High School Home School Curriculum
Once your student enters high school, the importance of keeping great records becomes even more important. In addition to keeping great records, you need to have a course of study that will satisfy the entrance requirements of the college your student is planning to attend. The most reliable way to know which courses your student must complete is to contact the college and ask for a copy of their entrance requirements. Not only will you find out which courses you need to complete, but you will find out all of the other criteria you need to plan for.
A typical course of study might look like this:
- Language Arts - Complete at least 4 units of language arts.
The language arts
comprise of Literature/Reading, Grammar, Composition/Writing, and Speech.
- Math - A minimum of Algebra and Geometry.
Higher math is recommended and it is
required for upper level science courses.
- Science and Biology, Chemistry or Physics, and at least one advanced course in Biology,
Chemistry or Physics.
- Social Science - Complete at least 3 units of Social Science.
U.S. History (1 unit), World History/Geography (1 unit), U.S. Government (1/2 unit), and Economics (1/2 unit)
- Foreign Language - Many colleges require 1-2 years of a foreign language.
- Electives, Courses in the Arts, Computer Science, or Apprenticeship Programs will
help round out your transcript.
As I mentioned above, please contact your institution of higher learning to find out their requirements. This typical course of study may be fine for one college but not satisfy another. Each is unique and vary in their entrance requirements and it not be in your student's best interest to find out after four years of high school that they didn't take all of the courses that they needed.
When the time comes, you will need to write transcripts for your student. This is not as hard as it sounds. It needs to have some basic information such as:
The name of the school. Homeschool is sufficient if you don’t have a school name.
Name
Birthdate
Social Security Number
Address
Phone Number.
You can also include Parent’s Names in this first section.
Next you need to list the courses your student completed and the grades they achieved for each course. Some courses will be assigned credit rather than a grade.
There are a couple different styles of transcripts you can use. The first style will have the courses listed under the grade. For instance:
9th grade
- Language Arts - A
- Algebra - B
- Physical Science - B
- US History - A
10th Grade
- Language Arts - A
- Geometry - B
- Biology - B
- World History - A
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The second style will use a simple table. List the courses down the left side, the grade in school across the top and with the grade achieved listed in the box which corresponds to the correct grade and course.
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
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| Language Arts | A | A | B | A
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| Algebra | B | | | |
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| Geometry | | B | |
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| US Government | | | | A
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An excellent resource for learning to write transcripts for your home school is The Full-Year Notebook System. This simple to use resource covers transcripts and courses of study in more detail as well as providing a structure for organizing your curriculum for the high school home school years.
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