For our nineth and final installment in the series on "What We Do" in our homeschool, today we are going to be discussing electives. After all what homeschool is complete without some fun subjects in the mix. If you haven't seen our other post in the series or would like to catch up
Incorporating Electives
Electives in some ways are simple they can be anything and everything. They are those random subjects that your kid is interested in and they are the housekeeping skills that you want them to learn. They might be entirely self-taught like a friend of ours who has taught himself the banjo among other instruments and today plays in part for his living. They might be a class that a beloved grandparent or family friend "teaches." It might be a free online class or an extracurricular activity that you pay for. They can be short classes that meet for only a few sessions or year long activities. Really your imagination is the only limit.
Over the years, we've fulfilled this area in several ways. We've worked on swimming, housework, and art class at home, just to name a few. Some of these were piecemeal, and some they enjoyed more than others, such as swimming as opposed to home ec. Currently the kids are looking into the idea of finding a free or very low cost e-course online on photography for smart phones, to improve their picture taking for Adventure Fridays.
One of the chief advantages in homeschooling is pursuing interest. I don't expect I will have a child that enters Julliard Art School because of the electives we dabbled in, but you never know what will develop into a life long passion or will prove a useful skill in their future. Exploring their interest is something that I can make time for and that they truly enjoy in their homeschool day. I'm not limited to nights and weekends, but can make it a part of their day. As you surely knew before this post, I'm a huge fan of following their interest and this is a place where they can shine.
Sometimes these things crash and burn. Britt tried out a coding class last year, and lets just say between the two of us it's still a foreign language. However, he did like the challenge of something completely knew and over the course of the class figured out that coding just wasn't for him. Sometimes they just need to right helps. Britt and Ruth have both tried to teach themselves an instrument, and gotten almost nowhere with it. When we have a little more cash flow, music lessons are something that they would like to explore. Other times they just fit for a time. The older kids all loved playing baseball and softball as well as participating in 4H, and would probably enjoy it again, but it was only a good fit for a season for us. Perhaps in the future we'll have opportunities to revisit those experience and perhaps we'll find new adventures in store.
Logging Electives
The real question I see among most homeschooler isn't how to incorporate electives but how to log them. We are getting to the age where logging is more essential as we begin crafting transcripts, so this has been on my mind this year as we enjoy elective classes. Florida gives some general guidelines for how many hours constitutes a credit and so we are tracking the time that we spend in various subjects. That can be done a few different ways. One is to have a curriculum designed to last for a certain number of weeks, and call that then either a half credit or a full credit depending on the time investment. The other way is to track the number of hours that you do an activity and then award credit accordingly.
They are very similar but come at the subject in opposite ways. For example, I have put together a history course for the two oldest, I can estimate that I spend around an hour a day on history 4 days a week, over the course of roughly 40 weeks, gives me 160 hours, plus field trips and such. Since the Florida guidelines state a credit hour is 135 hours of instruction time. So my history class will easily meet that. However, in the case of our hiking on Adventure Fridays I'm tracking the time we spend out in nature hiking and learning each week, and at the end of the year I will see what to award my high schoolers toward a PE credit.
At this point the trick becomes determining how to best record the information for your children's transcripts. There are all sorts of resources out there that provide course numbers for transcripts along with a class description, a Florida based resource is CPalms. It provides some general guidelines that you can use to either classify what you child is doing or make your own course. There is no Florida specific class for hiking, and I may write my own course description and call it Hiking I. However, we might call it Personal Fitness, Recreational Activities, or Outdoor Education and use the framework and familiarity that those classes provide. The advantage to using state wide class numbers, name, and descriptions is that they are more familiar to college entrance boards.
Rounding Out Your Lessons
This may all seem to simple to you, but electives really are a wide open field. Feel free to let your children explore anything your sanity and budget can handle and then determine how to classify it for academic purposes. The best advise I can give you for electives is to just have fun with it. There is a vast world of knowledge out there, let them explore it all.
Well, while today's post was short and sweet, I hope it rounded out and completed our series on what we do for our homeschool. There are so many areas that we can dive into and explore as homeschoolers, that we could right countless articles on the subject. But I trust these major areas at least gave you a glimpse into one family's homeschool routine and hopefully even gave you some ideas of ways that you can tweak or adjust your own homeschool to be even better. I know I'm always looking for fresh ideas and ways to make our homeschool days smoother and more enjoyable. So please share your own wins and if you like failures. Share your best tips and tricks, and for goodness sake if nothing else, send me some spelling ideas. Ha!
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