Requirements, Credits, and Transcripts, Oh My!

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The Blog Cruise question this week explores graduation requirements and high school transcripts.  We’ve just started this new educational season with a 15 year old tenth grader.

Poor BooBear!  As the oldest child, she is my guinea pig for everything and that includes this home school stuff too.   We stumbled our way through 9th grade but realizing that high school was a present reality and not some distant concept, we’ve come up with a plan, a rough around the edges with wrinkles in the middle plan, but a plan nonetheless.

Legally, as a home school parent, I am not obligated to follow the state’s list of mandatory classes when setting the standard for my school.  We’re using suggestions from our state home school group and suggestions from Lee Binz, the home school scholar.

Though I can find recommendations such as 4 credits of science, 4 credits of English, etc,   I still had to determine what constitutes a credit.   High school credits are not configured the same as college credits.  For some courses this is easy.  If my daughter takes Geometry and completes the textbook, she gets 1 credit of geometry.

But what about courses we create on our own such as a music history class or a photography class? In those cases record keeping is essential.  The student must record what they are doing and how long it takes them to complete the task.  We’ve set the standard for “independent study” types of classes as 180 hours of work is equal to 1 credit.  

I’m using Homeschool Tracker Plus and The Old Schoolhouse High School Planner to plan out high school courses and keep detailed records.  HST + has a transcript report that will take the information I input and spit out a transcript. 

BooBear has a copy of the TOS High School Planner and she is responsible for recording work that she does independently towards her music and photography credits.  I’ll use those logs to input grades into HST +. 

I think by the time Tailorbear enters high school, I just might have the wrinkles smoothed out on the planning process.  Her requirements will be slightly different than Turtlegirl’s which are slightly different from BooBear’s but the principles will be the same: giving them what they need in high school to become successful adults.

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Comments

  1. Thanks for sharing your tips! We also love using our Planner for keeping track of our records! :)

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  2. Ok - I've got to get the planner. This much is clear. I too was wondering about what constitutes a credit. We are part of a wonderful co-op that offers classes that help with that scenario, but I still don't feel confident. Lots of records - yes! I hear that too!

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