it (see Chapter 3), tracking your middle schooler’s courses and activities gives you great practice for the high school years, when transcripts become all important.
Start with the basics:
What subjects does your state require? Math, English, science, and social studies usually begin the list.
What subjects do you think your student needs to learn? Combining these subjects with the ones from the previous bullet gives you a nice, round group of classes.
What are your student’s outside pursuits?Does he participate on a traveling soccer team? Write it down under physical education or fitness. Did he set up a home business last year? Great — you have to keep track of the money, which is math, and keep the process rolling, which requires general business knowledge.Some activities, such as time spent at the local animal shelter, may simply fall under “volunteer activities” unless your teen gleans some animal science knowledge along the way. (Then, of course, it takes its place beside the weekly science text on your planning pages.)
If your middle schooler tackles a subject early, such as Algebra 1 in seventh or eighth grade instead of waiting for high school, it still counts as a high school course. Be sure to keep track of dates and grades for any early high school classes, even though they don’t end up on the high school transcript.
Putting Grades to the Test
If your child moves into the middle years with some homeschool time under his belt, then he may have little experience with grades. On the other hand, if you bring your child home to school during middle school, grades may be a painful reminder of the past. Even if you never graded work before, these junior high years are a good time to start.
For one thing, grading now gets your student used to grades in high school. Going from a completely nongraded eighth year to an all-graded ninth year can be a bit of a shock. Also, if you want your child to continue past twelfth grade, he needs some kind of transcript to take with him. That’s where the grades come in.
Many homeschool parents shy away from grading because they don’t really understand how the grading scales work. Chapter 24 lays out a simple and effective grading system that gives you letters the colleges can deal with while being fair to your student. Advanced schools, whether colleges, universities, trade schools, or apprenticeship programs, don’t deal well with S for satisfactory and E for excellent. They need a common language.
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES ADD DEPTH
Although it’s much easier to schedule a young teen who does nothing but traipse to the library to replenish an armful of books and then bring them home to read, the maxim that “all work and no play makes dull students” is a true one. In addition to meeting the social needs of your child (beginning with the teen years, this is no small matter), outside activities make your student much more fun to talk to. Varied activities help your teen to develop interests that make him a well-rounded individual.
One of your main goals as a homeschooler is to mold your children into creative, productive members of society — at least, I hope that’s a goal. We all know people who read erudite books that make our heads swim yet cannot seem to grasp the main fundamentals of life. When your student steps outside his own “self bubble” to volunteer, joins a sports team, or learns from an expert in an area of his choosing, he takes a huge step into real life. With any luck, he also stumbles on an interest or two that remain lifelong hobbies.
Unless your student enjoys conducting experiments or building models from matchsticks that test the laws of physics, pure textbook learning only goes so far. Living life is much different than reading about it. Your child branches into the living portion when she begins to engage in extracurricular activities.
Calculating the amount of paint that she needs to help redecorate the local county fair buildings brings math skills into the daily living category. So does noting how much dog food the local animal shelter uses on a weekly basis. Think about monthly dog food consumption and the numbers get huge!
Not only does your child get to practice what she learns in the classroom, but she also learns to interact with people of all ages, abilities, and strengths. She figures out what it is to join together with others to complete a goal. And she realizes the worth in reaching out to help someone or something else — without you ever saying a word.
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