Higher education Options for Financially Frail Homeschoolers

True confession - my partner and I did not do a terrific job planning financially for university or college. What I mean by that is that we hadn't saved any money - or at the bare minimum not nearly what you need to have for room and board, let alone tuition. We needed a massive scholarship - a REALLY massive scholarship.

When you need a huge scholarship, you really want to surpass a common college prep plan and try to take some more rigorous classes. Try to take some challenging AP or CLEP exams. Whatever you do, you have to make sure that you cover the core classes and basics in all areas. Make sure that when it says that mathematics - three to four years, then you are covering mathematics three to four years. But at the same time, you want to try to exceed the maximum requirements when you can.

One more thing you can do is make sure that you include things like all of their early high school credits which indicates that they have reached beyond the suggested amount. There were specific areas that we were able to extend past without making it seem like it was really tough work.

Let's consider for example that you are the homeschool parent of a budding scholar-athlete, but you are not certain that a full-ride athletic scholarship is in his or her future. You will want to make sure that your scholar covers the highest suggestions of English, math, and social studies, and that he has four years of those. But then he's also going to try to have four years of science and when it comes to that P. E. section, he may have six credits of P. E. because he's playing baseball and swimming during the exact same year.

For my own children, we did meet the ordinary educational requirements but my children really enjoyed the social sciences. My younger son had many years of economics, not just a quarter. I don't remember how many he ended up with, but it was probably six or seven credits in social studies. He studied economics all the time for enjoyment, and he also exceeded the fine arts credits because he took piano every year.

Neither one of those things was hard for him, that was something he really liked doing. In this way he exceeded the minimum and demonstrated that he was passionately interested in a very intriguing academic subject.

I can't overstress the worth of having an area of zealous interest when it comes to winning the big merit based scholarships. In fact, failing to encourage a student's passionate interest is one of "The 5 Biggest Mistakes Parents Make When Homeschooling High School. " Understand how to stay away from all 5 mistakes in my free e-mail mini-course.