Homeschooling High School Without Tears

Homeschooling - Gustoff family in Des Moines (Photo credit: IowaPolitics.com)

by Jamie Gaddy

Homeschooling requires a lot, but homeschooling high school really takes effort. As a homeschooling mom of six, I am now homeschooling 2 high school aged children.

Both of them are very different and have very different educational requirements. Yet, I have found with each of them that I need to keep that motivated while challenging them academically.

The only problem I have is that we have a budget to stick to; which means that I don't have a lot to spend on getting them the variety of courses that they need.

For this reason, I began to research the various FREE online courses that are available on the internet. I began to realize that I literally had a wealth of resources right at my fingertips. There are so many amazing options with the open course ware that colleges across our country have made available.

These courses are high quality, and are usually from amazing universities such as MIT and even Yale. During this past year, we have been able to use these courses to gain incredible knowledge, and then to validate this knowledge we have taken the CLEP test that corresponds to each course.

This not only gives them viable course work for high school, but also college credit as well! It is definitely a win/win situation for each of them. This used to be a fairly unused method of dual enrollment.

However, in the last few years, with the explosion of open course ware CLEP testing for college credit is growing exponentially.

If you are wondering how you can find these courses and others like them, you can use a great web site called Let's Homeschool High School. This site has been invaluable for me as I have planned my children's high school years.

I am impressed by the level and quality of the courses that I have used and am even more excited because we have been able to take amazing courses for FREE, with simply the cost of the CLEP tests.

My oldest daughter is now applying to colleges, and has most recently applied to Mercer University and was pleasantly surprised at how home school friendly they were.

For those of you who prefer to homeschool via textbooks and not the internet, the same can be done through your local library. You can purchase a CLEP study book and then check out the books you need to study for the exams for FREE.

This allows you to get the material and formulate it into a course type setting. You can then easily take the CLEPT test to validate your course and again gain college credit that can be transferred to almost every college in the United States.

As a homeschooling mom of six, I help challenge my children with curriculum that I make as well as online curriculum from http://www.time4learning.com. I am a freelance writer, college professor, pastor's wife, and a aspiring artist. What a mix!

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