Home school Transcripts - The Flexibility in Designing a Perfect Transcript

The first thing your transcript needs is a title. Some families get creative with naming their home school and prefer to use that name on the transcript. Yet, you do not actually need to use the term homeschool unless, of course, you would like to. A transcript also should include the student's name and some type of identification of the student.

I do not recommend that you use the student's social security number on their transcript. I believe it is too easy to lose all these little pieces of paper. Besides, colleges do not need your social security number until after you have been accepted. There are certain home schoolers who will include their social security number yet I don't recommend it.

You will want to place all the educational experience in the center of the page. This is also where you are able to put the final grade that you gave them. Many transcripts also include a grading scale along with a credit level. Including the year the class was completed will allow the college to know what high school year the particular class was taken.

If you aren't working with a curriculum it can get difficult to know how to document classes. For certain classes i suggest you record the number of hours of the class. For instance, if it was a theater performance then you know that you have a whole credit because you added up an enormous number of hours. But if it was something such as dance, you could write down only 40 hours of swing dancing and then you can add it to the hours for other kinds of dance to finish that credit.

My suggestion is to work with sticky notes as an organizing tool. Record each class and the number of hours and then brainstorm the various subject areas that class could be in. What that will mean is when they had 40 hours of swing dancing the subject area could be fine arts; you could call it dance but you might also call it PE since anything that fails a sweat can count as PE. That is where you do all of that brainstorming.

When you do this with all of your delight directed learning, then you can combine them into different classes. If they put in 40 hours in taking first aid in a CPR class, then 40 hours riding their bike, and then 40 hours swimming, look at those three sticky notes and determine what they have in common. In this illustration you could combine them all into a PE class.

The freedom to reveal all the wonderful home school high school experiences of your child is worth the extra work. It will be worth it in the end.