The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [65]
When your teen gets a job (other than casual employment such as baby-sitting and lawn mowing), you’ll also need to look into work permits. Child labor laws regulate the ages and number of hours children are allowed to work, although family businesses are often exempted from such rules. Work permits are often obtained through local public schools or directly from the state labor department. As always, your state homeschooling groups should be able to provide information to guide you.
Getting Ready for College
If your teen is considering college, it’s a good idea to get familiar with the alphabet soup of college admissions tests: ACT, SAT-I, SAT-II, PSAT. The SATs and the PSAT are produced by the Educational Testing Service and are used by colleges throughout the country. The PSAT, usually taken early in the eleventh grade, is also used to qualify for National Merit Scholarships; students can also ask on the test form for information from colleges they are interested in. The SAT-I is the newest version of the SAT and contains tests of mathematical and verbal reasoning; the SAT-II (formerly Achievement) tests cover specific subject areas. The ACT, produced by the American College Testing Program, is used mainly by colleges in the Midwest and South. Any bookstore will have shelves of test preparation books for sale; many will include copies of actual past tests, which will give you the best idea of what to expect. A test preparation guide, such as those from Princeton Review or Kaplan, can also be valuable for learning to think like the test makers and developing the knack for multiple-choice exams.
Many homeschoolers start taking community college classes during their early to midteens, usually one or two courses in subjects that particularly interest them. This can be an alternate route to establishing evidence of one’s ability to perform college-level work (as opposed to relying on high school grades and transcripts). Many colleges will accept some minimal number of college credits as equivalent to a high school diploma for admissions purposes. If, however, your teen plans to apply for scholarships for use at a four-year college, be sure to check into their eligibility rules. In some cases, too many college credits may be a disqualification for scholarships awarded to graduating high school students.
The middle teens, while there is still time to fill in any gaps, are also a good time to start the whole process of looking into college options: learning about specific requirements for programs you may be interested in and beginning to organize information for admissions applications. We’ll talk more about college admissions and other possibilities for life after homeschooling in Chapter 14.
CHAPTER NINE
Evaluation and Record Keeping, or How Do We Know They’re Learning?
EVALUATING AND KEEPING appropriate records of your children’s learning can be one of the most daunting tasks facing new homeschoolers. What if your children don’t keep up with what kids their age are doing in school? How do you prove to college officials or potential employers that they’ve learned enough to handle college-level coursework or the demands of a job? What about grades and transcripts and achievement tests and all the other bits and pieces that make up a student’s “permanent record”?
How do you know whether they’re learning what they should know?
For most new homeschooling families, this is a major concern. You worry that you won’t do right by your kids, and you won’t know how to tell whether there’s a problem. Perhaps this dependence on an outside authority to tell us how well we are learning is an effect of our own schooling, but in no other area of our lives are we so unwilling to trust our own judgment. Consider, though, the matter of physical health: How do you tell when your kids are sick if you’re not a doctor? It’s easy to recognize a healthy