Homeschool Records - My Adventure In Making Homeschool Records

By Author: Floyd Kenneth
Total Articles: 13
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One of the many issues that I found most concerning when I was getting all set to home school high school was how to do course descriptions. I am definitely not an English major, I am a nurse. I understand a great deal regarding Math and Science and less concerning writing. I had been speaking with people and I got the feeling that you will need to have some type of Masters degree in education for you to write a course description.

I had never seen a home school course description and I didn't know what it looked like. I only understood I was required to do it yet I didn't know how. I dealt with that stress the way I typically do - I researched. About the time my kids were in about 6th grade, I began doing research. Whenever I attended a convention to get curriculum for my children, I also bought a book for myself concerning ways to home school high school.

In all my research I realized that no one agreed on the right way to do course descriptions. That was really concerning to me. They were applying words such as voice, person, tense, verb tense. I hadn't considered these kinds of things since high school. As ...
... a result, I had no idea what I was expected to do. I only knew that course descriptions were in places like college catalogs and online, and that they seemed frightening. I realized that I had better take my research to the next level and so I questioned the actual experts.

The actual experts were home school moms who were older than me, who had undertaken the task, gotten their kids into colleges, and had gotten good scholarships. I asked them how they created their home school records.

After that, I spoke to colleges. Anytime I visited a college, whether it was for a college fair or a visit, I always questioned them what they wished to see in school records. I found the whole body of information that I obtained from this research rather interesting.

One of the things that I discovered was that colleges really just sought details. Once we were visiting a college and I showed them a one-page description of an English course that I had done and I showed it to the admissions person. I told them that I had this type of information for all the courses that we had completed in our home school. I asked them if this was excessive or not enough, and also if it was the data that they desired and exactly how they preferred it.

It was significant because this college admissions person said that she loved it and it was specifically what she required. She said that she wished all of the public school kids were required to write course descriptions just like it. She was so discouraged with the state of public education mainly because kids would get to college and their transcript would claim English 1, 2, 3, 4 but actually were not able to read and write. She had a difficult time comprehending exactly how it could state one thing on their transcript and yet they aren't functioning at that level. She had no idea what they were teaching them in high school English and she wished that she had this quality of information from all of the kids that applied, not only from home schoolers.

I found that reassuring on many different levels. It was wonderful to realize that we stacked up quite nicely with our peers. But it really said to me that more records were more desirable and to really offer them what they wanted.

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