A few tips for Ohio homeschoolers

Ohio Homeschoolers are trying to get their notifications in before the start of the public school year. I wrote about this a little bit last year and I’d like to expand it a bit.

The notification form for Ohio Homeschoolers is available here.   This is the standard form for the state. Some school districts (like mine) send their own form.  Just ignore it.  The standard form is compliant with the Ohio law and that’s all the school district is really entitled to.  YOU ARE ONLY REQUIRED TO GIVE THE INFORMATION ON THE FORM.  Do not give any additional information like social security numbers.

The first five items on the form are pretty easty to comply with. I also make a list of the books and courses that I am going to use as required in item #7; however, I always ran into a little trouble with the #6 in the list of required documents.

(6) Brief           outline of the intended curriculum for the current year. Such outline is for           informational purposes only

I wasn’t sure what a “brief”outline was exactly?  Wouldn’t my list of books and resources pretty much suffice as an outline of what I hoped to cover?  No.  Because when I sent I sent in just the book list with the forms, I got a letter back that they needed an outline.  For years then, I took every textbook with me down to Kinkos and copied all of the tables of content.  It was a lot of work, a lot of money and a lot of paper! Plus, I’m pretty sure they never even looked at them as I totally forgot to put Calvin’s math book contents in with the packet one year and no one ever questioned it!

So a few years ago I tried putting the list on line on one of my blogs with links to each book.  In my cover letter I mentioned that this was to be my “brief outline.”  That’s the year I learned they don’t read the cover letters either.  I got a form letter in the mail a few days later asking for my outline.

What to do?    I wanted something I wasn’t going to slave over, something that wouldn’t require LOTS of copying and would satisfy the regulations.  That’s when I found this site:  Curriculum Standards | Typical Course Study | Learning Standards by the folks at the World Book Encyclopedia!

They have all of the grades through 12th grade and they are easily copied and pasted into a word document where they can be easily adjusted and changed to meet your needs.  They met the requirement of a “brief outline” for my school district!  If you’re a newbie in Ohio, or if your state requires an outline, maybe this will work for you too.

Update:   Ruth made the suggestion that perhaps the Ohio Standards would be available for this same purpose.  So I did some digging around and I found the Ohio Department of Education Standard Guides. While I think the design of these standards is a bit cumbersome for a quick cut and paste for notification purposes, they could be useful for homeschooling parents to have just for their own use.  They have a great print out form as a PDF as well.

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