your child will write real poems, a real short story, a real personal essay, and then go back and revise all three into a final portfolio. Instead of grading by gut feeling ("this sounds nice"), they learn to name a specific problem in their own draft, point to the exact line causing it, and decide a fix, the same three-step move, reused across every genre. Your job is mostly to read their drafts and ask a short list of specific questions, not to judge whether the writing is "good."
Every course above is published in full, every unit, every module, every objective, and you can try a real lesson without an account.
No, and the transcript is the reason people worry. Letters & Devotion derives grades from mastery rather than parent judgment and logs hours per course automatically, so a junior year done at home produces the documentation an admissions office expects.
No. It is algebra-based throughout and assumes Algebra I and Geometry, with Algebra II running alongside it. That is the standard high school physics sequence and it is what colleges expect on a transcript.