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Homeschooling High School: Transcripts

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Now that you’ve got a handle on how you’re going to assign credit for your child’s high school courses, it’s time to make them official-looking and create his transcripts.

I’ve known several homeschooled kids who have gone on to college with a mom-created transcript. At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, I am using one of the many customizable transcript templates from Total Transcript Solution. However, you can easily create your own professional-looking transcript using a program like Microsoft Word or Excel.

You can also find printable transcripts, along with a lot of other great homeschooling high school information (including an explanation of how to figure GPA), on Donna Young’s site in the high school section.

Your transcript should include several basic pieces of information:

  • Student’s name and address
  • School name and address
  • Parent’s names
  • Student’s date-of-birth and social security number
  • Student’s graduation date and GPA
  • Course descriptions, grades, and credits earned, broken down by semester and year
  • Grade key
  • Test records
  • Cumulative GPA
  • The parent’s date and signature

I tried to make the course descriptions the standards that colleges are used to seeing and I based them on the course titles that I found when searching out graduation requirements for my state. So far, they include courses such as:

  • Freshman Lit & Composition
  • Algebra I
  • Spanish I
  • Survey of Modern History
  • World History
  • Government and Economics
  • Health and Physical Education

There is also a course listed as Pre-Algebra (Remedial). Early in our homeschooling journey, we decided to call Brianna 5th grade for an additional year, for many reasons, not all of them related to academics. By her 8th grade year, she was ready to catch that year up.

The only area that really required catching up was math. Because she would have taken pre-Algebra and been given credit for it in a traditional high school setting, she finished it and got credit for it in our homeschool.

My biggest piece of advice about high school transcripts? Don’t wait! Start in 9th grade and update your child’s transcript at least yearly, if not by semester. It’s so easy to forget things that you might have wanted to add. Transcripts are not a task that you want to be catching up during your child’s senior year.

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Be sure to visit these brilliant women during our 10 days adventure between November 7th-18th!

 

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Kris Bales is a newly-retired homeschool mom and the quirky, Christ-following, painfully honest founder (and former owner) of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. She has a pretty serious addiction to sweet tea and Words with Friends. Kris and her husband of over 30 years are parents to three amazing homeschool grads. They share their home with three dogs, two cats, a ball python, a bearded dragon, and seven birds.

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4 Comments

  1. Thank you so much for this series.  This will really be helping us here, as our oldest is in 8th this school year.  And, if I hear from "well-meaning" friends and family "what are you going to do with him for high school?" one more time, I may scream, lol!  🙂  I guess in their minds homeschooling through high school is even worse than elementary school.  ugh.

    Thanks for all of the great information.  I will certainly be checking it all out.

    Many blessings,
    Lisa

  2. I am the principal of a high school umbrella program. We do not put the child's social security number on the transcript and nobody has ever required it (and we have sent many students to many different colleges over the last 12 years). We also include service hours and extracurricular activities (although we advise students to do a CV for the latter) on our transcripts. It shows that the student can manage school and life and is involved in the community.

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