One of the blessings of homeschooling high school is the freedom to build a lifestyle of service for your teens. Volunteering and service mindsets help build good character. Not only that, but they build a good transcript!
Adding service or volunteer hours to a transcript gives it sparkle, which makes transcripts college-attractive. Admissions officers are often looking for students who understand how to build into a community because this can help build good college culture. That is, colleges like to know that homeschool high schoolers are not just sitting at home, but know how to contribute good to the world around him.
However, for non-college-bound teens, why not add your teens’ service hours to the transcript? When you show your teens’ full high school experience, it gives them a more accurate record of their high school years. In this case, transcripts become good memory holders. Not only that but it helps homeschool graduates remember things they can talk about in job interviews:
Tell me about yourself.
Well, not only am I prepared for this job, but I also have a history of being involved in my community…
As you know, there’s not ONE right way to homeschool high school…or to handle homeschool transcripts. However, I will share with you how we handle recording service and volunteer activities.
At the foot of the transcript, we include a section called “Service Hours”. In it we simply record the total number of hours our teens have done service or volunteer work.
This is similar to the way some traditional schools handle recording service on their transcripts. They have a “required number of service hours” for their high schoolers and they simply record the number of hours each teen has earned (equal to or above the required number).
We homeschooling families do not usually need a “required number of service hours” for our teens, since volunteerism is often part of our family lifestyles.
Anyway, you can simply have a section on the transcript titles Service Hours and simply record that total number of hours.
We list our teens frequent activities in the Extracurricular section of the transcript, along with the school year(s) they were done. For instance, if our teens volunteered in the church nursery each month for their junior and senior years of high school, we would list as Extracurriculars:
Church nursery volunteer, 11th and 12th grades
We do this because it shows commitment and consistency in at least some of their volunteer activities. This does not mean that they should not participate in one-off service projects. Of course they should! However, those are not recorded as Extracurriculars.
There’s not ONE right way to earn service hours for the homeschool transcript! That is because there are so many factors in making decisions on how to serve. For instance:
Make this part part of your homeschool planning times and include your teens in a discussion on what they would like to do. Think about and discuss:
As you discuss this together, you both come to good ideas. Not only that, teens start building their confidence and personal meaning as they think about and begin volunteering.
Blogger, curriculum developer at 7SistersHomeschool.com, counselor, life and career coach, SYMBIS guide, speaker, prayer person. 20+year veteran homeschool mom.
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