Homeschooling in Highschool: What to Know Before You Start

hi I'm Candace and you're watching homeschool on the hill and today I'm talking about homeschooling in high school but I'm going to specifically focus on the things I think you should know before you start homeschooling your high schooler okay so the first thing I want to talk about and this is the most important thing to me like if you don't watch the rest of this video that's fine but just stick around for this first point and that is that homeschooling in high school is different than homeschooling in the earlier years now yes obviously it's really different like how much your child can work independently and the complexity of the different subjects and all of that good stuff that's not what I'm talking about when we started homeschooling our kids no one was in high school yet and when you start homeschooling early on you know that and I tell people this all of the time that are on the fence about homeschooling it's not a forever decision you can always put your child back in the public school if things aren't working out in your home school but high school is a different ballgame and it is so important to me that you guys know this because it was never talked about I went to home school large homeschool group meetings thing like kickoff rallies I talked to home schoolers who had you know high schoolers and maybe it's because they never tried to put them back in public school so maybe they didn't know but I want to get information out there so that you know that when you begin homeschooling in high school it really is different than oh well you know we've just decided to put them back in public school and you just pop them back in and everything's fine so what I'm trying to tell you is before you start homeschooling your high school-aged child if you were considering withdrawing your kid from public school right now like this is something you're thinking about your child's in 9th 10th 11th grade whatever and you're thinking about bringing them home you need to talk to the school that they would go to if you were to put them back in you need to do this now because not all homeschool credits will transfer and be accepted back into the public school setting there's a lot of misinformation about this but I'm going to tell you specifically my local public high school and this is how this worked when my son wanted to go back to public school the second semester of his ninth grade year so he'd been home for eighth grade and half of ninth grade and when he went back in they didn't want to count any of his courses from that first semester of ninth grade which really believed me what I didn't realize is that a parent keeping those grades and keeping those records at home at least for my high school and I would say for most isn't isn't going to be credible to a school so when you take that to a school they're gonna go we're not counting that so it didn't matter how high my son placed on his placement test any any place really high grade levels above where he needed to be they didn't want to recognize the coursework now there are full-out accredited homeschooling programs some of them are religious some of them are secular I think Abeka has one I think Bob Jones has one I think the thing to know and if you are like super intimidated right now it is a little intimidating because there's there's a pretty good cost attached to those things and I've looked into that and yeah it's a lot so for us one of the things we say is if we decide to home-school in high school it is going to be a forever decision if you homeschool your child doing it all on your own without this extra service that's keeping your transcript for you and then you go to put them back in let's say you you homeschool 9th and 10th grade and you think I'm gonna pop them back in for 11th grade they're getting restless at home there's a good chance they're not gonna count the work from ninth grade and from tenth grade and your child will not graduate on time so you do need to keep this in mind like it is like I said if you watch none of the rest of this video please know that it's really important to me that you know that that you check with the school your local public high school that you would send your child to and say what do I need to do to go ahead and ensure if if we wanted to come to school before the end of high school if we wanted to transition from home school to high school what do I need to do to make sure that's possible okay so let's say that you have made the decision I didn't scare you too much you have made the decision that you're going to home-school your child through high school whether you use an accredited service for your transcript or you do your own record-keeping however you want to do that the next thing you need to do is you need to get familiar with your state's graduation requirements this is different than just knowing your state's home school laws and how you're allowed to home-school this is the actual graduation requirements for the state that you live in and guys there might be somewhere that this is all put together I'm like HSL DEA or whatever but it's a simple Google search away if you live in Arizona and you need to be on the Arizona Department of Education website and find out what students in the state of Arizona are required to take in high school so that they can be considered a high school graduate this really varies greatly from state to state I actually looked at Arizona just as an example just for something to look up and I was surprised to see that they require less science and less history than the state that I live in instead of three credits in each of those my state requires four so it's different per state you really have to look at your own state's requirements and let me just give you a tip you need to find a homeschool mom who has done this in your state it's great to talk to me here on YouTube and other people but unless you have someone that lives in your state and that can guide you through it I'm gonna give you advice and say well we require this and you know my home school diploma does count where is in your state you might have to get a GED you have to talk to someone in your state and you can find these people at your church you can find them probably at coops and sometimes even on the internet I know I came across we were looking at moving one time and I came across this great website that this homeschool mom had created in Ohio and she was like so thorough and all I kept thinking was if we move to Ohio this is my contact person this is the person that's gonna tell me how you do all of this okay so moving on talking about credits and what's required this is so important that you know this before you start homeschooling in high school you need to write everything down right at neon don't think oh I'll remember this stuff when I'm building that transcript in eleventh and twelfth grade I'll remember what science they took when you have a few kids at home and you've used a lot of different stuff and you made some changes mid-year or whatever you'll start to forget I know my oldest son he takes like four different electives some new years and I can really lose track of what was that half credit that we took in the fall semester of ninth grade so write this stuff down it's as simple as a sheet of notebook paper that says your kid's name 9th grade and you write down all of the the courses that you took and their average and how many credits it was worth and while I'm talking about credit I am referring to what's called a Carnegie unit and I encourage you to google that term and see what that means and I will say this as I'm telling you all of this like you can't take everything I say and say well this is what it's like in every state across the board but this is quite common even though I did talk to another home school mom friend and her sake talked about credits a lot differently like though the requirement seems so much higher than my state like multiple times and I was trying to figure out how they were awarding the credits for their different courses and I never did figure it out but basically when I look into what's called a credit or a Carnegie unit the explanation that's given talks about a course that would require like a minimum of 120 instructional hours and you know if you think of a school year you usually do 180 days and so you think about a hundred twenty hours of instruction which means that you can do kind of less than an hour of instruction across that 180 days or however you want to chop that up now that would be a full credit course but for a half credit course you would obviously want to do a minimum of 60 and for us that's how that's how we divide ours up if it's a full credit course for my high schooler he takes it all year if it's a half credit course we just take it for the semester now if you've taken on the task of actually creating the transcript and keeping all of your records for yourself then there are so many free templates like you can really Google like home school transcript template and all of this stuff's gonna come up you can pick the style you like the best you can get in Excel and make your own little spreadsheet type template and start filling in things the way you want I'm all about just keeping it on a list until we absolutely need that transcript okay now speaking of transcripts this is important this is important pre high school because a lot of people don't realize that those high school credits can be earned before high school now in my state eighth grade seems to be the earliest that a student can start earning credits that will count toward graduation now let me say we are actually not interested in our children waiting high school early and I just not against that but as I look at my boys I really don't want them to go off to college at 16 or 17 years old we're just not thinking that's going to be right for them but I know some people are really interested in that so getting those credits in even earlier is important for us we look at it like okay if my I have a seventh grader this year and next year in eighth grade and he can go ahead and get his let's say Algebra one out of the way he can get maybe his biology maybe Spanish or you know something like that and we can start going ahead and getting those credits and it just allows us to be a little bit more relaxed over the next four years I may say I don't want them to go to college early but I don't mind if they do like dual enrollment so we've talked about that but as far as like are we trying to get all of our credits and finish high school early no we are not but some people are interested in that and so you can know now your state may be different you you may be able to do high school credits as early as maybe seventh grade I'm really not sure so I would definitely check the Department of Education website and see if you can find your answers there but for us it's eighth grade so just keep that in mind I don't think we have enough videos here on YouTube with people talking about homeschooling in high school and I've just hit a few points here I was not trying to tell you how to home-school through high school just some things I thought maybe you should know if you're considering it but I would like to talk more about homeschooling in high school and I know you guys have questions and so I want you to leave any specific questions you have and in the comment section below and what I can do is really figure out how to address that through videos okay well that's it for this video but not on the topic of homeschooling in high school so I look forward to your comments your questions so I can know kind of where to focus for the topic of another video on homeschooling in high school as always I thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you later bye you

Channel: Homeschool on the Hill

Views: 25,096

Rating: 4.9341178 out of 5

Keywords: homeschool, homeschooling, homeschooling in high school, high school, homeschool high school, high school homeschool, what to know, homeschooling in the high school years, homeschooing a high schooler, homeschooler, high schooler, homeschool on the hill

Id: 0425ASZnkW0

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 14 2018