Certainly, the thought of teaching your child at home during the high school years is one of the most intimidating. It is also, no doubt, one of the most skeptically asked questions from family and friends: “You won’t keep her home for high school, will you?”
However, teaching high school well is not the impossibility it might seem to be. The options for high school at home are growing rapidly both in quality and quantity. There are traditional methods whereby the parent teaches the child from a textbook, much like in a classroom. However, there are also online classrooms, courses on CD-ROM, student-driven texts and workbooks, and internships/co-ops that will cover any subject you are looking to study in a given year. You can download your province’s curriculum and teach to it, or you can use any number of the excellent resources available at curriculum providers and cover the subjects your child needs to follow his ideal education path.
However, presumably, you already have curriculum providers with whom you are familiar, and you already know how you want to teach your high school aged child at home. Maybe your question is not what to teach, but how to document it. Out of all the work your child will do over the next 4 years, what should you keep, how should you record it, and how do you make it look official enough for a university or college to accept? Again, there are many available resources and examples of proper documentation to help you in your planning.
If you are really second-guessing the authenticity of your record keeping, or if your student wants to apply to American schools, a great option for your kids is that of standardized testing. There are many benchmark tests that will give objectivity to the grades you’ve assigned to your child’s work.
Overall, it is important to remember that you can teach your child through high school. There are more than ample resources available for you to use, and HSLDA is behind you supporting you all the way.