Are you considering homeschooling your teenager or currently looking for tips? Homeschooling offers tons of great opportunities and benefits, like flexibility, choosing your own curriculum and making your own schedule. Putting curriculum together and keeping track of everything does tend to get overwhelming though. If your child is in high school, it gets even more challenging. 

Plan Around Post-High School Plans

First and foremost, it’s important to consider your teenager’s long-term plans. What do they plan to do after high school? Go to college? Start a job? Take a year off? All of these will factor into your overall homeschool plan. For instance, if they plan to go into the workforce, you should focus on classes that feed into what job they’d like to go after. Whereas, if they plan to go into college, you should focus on SAT test prep and classes that line up with their intended major.

Start a Transcript ASAP

As soon as you start freshman year, go ahead and start a transcript. Starting it immediately and keeping up with it will make things much easier closer to the end of high school. Even if your child isn’t considering college, it’s good to have it in case they ever change their mind or if an employer wants to see it. I created my own just by looking around at resources online and in homeschool Facebook groups. It really wasn’t hard at all, thankfully!

Utilize Resources 

The only real downfall I found with homeschooling high school is I oversaw finding out everything. It’s important to track down resources, from social media groups to websites, and always keep those bookmarked. 

One example of a big high school item that needs to be dealt with is driver’s education. That’s something a public or private school tends to take care of but, in homeschool, it must be done on your own. I had no clue what to do and spent a lot of time researching. Luckily, there are lots of great private driver education schools in our area. Don’t forget to get the Driver’s Eligibility Certificate (DEC) form from the DNPE website. 

Focus on Content, Not Grades 

While it’s great to have grades for the transcript, one of the biggest benefits of homeschooling is you can focus more on the content vs. standardized tests. You can still have grades but not make them the major focus like it tends to be in public schools. Instead, focus on electives your teenager is interested in and topics in main classes that they feel passionate about.

Create a Schedule that Works for Your Family

When kids are little, we constantly hear about how much sleep they need, but somehow, it gets glossed over in the teenage years. However, it’s more important than ever. So, if your teenager tends to be a night owl, consider letting them do coursework then and get extra sleep in the morning. Or, if they rise with the sun, go ahead and knock things out and do other things the rest of the day.  

I hope these tips help you and your teenager navigate homeschooling high school with a little more ease!