Summer is the perfect time for fun miscellaneous activities like summer camps, swim teams, home improvement projects and family vacations! I understand that is a lot to balance, but have you ever wondered if your students can receive high school credit for any of these activities?
It’s possible! Both of my boys earned their P.E. credits during the summer months through a swim team they participated in.You can count credits even though they’re over the summer months, just count your hours and document well!
A homeschool mom whose student was going to a science summer camp contacted me and asked me this question:
How would you document a week-long summer camp in a science-related field?
It kind of depends on the camp. Some of the Gold Care members I’ve talked to in the past have done summer camps that involved a lot of the lab works so they might not do the lab work during the school year; they just do the lab work during the summer camp.
You want to add up all the hours, so if they’re at camp whole week and work for eight hours a day, and they are there for 5-10 days then that would be 80 hours which is half of a full credit. Maybe you can call it the science that they studied and give them half a credit. For example, if it was a computer science camp then you would call it Computer Science for half a credit.
It kind of depends whether you have it as a stand-alone class or use it as the way you got the labs or the supplements for the other classes on the transcript. Not everything is separate on the transcript. If you go to a lot of places, you may not call it theatre and say that some of it is part of your English credit as part of your study of Shakespeare. Sometimes all these wonderful experiences are going to be in your course description under some other subject area. Summer camps are a good thing to list on the activity section.
My teens’ summer has been very full of valuable and educational activities, such as volunteer work, Scouting activities, Farmer’s Market sales, physical fitness activites, and the like. I have been maintaining a list with hours invested and I plan to apply it as either credit or in an activities resume later–wherever it seems to fit.
I always estimate the number of hours spent on horseback based on the camp’s sample schedule and add it into the hours of PE. I also save copies of whatever horsemanship certifications my child earns (the instructor is part of a national organization). If we had a horse ourselves, you bet my child would earn all PE credits quite easily.