Freedom Homeschooling

Affordable High School Electives

by Freedom Homeschooling | Jul 4, 2022 | curriculum, general homeschooling | 0 comments

High school electives give students a chance to explore their interests, learn life skills, and prepare for future careers, all while earning credit for their transcript. Electives are as valuable to a well-rounded education as core subjects like math and literature. However, elective courses can put a strain on a homeschool family’s education budget. Since these courses are more specialized, they often come at a higher cost. Fortunately, there are some affordable options available. Here are a few curriculum companies that offer a wide variety of reasonably priced electives:

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7 Sisters Homeschool

7 Sisters Homeschool offers several high school electives to choose from. Their courses are presented in PDF textbook format, which helps keep the cost low. To save printing costs, your student can view the PDF on a computer or other device. Most of the courses cost $30 or $35. However, Speech I and the Career Bundle are priced even less. You can reuse these PDF texts for other students in your family if they decide to pursue the same electives, allowing you to save even more. All of 7 Sister’s courses are taught from a Christian perspective. These are the electives they offer:

Skillshare

Skillshare is an online learning platform that offers thousands of video-based classes. Skillshare has courses in art, crafts, graphic design, photography, film, business, writing, music, web development, entrepreneurship, culinary, sewing, and much more. Experts and industry leaders teach the classes. Students can take an unlimited number of self-paced courses and watch the videos anytime.

Power Homeschool

Power Homeschool offers an extensive selection of affordable, secular homeschool electives. All of their courses are taught online through prerecorded video lectures. A quiz or activity follows each video lesson. You may enroll your student in up to seven courses for $25 per month. These seven courses can include any of Power Homeschool’s core classes (math, science, history, language arts) or electives. These are self-paced courses, and your student can start at any point. There is no commitment, so you can also cancel at any time. These are their elective offerings:

Lifepac

Lifepac is a reasonably priced workbook-style curriculum, which is taught from a Christian perspective. Lifepac’s electives vary in price from $50 to $100, depending on the course and where you purchase them. Besides purchasing the courses directly from Lifepac, you can also buy them from other retailers like Rainbow Resource Center and Christian Book. So, shop around to find the best price. These are the electives Lifepac offers:

Christian Light Education

Christian Light Education (CLE) provides a wide variety of electives courses. Most of these courses use textbooks or a combination of textbook and workbook. Others are workbooks only. The prices vary widely by course. For example, the one-semester Computer Basics elective only costs $22, while all of the Accounting course’s components add up to almost $350. However, most of the courses are in the $50 to $200 range. That is more than the other options included in this post but still reasonable, considering some of these electives aren’t offered by many homeschool publishers. CLE’s more expensive courses all include a traditional textbook. To reduce the cost of these courses, you could purchase the textbook used and then sell the book when your student finishes it. Here’s what CLE has to offer:

Where do you find electives for your high schooler? Comment below.

Affordable Electives for High School