High School???????? post 1

I am less than one year away from having a high schooler in my home.  Oh boy!!

I've been homeschooling since he was in kindergarten, so I'm not threatened by designing or buying curriculum for high school.  I know many people are intimidated by math or science; I say Bring It On!!

I've been stalking websites, reading books, and looking at whatever information I can get my hands on to determine how to keep the records and make transcripts from all that information.

The best book I've found is Setting the Records Straight by Lee Binz.  She has  broken down the information into manageable bits and with humor that makes it an enjoyable read.  I loved looking not only at her transcripts, but the other examples that she has listed in the back of the book.

One thing that I knew that I needed to do, was to lay out a plan of course of study for the next four years.  I know that things will change as TL firms up his interests, but I wanted to have a set course of action.  The first thing I did was lay out the possible classes and credits that he would earn.  Then I compared my list to the list in her book and it was right on.  I took a college-prep program in high school so I designed my plan according to that.  I also added in computer science, because let's face it, I'm old.  We chiseled our papers into stone.  My one semester class in high school consisted of our teacher boring us to death with information about DOS systems (yeah, I went there).  If it wasn't for Pong that was uploaded to our computers (which probably weighed 100 pounds each) we would have drifted off to sleep.  And yeah, I went there with Pong.  If the kids today could only see what we considered fun and enjoyed hours of entertainment with!

Back to credits.  Most high schools require 19-22 credits to graduate.  WA needs 22.  I looked up CA, since we live here now, and they only need 13!!  Are you kidding me?  Nothing like setting the bar really high!!  And they wonder why CA is in the toilet.  I did call the school liason here on the base and she told me that to graduate to go to college, you needed 9-11 more credits........still not required just to graduate though.

The credits that your child needs to graduate is determined BY YOU as the homeschool parent.  Whether it be 18 or 40, its up to you.  I only compared my plan to the state's because I wanted to see how it compared.  Like I said, its up to you to determine how many credits your child needs to graduate from your school. 

I will be discussing this topic on length, in case anyone cares, and hopefully post information on grading, transcripts, course descriptions, CLEP and honors classes, etc.   If there's anything that you want to discuss, let me know and I'll talk about what I've learned.