How We Planned for High School

We tried to let our kids into our decision making process as much as possible when it came to planning high school. 

• It might be helpful for your student to go and tour an actual brick and mortar high school.  If your child has been homeschooled all along, the idea of high school might be fuzzy to her/him.  To see an actual high school and what is required of the kids and the whole elaborate set up, might help your student see how significant the whole endeavor is.  It will give them a wider framework.  High school diplomas are a real thing!  You need it to pretty much get anywhere in adult life, whether you see this as a good thing or not, it is there, something that needs to be addressed.
• Since my husband wanted to ensure that our kids felt on an even playing field with kids who went to brick and mortar schools, we actually looked up what our county required and showed that to the kids.  Probably somewhere on your county school website, it shows what the expectations are to graduate from high school.  In our county they had three different levels which I now forget what they were called but it was something like basic, standard and college prep, or something like that.  Sorry I am too lazy to look it up right now!  
• Your student might be super interested in all this info or his/her eyes might glaze over and the attitude might be I can't take all this in.  If the former, that's great!  Your student will be an involved player in planning his/her high school career!  If the latter, then say, ok, it looks like you are getting overloaded and don't want to deal with these details.  So, tell you what, I will play guidance counselor for you, but you get veto power over my decisions.  
• To begin:  take a typical 9th grade curriculum as your guide and go through subject by subject and figure out how you are going to tackle that subject.  There!  You've just planned out the year!  Do this at the beginning of each year.  
• NB:  A lot of this is trial and error. So your teen may discover that they learn best a certain way.  For instance, I had some kids, for the sciences, who learned best in a classroom with a teacher right there guiding them the whole way.  But my youngest often found that distracting, especially in science.  She preferred to sit and read the textbook thoroughly herself and she really only wanted a group experience when it came to the labs.  And maybe this was because she didn't like the teaching style of the co-op teacher.  She found her confusing and too slow.  But anyway, she had a really distinct response to how science was taught compared to her older siblings.  So remember your student's mileage is going to vary from subject to subject and year to year even.  Everyone learns in their own way.  And since high schoolers are in the middle of maturing, they change as they grow!
• Back to planning!  We were eclectic and over the years with 5 different students we had almost  every permutation possible!  We kept the math tutor throughout high school.  They took co-op classes, on line classes, community college classes.  They studied a particular subject at home closely following a spelled out curriculum for it. They had loosey-goosey self-designed study where we pulled together several resources as we moved through the subject.  These often involved a video component (usually from The Great Courses), a reading component (where we developed the reading list ourselves) and a writing or product component-where the student had to demonstrate what they had learned through a paper or project or a final exam created by me or pulled from a resource I found somewhere.    We never took advantage of taking actual high school courses offered by our county either in the actual school building or on line, but some homeschoolers do science and math that way.  And we never actually unschooled where we counted pure experience as credit.    
• Counting credit - we went by the rule that most courses involve 120  to 180 (those with labs like science and foreign languages) hours of study to earn credit.  OR finish the curriculum/textbook.  
• Our schedule was determined by when the outside classes were held. So a teen might need to go to a co-op class one morning and another morning need to get on line for a class.  On mornings where there was no need to get up for a class or for a tutor, we'd meet mid-morning (because teens like to sleep in when they can!) to pray, focus a bit on religion and then work on whatever subjects we were doing on our own.  
• Teens really do seem to work well at night.  At least mine did.  So often after dinner is when they'd hit the books to do homework for various outside classes.  This was helpful because my husband was home to help them with advanced math and science, neither of which I felt very confident in myself.  I'm much better helping with foreign languages, English and history.  

Next post!  Transcripts!  Easier than you think!