Podcast #183 – Creating a Homeschool Transcript

Take the mystery out of making a high school transcript for your homeschooler!

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Resources mentioned:

• Homeschool Graduation Requirements – A Simple Plan (post)
• Lee Binz The HomeScholar (Total Transcript Solutions)
• Homeschool Hall

Transcript of Podcast #183

If you have a homeschooled high schooler and you are starting to think about creating a transcript for them, this is the podcast for you. Even if you feel like you are way behind the power curve on this, maybe you are actually getting ready to graduate them this year, or maybe you’re way ahead of the power curve and they’re actually an eighth grader and you’re just thinking ahead to the high school years. I am here to help you to take the chaos out of all of this and create a calm, peaceful, step by step way of building a transcript that is useful for no matter what your child decides to do after high school. Let’s dive in!

Hello, friends. Welcome to the Raising Arrows podcast. I’m Amy Roberts from raisingarows.net and this is episode number 183, Creating a Homeschool Transcript.

So my experience here is, having graduated four children, three of whom definitely needed a transcript. The fourth, I went ahead and built her a transcript, but she hasn’t needed it as yet. The reason that my first two needed a transcript was because they needed to get into college, and then my third one needed it for the military. So as you can see, I do have experience in this. And years ago, thankfully, I ran into somebody who really helped me to take the stress out of building a transcript. And that woman was Lee Benz from the Home Scholar. She had the Total Transcript Solution, I believe was the name of the product that she had. And in that she had lots of different templates and lots of information that was super, super helpful to me. I believe she still has a website that she helps homeschool moms learn how to do high school, how to do, transcripts, how to take care of all of those things that kind of seem stressful about high school years. That website is homehighschoolhelp.com and forward slash Homeschool-Transcript-Solution, you will find the whole program that she put together years ago that I still believe is a very good way to go if you are feeling completely overwhelmed by putting together a transcript. This is a really good program.

But I’m gonna walk you through some things today that I really believe you will be able to, manage this on your own if you just take it piece by piece and realize that this isn’t actually as scary as you may think it is. I have been surprised by how easy the process is and how most schools and the military alike really didn’t question my transcript. And it’s because it was put together in a format that made sense. It was signed, it had all the components that it needed to have. And so that’s what I’m going to share with you today. What do you need? What does it need to look like? And show you just how easy this is.

The very first step I want you to do, though, is to get onto the Internet and I want you to look for examples of Homeschool transcripts. Actually, the best thing to put in to the search engine is transcript templates. And I want you to just look through the various options there are for these templates. There are actually a lot of free ones out there where you just download the template and you plug in everything. There are also programs like Homeschool Hall, where you just put in the different classes and they build the transcript for you. That’s a really good option as well. So I want you to look over those different templates and I’m going to tell you what I believe needs to be on the transcript. You may see other things on transcripts that you look at, but I feel like these are the things. Again, I said I’ve never been questioned about my transcripts that I’ve done for my kids. So these are the things that I feel like got us there.

So at the top of the page, I have the name of our homeschool. And years ago, I was determined to not hide the fact that we homeschooled. I wanted it to be well known within the name of the school, that we were a homeschool. So I chose Heritage Arrows, Homeschool, that came from the verses that also make up the name of my blog, Raising Arrows. And that’s from Psalm 127, verse 4. And so that is how we got our homeschool name.

And so I have the name of the school because they typically want to know the name of the school. And then I either have a full accounting of the school itself. one of the transcripts that I used from Homeschool hall, that’s what they did. They had the information on one side, and so there was the name of the school. And then I had my husband’s name, because technically my husband is the principal and I am the teacher. Most of you know, that’s how that works in a homeschool setting. Then I had our phone number, I had an email address, and I had our own physical address on that school information section. And then I had our child’s full name and the fact that this was his high school transcript.

Another transcript that I used had the name of the school at the very top and then our child’s name with all of their information, including their Social Security number on there and the address. And all of that information was also on there as well. So you can either put it under the school information or under your child’s information.

Somewhere on there you are going to have signatures as well. And I put two signatures. I put my husband as the principal and myself as the teacher. And I have those usually at the bottom of the transcript. And then in four quadrants in the center of the transcript is where you’re going to have 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade and 12th grade classes. And these are all going to be separated out. They are also going to include how many credits total in each of those years and the GPA total for each of those years. So as you look at the transcripts, just pay attention to that. Do you have four different sections for 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th? Do you have a place for signatures? Do you have a place for the information for the school and for your child? That’s what you’re looking for. Very basic stuff, but now we’re going to talk about how you actually build this.

On my blog I have a post about graduation requirements. The name of the post is Homeschool Graduation Requirements – a simple plan, and it will walk you step by step through how to figure out what your child needs in order to graduate.

Now, if you’re at the end of your homeschool years and you’re scrambling to build a transcript, we’re going to talk about that as well. But if you’re at the beginning, this is a great time to look through the requirements that your state requires and kind of map out where you need to go. And that’s what this particular post will help you with. The Homeschool graduation requirements post, it’s more the front end building a plan to move forward with into the high school years. But it can also be very helpful if you’ve already done the high school years and you’re trying to brainstorm and figure out where to plug in all these different things on a transcript. Because homeschooling is often very different from public schooling. Public schooling compartmentalizes all the different grades. And if you have been doing some sort of public school esque homeschooling program, you will also find that it’s compartmentalized as well. So it might be a little easier to plug it in because you definitely did English I in the freshman year and so on and so forth. But for us, we do not have a compartmentalized program that we do. We have a very fluid, interwoven program. So I have to separate all the parts and pieces and put them into the correct year. Sometimes it’s not actually the correct year. And that’s, that’s what I’m going to try to help you untangle all of that.

If you are doing a program that’s like a boxed curriculum where everything is laid out for you year by year, you’re just going to plug into each of those quadrants what your child did in ninth grade, what they did in 10th grade, what they did in 11th, and what they did in 12th. You’re going to make sure that you have all the grades that they got, the total gpa, the total number of credits. That’s important.

If you look at your state requirements, you will see that there is a total number of credit hours that they need in order to graduate. So you want to make sure that the number of credits that you have for your child matches up to how many they need to actually graduate high school.

Now, that does not mean that you can’t have extra. That’s certainly acceptable. But you don’t want to have less than. You want to make sure that if Your state requires 27 credits, you have 27 credits. If I remember right, our state requires something like 21. And so I usually end up with more than that for my kids because I want to give them credit for the things that they’ve actually done. But you just definitely don’t want to have less than that because there will be questions then about whether or not you did enough in order to graduate them. And places like the military and colleges are going to notice that kind of thing.

The other thing that I often have on my transcript as well are the dates of when each of those years in school happened. So like this, if this is their senior year, then this is the ’24-’25 school year. And I would put that right next to the 12th grade, 2024, 2025, to show that this is when they actually were in that year.

And I know sometimes that is also fluid in homeschooling families. We homeschool year round and so our years kind of flow into each other and end up not being as clear cut as if they were in public school. So you have to keep that in mind as well. Again, untangling all the parts and pieces, especially if you have a very interwoven curriculum. But you can do that. It is really absolutely acceptable to take the parts and pieces out and put them into individual categories that maybe aren’t Even in the actual year that they took them in order to balance everything out.

Okay, so let’s kind of unpack this a little bit. Let’s say that you’re doing a history based curriculum. So you have been learning about the ancient world. And you started with creation and you went through a Bible survey, part of your history. You went through ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome. You had all the different mythologies, you had, some art appreciation that went in there, you had some government foundations with Greek and Roman information. You had some architecture. You also had some early science.

And perhaps you’re using a completely separate science book. So you’re going to put that into the year that it fits with the best.

And whatever course your child took in high school, that’s the course that they get credit for. And you can actually pull in junior high classes as well. Especially if your child was more advanced and they took classes that were more high school level while they were in junior high, it is perfectly acceptable to pull those into the high school years.

So a good example of this is pre-algebra. Let’s say that you have it in your head that pre-Algebra is an 8th grade class. And when your freshman took pre-algebra because they were struggling a little bit with math, you feel like you can’t count that. And therefore you now have to find a lot of different math classes to cram into their high school years in order to get them for credits of math (if that’s what your state requires).

That is bogus. That is a myth. The class that they took in high school is the class they get credit for. I tell people all the time in the public school I was in, I was in pre algebra as an eighth grader with seniors. Seniors in high school. This was their last chance and they were taking pre algebra. The public school does it. You can do it too. Now, would I recommend taking pre algebra as a senior? No. Not unless you feel like you have a child who needs an individualized education plan or iep, someone who maybe needs a little more help, and that’s as high level as you’re going to get. But I don’t think that’s typically the case.

Now. I had a child who struggled in math and he took pre algebra as a ninth grader, then he took algebra, then he took consumer math, he never took geometry. He never took algebra 2. He was really struggling and it took him the entire four years to get through those three math classes. He needed more time and that was just who he was. I probably could have put together a separate IEP for him. But I didn’t see it be necessary. I just put it onto the transcript the way that it was and it was accepted just fine.

Now the interesting thing with him was that he’s very strong in his English. He not only had English I his freshman year, he also had a creative writing class. And I did not feel like it was a small enough thing to put it under the English I. It was really a very extensive class and he learned a lot and he wrote a lot on the side as well. And so I wanted to give him credit for having done the creative writing as well.

Okay, so going back to this interwoven history based curriculum where I was sharing with you all the different parts and pieces that maybe you were learning in there. If you notice, you had this pretty rich year of Bible history. So you can call that a Bible survey, you can call that Bible history, something along those lines because it was so extensive, because you were doing this entire survey of the Bible. Or maybe you just did the Old Testament, call it that and put it in its proper place along with ancient world history.

Maybe you also had some art appreciation in there or art history in there, put that in there as well. Whatever science they were doing that year, put that in there. Were there any electives that came out of this? Or have they been taking piano lessons or a foreign language?

Maybe you did some Latin while you were doing the ancient history. Make sure that it is a full year’s worth of Latin, which is not as much as you might think it is. Because you have all the conjugations and things like that that have to be done with Latin. And you don’t get very far in a year. But make sure that you’re not cheating the system, you’re not lying about it. They really did enough Latin to count as a credit of Latin.

Put your math in there and anything else that they did that year that should be in there should be given credit. One thing that I gave one of our sons s credit for, actually two of our sons have gotten credit for video production and filming. And that is because they worked with me to produce my videos and to edit them and to film them. And they did a fantastic job and I wanted them to have credit for that. And they did it for a whole year. And so I wanted to make sure that I was giving them credit for that on their high school transcript. Another thing that you can do is take classes that were done in a co op setting, put those into the transcript, even if they Overlap with another similar class. If they overlap too much, why not separate them out into two different years, even if they were done concurrently? So for instance, I had one child who took astronomy and anatomy and physiology. One was a co op class and one was with us at home. Well, it was done concurrently, same year, overlapping. But I wanted to make sure that I had science in a 10th grade class and science in an 11th grade class. And so that’s what I did. I separated them out and put them in two different years, even though he was taking them pretty much overlapping in one year. This is particularly helpful if you have one year that was super heavy on electives and you need to just kind of move those electives around or you need to move certain classes around because you don’t want one year to show up as 12 credits and another year you’ve only got like five credits. You need to balance these out and it is okay to separate them into different years even if they weren’t in that year. I know some of you might be having a little bit of a difficult time wrapping your brain around that, but really this is simply an accounting of what your child did in their high school years. Nobody, and I mean nobody cares what year they took that class. They just want to know that it was taken. They really, at the heart of this, want to know if the credits are there. And so they’re really at the end of the day looking at the credits and the GPA and that’s it. They just want to know that that is all on track. Now you might be wondering, how do I figure out the gpa? One really good program that I mentioned earlier was Homeschool Hall. It will figure it out for you. If you just plug the grades in, it will automatically generate the GPA for you. It’ll automatically generate the credits for you. So that might be an option. And those are $20 a transcript. And you have the ability, I believe, to go back in and adjust anything that you need to, like unlimited adjustments, I think. And so you can just order that $20 transcript and then tweak it as needed and keep printing off copies that you need. Now some of you might be thinking, what does this thing need to look like? Do I need to print this off on Pigskin and have it notarized and make it supericial? The answer is no. I simply printed ours off PDF on a piece of copy paper. And that is all that these schools in the military cared about. They just needed a copy. So we would print it and I would sign it My husband would sign it and that was that. And they would send that in with an application for the college, or they sent that in with their military paperwork and it was sufficient. That was all they needed. No notary, no, special document paper, nothing like that at all. It did not need to be special at all. And I think that’s because things have really changed a lot in our world and in our educational system where that’s pretty much all the schools are doing. And in many times they’re not even printing them off. They’re all digital. And so you could even probably do that if that’s something that your college or whoever is needing the document. You could put it into a Google Doc, you could put it into Dropbox or something like that and then just send a link. But I will tell you that the places that I have had to send transcripts, all they needed was a printed copy on a piece of copy paper. They do not care what it looks like. They just care that the credits and the GPA are there. Okay, I am going to finish this podcast by giving you a step by step example what each section of one of my children’s transcripts looked like. This is going to be our second child. At the top of her transcript is the name of our school. Then to the left is her full name, her Social Security number, her address, and my phone number. Then I have freshman year. And her transcript is very boring and plain looking. It’s just words with some bolded spaces here and there. So her freshman year. And I have the dates of that. Then I have final grade and credit.

These are the classes that I put into her freshman year. Now remember these might some of them not have been taken in her freshman year. Some of these might have been as an eighth grader, some of these might have been as a sophomore. And I needed to juggle them over into a different year to make it work out well. She took a lot of extra classes, so I needed to do that. So here’s what we did. English 1, Ancient World History, Physical Science, Algebra 1, Spanish 1, Photography and Piano. She took piano lessons all that year. She was doing photography extensively at that time in her life. And she was taking Spanish and algebra and all of those things. So I have a final grade for her and all of those. And then I have her total credits.

Then in her sophomore year, I put that right underneath, I have the dates for that. And she took English 2, Algebra 2, Medieval History, Biology with a lab, US government, Fitness and Nutrition, French 1, and Art. The reason that art was in there is because during our Medieval history studies we do a lot of art. And so I put the art there. She also took a French class that year. and the US Government was because she had taken so many years of a program called Teen Pact that I was able to put that in under her sophomore year. That gave her eight credits that year.

Now, I could have moved some of these credits to a different place, but I went ahead and put them there. Her junior year she took English 3, Survey of Church History, American Sign Language, French American History, Economics and Graphic Arts. The graphic arts was because she was creating a lot of graphics for her own posts, for things on Instagram, for things. For me, I wanted to give her credit for that. Economics was an actual class that I have my kids take. The Survey of Church History. That was actually a bleed over from the Medieval history time because we already had eight credits there. I pushed it into her junior year and even though she had been taking sign language for many years prior to that, I went ahead and pushed that clear into her junior year because she was lacking full credits there. And so that gave her seven credits in her junior year.

In her senior year, right below that, I have English four, Advanced Biology, Modern World History, Geometry, American Sign Language two, and Fitness and Nutrition. That was six credits in her senior year. And she actually did have a very light senior year. we moved shortly before that. And so she could have probably graduated a year early, but because of the move, we had to put some things into that year. Then below that, I have total credits earned are 28. Her cumulative GPA was a 4.0. And I also put her date of graduation. I also put a grading table at the bottom just to make it super simple. And that was an A equals 4, B equals 3, C equals 2, D equals 1, F equals 0. And then I simply have a little verbiage at the bottom says, I do hereby certify and affirm that this is the official transcript and record of my daughter, her name in the academic studies from the time she started that date to the time that she finished and that date. And then I have her dad’s name with father, slash administrator, and my name with mother, teacher, and a line above those for us to sign on. That is her final transcript. That is all it is. I keep it on my computer. Every time she’s ever needed a transcript, we simply print it off and res sign it again. Hopefully this has taken some of the mystery out of transcripts. They are really not that difficult. And trust me, I have not run into Any problem with any of the places that my children have needed transcripts because they look professional, they look complete, that is all they care about. Now, if I had handed in some handwritten, scrawled piece of paper that didn’t have a signature and didn’t have a lot of information, certainly that would have been questioned. But a piece of paper that looks like it has everything to it is professionally printed off and it’s not a jumbled mess is going to be enough to satisfy most places that you need a transcript for. Now, if your child is headed to an Ivy League school, you probably already have someone helping you with transcripts and with all of the application process, that’s going to look a little different because certain schools have certain regulations. But for the most part, most of us are sending our children to schools and colleges and the military and those places need something simple and legible. That’s all they’re looking for. So get out there, find yourself a, template that you relate to, one that you feel like is easy for you to use. Get that template, start plugging things in. If you need to take a bit to write down all the different things that you’ve done over the years, do that again. Take a look at my blog post about homeschool graduation requirements. That will also help you kind of think through all the different classes that your child might have taken that would fit into this transcript. Put together the credit hours, put together the gpa. I will say a little thing about GPA before I finish this podcast, and that is that you need to grade them based on effort, based on how well they did, based on attitude. I require my children get A’s and B’s. I do not allow them to get below that. I would rather not even count the class because if they are not getting As’s and Bs, I feel like they didn’t learn the material. And so I am really adamant about that. And I don’t know how you feel about that. And it may be that they got the in a class that was a co op class or a D in a class, I still would really highly encourage you to figure out why they got that grade and if you can redo it, because there are certainly classes. I had a child who had an algebra issue and don’t we all have algebra issues? Anyway, he had an algebra issue and I made him go back through algebra with a different program to help him understand it. I do not want my children to fail at a class and just push them through. And so my children have a’s and B’s in all their classes, because that is what I require. So I would encourage you to help your child to achieve A’s and B’s. Maybe a C here and there, but I feel like even that is questionable as to whether or not they actually learned the material. And that’s what I’m looking for. Did they engage with the material? Did they learn the material? When I get their tests back, are they well thought out answers? Are they getting most of the information correct? Not every class we do has a testing system. Our history is not tested. It is interactive and I can see whether or not they’re interacting with the information. I ask a lot of questions and they give me a lot of feedback and I know whether or not they’re actually participating. And if they’re not participating, we need to do something different so that they do. And that is the beauty of homeschooling. Nobody gets pushed through. You get to stop and take a second and figure out what’s going on and help your child excel and achieve. So as we’re here at the end of the year, I hope that this takes a little bit of the mystery out of creating a transcript. And if you were at the beginning of this high journey, kudos to you. I hope the transcript process is very simple and very stressless for you as you go into these high school years. Have a fantastic end of the school year, my friends.