College Planning: Helping Your Homeschool Student Develop A Long Range Plan For College and Beyond
By Mimi Rothschild
One of the most important things you can do for your homeschool student is help him develop a long range plan for college and career. Planning for college should begin as early as the middle school years, or even earlier depending on your child. One advantage of homeschool is that you can add courses to your curriculum beyond the basic requirements, and one of these homeschool courses could be "planning for college." You and your homeschool student could prepare the course together, setting up goals for the course and making a checklist of what he wants to achieve in the course. Once you feel that your homeschool student is mature enough for this course, you could repeat it every year as he comes nearer to college, changing it accordingly to meet his growing needs.
Remind your homeschool student that developing a long-range plan is about his needs and his goals, not yours. Although he will need your help at first, he will become more mature with his decisions and goals if you start early by steering him in the right direction and then letting him make the decisions. If you decide to do a special course for long range planning and college preparation in your homeschool curriculum, you can help your homeschool student outline the tasks that need to be done. Remember, he should do them, not you. Have him find out what type of high school classes he needs to take in homeschool in order to achieve his goals or even to receive college credits. As he progresses through the grades in homeschool, help him to adjust his classes, extracurricular activities and part-time jobs or volunteer work so that they will help him with his college courses. Encourage your homeschool student to research the colleges that he is interested in and even contact them to ask for a tour. Have your homeschool student do extensive research on college savings programs or collage financial aid programs so that you and he can devise a plan for paying for college. The more involved your homeschool student is in making long range plans for college, the more importance he will place on higher learning and his responsibility in the continuing education process.
As a homeschool parent, you will need to make plans of your own concerning your homeschool student's college education. This will mostly entail finding the right college savings plan so that you can help you child in the best way possible.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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