Have you created a high school transcript?

I use One Note as a digital notebook for all of my notes, course descriptions,  “grades” etc.  I use it on my computer, iPad, and phone.  I am using http://www.transcriptmaker.com to make my transcript.  You could do it with a spreadsheet for sure.  I’m a perfectionist though and I like the layout of the transcript and the fact that I subscribe a month at a time and add to it.  Later, I resubscribe to add more.  It calculates the GPA and looks professional.  I and doing mine by subject not year.  Some of our things are cumulative over four years.  If you email me, I can send you a copy of mine for dd16. Not sure if there are samples on the site.

FYI, we’re on our homeschool moms retreat this weekend. Brunswick, GA this time. 😊

When my son was in high school, I would sit down each summer and plan for the upcoming year and make notes regarding the credits he had accrued the previous year. I would remind myself of the credits he still needed to graduate and I would plan his credits for the upcoming school year. I made a sample transcript including the credits he already had and the credits he would earn in the future just to see what it would look like and keep myself on track.

When he graduated high school, I took those notes and made a transcript using a free online transcript generator. I can’t remember the name of the website or I would share it. I know I came across it through googling homeschool high school transcript and looking on various homeschool websites until I found one I liked.

It was really a pretty simple and straightforward process and didn’t require lots of time. I did not do course descriptions as they weren’t necessary for his goals. I don’t plan on doing them for my daughter either since she plans to start at our local community college and they just want to see a transcript. From my understanding, only choosy colleges request course descriptions so they are not usually needed.

Transcripts really aren’t difficult at all! If you’re a member of the Ambleside Online forum, there are some threads dealing with transcripts and course descriptions that you might find helpful.

I use rod and staff planners and my kids are responsible for writing down their coursework along the way each year.  I have them keep a running list of readers in the front of the book donuts easy to compile.  Once it came to transcript time, I used hslda’s service.  Each of the three colleges my daughter applied to were all open to accepting more than the transcript (some schools want only the one page, no more).  This gave me the opportunity to make a book list page which included a paragraph summarizing our educational style (one school actually suggested this kind of informational to help them learn about the student).  We also had an extensive list of musical experiences and extracurricular activities (she’s going to be a music ed major).  So, in total, we had three documents we used.  Maybe one of the schools online form didn’t necessarily ask for all this information, so I emailed to ask if this would be helpful information for them or not; they happily accepted more documents.

Other than math where I had definite numbers to make a grade, I used my honest best judgement to assess my daughter’s grade.  I graded keeping in mind:  completion, mastery, diligence, effort and level of difficulty. I gave course credit for some co op classes like Music Theory and credit for a college orchestra she had the opportunity to be part of (even though we didnt pay for actual college credit, I still gave transcript credit).

So, this was our experience…very homeschool friendly state universities! (NJ).  Hope this helps!💗