Seton Magazine Catholic Homeschool Articles, Advice & Resources
Summary
We hope this list of the 2025 Seton curriculum improvements and course updates will help you with your curriculum choices.Seton works incredibly hard to keep our costs to families as low as possible while constantly improving the quality of your curriculum. Despite rising costs everywhere else, Seton has announced no tuition increases for 2025.
Our new curriculum improvements and course updates became available on June 16 (unless otherwise noted). Here is a list of all the changes parents will find.
Phonics/Spelling
Phonics K, Phonics 1, and Spelling 1 are undergoing a cosmetic change. They will have new covers more consistent with Seton’s other traditional Catholic art covers.
These new covers will feature St. Joseph for Phonics and the Holy Family for Spelling, and these books will be getting some additional inside pages with traditional Catholic art. The content of the courses will be essentially unchanged. This is a minor change that I might not normally include in a list like this.
Still, since it is a cover change, and we usually only change covers when there is a massive change inside the book, I wanted to explain that the content inside is not changing to help avoid confusion. This won’t be a June 16 change but will occur as we deplete the previous printing.
Science
Science 5 for Young Catholics is getting a complete visual redesign. The content is the same, but the graphics and layout bring a high-quality, beautiful, and professional look to the solid content we already have in the course.
Diagrams and illustrations are such an important part of Science courses, so this really is a pedagogical improvement and not merely a cosmetic improvement. Because the text is the same, we are not calling this a different edition of the book, but we are instead calling it a different printing and making just a minor cover change, replacing a lion with a tiger in one of the quadrants of the cover so that our counselors can more easily help parents identify which version of the book they have.
Art
When walking into an art museum, a student is presented with many kinds of art, paintings, sculptures, pottery, and jewelry, all of which give insight into the times in which those artists lived. Studying art is also about studying history, theology, literature, and even a little math.
Art 3 for Young Catholics (Second Edition) is designed to expose students to a variety of art and artists and teach them some of the techniques used in creating art. This course is designed for Third-Grade students, but parental help may be needed for some of the projects.
Stained-Glass and Rose Windows
There are 18 pairs of lessons in Art 3. The first lesson in each pair explores a type of art or a subject in art.
The second lesson in each pair provides a project that allows students to create their masterpieces based on the theme or technique presented in the previous lesson. Some projects are simple and can be accomplished quickly; others are more involved, and may be best to spread out over a few days.
Please allow your student to do as much as possible independently. It might not be perfect, but the goal is the student’s progress and enjoyment of the course; perfection is not.
An example of the pairing of teaching and then doing method found throughout Art 3 for Young Catholics are the lessons on Stained-Glass and Rose Windows. As our author, Mary Ellen Barrett demonstrates in this video, the lesson on stained-glass and rose windows is followed by step-by step instructions for making a Rose Window.
Health and Nutrition
The Health and Nutrition Online course is also getting a beautiful physical textbook in the same style as our Biology for Life book. While the text content is the same, we put many new graphics together for the new Catholic textbook. The new name for the course will just be “Health and Nutrition” without the word “Online” at the end. This new textbook is a drastic improvement in the quality of presentation, and we are very excited about it.
What is nutrition? How is energy obtained from food? What does the entire human body require to maintain life? What is the adaptive immune system? What is CPR? These are just some of the many questions that are answered in this textbook on health and nutrition.
An Invaluable Resource
The book begins by examining some of the foundations of human health: muscles, bones, joints, blood, breathing, and so forth. Other topics related to the health of the human body are also explored. Key factors affecting human health are examined, including pathogens, the immune system, and various diseases.
A book on health and nutrition is invaluable for high school students. In particular, those considering nursing or another medical field may find this book to be a helpful preparation for their college studies. But all students can benefit from these important topics.
We hope you enjoy this book and that it helps you to gain new insights regarding how to stay healthy throughout the various stages of your life.
History
History 6 has a new Geography Skills 6 workbook. This is the latest addition to our Catholic Geography Skills series and pairs with the Geography Skills 7 book that came out last year. Level 6 covers North and South America as well as Europe, and then the Level 7 book covers Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
These books cover serious geography content, not just map skills like the old Continental Press or Scholastic books. These cover the Geography, History, Government, Culture, and Economies of many of the major countries in each region, in addition to learning map skills. Most importantly, they are Catholic, so they also have some information about the Church or local saint in many of the countries.
The Audiobook Project
Seton is always trying to find new ways to use technology to improve the quality of our courses and increase the value of your enrollment. Last year, we created computer-generated videos for our elementary music courses, which play the songs and highlight each note on the score as it is played.
This year, one of our projects is creating audiobooks. Of course, the concept of an audiobook is nothing new, but what is new is the ability to create computer-generated narrations that sound completely natural. We have the new high school U.S. Government course content in audio form. You can hear the Audiobook Sample here.We plan to move on to the junior high science and history courses next and have at least some of those finished by Fall.
The goal for this year is to create audiobooks for all the Seton Press books for junior high and high school in the subjects of science, social studies, and religion/theology. These are not robotic-sounding recordings. You will be amazed at how far technology has come to be able to produce life-like audio. You can listen to a sample lecture on the U.S. Government course page on our website.
U.S. Government
Last year, Seton released a new U.S. Government Online course written by Dr. Paul Clark (one of Dr. Mary Kay Clark’s sons, who is a professor of philosophy and a practicing lawyer).
This new content is now being printed as a physical Catholic U.S. Government textbook, so the course will no longer only be online. This means there would be a new course with just the name “U.S. Government,” and the “U.S. Government Online” will be discontinued.
Now that we have a Catholic government textbook, we will discontinue the Foundations of American Government course, which used a textbook from Abeka. However, we will continue to make this course available to families who already own the Abeka textbook. The structure of the course will remain the same as it was online.
This is a half-credit course that satisfies the government diploma requirement. It is a default course in 12th Grade and is limited to juniors or seniors only.
Default History Courses 10th and 11th Grade
In the past, World History was the default course for 10th Grade, and U.S. History was the default course for 11th Grade. We are switching those this year for two reasons.
First, the World History tests are more difficult than the U.S. History tests. Second, Seton wrote a new book, History of Western Civilization, which has not yet been published but will replace World History and be available in June of 2026.
This new book will be slightly longer than the current two-volume U.S. History, and 11th Grade will make more sense as a long-term default.
Honors Applied Physics
The current Saxon Physics course is at an advanced level, requiring Algebra 2 (and ideally Pre-Calculus) as a prerequisite. As a result, only about 100 students each year take Physics with Seton, which is a shame because it is an extremely important science.
We have a new physics course, which I talk about below, but for the Saxon Physics course, we will be renaming it and giving it an honors designation without changing the course design. It will now be called Honors Applied Physics. Any student currently enrolled in the Saxon Physics course will have their course name changed. Having an “honors” course not only looks good on transcripts going to a college but also Seton honors courses have a 5 point grade bump, so if a final course grade would have been a 90 based on the tests, an honors course student would get a 95.
Physical Science
Since Apologia released a 4th Edition of their physical science textbook and discontinued the student notebook for the 3rd Edition, Seton created a course using the 4th Edition book. Families looking to use the student notebook should select that revision of the course.
First, the 3rd Edition will remain our default 9th Grade course this year, but the 4th Edition will become the default next year. One major difference is how the supplemental student notebook is designed. Apologia has added its own 32-week lesson plans into the notebook, with additional assignments like labs and a research report.
Keeping it Simple
Having two sets of incompatible lesson plans would be fairly confusing. While we have Seton lesson plans for the 4th Edition, we recommend that if you are using the student notebook, you use the lesson plans in the notebook and take the Seton tests.
Historically, about 20% of families opt to purchase the student notebook. With this new edition, the notebook route also requires the purchase of the Apologia tests and answer keys packet, which has the answers to exercises in the notebook.
Physics
The new Physics course requires Geometry as a prerequisite. The textbook is an OpenStax textbook that has been modified slightly by Seton.
OpenStax is an organization that creates free “open source” college textbooks, and they have been branching into some high school subjects as well.
While the books are purely secular, Seton has gone through to ensure there is nothing objectionable, removed some things that might be considered controversial, and even removed a few chapters that didn’t seem necessary for our course. This course focuses on Newtonian Physics without delving into the more advanced relativistic and quantum physics as those require more advanced math. It is crucial to ensure students have a strong grasp of the fundamental concepts, which they can easily grasp before moving on to the more advanced concepts.
Physics is a very important subject, and while this course is not currently one of our default science courses, it would be an excellent option for those interested in science. It is a course we will consider making default in the future.
Although this would not be our usual recommendation, our science and math counselors have determined that this new Physics course and the Honors Applied Physics are different enough in level and some content that they can both be taken for credit—i.e., they are not mutually exclusive like Algebra I (Saxon) and Algebra 1 Online (Teaching Textbooks) which cannot both be taken for credit by the same student.
