High school transcript -- check
For the past couple of days I have felt as though I have spent far too long on the computer. No, not because I've been spending hours surfing blogs or catching up on the latest facebook news (as if!), but doing actual work-type stuff that had to be done. As well as taking care of little odds and ends that had piled up, I also wrote an article that will be coming out soon (I'll let you know) and I made M. a high school transcript. She is in the midst of applying to colleges and it was becoming somewhat important that I stop putting it off.
In the end, it was not as horrible to make as I had expected it to be. I knew what she had done, it was just a matter of organizing it into more traditional sounding classes that could be understood by college administrators. I still need to write a course description sheet in case it is asked for, but that should be fairly straight forward. After spending nearly four years mildly fretting that M. wasn't doing enough, it turns out that I didn't even use everything. Once one is well above the typical number of credits for a college bound high school student, it seems to be gilding the lily a bit to keep going. My children are learning many things and learning them all the time, not just during traditional school hours or during traditional attendance months. It all adds up.
So, having completed one more new hurdle in the world of homeschooling with my poor first-born practice child, I am feeling much more relaxed about the ones coming up. I'm glad I have moreguinea pigs students on which to hone my new found skills.
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Note to my Arizona readers whocomplained mentioned that there was no video of the waddling baby ducks. I will put one up as soon as I can. You see it's complicated... Blogger won't let me upload video straight from my camera, so I need to put it on a disk. But, I am fresh out of blank disks, so I need to go to the store and buy some. But that requires I leave my house and enter a store, which happens very infrequently. Lucky for you, my printer is about to run out of ink which will force me to the store and then I can buy disks at the same time. You can just cross your fingers that my children will copy a lot of coloring pages without permission in the next day or so and use up the rest of my ink. :-)
In the end, it was not as horrible to make as I had expected it to be. I knew what she had done, it was just a matter of organizing it into more traditional sounding classes that could be understood by college administrators. I still need to write a course description sheet in case it is asked for, but that should be fairly straight forward. After spending nearly four years mildly fretting that M. wasn't doing enough, it turns out that I didn't even use everything. Once one is well above the typical number of credits for a college bound high school student, it seems to be gilding the lily a bit to keep going. My children are learning many things and learning them all the time, not just during traditional school hours or during traditional attendance months. It all adds up.
So, having completed one more new hurdle in the world of homeschooling with my poor first-born practice child, I am feeling much more relaxed about the ones coming up. I'm glad I have more
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Note to my Arizona readers who
Comments
What did you use for guidelines? Examples online? A purchased resource? College requirements? Your own head?
I'm a long way off as my oldest HOMESCHOOLED guinea pig is only in 6th grade, but seeing how quickly middle school flew by for Rose Bud, I know I'll be tackling transcripts sooner rather than later. Sigh.
Blessings,
Sandwich
I used the Transcript Boot Camp CD put out by www.homeschooltranscripts.com as a starting point. The thing I like about it is the idea that you track what your child does, with hours and then work backward and create courses based on number of hours/Carnegie units. I also loved the idea of formatting the transcript by subject, not by year, since we learn untraditionally and it is difficult to say what we did in any given year. What I don't like about it is its alarmist nature... I do think they make the whole process much more difficult than it needs to be and that they play on parents' fears that colleges are going to want extensive portfolios with time records, etc. Being married to a college administrator, I know that colleges don't really want these things. Plus every homeschooled high schooler I've known who has applied to college has gotten into many of the colleges (if not all) that they have applied to, with just a transcript and (sometimes) an explanation of coursework.
For the most part, I just used common sense as to what makes a good high school education... which I started thinking about when M. was a freshman.
Does that help?
e