teens

6 Ways to Organize Your Homeschooled High School Teen

April 17, 2015 | 7 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Organization is not something we should just learn our self, but it’s a blessing we need to pass on to our homeschooled high school teen.

6 Ways to Organize Your Homeschooled High School Teen @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Look at these 6 ways to organize your homeschooled high school teen.

1. Dedicated space.

Source: PBteen

There is nothing more important to helping your teen stay organized than having a place for “it all”.

From the time they start learning to drive until the time they graduate, they have a mounting amount of things to take up their space.

Like you, they too need to know that when they put something away, somebody else will not move it.
Having both a dedicated space to store their items and to study at will help them to learn to manage their space.

2. Coloring is for High School.

If you have a teen that loves to organize, then something that makes a young organizer get giddy is a not only a new set of high lighters, but a color coordinating system.

I allow high lighting in books at any level if it will help my boys retain their information.
Yes, I know the book won’t have any resale value, but I am foremost concerned with teaching my boys a method to study.
They are all visual learners and so having an easy system for remembering new words and key points when studying is one I encourage.
Finding answers to questions happens when the answer is highlighted or underlined.
Too help them develop a code for each color.
For example, we used green for new words, then reviewing material becomes a snap.

3. Written or Digital Planner.

Though I love techie things, I found that having a paper planner or just even a daily checklist if a planner sounds cumbersome to a teen was a better fit for us than a digital device.

Student Planner 15 min increments editable 1

Student Planner 15 min increments editable 2

(2 Page View for the Student Planner – Tracking in 15 minute increments.)

I managed my boys’ time on line and because being on the internet was something they could not do in private, we found it easier to manage their time through easy paper checklists.

4. Subject Balance.

Taking their notebooks, planners or checklists with them in their bedrooms gave my kids time to look over what they actually did versus what we planned.
Like us, they can over plan.
Learning to balance the time they spend on each subject is critical to keeping the flow to their day balance.
High school is the time to learn to organize subjects differently.
For example, like a lot of college or upper level subjects, they may tackle one or two subjects intensely and then move on to others.
What matters is what is accomplished at the end of a semester or at the end of however your track a school term.
Let them try different approaches to organizing the approach they take to school subjects while they live with you.
That is the time to see whether a creative idea works or not.

5. Paper Management.

Mr. Senior 2013 came up with his own system of managing pages for assignments for the week.
Actually, it was a perfect example of how our children will model our behavior if we put forth a bit of effort.
He adopted a system I had used for years, which was pulling the pages out of a workbook or printing them off for the week from the internet and placing them in an organized bin.

Homeschool High School Student Organization @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

One of the reasons I fell in love with this system was that it showed my kids what was expected each week and they could get started quickly without waiting on me to present their work to them for the day.
Nowadays, they call it a workbox system, but I still love organized bins that hold weekly assignments.
They are super compact if you are short on space and everybody can access them and see what is expected each week.

6. Supplies Matter.

Get your teen excited about an organized lifestyle by providing them with cool supplies.

Whether you’re starting a new school year or want to get your teen excited about organizing, sleek and snazzy supplies can infuse a crush for organizing.
One or two snazzy pieces to organize their supplies will give them a kick start to organizing.
In a world that teaches that we constantly need more of everything to be happy, our teens will be faced with the same decisions about trying to keep their lives clutter free.
Organize your homeschooled high school student now because organizing chaos never worked.
Organization at the high school level is not only the beginning to successfully learning how to follow a workable schedule but to mastering the skills needed for savoring life.

What about you? How do you organize your teen for high school?

Homeschooled Teen Job Performance Evaluation Form

March 3, 2015 | 4 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Homeschooled Teen Job Performance

Today, I created a homeschooled teen job performance evaluation form.

I don’t want to sound corny, but some of the best forms I love to create are ones that help you and me both. I got this email.

I have a 16 year old who has her first job. We are utilizing this as a time management and financial portion of her homeschool. I have been unsuccessful in locating, for lack of better terminology, a questionnaire to have her employer fill out to let us know how well she preforms her job, interacts and demeanor while away from our nest. We know that she has had perfect attendance (she cannot drive yet) but still as her parents and little time to continue to influence her before the real world hits I was hoping that there would be a template of sorts out there and I have yet to locate one. Would you be able to help?

Evaluations by my employer were part of my grade too when I was in high school so I loved this idea.

Teen’s First Job Performance

Excited about sharing this next form with you, I jumped on this idea.

Too, though it was REAL hard I restrained myself from using colors because I wanted it stay more professional looking or something that you could present to your teen’s employer.

Teen Job Performance Evaluation Collage @ Tiina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Download form here.

Thank you always for your suggestions as we build the 7 Step Homeschool Planner together and I hope when the time comes you can use this form.

I am just in love with it and with it being part of your teen’s final high school credit course.

You’ll love these other teen helps:

Hugs and love ya,

Should I Let My Homeschooled Teen Graduate Early?

March 2, 2015 | Leave a Comment
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

The question should I let my homeschooled teen graduate early crossed my mind a few years before high school.

My oldest son was the kind of teen that never needed to be reminded of deadlines and pretty well knew that he wanted to do some missionary type of work after graduation and before he pursued a career.

Too, even before taking his high school courses, he would work into the afternoon without my prodding him to do so.

In ninth grade, I could have noted the 8 credits he had because we schooled year around and because he didn’t mind working long hours on his curriculum.

If he kept up that schedule and pace, he could easily have graduated in about 3 years depending on the number of high school credits I had planned.

In other words, I just knew he was on the path to early graduation. Do you know that my plan was for him to graduate early?

If you have been following me for a while, you know however, that our lives took a significant change when the Mr. had his heart attack during the 10th grade year of Mr. Senior 2013.

Mr. Senior 2013 stepped up and helped me run our business while my husband recuperated and of course, my son’s schooling suffered.

Instead of focusing on the sad time then though, I always like to focus on the good that came out of that for all of my boys.

Though, Mr. Senior 2013 did not graduate early as planned, I realized that he didn’t mind at all because he learned more about our family owned business then he ever knew before.

He has learned valuable skills in customer service because he was the one that had to go with our installation guys to our customer’s homes.

I was very nervous, but like a lot of our mature homeschooling teens he was equal to the task.

Though things don’t always happened as planned, I still see many positives for allowing a mature teen to graduate early.

If a teen knows what they want to pursue, then they have extra time to pursue what interests them.

There are many teens who are mature and already know that they want to pursue a career that requires minimal college time.

I knew one teen boy in our homeschool group that knew he was going to be a chef and wanted to start pursuing culinary classes.

In his early high school years, he was hosting food parties in his home cooking for people.

He had a true gift for the culinary arts and his parents recognized the need to allow him to pursue his dream.

Many schools encourage a gap year and see the benefit of it.

Does it really matter if your teen takes a “gap” year earlier?

Only you as the homeschool parent knows if your teen is mature enough to take a gap year and pursue what interests them.

High achieving and mature teens are ready to get on with their life.

Some teens are high achievers and are ready to get on with their life.

On the flip side, homeschooling is about recognizing the different personalities of our teens and some want to be done with the “book learning” part of school so they can get on with doing activities they know will help them be independent adults.

They may never be the bookish type of person but our teen may still be mature enough to have already decided what course he or she will pursue.

Too, teens feel the same satisfaction that we do as adults when it comes to knowing that they can finish early if they have fulfilled the number of high school credits we require.

If a teen is on the college track, then wouldn’t a year head start help him or her to add a internship to the mix, pursue some other goals or just get them ahead in college?

Homeschooling highschoolers can be complicated, but you don’t have to worry about ALL the choices, just concentrate on what your teen needs.

There is nothing wrong with a teen not being ready to finish high school earlier because teens all mature at different rates and there is no rush – really.

They only have one time in their life to be carefree, independent, yet totally needing your guidance.

There are so many things that affect whether or not it’s beneficial for a homeschooled teen to graduate early, but in the end all that matters is the decision that allows your teen to pursue his or her chosen course when they are ready.

What about you? Do you have a teen you feel may graduate early?

Hugs and love ya,

Check out these other posts to help with homeschooled high school teens:

Homeschool High School Readiness?

Homeschool High School How To Prepare THE Transcript

Homeschoolers Who Want More Than College

Homeschool High School–How to Log Hours for High School?

Treasure the Moments of Homeschooling Testosterone Armed Teen Boys

October 25, 2014 | 5 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

I don’t want to sound cliché, but I treasure the moments of homeschooling testosterone armed teen boys. Thinking back when all the boys were real young, my sis came over to my house one day with her girls, which are about the same age as my boys. We were not only discussing how to homeschool boys, but also how we could join forces to homeschool our kids together.

How to Easily Homeschool Boys

When we looked up, my boys were outside in the yard with tree branches fighting and her girls were inside coloring pages, inside the lines no doubt.

(Boys to …………..

I didn’t speak out loud what I thought of her girls, but she did later about my boys.

She discussed with me about putting my boys on medication and I silently thought she had beaten the life out of her girls to the point they had no personality or energy either one.

I didn’t really speak out too because deep down I had a nagging fear that something might actually be wrong with my boys.

We both had our first glimpse of the opposite gender of which neither one of us had any experience handling. Fast forward many years later, I never put my boys on medication because I knew as the mom that they were boys.
What does that mean? It means they learn differently than girls when they are young and it means more noticeable differences happen in the teen years.

Much of my work in disciplining my sons did come when they were younger because I was trying to teach them to sit still when they really needed to wiggle.
When my sis and I would meet together, I would be the one with my hands full as my time was spent beating my boys, mmmm, I meant settling fights and prodding the boys to complete their work.

As my sons have morphed into the teen years, my work as mentor has not stopped. It has required more finesse, patience and respect of the fact that they are born with an inward need to exercise authority even over me and a some lot of days that set my not so laid back personality in a frenzy.
Because homeschooling is not just an adventure for my boys, but a journey in learning year by year for me too, I want to share a few things that worked and did not work for me as I homeschool teen boys.

……. Men)

1). Embrace the differences. As my middle son, Mr. Awesome approaches completing his high school years, his relationship with me is different than Mr. Senior 2013. Unlike Mr. Senior 2013, Mr. Awesome wants very clear cut guidelines as to what is expected of him in high school for each year. So I changed the way I prepared his high school curriculum without giving up some of what his father and I required of him in high school.

For example, with Mr. Senior 2013, we planned his high school together each year. With Mr. Awesome, I planned for two years and he is taking an online school for the next two years.

I still have some classes we do together like geography and some history, but he wanted an outside source. I admit I was a bit disappointed, but then I have to remember that I have hopefully modeled the art of reasonableness and more importantly considered his needs and differences in high school.

Some things have not been different than Mr. Senior 2013 like my middles son’s need to also question my decision making ability now.

Mr. Senior 2013 and I had many head butting sessions, which only ended with me physically and mentally exhausted. Having gone through the rooster syndrome with my oldest son, I was a bit more equipped this time with Mr. Awesome.

Blessing and Challenges of Homeschooling Teen Boys

Instead of taking his questioning my authority as a personal assault, I realized his need to start exercising his thinking ability to make good decisions. If he does not start learning when and how to question decisions now, then how will he be able to make good decisions on his own and then to care for a family later?

Understanding this has helped me a bit more to have patience when I am questioned about every school subject. It is on the job training for the preparation of the challenges of manhood.

2.) Figure Head of Male Authority a Need. I sympathize with those single moms, but even they can provide a positive male role model. It may be their father, uncle or other close friend or family member. Men just have an unspoken word among themselves when it comes to male bonding time.

It is not that a single mom cannot homeschool a testosterone packing teen, but it sure makes her job easier to have a male figure to turn to.

In all my worry, both of my sons lapped up the influence by my husband and his time as he models the kind of men I want my sons to become.

Too, my husband is able to help my sons to accept the fact that as mom, they need to learn how to accept my authority.

Applying this to homeschooling has not always been easy, but I try to do my part in always listening to what each of my sons have to say no matter how trivial it may seem.

Admitting that I too make mistakes and want them to learn to make capable decisions independent of a woman (though always listening to sound advice by either a man or woman) has always been a good stepping stone to them completing assignments or subjects that my husband and I have planned for them.

This goes back to appreciating the fact that they are a different gender and their need to exercise domination and independence is such an intrinsic part of homeschooling each day.

It is hard to separate the parenting from homeschooling during the teen years.

3.) Create A World Separate From Yours. Again I noticed the slight differences between my teen boys when it comes to having other teen friends and have had to adjust to their needs. Mr. Senior 2013 was more content with just a few friends though he still needed a sphere of friends outside of our family.

Mr. Awesome on the other hand has a stronger need for more socialization with teens. He has a more-the-merrier attitude when it comes to other teens and even other people.

Creating opportunities for both my sons to interact with both teen boys and girls has been some of the hardest work on my part beyond academics.

Our homeschool co-op, church activities, fun sports and group field trips just for teens have been some of my best life saving tips to fill my boys need for the right kind of association.

Coming up in more articles about how to homeschool teen boys, I will be sharing specific curriculum that clicked better for us and more specifics as to how boys learn.

Your turn. Have you hit a brick wall when homeschooling your tween or teen boy? What tips work for you?

Hugs and love ya,

Want to brush up on some more tips for homeschooling teens?

Guiding Older Children

Homeschooling Middle School Doesn’t Always Mean Middle Way

Homeschool Writing Program for Middle and High School

Homeschool High School Readiness?

How to Catch Up When Your Homeschooled Teen Tests Below Grade Level

October 7, 2014 | 4 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

You have had some great questions lately and I can’t help but to ask you if I can share them with my other readers. Today the dynamic reader question: when your high schooler tests below grade level is one I feel some of you may also be wondering about.

Homeschool High School Teens

This is one of those questions that you may think that you are alone in asking, but you are not.

Check out Suzanne’s question:

Hi Tina. I just started this homeschooling adventure with my 16 yo/10th grade son…this week! My question is, his assessment says he’s at a 7/8th grade level in Language Arts! He’s feeling kind of bummed out about it. How do I get across to him that this is just the beginning, and he may breeze through this 8th grade work quickly as well as the next couple of levels to get him caught up with actual 10th grade work? I hate to say it, but I didn’t realize it was this bad and he had been “pushed through” these last few years! I’m very upset with our public school system here, and so glad to have this chance to help him. I just want to help him anyway I can.
Thanks for your advise!

First, thank you for asking me! I know this can be a sensitive subject because as the parent, we may have a tinge of guilt feelings.

But I am here to tell you that even if you rocked along happily homeschooling on grade level that life could throw you an unwelcoming event. When the Mr. had his heart attack, I found it more helpful to focus on what I could do to help Mr. Senior 2013 get caught up in high school and not focus on what we had lost.

Help Your Child to See Not All Goes As Planned. Your attitude in helping him to see that this was not all his fault will help him to not only cover language arts with more focus, but it teaches him that we have to roll with life’s punches.

View this as an opportunity to turn this into a lesson about more than language arts. How he deals with this set back is preparation for adulthood and high school.

He is old enough to appreciate that sometimes because of no fault of our own, we can get behind. This helps him to focus on a “fix” for the solution and keeps it positive.

Maintain Your Balance In Test Results. Without knowing what type of test he took, it is hard to assess it (no pun intended). Though a lot of research goes into standardized testing, there are some tests that are not worth taking. Remember to not be so quick to assign them validity.

Too, curriculum providers vary from grade level to grade level when it comes to language arts. For example, Rod and Staff, which is one of the most rigorous grammar programs that I have used has a student completing grammar by eighth grade.

It wasn’t until recently (say within the last 5 to 7 years) that they came out with a high school program.

Other providers, like Bob Jones High School prefer to use a spiral method of teaching some of the same concepts taught since 4th grade all the way to high school. Does he really need that much review?

Testing your son using various resources like both the online tests (free or otherwise) provided by language arts provider as well as standardized testing gives you a much more broader view of his capabilities and skills.

Language Arts Consist of 4 Skills. Then after having received a much more clear picture, it is important for you to understand that language arts consists of basically 4 different skills. This will help you to hone in on the one or two skills that need immediate help.

The 4 basic skills of language arts are Grammar, Reading, Writing(Composing), Spelling.

Others come into use too like vocabulary, which generally is best learned within a literature or reading program. Sharpen the skills that are more vital now.

For example, though grammar is important, it is a tool that helps us to navigate while composing thoughts. If a highschooler is behind in knowing how to master the basics of composition or how to communicate his thoughts effectively, then he will be hampered life-long. So what I am saying is that not all skills, even under language arts deserve the same amount of time at this age.

It does not mean that he should not work on them, but give the best or earliest part of his day to the most critical skills that he needs so that he is able to master them quicker. Spelling too can be learned right alongside what he is writing. For example, hold him accountable to spell each word correctly that he uses in his essays.

If you do this, (hold him accountable for each language art skills), you will see that on one essay, he will work on all 4 basic language arts skills more effectively. This is a feat to cover each week and he will make rapid progress.

In addition, an online course where a child can go his pace AND get credit is sometimes the solution. Look at this Online Homeschool High School Poetry (No Teaching Involved) course that one of my teens did.

Set A Limit. I found too in working with highschoolers that having clear cut guidelines as to when something needs to be completed by gives him the encouragement and hope to know that it’s not always going to be like this.

Most teens like to know clear cut guidelines and a stopping point. When a teen works with no clear cut goal, though we think we have a goal of catching them up, it’s not a finite goal to them. Most teens will work harder knowing that they will accomplish their first goal. Anybody works better knowing they have accomplishments.

If need be, cut the assignments in half and especially if he his quickly catching up.

Highschool Graduation “On Time” is VERY Possible. I learned a very valuable lesson with my first son that I am now practicing with my second highschooler and that is to have a backup plan.

With Mr. Senior 2013, I had planned all of his high school courses. Then when we got side swiped, I didn’t have a back up plan. We had to step rapidly to finish our set course by high school graduation.

With Mr. Awesome, I felt like I have had the best of both worlds, which is where I lesson planned 2 years of his high school and used part planned for the other 2 years.

Using an online school, I didn’t want Mr. Awesome to have the unnecessary stress that Mr. Senior 2013 did in that all his course planning came to a halt when I was at the ICU and taking care of the Mr. during Mr. Senior 2013’s high school years.

So what I am saying is that using a very basic high school program like Penn Foster or American School, where they review remedial skills can be a life saver when needed. Most easy high school programs like that take only two years to do.

Again, by using part of my courses I selected along with the ones the online school offered, I feel like Mr. Awesome still has a unique high school experience. It was the perfect compromise for my situation.

Finite goals by both the online school and your courses gives your teen a goal to look forward to and can help close any gaps in his learning.

Being behind is a very grown up and adult issue. It does not have to be a negative experience, but can be an experience for rapid growth and maturity in how to deal with what comes at us as adults.

Too, don’t forget learning doesn’t stop at high school graduation.

It has been my experience in helping hundreds and hundreds of homeschoolers that these kids are bright, caring and motivated when giving the right reason to be.

He is not studying language arts just for the sake of catching up, but he is studying language arts because he needs those coping skills as an adult.

And oh good grief, if I could only answer your questions without writing an online book then I would be happy. I hope this helps you.

Give your son a lot of praise, a great big hug and working hard never hurt anybody, but builds strength, character and determination.

You’ll love some of these other tips:

Hugs and love ya,

teens

6 Ways to Organize Your Homeschooled High School Teen