Options for Homeschooling Through High School
Welcome to this video in this video series on homeschooling through high school. I wanted to make this video in this series of videos because I’ve seen in my experience with homeschooling that parents will oftentimes consider stopping homeschooling once the son or daughter reaches the high school years, and I wanted to let the families know of what choices are out there for homeschooling through high school. So let’s take a look at those options.
I’ve identified four. I’m sure others can find variations and maybe even add to this list, but I wanted to present to you four options for homeschooling through high school. They all four will involve traditional home education, and three of the four will involve course credits for students who want to earn either course credits or the diploma. But before we dive into these four options, I wanted to first define the term traditional home education.
Traditional home education or traditional homeschooling means that you, the parent, are 100% in control of the learning. There’s no teacher-directed mixing, you know, shared responsibility or aligned or what used to be called blended. None of that. You are 100% in control of your program. That is traditional home education.
With that in mind, let’s look at these four options you have for homeschooling through high school.
The Four High School Options
1. Traditional Home Education
The first one is traditional home educating. You can continue through grades 10, 11, and 12, continuing your traditional homeschool approach. You’re choosing everything, you’re in complete, absolute control of the how, when, where, and why what’s going on in your learning program. That is traditional. Now that won’t end up in a diploma. I have to say that just to meet the regulatory requirements. We have to let, and even in the notification form you’ll find this information, so I do have to say, following a traditional home education program will not automatically result in your son or daughter earning a diploma or any course credits. Your son or daughter can earn the course credits in the diploma. Look at those options below, but when you’re talking about strictly parent-directed, non-Alberta Ed home education, your son or daughter won’t earn a course credits or the diploma for that. So that’s one option: traditional home education.
2. Traditional Home Education Plus Course Challenges
The other option is traditional plus course challenges. Now a course challenge is basically a credit by examination. So a student can earn course credits from Alberta Ed without having to take the course from an Alberta Education school or institution or any of teacher-directed program from Alberta Ed. We’ll look at that in detail in another video, but I just want to let you know, as you homeschool through high school, your son or daughter has options for earning course credits toward a diploma if that’s what he or she wants, and this first option would be through credit by examination or credit by a portfolio, and that is called a course challenge.
3. Traditional Home Education Plus Distance Ed Courses
The second way to homeschool through high school with an eye on getting earning course credits and/or the diploma would be following a traditional home education program but adding a distance ed course or courses to your son or daughter’s learning program through the years. Right now, those distance ed programs are distance ed courses come from the Alberta Distance Learning Centre or ADLC. So currently, the ADLC has a unique place here in homeschooling because a homeschool student can actually enroll in a teacher-directed course from ADLC and remain a home education as a student. So in other programs, that student would be considered a shared responsibility student but not so with ADLC. Again, ADLC is unique in this situation. So a home education student can earn course credits from a teacher-directed program if it’s from ADLC core courses in a host of options in electives as well. So that’s another option that a homeschooling student has through high school in addition to course challenges. So course challenges and ADLC courses both combined to give you a lot of choices for earning this course credits toward a diploma.
4. Traditional Home Education Plus Grade 13
The fourth option through homeschooling through high school is what I call traditional homeschooling plus Grade 13. Again, like with all the other topics, we will dive into these topics in more detail in upcoming videos, but I want to let you know that these options exist. So this fourth option, traditional plus a Grade 13, is, I will allow you, the family, to continue traditionally homeschooling with the option at the end to have your son or daughter take steps toward learning or earning the high school diploma. So you can have the best of both. What I mean by that is you can have the best of traditional homeschooling from grades one to twelve, doing it exactly how you want, but then you have the best of a diploma because a diploma will open doors more easily than not having a diploma.
I do want to be on record as saying you don’t have to have a diploma to enter various post-secondary institutions, but the doors for those post-secondary institutions are a little reluctant to open to students who don’t have a diploma. They will open, they can open, it just takes more persuasion and pushing and more effort. So I just again want to be on record is saying you don’t have to have a diploma, a lot of places don’t require a diploma, but if you want the diploma, you have some other options and while you still home educate. So this last option I wanted to present in this overview is Grade 13, and what that is is using the additional year of funding, and sometimes additional two years of funding, for focusing on teacher-directed or at least Alberta Ed courses and credits. So you have the best of both. You have the best of traditional homeschooling from grades 1 to 12, then you have the best of having a diploma as well. It just takes an extra year, maybe two if the son or daughter’s birthday falls in a way that will give that student an extra two years, but you could have an extra two years to start earning, not start, but to earn course credits toward your diploma, and we’ll look at that in more detail. Some families, some students are open to that, some are not. Some want to be done with high school at the end of Grade 12 and don’t want to spend any more time in high school. So for some that’s not an option, but we’re talking about options so I wanted to throw that in there. We will look at all of these options in more detail, so please join me in the upcoming videos.
