Many homeschoolers will discover that they don’t need to wait until their child reaches 9th grade to start high school work. You can learn why on today’s Home School Heartbeat with Mike Smith.
Mike Smith:
Our guest this week, Inge Cannon, has joined us to discuss how homeschoolers can handle high school transcripts. Inge, I’ve heard many people say that the junior high school years are the most wasted years in a child’s education. How do parents avoid that wasted time?
Inge Cannon:
Mike, historically, junior high was designed to be a remediation exercise—to take children from primary education and review everything in math and grammar and language arts to make sure that they would be ready for high school. And then in the areas of science and social studies, what we begin to do is get what I call the inoculation version of everything we’re going to get later on. In other words, we learn just enough that we’re forever allergic to studying it again. So I tell parents that if your child is ready to do that work on the high school level, skip the junior high book. Take the high school U.S. history book, or high school world history book; split it in half—do ancient world history one year, modern world history another year. And don’t forget, Mike, any time your student does high school work, he gets high school credit, no matter how young he may be.
Mike:
Thanks, Inge, that’s very helpful. And please join us next time when we’ll talk about community service and extracurricular activities in our transcript. I’m Mike Smith.
