Homeschooling Through High School

Can you homeschool all the way through high school? YES! Can you prepare your child for college, career, and real life? YES!

We home-educated two children from 7th grade through high school. Our son chose to work hard, graduate 3 months early, and start a career in sales. He's considering college in the future. Our daughter skipped a grade at home. The summer before she would have begun 11th grade, she learned that the local high school offers two teaching-internship classes (four days a week in elementary classrooms). We prayerfully considered it and felt it was the right thing to do, as she wants to be a special education teacher. The high school considered her transcript and our curriculum, and announced that she had too many credits to be a junior. They made her a senior, and she graduated from public high school with a 4.0. She's now attending an exclusive private college at the age of 16 (and doing very well). Can you do it? Yes!

Many parents, though they have successfully homeschooled for years, feel they cannot give their children a quality education once they reach high school age. Many reasons are cited: lack of education themselves, time, lack of equipment, socialization. However, these need not be bars to a quality education at home.

Many people assume that homeschooled kids spend 8-12 hours a day at the books. Worse, many parents assume that in order to teach the upper grades, they will need to learn the material, and then spend hours teaching it. Even veteran homeschoolers assume that high school will be so intensive that government school will take up less time and effort.

The amount of time and effort high school will take is dependent on three things: your child, your curriculum, and your teaching method. If your teenager is interested in learning and motivated to succeed, they'll do their book-work quickly and move on to other learning opportunities. If the book-work you choose demonstrates new skills well, learning will be easy. And if your teaching method works to make your child interested and motivated, homeschooling through high school need only take a few hours per day.

In our homeschool, we generally worked from books in the mornings. Occasionally we'd stretch to an afternoon. I seldom taught - we used a self-directed learning approach. Some days we simply knocked off and watched television or went out somewhere.

Use Quality Curriculum and Books. Yes, you can cobble something together - but being able to say on the transcript you will one day prepare for college, "We did Saxon Math and Apologia Science" (or whatever you happened to use) tends to go over better than "We used this and that". There are less expensive curriculums out there. Yes - I just named very expensive books. We were blessed to be able to borrow them from friends and our church's homeschool library. A few things were bought second-hand.

If you do "use this and that" - keep a list of them so you'll be able to cite sources on the transcript. We did a science credit in forensics one year by using three library books, a dead chicken, and other household items.

Equipment for certain subjects can be difficult. Chemistry, for example, often requires a variety of things ranging from beakers and test tubes to a mass scale. Biology often requires dissection - meaning you must supply both tools, something to dissect, and a microscope. Although there are many websites and stores where you can buy this equipment, in most cases you do not need to - just put the word out to other homeschooling families that you need to borrow an item. Make sure you specify how long you need it for (a week is a lot different from a whole school year!) and label it with the family's name. Return it in the same or better shape than you got it in. Be willing to loan out your items, too! Also, put limits on the number and type of experiments you do. Does your child really need to dissect a fetal pig - or can they learn scientific principles from a much less expensive frog? Must you do the experiment that calls for $50 worth of chemicals, or can your child read about it and move on to a less expensive lab?

You will also want to keep excellent records and samples of work. Some colleges don't care - they just want a basic transcript. Other colleges may want copies of work, records from each years end of grade testing (if required by your state), and sometimes even a list of assignments! Fortunately, times are changing and schools are much more willing to accept homeschooling as valid education. However, you don't want to run into such a situation and not have solid records to show your child's ability!

Try to find a good balance for the "how" of homeschooling. Self-directed learning worked for us for most subjects. I'm not a college graduate, and I can barely balance a checkbook. My kids had surpassed me in mathematical skills by the time they'd finished fourth grade! They learned on their own through the end of ninth grade, and then I enlisted the help of a friend who loves things like trigonometry. She tutored for an hour a week (sometimes every other) very inexpensively. Assignments were turned into her, and she did periodic testing. As a result, when our daughter entered 12th grade at the public high school, she got an A+ in Algebra 3 and has passed the CLEP exam for college math. There may be some classes that work out better in a group setting. Church and community groups, 4-H, and even some colleges offer classes that homeschoolers can take part in.

Use real life situations and opportunities for learning. One advantage of homeschooling is that young people can interact with people of all ages. Instead of carrying around a plastic baby that cries and makes fake wet diapers, a homeschooled teenager may babysit a real baby. Instead of reading about pond life in biology class, a homeschooled student may spend a week cataloging species and conducting safe experiments on live pond animals. Homeschooled kids tend to learn how to cook from an early age - but if there's a special interest they may learn advanced techniques. They may volunteer at a charity, church, civic, or political event - even moving into positions of leadership there. They may even join a "Juniors" organization (usually fire or police) or even take part in Civil Air Patrol. Some students even intern in an area of special interest - learning diverse things like chair caning or animal husbandry. This is an excellent way to decide on a future career. Depending on what skills are learned and the amount of time spent, these activities may translate into credits.

There are many excellent websites and books on the subject of homeschooling through high school. However, the one I recommend most highly is Homeschool Legal Defense Association. HSLDA is a Christian non-profit group that assists homeschoolers in just about everything - most importantly, the laws of your state. Membership is extremely inexpensive. If you do run into trouble of any sort, they're just a phone call away. HSLDA offers lots of information regarding high school, test prep, graduation, and more.

If you're not sure that you can homeschool through high school, take some time to plan, find good curriculum, line up tutors for subjects you can't teach, and make sure you keep good records right from the start!