Figuring Out Homeschool Graduation Requirements
Our state requires “instruction and training in orthography, reading, writing, the English language and grammar, geography, arithmetic, drawing, music, the history and constitution of the United States, the duties of citizenship, health education, physical education and good behavior.” The number of annual hours of instruction for middle and high school is 990 per year.
Because there are so few restrictions in our state we needed to begin with college admissions and work our way backwards in high school planning.
First I looked at the websites of our state universities and several in neighboring states and made a list of common requirements which turned out to be really basic and almost exactly what I remembered from my own high school years.
3 Math: Algebra I, II and Geometry
4 English
3 Science (labs preferred)
3 History/Social Science
2 Years of a Single World Language
My next question was what qualifies as a credit or year of history or math? If you are using a curriculum a credit is pretty easy to figure out. If you have completed all (or most) of the content in that resource, then you did it.
But what about courses that you put together yourself? I love pulling resources together and tailoring our learning to my kids’ interests and learning styles. HSLDA says that “you will want your teen to log at least 150 hours for 1.0 credit (roughly five hours a week for 30 weeks).” Our family schools closer to 36 or 38 weeks in a year, so I busted out my calculator (990/36=4.2) and came up with the answer of 4 hours per week per subject to earn a high school credit.
If every year should have 990 hours of instruction and 150 hours equals one completed class, then they should be able to complete about 6.5 classes/credits a year. Obviously if they are interested in something and want to learn more I’m not going to tell them that after 5 hours of school work in a day they are forbidden to use their brains. But this gives me a good way to plan our time.
That list of required classes for admission into most colleges totals 15, so that leaves a lot of space for creativity in the subjects that the kids dive into. There are also no specifics about the English, Science or History courses for most colleges, although some of them require US History/Government and that is one of the requirements of our state, so that should be in there someplace.
Our plan for next year, which will be 9th grade for the twins, looks something like this:
(1) Great Books: Medieval
(1) Biology
(1) Geometry
(1) French or Greek (depending on the student)
(1) US Government & Politics (it’s an election year after all)
(1) Martial Arts (they are testing for black belt this year and they put more than a full credit of time in)
(.5) Logic
(.5) Creative Writing