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Needing suggestions for a .5 credit in economics


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My ds17 (a senior) just finished .5 economics credit using Thinkwell Economics. Here is a link to it on the Thinkwell site:

 

http://www.thinkwell.com/homeschool/product/economics

 

We actually bought it at a discount from Sonlight. We didn't use the rest of the Sonlight economics program, just the Thinkwell course (which was plenty as I'll explain below.) Here's a link to it on the Sonlight site:

 

http://www.sonlight.com/570-50.html

 

Basically, the course consists of watching the multimedia online lectures (which are VERY good), and doing the practice problems online after each lecture--these are automatically scored. I always had my ds revise his exercises to 100%.

 

Anyway, the course worked out well for us, although it was much more time consuming than I had planned on. In order to get through the entire course in a semester, you basically have to do 3 lectures/exercise sets per day, which takes about 1.5 hours. There's no way to speed it up really--after all, you can't make the lecturer talk faster! :001_smile: So, I was glad we hadn't attempted to add in the extra books that Sonlight has in their program, even though they look good.

 

I'll also note my ds (who has zero interest in economics) really enjoyed the lectures. The lecturer--a Stanford professor who developed the Thinkwell program--is SO good, and very entertaining. Ds was telling me yesterday about one of the examples in a lecture, and said he had had to pause the lecture in the middle because he was laughing so hard. :001_smile:

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I had my daughter read the ABeka text and discuss the questions with me. She also read Penny Candy and another book that I can't remember....if I can find it I will post the title. Then I had her read Atlas Shrugged. She wrote a term paper on Atlas Shrugged and I thought it was a good amount of work for a .5 credit class.

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My ds17 (a senior) just finished .5 economics credit using Thinkwell Economics. Here is a link to it on the Thinkwell site:

 

http://www.thinkwell.com/homeschool/product/economics

 

We actually bought it at a discount from Sonlight. We didn't use the rest of the Sonlight economics program, just the Thinkwell course (which was plenty as I'll explain below.) Here's a link to it on the Sonlight site:

 

http://www.sonlight.com/570-50.html

 

Basically, the course consists of watching the multimedia online lectures (which are VERY good), and doing the practice problems online after each lecture--these are automatically scored. I always had my ds revise his exercises to 100%.

 

Anyway, the course worked out well for us, although it was much more time consuming than I had planned on. In order to get through the entire course in a semester, you basically have to do 3 lectures/exercise sets per day, which takes about 1.5 hours. There's no way to speed it up really--after all, you can't make the lecturer talk faster! :001_smile: So, I was glad we hadn't attempted to add in the extra books that Sonlight has in their program, even though they look good.

 

I'll also note my ds (who has zero interest in economics) really enjoyed the lectures. The lecturer--a Stanford professor who developed the Thinkwell program--is SO good, and very entertaining. Ds was telling me yesterday about one of the examples in a lecture, and said he had had to pause the lecture in the middle because he was laughing so hard. :001_smile:

 

 

Do you think it should be a full credit if the additional Sonlight books were added in?

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I had my oldest do the Teaching Company's 36 lecture course - writing out the answers to the questions in the accompanying book. It was easily done within a semester.

 

The lectures were very informative about the basics - though interesting in sections considering the Economic downturn happened since these were recorded. They were neither conservative nor liberal - just informative - posing thoughts for both sides. I liked that about them.

 

For my next two I'll probably try Notgrass and have them watch the lectures.

 

My oldest plans to double major in Economics. When I asked a prof at a school he's likely to attend he told me that just knowing the basics was enough - hence TTC lectures for us. I suggested having my son take a cc course in it and was promptly told, 'no.' This college (and many others we considered) will NOT give credit for courses taken within their major - only credit for courses taken outside their major. It would have been a waste of money.

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Do you think it should be a full credit if the additional Sonlight books were added in?

 

Well... I don't think so. The additional books were a novel, a book on the Christian perspective and a personal journal. Great books to go through for personal reasons, but Thinkwell is really the core academic portion. I felt like 1/2 credit was small considering the amount of material covered in Thinkwell, but... economics in high school is usually just a semester course, and I felt like it would look odd for it to be a full credit on his transcript. So I just did the .5 credit. He had plenty of other credits as it was.

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