Homeschooling parents whose kids will likely seek admission to college usually realize their homeschool graduates will need parent-made homeschool transcripts. They will probably also need “outside evidence.” That’s because a homeschool transcript full of parent-graded courses and independent learning done at home may not by itself convince university admissions counselors of a teen’s preparation for college-level work. Continue reading »
High School
Homeschooling High School
Creating a Homeschool Transcript
One of the things that intimidates people the most about homeschooling high school is how to make homeschool transcripts. Thankfully, the solution is much easier than homeschoolers expect it to be, and it’s free—you don’t need a homeschool transcript service or expensive record-keeping software in order to create a homeschool transcript to send to colleges. There are several ways to produce homeschool transcripts for your student, including availability from various organizations, online planner services, or creating your own. We have made it easy to print your own transcripts with our free homeschool transcript template for Excel—just input the information, set the print area, and print the spreadsheet. You’ll find the link at the bottom of this page. Continue reading »
Instead of Curriculum: Earn High School Government Credits Differently
Don’t depend on boring government textbooks; use an activities approach to learning how government works. If teens do these activities, talk about their experiences with you and others, and follow rabbit trails online, they will likely retain more knowledge about how government works than if they just read from a government textbook. Continue reading »
Resources for Homeschooling High School When Mom’s Not the Expert
When negative people who don’t know anything about homeschooling start talking about why it can’t work, one of their criticisms is that homeschooling parents can’t possibly know enough to homeschool the “hard” subjects of high school, which is why homeschooled kids won’t ever get into college. Of course, this would be a shock to all the homeschooled kids who’ve not only been accepted to college, but also already graduated. Continue reading »
College Admission Requirements: Homeschooling High School
Homeschooling is not public schooling, and homeschooling parents have wide latitude in what their children should study, how they should learn, and what qualifies a teen for graduation or a diploma. Homeschooling is governed by state laws, which vary from state-to-state, and you should check with a homeschooling organization in your state to see if there are course or “subject” requirements, and how homeschoolers show they have met those requirements in that state. If there are no course requirements, as with homeschoolers in most states, what should your child study and learn during high school, if college is on the horizon? Continue reading »
Bad News/Good News of Starting Homeschooling in High School
Starting homeschooling during the high school years can seem intimidating or liberating — or both. There is both good news and bad news about starting out homeschooling in high school, but for many people the good outweighs the bad. Continue reading »
Ask Jeanne: Do Homeschoolers Get a Diploma?
“Do homeschoolers get a diploma? Half of my family is pro-homeschooling and half is anti-homeschooling. How do I convince my family that homeschooling would be a better and more positive solution than public school?” You have a couple of overt questions and a couple of implied ones. Let’s see what we can tease apart here, because these are common concerns for prospective homeschoolers. Continue reading »
Teen Tech Project: Building a Computer
This week I visited with a homeschooling family whose son was anxiously awaiting his shipments from New Egg and Tiger Direct — full of the components he would assemble into his own PC.
This brought back fond memories, since two of my three sons undertook this same project during their teen years, and my oldest actually did the same after he graduated. Continue reading »
Homeschooling Teens: Finding a Third Place
Homeschooling teens means a lot of questions about preparing for college admission or getting experience and training for a vocation or artistic endeavor. We wring our hands over curriculum and credits, and we help our teens learn to drive and manage their money.
But another little piece of life experience we can help our teens with is being able to work in “a third place.”
Typically, a third place is talked about in the world of adults, as the place that is “not home” and “not work.”
College students and some high school students often study or socialize in a “third place” that is “not home” and “not classroom.” Continue reading »
Khan Academy College Resources
This video-based new resource from Khan Academy offers a step-by-step approach to college admissions from a variety of viewpoints. You will hear students from different socioeconomic, cultural, and academic backgrounds as well as from admissions officers from Yale, Stanford, University of Virginia, and more. Through student and dean interviews along with information from other experts, the program covers getting started, making high school count, exploring college options, applying to college, and paying for college. With Khan Academy’s characteristic virtual blackboard, the program goes over the FAFSA, CSS Profile, and other financial aid information. Continue reading »
Free AP® Courses
Each May, the College Board administers Advanced Placement exams for a variety of subjects. EdX, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard, offers free interactive online classes and MOOCs from MITx, HarvardX, BerkeleyX, UTx and many other universities. RiceX recently launched the first free online AP® classes through edX: AP® Biology, AP® Physics 2, and AP® Environmental Science. Visit edX to register or find out more. Continue reading »
Homeschooling High School: Our 11th Grade Plan
We are homeschooling high school all the way through. If you would like to see how we track credits and create transcripts, see Our 10th Grade Plan. If you haven’t checked out our free Homeschool Planner Plus download, you should take a look at it for creating high school transcripts. It is easy to plug in your courses and credits and the spreadsheet calculates your GPA for you.
The 11th Grade Plan: DE English – This year’s focus is on composition through the local community college’s ENG 111 course. Over the course of the semester, students work to complete a research paper from the abstract topic proposal to the final draft. It is a challenging course that goes into the details of the process for a single paper instead of completing multiple papers. Continue reading »
5 Homeschool Graduation Ceremony Ideas
Do homeschoolers have graduation ceremonies?
Some do; some don’t. And those who do have graduation ceremonies may mark the occasion differently from one another. If you are looking for homeschool graduation ceremony ideas that fit your family, there are many options from which to choose. Here are a few that work for many different types of kids and families. Continue reading »
Two Vital Factors for Homeschooling Teens
The teenaged years are actually the most rewarding of the homeschooling years. That’s what we’ve found with our four homeschooled kids. And that’s what I was told by many of the 110 families I interviewed for my book Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything. People in Ireland, Australia, India, and the U.S. described coming to this realization in similar ways. Their concerns about helping a young child master the basics or their struggles to find the right homeschooling style gradually resolved. Parents grew to trust the process of learning much more completely and, perhaps as a result, they saw their children mature into capable and self-directed young people. Continue reading »
9 Benefits of Hosting an International Exchange Student
Hosting an international exchange student can be a great experience for homeschooling families. We hosted a student from Ecuador, and while the commitment can seem daunting, having Isaac José with us for a school year enriched our lives.
What are some of the benefits of hosting an international student? Continue reading »
Challenges to Homeschooling High School
Homeschooling a teen can be really hard. While I’m overall glad to be homeschooling, I have a high school age daughter who is difficult to work with and who is inconsistent in her approach to homeschooling. She has always been a challenging child, and as expected, the teen years have had a lot of turmoil. Homeschooling seems to catch a lot of blame for our problems — but it’s not from outsiders or family members. She spends a lot of time lamenting being homeschooled and blaming us for trapping her in home education — despite the fact that she has always had the option to attend school, an option we would have genuinely supported. Continue reading »
Upper Level Writing Resources
As students move into high school writing, expectations are higher and the process becomes more complex. Student have to use well thought out organization, careful planning, concise expression, and relentless editing to produce quality writing. The Writing Center at UNC has put together a large collection of writing resources for college writing that are excellent tools for upper level homeschoolers. Continue reading »
Homeschool High School Composition: The Assignments
Part I of Homeschool High School Composition gives an overview of how to approach teaching homeschool composition. It is important to read it before using the assignments below, since it is a different perspective for teaching composition. Below are the assignments for composition using this part-to-whole process. The assignments use the UNC Writing Center’s free online resources.
If you would like to download the assignments, we have them as a PDF download here: Homeschool High School Composition Continue reading »
Homeschool High School Composition
The Writing Center at UNC has put together a large collection of writing resources for college writing that are excellent tools for teaching homeschool high school composition. The center’s downloads and videos offer detailed explanations about research, sourcing, organization, editing and proofreading, voice, fallacies, thesis statements, and dozens of other writing topics. The resources are arranged alphabetically, making them easy to find by topic but not offering much in the way of an orderly progression for teaching. The following is a suggested order of study for using the resources for composition for a homeschooled high school student. In our case, we used this for a literature composition, but literature compositions can be the most difficult type to write. It might be more effective to initially use the process with a topic of choice instead of an essay on a particular book. Continue reading »
High School Homeschooling: Our 10th Grade Plan
From the feedback and questions that we get on our Facebook page, there is a great deal of interest in how to homeschool high school. This year my daughter is a sophomore in high school, and I thought it might be helpful to share our 10th grade plan with you. Contrary to popular belief, homeschooling high school is often easier than homeschooling younger grades. Students are older, more mature, and better able to manage their own academics. When they need assistance, the material is more difficult, but between teacher guides, online resources, and friends with a knowledge of the subject matter, we have not found this to be a problem. Continue reading »
