What About High School Credits?

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When it comes to graduation each school chooses what is required for students to graduate. This means you, as the person in charge of your homeschool, choose what is required for your teen to graduate high school. This means as a homeschooler you can choose what is best for your child and even have different requirements for each child in your homeschool.

Most school credits fall between 17.5 and 22 credits. Many of the homeschoolers fall between 22 and 31, so as you can see there is quite a difference in credits, which makes sense because your child has more time for a custom education that allows them to explore things traditional schools don’t have the ability to. Most of that is because our students are learning all the time and the school only counts the courses that they take at the school. We as homeschoolers can count many things that our students do that the schools would not, for example, our students watch documentaries, read cool books, do experiments, fix things, take classes, build sheds with grampa, and much, much more, that would not be counted if they were in the government school because they didn’t do it when they were there.

What About High School Credits? - By Trisha

How do you determine what your student should have for credits?

You set challenging, reasonable goals and when they are met they get the credits and graduate. What freedom we have as homeschoolers! When deciding how many credits and what credits your teen needs for graduation a good rule of thumb is to look at the colleges they plan to apply to and make sure you hit their minimums for admission.

How do I come up with reasonable goals? Sit down with your student and see what they want to achieve, let them own their education with your guidance. Talk to them about what careers they are interested in and what schools they would like to apply to. While this may change as the years go on it can make a great basis for building your high school transcript plan.

What do they want to do for a career (be cautious because in the early years of high school they may have a goal and in the end, their goal may be different)? If they want to become a web designer then they may want to take a course on HTML or computer graphics (there are many free courses out there, Udacity.com has tons of computer courses free). Maybe they would like to become a veterinarian, the course of study will then have a lot of science to it. You should always include grammar and a couple of maths, but Algebra and Geometry are not necessary unless it pertains to a field they would like to go into, that does not mean that they won’t want to take one of those courses, but it is not required.

How do I come up with credits?

There are a couple of different ways to determine credits. If you are using a textbook and complete 75% of it then you can count it as a credit. That is not to say you have to complete everything and every answer in the book, but you do want to be sure your child has an understanding of all the material in that book. If you are designing your own curriculum or using another means of learning the information you can count hours as credit. According to HSLDA a credit hour is 120-180 hours. The science courses with labs will be in the 180 range and basic subjects like math and history will be in the 160 range, while electives can be in the 120 range. Half credit courses will consist of 60 hours and quarter credits will be about 30 hours. Logging hours works great for things like art, sewing, cooking, web design or carpentry to name a few. They also go on to say that if your student takes a college course for example English 101 and it is a 3 credit course for one semester, you can count it as a full year one-credit course for their high school year. College credits are calculated differently than high school credits. A good rule of thumb is 50 minutes a day, 5 days a week for 36 weeks, for a one-credit course.

How to track your child’s high school credits.

The most important part of high school credits is tracking them and placing these credits into your child’s high school transcript they will one day need for college admissions, jobs, or military service. Putting together a quality transcript is important but easier than you think I recommend: Setting the Records Straight: How to Craft Homeschool Transcripts and Course Descriptions for College Admission and Scholarships and Transcripts Made Easy: The Homeschooler’s Guide to High School for a great base in learning how to create quality high school transcripts colleges will love. 

Enjoy the time.

Your students are only with you for a short time, do not make the high school years burdensome. Plan ahead and allow the student to own their education, sit and talk with them about what they want to do when they finish school and help them achieve that goal, you cannot do it all for them, they will learn a lot by being part of that planning. As the time approaches that they are ready to graduate they will have a sense of accomplishment that will get them off to a great start to their future.

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