<p>Just what the question says.</p>
<p>My daughter plays an instrument, ice skates and takes ceramic lessons. She is involved in the local math community - she is on a math team, and goes to weekly math circle classes (and the organizer will be writing one of her academic recs). For the past four years she has gone to a much beloved summer camp, but this year she is too old for it. She will be off for a two week math camp this summer. She is also volunteering at a local stable that offers therapeutic riding instruction to physically handicapped and autistic children.</p>
<p>I worked and volunteered, but you can join or start clubs, play sports, etc. Anything a regular high schooler can do.</p>
<p>Eh…it’s so hard to find any clubs for home schoolers in my area. And I don’t think I can join the ones at my local high school. I’m just finishing up eleventh grade and have to cram extracurriculars this summer and the first half of twelfth…</p>
<p>Well, what do you do with your free time?</p>
<p>Go on the computer. I do go to my church and help with the cameras and lighting… but that’s more volunteer work. I was on the debate team and school newspaper in public school…but now I’m home schooled. I want to take ballroom dancing lessons…however my parents are already shelling out money for a college course I’m taking. I can also sing in my friend’s church choir. The main thing I’m doing this summer is volunteering for an aspiring Congressman and studying for the SAT…lol</p>
<p>Help with cameras and lighting at church 9,10,11,12
Debate team 9,10
School newspaper 9,10
Help with campaign for congress 11</p>
<p>Excellent GeekMom!!</p>
<p>That is exactly what you can write on your transcript. You don’t need lots of ECs. Having just some is fine. Those that have a lot of ECs tend not to be able to spend a lot of time with all of them and schools realize this. It is better to dig deep with a few than have a shallow trench with many.</p>
<p>In fact, on some of my son’s college aps, I noticed that they only gave space for a few ECs so you had to pick the ones that you wanted to showcase.</p>
<p>Also, just because you are homeschooled, does not mean that you can’t be in a club. You can simply start one. It’s not that difficult.</p>
<p>You can join clubs [Math, Science, etc.], learn an instrument, join a community sports team, volunteer at a hospital… Or you can be creative by getting a group of friends and help clean up around the neighborhood.</p>
<p>Another view is that this is the sweet spot of home schooling and almost the point of the whole enterprise. I mean to do things you couldn’t do if you had to go to school, rather than to mimic school ECs.
In my daughter’s case she danced six days a week, and worked taking apart mammals at a natural history museum. The mammal part was not possible on a school schedule. The dance part would have been a complete stretch for a school kid, and I can’t imagine maintaining “B” or even “C” grades in school with such a schedule. She ended up being accepted to the School of American Ballet (the feeder school for the New York City Ballet) and lived in the same Lincoln Center dorm Julliard students use. There was no way she could have done this and been well educated if she had to go to school.
The whole point to me is to live an exhilarating life as a teenager. We may end up as drudges eventually, but the teenage years are too early for that, IMO.
But what about college? IMO the more the applicant tries to establish his or her bona fides in school terms, the more the student will be judged in school terms. How many APs do you have? What about AP Calculus?
My daughter’s Princeton interviewer asked her if she had taken Calculus AB or BC. She had no idea what the interviewer was asking, and said as much. This neighborhood interviewer was spending $40,000 a year for our local private school for her two kids, and who knows how much more for tutors, a regular expense in my neighborhood. With this investment in “the system”, I’m sure she didn’t turn in a rave review. She suggested that my daughter apply to NYU.
My daughter was admitted to Princeton, and I can’t believe this was a hard choice for the admissions folk. By the numbers, one out of maybe twelve the interviewer screened.
“The Teenage Liberation Handbook” is a good source of ideas of what to do if you don’t need to go to school.</p>
<p>From my application: (admitted to schools like Columbia, Duke and of course Pomona, waitlisted at Harvard and Princeton)</p>
<p>boy scout venture crew (eagle scout)
swim team (local high school)
strategy game design and website management, for companies such as Electronic Arts
violin and youth orchestra (concertmaster)</p>
<p>I did sports and instruments: I played competitive tennis and golf, and loved piano and violin. Those were the four extracurriculars I listed on my college apps and incorporated into the short essays. Its been 4 years (gonna start my last year of college, how time flies…) so I don’t quite remember everything I put…</p>
<p>Take something you currently love to do and take it to the next level by improving your skills in this. It seems that you like to sing. Keep singing. And the community service thing is a definite plus.</p>
<p>Pretty much everything I can think of is in the posts above. I’m a rising junior homeschooler and this is a couple things I have done so far:</p>
<p>Varsity soccer (at local hs)
Musical (at local hs)
Violin
Saxophone
Active church member
Writing club (local hmsclrs)
and I’m currently involved w/volunteering for the Red Cross and a local food bank.</p>
<p>If you don’t have any organizations nearby look online for virtual volunteer opportunities! And many extracurricular activities can be self-taught (ex. instruments & the arts)</p>
<p>Home school groups participate in Destination Imagination (problem solving). It is a great activity to help learn teamwork skills and thinking on your feet.</p>
<p>Forensics (speech and debate) is excellent. However, I’d much more readily recommend it to someone who has at least 3 years remaining in high school than to a junior or senior. Additionally, I only recommend it to someone who is willing to dedicate most (hopefully all) of their extracurricular time to forensics, instead of just making it an expendable addition to their list of ECs. This is because it’s a very intensive and competitive activity, and much of its quality is based on the sheer amount of time that someone can dedicate to it. The more experience you have, the better you perform, and the more you learn.</p>
<p>Expect to spend at least an hour every day researching and practicing. Also expect to travel to least four 3-day tournaments from January through late-May/early-June, not to mention as many short practice tournaments as you can afford from October through January.</p>
<p>Another observation worth noting is that you would participate in forensics through a league, not through a local club. The club just exists to coach you to success at tournaments, bringing you closer to the title of national champion. Some students even compete without a club, although this is by no means recommended, unless you live prohibitively far from the nearest club.</p>
<p>EDIT: I forgot to mention summer camp. In addition to competing at tournaments and involving yourself in your club, you definitely want to go to at least one debate camp during the summer. Most camps for homeschoolers last one week each; camps for public schoolers range from 2 to 7 weeks each. The latter are FAR more profitable, even for homeschooled debaters.</p>
<p>Do any of you have any recommendations oriented around writing? I thought about sending in something to my local newspaper but it doesn’t seem as though there is a designated teen section or a creative writing section. The majority of the articles are relevant to current issues within the community.</p>
<p>Ultimately, I’m not too familiar with any contests or clubs.</p>
<p>You might do a summer camp for writers as well. I know the colleges around here offer them. </p>
<p>You can submit stories to your local paper. Our local paper loves to have someone else do its work for free. A newspaper would be interested in feature stories about things of interest around your area. Could you write about a tourist attraction or park or something else that is interesting in your area? Do you know any interesting people whom you could profile? Veteran’s Day is in November, could you profile a veteran? You might even submit something about a field trip you take as part of your homeschooling experience. People are fairly curious as to what homeschoolers do.</p>
<p>Also, around here there are plenty of publications that are distributed for free. They are usually found at the grocery store or other place where lots of people pass by. Often, those publications are happy to have people write for them. One time, I wrote a little feature about a goldsmith in our community who also happened to own a local jewelry store. Business people LOVE the free advertising.</p>
<p>The only creative writing in a newspaper is found in features. News writing is a different style, but most papers do like to run features–stories of special interest to the paper’s readers.</p>
<p>Once you get a few things published in your local paper, you might want to look into submitting things to magazines or more widely read publications. Good luck.</p>
<p>^Thanks for the suggestions!</p>
<p>I’ll try to see if my local newspaper would be willing to publish a couple of creative writing pieces.</p>
<p>Take your current skills in cameras and lighting – which you developed and now use at church – and find a community theater production crew that’s putting on a show in the timeframe you mention. They might list their auditions in a local newspaper or online.</p>
<p>If you take these technical skills outside of the familiar setting where everyone knows you (church), you are deepening the EC, taking it == and yourself == to another level, technically and perhaps socially. There might be fancier equipment to work with, and new people to meet. </p>
<p>Community theater rehearses in the evenings and usually performs on weekends, so not every student can take advantage of community theater opportunities. But you can! It also exposes you to multi-generational communication with other adults and young working adults outside your church community.
College will have many new people to meet, so it’s a good expansion of you during highschool.</p>
<p>Talk with your family to get everyone on the same page about which play you might choose to volunteer for, so you’ll all feel good about the rehearsals and performances. Something very avante-garde with racy costumes might not work for you, but perhaps a musical or classic play would be fun.</p>
<p>I know a FIRST robotics team near me that is all home schoolers.</p>