Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool

I said I would write more this week about credits, transcripts and records. Let me write more about credits today. I shared before that basically, when your child does a class all school year, that’s one credit. A one semester class would be a half credit.

But your child doesn’t have to take a class to get a credit. You could issue credit for their time in a community drama club. You can take a wide variety of things and find the value of it and turn it into credit. You could list home economics on the transcript and give your child credit for cleaning, cooking and babysitting.

There is no one rule for what counts as a credit. Here is a list I found of Pennsylvania’s guidelines. To count as a completed high school course (one credit) a student can do ANY of the following: complete two-thirds of a textbook, have 120 daily logged entries, have 120 hours of logged study, complete a 10 page research paper, complete a college course, or pass an AP exam. These are good guidelines, except I don’t think you need to “log” your children’s every move unless you’re required to.

An Easy Peasy course meets the “120 daily logged entries” requirement. Let’s look at the time guideline. One credit is 120+ hours in a year. A half credit would be 60-90 hours in a year. Think about how much time your child spends making video games on the computer, writing a blog or a novel, taking photographs, etc. If there is something your child loves to do, chances are this time requirement is easily met. You can turn any of these types of things into a course listed on a transcript as long as they put enough time into it. I’ll plan on writing about transcripts tomorrow and how to put a grade on “courses” like these.

Post updated: 2/27/14

I got an email alerting me that “In another Facebook group there are a few women in there who keep bashing EP because the resources are supposedly aligning with Common Core.”  I’ve also been told that my name is being used in anti-Common Core groups saying that I am “spreading poison.” I have read lies that people have been spreading about what I include in the curriculum.

I’m against the Common Core in general. This curriculum is not aligned with CC. Those speaking against me are saying this because there are resources on EP that are aligned to the Common Core curriculum, specifically sites such as Khan Academy and Georgia Virtual Learning. Every academic site meets some of the CC standards. If you teach your child to read, you are meeting a standard. If you teach your child to add, you are meeting a standard. If you allow your child to listen to an alphabet song on Starfall.com, he or she is playing with “aligned” curriculum. I use Khan Academy in one of my math courses. That course is the same course it was from before Khan Academy aligned their curriculum with the CC. When Khan changed something, I just added in a different resource.

Just please know that I am against these standards in terms of the government trying to dictate what our children learn and trying to mold our children’s worldview. I want to mold my children myself to have a biblical worldview. I do link to a billion sites, as you know. I know that some of them are aligned to those standards, but I linked to specific pages for specific purposes. Two plus two still equals four even if it’s on a school website aligned to the CC.

My own children use Easy Peasy and I want them learning TRUTH. I have been working on the high school site. I am very aware of all this as I decide on content. I do use sites that are aligned to the CC. In one course I show the students propaganda in course materials. In another course students are shown two opposing historical viewpoints. This is not spreading poison. It’s teaching truth. It’s helping our kids be innocent as doves but shrewd as snakes.

So hopefully I’m clear. If you hear “bashing” of EP, please don’t allow them to scare you. Think and choose for yourself. If you decide that you won’t use any website that is aligned with CC, then EP is not for you. If you do use EP and ever come across specific content that I use that you think is questionable, please contact me and it will be looked into right away. We have thousands of eyes and ears that can work together to protect our children.

One thing that is really hard to understand about homeschooling, especially for those pulling out of public school, is that your school district does not graduate your child. You are now your child’s school administrator and you will declare your child a high school graduate.

Some states give requirements for what a high school student must complete, things like 4 credits of English, 3 credits of science, etc. One credit is basically the equivalent of a full school-year course. A half credit would be a one semester course. Not every state will give you these guidelines, and even if they do, my aim isn’t the lowest possible amount of schooling to “finish.” If you use this full curriculum, you’ll do four years of things like science and math and not the minimum required. Either your child is going to college so you want to impress the best you can with a full course load, or this is your child’s last official schooling, so why not learn as much as possible?

Whether your state gives specific high school requirements or not, you are still your child’s school administrator, and you will decide when your child graduates. You must follow your state’s laws, but you have all of the authority to issue a transcript and a diploma. You can create a diploma or send off for one from a company that creates them.

There are still some places that don’t recognize homeschool diplomas. The HSLDA recently stepped in for a student whose college was requiring he take the GED. The school accepted the diploma without the test. You may run into ignorance out there. But from a legal standpoint, you are your school official and your records and transcript are official. You don’t need accreditation. All public schools aren’t even accredited. There won’t be any check box on the college application about whether you came from an accredited school.

I am going to give you some links to read more. I wanted to point out that I posted a blank transcript on the high school page. It’s a Word document so you can edit it. I also posted a sample transcript from Lee Binz.

Long post…I’ll write more this week about credits, records, and transcripts. Hope this helps. I’ll try to give you the best info I have from my research of all this. Here are the links.

http://a2zhomeschooling.com/teens/graduation_done_yet_homeschooling/

http://donnayoung.org/forms/help/high-school-requirements.htm

I get a lot of people wondering how I did this, how I had the time to put it together, how I came up with what to do. By the grace of God, let me tell the story of this curriculum.

Four years ago (originally posted in 2013), I had no written plan of what we were going to do for school each day. Daily I chose something for my two older kids to do from our bookshelf and from my collection of online freebies. We lived in a tiny two room apartment overseas, so it wasn’t hard to keep tabs on my kids getting their work done while the littles napped.

When we went on furlough the next year, it was harder to stay on top of everything. There are a lot more distractions in America. I started writing out my kids’ assignments. Over the weekend I would write out what my older two kids needed to do each day for the coming week. Then I tagged bookmarked websites with the day I wanted them to visit each site. What happened at the end of each week? The day of the week tags were removed from the bookmarks and new links were tagged. The written assignment sheets were thrown away and new ones were written. It got discouraging that I was losing all of the work I was putting into their school. I knew I would just have to do it all over again for each of my kids. I wanted to save my work.

When I decided to write their assignments online to save my work for my other children, I made the decision to write it so that anyone could use it. I didn’t want to have all of this for only my kids to use. I also wanted to help others who needed to homeschool for free.

It was hard at first writing up assignments because I had to change my approach. I used to do English through what we were learning for history or science. I tried that at first but quickly realized that English had to be separate in order to make it progressive.

At that point, my kids used math textbooks, other books we owned, as well as freebies I had downloaded, but I knew if others were going to use it, I had to use materials that were always available to everyone. I stopped downloading the daily freebies (so happy to not be chasing freebies anymore) and stopped using our hand-me-down textbooks.

For the first time, I gave my kids off for the summer in 2011, and I worked on writing assignments online. By the time my kids started school, I was eight weeks ahead. Once I got going and figured out what I was doing, I had a routine. I was up at 4 or 5 AM and did my quiet time and one Bible lesson. Then I did one week for one subject. One day I wrote a week’s worth of history assignments. One day I did science, etc. If I didn’t meet my goal by the time the kids were up, I tried to finish up during nap time. I had my routine and made it happen most of the time. By the end of the year, I was four weeks ahead of my kids. At this point I don’t think anyone else was using the curriculum.

I started right away on the following year, getting ahead and then keeping up. At night I did extra. I worked on preschool and kindergarten while my husband taught his internet classes until 11:30PM. I already had a lot of that learning to read stuff for my family, but I knew the curriculum wouldn’t be complete without it. Once I had that second year ready, in 2012, I announced the curriculum in a few places.

I got pregnant which spurred me on to work harder. I couldn’t sleep well after a few months, so I stayed up again working ahead, waiting for my husband to end his work night. Since I had finished the courses my kids were working on currently, I could put together individual courses all at once instead of working on every course at the same time. It was so much easier, so I could move faster. I also have the great blessing that when a new baby comes, my husband takes first shift in the morning, keeping the baby, so I can still have my quiet time and get a Bible lesson done.

So, that’s the story. It’s not really a super tale, just a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of thing and a good God leading me without me even realizing it. It didn’t start with an aspiration to create my own homeschool curriculum. I just wrote down my children’s daily assignments, thinking it was the best use of my time and energy. I had in mind my overarching goals and progression, but as always, the materials I used were what were available to me. I didn’t follow anyone else’s plan, or scope and sequence. I used websites and looked at their games and worksheets for certain grade levels and used those.

I obviously enjoy the work (most of the time) or I wouldn’t have been able to keep it up. It has made me realize that the Lord has gifted me to do this. I used to consider myself a jack of all trades, master of none. I discovered through this that I do have a special talent. It may sound silly, but I write outlines. It’s what I’ve done here. I’ve organized my children’s education into an outline, so it’s an easy-to-follow plan. I’ve never posted any credentials. I’m just a mom trying to prepare my kids for whatever the future might hold and with God’s abundant grace helping other parents do the same.

At one point I had three kids using one computer. One kid worked before breakfast, one after, and one after lunch. It was no problem finishing by around 3pm.

If you have kids sharing a computer, there are things you can do to help facilitate.

*Have everything printed that they will need. Write the day number in the top corner of the page, so you won’t have to get on the computer to see which worksheet they need to do that day.

*Have your elementary (L) level kids and your middle school (M) kids do their history, science, etc. together. Have them start with the program year so that one isn’t waiting on the other to finish his level to start each day.

*After doing their history, etc., one kid can do the level assignments while the other does any worksheets.

*If you have an ereader, download their books, so one kid can read while someone else is using the computer.

*Let them know that if there is a game they really love that day, they can play it more once everyone is finished with school.