How to homeschool high school?

[Night Elf]

While my dd16 is using a correspondence program to earn an accredited diploma, my son will likely not follow that path. We prefer to take the portfolio route for him using a general course outline I found online. It includes things like 4 units for English, 4 units for Math, etc.

 

I need to find specfic information on how to determine appropriately leveled materials and grant credit. Math seems easy because we can use a textbook program appropriately labeled, i.e. Algebra, Geometry, etc. But if I don't want to use textbooks for the other subjects, I need to learn how to create a course outline, how to find materials for it, and how to know how much credit it's worth.

 

Any recommended resources?

[Jane in NC]

Do you employ TWTM methods now?

[Lori D.]

I found these two books helpful in figuring out what is required for high school graduation/college entrance, AND for figuring out "what makes a unit/credit", how to "create a high school course", and how to put together transcripts:

 

 

Mary Schofield's "The High School Handbook: For Junior High, Too"

http://www.amazon.com/High-School-Handbook-Junior-Too/dp/0966093771/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231979444&sr=8-1

 

Vicki Bently's "High School 101: Blueprint for Success"

http://www.lulu.com/content/346549

 

 

And a great overview of homeschooling high school are these two books by Cafi Cohen:

- "Homeschoolers' College Admissions Handbook: Preparing Your 12- to 18-Year-Old for a Smooth Transition"

- "Homeschooling: The Teen Years: Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the 13- to 18- Year-Old"

 

 

BEST of luck -- and welcome (again!) to homeschooling high school! : ) Warmly regards, Lori D.

Edited January 15, 2009 by Lori D.
added info

[Night Elf]

Not entirely. I will reread TWTM's rhetoric level because it's been a while. I want to use living books for History and Science and want to have writing assignments based on what he's reading. I don't want to use a writing program. We discuss everything he reads. He hasn't responded well to textbook programs with vocabulary and review questions.

[Karen in CO]

was a little spiral-bound book I got from rainbow resources. It is High School Your Way. It had lots of little worksheets in it that I used to help plan out classes and resources and keep track of things. When I sat down to make the Transcript, I turned to the little form from the little book and had all the information I needed. I have found all of those same forms many places for free on the internet, but when I was confused and didn't know where to start or what I wanted to do, just having a form to discuss with my ds helped us to clarify our thoughts and make a plan.

 

The only other book that I used about high school was Homeschooling the teen years or something like that, but I read that early on. Do re-read the rhetorical stage of the WTM, it really focuses on getting the child to deeply read a few books and think deeply about them. I didn't follow it with my ds, but he is a very different kind of guy. It took us a few years to figure out what worked for him.

[cathmom]

I recommend the book "And What About College?" by Cafi Cohen. It has a method of keeping track of hours spent on subjects and then creating a transcript from that.

[Nan in Mass]

You might like using The Well Educated Mind for literature/history. You can read a book, answer the general genre questions in TWEM (not specific to a particular book), and do some sort of paper or project. Because the set of questions are general, you can pick your own books. Each genre section of TWEM has an quick history of the genre which makes a good starting place for doing historical context work. You could pick living history books to go with your literature books if you wanted to, or you can read the appropriate sections of a history textbook. Spielvogel's Western Civ is a nice, richly illustrated one. I like this method because we can pick our own books, projects, or paper topics. I have also found that the general genre questions work much better for producing a genuine discussion than anyone else's specific book questions. I am finding that my children are applying the questions to other things they read or watch. When they tell me about a movie they watched with friends, they do it TWEM way. I am amazed. TWEM has given them a way of processing literature and other media more deeply, one that they will probably use for themselves the rest of their lives. We read our literature selections together aloud for the most part.

 

We did MODG's natual history syllabus, which uses living books, along with lots of extra reading (more living books) and projects instead of biology. It is a catholic company, but there was no religion in it. For physics, we used Hewitt's Conceptual Physics, which is more a practical, less math oriented version of a physics text. It was a textbook, not a living book, but it continued the practical applied approach we had done in natural history. We added in pbs programs on trebuches (no idea how to spell that - sorry) and bridges and astronomy and articles from Science News.

 

For math, we've been using Singapore's NEM1-3, with a little Keys to Algebra for extra practice at the beginnning, then switched to community college for pre-calculus.

 

We do music and art. Often, I let my sons do an art project instead of a paper for their literature. They did drawings of Dante's circles of hell, for example. This seems to require the same amount of rereading that searching for quotes for a paper would. My children did Draw Squad before high school, and Artistic Pursuits (easy for homeschoolers) drawing book, so they can draw.

 

My older one did lots of travelling, so part of my job when he was home was to connect the bits and pieces he'd learned travelling to the rest of his studies.

 

All in all, I've found TWTM way of doing high school to be very "living", very real and untextbooky, and easy to adapt for each individual.

 

I have a notebook divided into subjects for each child, and whenever they do something, I write it in the notebook under one of the subjects. Every once in a while I look at how the subjects are coming along and decide what else we need to do to balance it and turn it into a year's worth of work (or a semester) so I can put it on a transcript.

 

HTH

-Nan

[laughing lioness]

You might want to check out Barb Shelton's Home School Design Form-u-la. Lots of info on how to create courses, record keeping, forms, etc.