Melissa’s Story:
How Journey Homeschool Academy Helped Melissa Andersen Teach a Rigorous High School Science Class — Without the Lesson Planning
MEET
Melissa Anderson
Oregon, USA
Melissa Andersen is a busy mom of four children, aged 16 and 14, plus 10-year-old twins. She has spent the past ten years balancing part-time work with homeschooling, simultaneously teaching three different curricula. But as her kids get older, they need new academic challenges — ideally ones they can tackle without her micro-management.
What Journey Homeschool Academy Offers:
- Rigorous, biblically faithful curriculum
- Interactive labs and multi-sensory lessons that keep students engaged
What Melissa Got:
- Completely planned lessons that didn’t require micro-managing
- An engaging curriculum her teen loved
- A break from grading
The Challenge
Finding a high school science curriculum that engages a teen
As Melissa’s oldest daughter, Emma, reached high school, Melissa found herself struggling to teach more advanced subjects, particularly the sciences, while also meeting her younger children’s needs.
Emma took freshman science through a textbook-based course, with a weekly co-op class. The class was “fine,” but Emma didn’t find the curriculum particularly engaging.
As sophomore year approached, Melissa wanted to find a science curriculum that was rigorous and faith-based — and it needed to be interesting enough that Emma would take the lead. She wanted to do more than park her daughter in front of a screen.
The stakes are really high, and I don’t want to mess up. Last year’s science class used a textbook model, with a weekly co-op class. It was just fine, but it wasn’t phenomenal.
The Solution
A hands-on approach with Experience Biology
Melissa heard about Journey Homeschool Academy’s approach to making science education more engaging through a multi-sensory approach that makes science more relevant to students’ lives.
The Journey curricula incorporate videos, tutorials, writing, graphics, lab work, and readings. All the pieces are designed to work together. That means, for example, that students watch a step-by-step video while performing the corresponding lab and writing a lab report.
Melissa enrolled Emma in Journey’s Experience Biology: Upper Level course. The curriculum features two weekly online lectures (with detailed outlines for note-taking), quizzes, quarterly exams, and 26 labs, including dissections.
But best of all, Journey Homeschool Academy handles all the lesson planning and most of the grading. That left Melissa free to focus on other priorities while Emma mostly managed her own learning.
I loved that I did not have to do any lesson planning. I could buy all the materials and know we’re ready to go. As each week went by, she could just get started without me having to lay everything out. It sounds terrible, but I didn’t have to do anything!
The Result
Lessons that intrigue — and stick
Emma loved her Experience Biology coursework, constantly telling her mom how “cool” the lessons were. The instructors were readily available for questions or encouragement, and the multisensory approach reinforced the material so Emma retained the material months later. Research questions required her to search for answers beyond the curriculum, connecting the concepts to the rest of Emma’s world. And she enjoyed the hands-on labs, especially the 11 dissections.
All the while, the lessons integrated scientific principles with biblical foundations, which was important to Melissa.
Compared to her textbook-based chemistry class, Emma had to work a lot harder — but both mother and daughter saw the value in learning how to prepare for an exam. The pace kept her challenged, but never overwhelmed, and she now has a full-credit lab science course on her transcript.
Emma now hopes to pursue a nursing career, so Melissa is thrilled that Journey Homeschool Academy made science so accessible and engaging. And as her other children need science education, she has a resource she can trust.
She really loved it. The videos were visually very engaging, and she kept telling us, ‘This is really cool.’ And I loved that it integrated scientific principles and discoveries while also showing the biblical correlations. It’s helped her get a deeper scientific footing in her faith.
Help your student get excited about science with an engaging, faith-based curriculum you can trust.
Take the lesson planning off your plate. Journey Homeschool Academy’s multi-sensory approach makes science interesting and relevant to your student’s life.
“ I can’t express enough how Journey Homeschool Academy simplified teaching homeschool high school science. I don’t know that it could get any easier than this setup. It was great for me, and it was great for my daughter.”
Melissa Andersen
Homeschool Mom
