Home schooling during the high school years can be a fun and rewarding time for both the child and parent. This time can be used to keep, maintain and even deepen a relationship with your child during a high stress time of their lives. This can be a time to build a trust with your child so that they are willing to listen to council that you would like to share with them during this time of their lives. Also, as a Christian parent it can be the time to guide your child in their Christian walk and to help with any questions that they have so that their relationship with the Lord is their own; which will help them as new choices and decisions come their way in the upcoming years.
As your child enters the high school years record keeping becomes very important. You will want to start recording the things that your child accomplishes so that you can report them for college admission considerations. This is the time to start looking at the requirements of the top three college choices that your child is thinking about attending. This will help in knowing what they require from incoming freshman. Also, check your state requirements in what they recommend a high school student to have before graduation. Some things that we learned along the way is to start a record writing down every book read during the high school years either for school or free reading. Keep up to date with your records; this will help if you need to present them for scholarships or grants.
Keeping track and recording your child's extracurricular activities are just as important as recording the grades of the academic classes. For homeschoolers this is important because sports can also be counted as physical education credit as well as extracurricular. Colleges are interested in a child's outside activities only to show that they are a well rounded person, sports, 4-H, part time job it isn't important to a college what a student is involved in just that they have a well balanced life and are active in academic as well as extracurricular activities.
During this time of your child's development it is important for them to start learning life lessons while they are still in a safe environment and still have you as a sounding board to hear from them and have some input towards their dreams and decisions. This is a great time to teach about finances, if they have a vehicle its time for them to pay for the bills that occur from that vehicle; hopefully there isn't a payment on it; but there will be insurance that has to be paid, gas, maintenance such as new tires and oil changes. All of this is to teach them that as they get ready to step out on their own there are financial things that they will be responsible for and this is a step towards learning this responsibility.
This is a busy, exciting time for your teen. They still have their school work to keep up with; they are busy with extracurricular activities as well as many of them having jobs to help them earn the money they need for their special purchases. Its also a time for teen parents to start paying more attention to record keeping to help our teens take the next step in their educational process as well as being there to listen and give sound advise as your kids contemplate what they will do next in their lives.
