Top-10 Tips for Homeschool Planning for High School
Over the next week, I’ll be writing a series of posts on planning the school year. Once the series is complete, I’ll pull the posts together into one cohesive document to share on the website. I will also include actual planning forms to give you solid, practical help.
To start, here are some basics for making a multi-year plan along with the first of the planning forms:
Top-10 List:
Planning the high school years with Homeschool Connections.
- Determine what courses are needed to meet basic graduation requirements. Here is help to get you started: Basic Scope and Sequence for College-Bound Catholic Students. You could also use your state’s requirements as a base to start.
- Review your child’s coursework to date. On your scope and sequence, cross off courses completed so far.
- Make a list of courses still needed for graduation. Determine how you will spread them out over the remaining high school years.
- Ask your child about future goals. A student who wants to be a programmer will take different courses than a student who wants to be a chemist.
- Determine your student’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, a student who struggles with language, but learns well using multi-sensory methods (dyslexic children often fall into this category), may do better with American Sign Language than with Spanish.
- Take into consideration your student’s loves. An example here is a student who loves to write stories. That student should take more of our fiction-writing courses. They will still learn important writing skills in addition to learning literary analysis. The bonus is that they will enjoy learning it more in a creative-writing atmosphere.
- Once you have taken the above steps, you will have a strong idea of where you want to go in the future. Now open and save the HSC course catalogs and review all the options available to you.
- Look for other resources to help you and your child meet goals. Books; websites; local co-ops; other online course providers; etc.
- Seek advice from other homeschooling parents. If you’re having trouble with a needed course or can’t decide on the best path to take, go to your local or online support group. We’re also here to help you at [email protected]
- Free planning forms can be found at Homeschool Planning Forms
Use this form to complete these steps successfully: Planning High School with HSC (Word document will download automatically).
