College Scholarships for High School Credit

Transcription

1 Parent Training a la Carte College Scholarships for High School Credit Lee Binz, The HomeScholar

2 College Scholarships for High School Credit 2 College Scholarships for High School Credit By Lee Binz The HomeScholar This is NOT a free e-book! This book does NOT come with any resell rights whatsoever. If you received this e- book for free, from any source other than The HomeScholar, or are aware of its illegal distribution, please send an to: [email protected]. You may not alter this e-book in any way, shape, or form, and it must remain in this original PDF form with no changes to any of the links contained within. Copyright 2011 THE HOMESCHOLAR. All rights reserved. This book may be copied or printed by the original purchaser for personal or family use only. Such reproductions should not be sold or distributed. Except for the above stated authorization to photocopy, no part of this book may be reproduced by any means without written permission of the author. Printed in the USA Published by The HomeScholar; Marine View Drive SW Normandy Park, WA Disclaimer: Parents assume full responsibility for the education of their children in accordance with state law. In addition, parents assume full responsibility for the accuracy of all homeschool records

3 College Scholarships for High School Credit 3 Introduction The first thing we re going to talk about is the concept in a nutshell. I was consulting with somebody today about when is the best time to be taking this class because her children were 7 th and 8 th grade. I said, It s good to start early because I started learning about this concept when my children were in junior high. I read and read about it and when it was time for me to implement my plan, I understood the concept really well and was able to implement it without any difficulty at all. Essentially, we re trying to kill two birds with one stone. Try to find private scholarships; then, have your children write essays or have them complete something educational to fulfill a scholarship requirement. Afterwards, count those essays, or whatever educational things that they ended up doing, for high school credit; and hopefully, earn scholarship money, at the same time. If you do mostly essays, it would most probably be an English credit, but it is possible for people to get other high school credit for different things because sometimes you can find a lot of scholarship applications that are for Youtube videos or audios or different things that are more artistic in nature, like music or art. I was not able to afford college for my children because, strangely, for a home schooling parent, we were a single income family; it was just my husband working and I was at home homeschooling; so we didn t save up a lot for college. One of the things I did when my children were very young was read this book How to Go to College for Almost Free by Ben Kaplan and it really got me thinking about this whole concept, because it talks about writing essays to find private scholarships, and I thought, Wow, for home schoolers, that could really be your high school credit! I became really determined to find some private scholarships. I discovered that essay writing is something that my children did fairly well, and so during junior year, I started to search for scholarships using the strategies in that book and I

4 College Scholarships for High School Credit 4 used what they did in their writing for high school English credit that year. I noticed that their small scholarships would lead to much bigger scholarships; so they might get a little scholarship here, but it got put on their activities in awards list and then it lead to larger scholarships that came from the college. I also noticed that even small scholarships can have really big rewards and we ll be talking about that later; but even if it has a small monetary value, the nonmonetary values of a scholarship can be quite large. I also liked the fact that it was an English curriculum for free because you shell out money for curriculum all the time and how often does that curriculum pay you. It also kind of encouraged the delight- directed learning in my children when they could see the value of what they were doing in terms of monetary value. Each of my children earned $2,000, a number of my friends and some clients have won much more; it depends on your situation and what you ve applied for. I will say that when you look at $2,000 next to how much money you need, it kind of sounds like a drop in the bucket compared to $24,000 for tuition at a private school. Next month, we re going to talk about getting the big scholarships. I have a video called Getting the Big Scholarships and I want to give you some quick tips from that, as most of the huge money for college will come directly from the college itself. Position your students in a place where they can get maximum potential and get the huge merit-based scholarships that come from colleges; you don t have to have a child who is a genius; but there are some things that you can do that will really help. The first thing is to plan a rigorous curriculum. To get the big scholarships, make sure that you not only meet, but also exceed, the minimum requirements in every way that you possibly can; prepare for the SAT or the ACT because most of the money is tied to test scores, not just for homeschoolers but for all

5 College Scholarships for High School Credit 5 the students who apply. Try to really impress the colleges; do not just apply to colleges, but strive to make a really good impression on them; you can also save money for it by homeschooling college. One of the things that can help you get big scholarships the most is simply by paying attention during junior year. The junior year of high school is really pivotal; if you don t pay much attention during freshman and sophomore year, but pull it all together during junior year, you could get really good scholarships. Junior year is pivotal; there are some very important tasks during this year, and if you do them, they can really help you with your scholarships. Private scholarships may yield less money than the scholarships from college, but they are still a great way for you to not pay for curriculum and instead, have your curriculum pay for you. The first step is to prepare your student; that means that you not only have a rigorous curriculum but you must also teach your child the ability to write well. If they have a really good vocabulary and some essay writing skills, then those things will really help you when it comes to writing essays. If your child isn t writing very well, focus more on the artistic and hands-on scholarships; but you re probably better off focusing on the writing skills that they need for college rather than trying to find scholarships when they aren t writing well. Vocabulary and words can be brought on with real literature by reading books and essays, writing skills come with practice. It helps to find these scholarships if your child is interested in something. Those unique interests can help you find scholarships that are completely tailored for your child. A quick overview on how to win private scholarships: find scholarships filter them

6 College Scholarships for High School Credit 6 format them so they re easy to fill out follow through, the hard part and file that educational experience in your educational record Find Google search the word college scholarships. When you ll do that, you ll get 6.5 million hits. As much as you d like to think that getting 6.5 million scholarships would be a wonderful thing, it is not humanly possible to apply for 6.5 million scholarships, even over four years of college and certainly, not over one year of college or high school; so, that s not going to do you any good. Instead, use a search engine that is specific to scholarships. Here is the list of search engines: There are also some that are unique to different states, so you can try googling Washington state scholarship and see what shows up with your unique state. I do recommend fastweb since that is the one that has earned us the scholarship money. When finding scholarships, the first thing to do is to input information about your student because the more you can tell them about your student, the more specific the scholarships are. As much as that seems a little counterintuitive, what you re trying to do is to have many specific scholarships like that because you can t fill out 400 scholarships. One of the best ways to limit that is to input your student s information. Frankly, that takes a long time. When you re filling it out for the first time, allow yourself at least two hours, or half a day, for inputting information. You don t really have to have your student there; guessing or maybe, occasionally, yelling at them when they re watching TV. As you re inputting information, take notes;

7 College Scholarships for High School Credit 7 when you re inputting that information, they re going to ask you the strangest questions in the world. Every time you click on something, write it down on a piece of paper by the computer. Everything you write down is something that might work for you for a college application essay. It s kind of like a brainstorming technique, and if you save that list for your college application essay topic list on your computer, then that can really help you come up with the college application essay. When you input information it will take it down from 6.5 million hits to a few hundred. If each one of those scholarship takes a week to apply to and there s 36 weeks of school, that doesn t add up. Even if you worked all year round, you still couldn t fill out four hundred scholarships. You really need to keep it down to maybe 30 or 40 scholarships that you re really working hard at and applying for that year. When finding scholarships, you want to look at other things as well--beyond those scholarship search engines. Look outside your family, at scholarships that are won by family and friends, what the other high school kids have won, and search at local businesses. When we were at our senior year of high school, I was really surprised at how many scholarships I saw just on the wall of different stores. Another little tip that worked out for us -- search your local high school. We searched Highline High School scholarships to see what was available. Often, school district scholarships will have an entire page devoted to scholarships that their students can use for college. Also, figure out what area of specialization your student has because you ve taken notes on that input information. Then take that specialization area and put it next to the word scholarships and google search for that.

8 College Scholarships for High School Credit 8 Most of the scholarships are for high school juniors and seniors, but you can find scholarships for younger students. If you wanted to apply to a few as a younger student just for fun, and incorporate that into your English program, that might really work well. But for juniors and seniors, there are so many scholarships out there that it s possible for you to just apply for scholarships as the sum of a whole English credit. Once you ve identified your scholarships for your junior year, many of those scholarships will repeat each year. Sometimes they ll even repeat the topic of the scholarship essay each year. If you have a 9 th grader and an 11 th grader and you re giving your 11 th grader scholarship essays for their English program, you can give those same essays to your 9 th grader. Two years later, you can have your younger child submit those same essays for scholarship. Filter You d want to think about baseball when you think of filtering scholarships because the whole thing can boil down to one statement: One strike and you re out. When you re looking at a scholarship and reading it at the briefest of reads through the first three to four paragraphs, the very moment that you see something that eliminates your child, give up the thought of that scholarship and move on. It doesn t matter how much you want that $20,000, if it says it s only for girls and you have a boy. Remember, you may have a hundred of these scholarships to weed out; you don t have time to be arguing with people about how you should be allowed to take it even though you re not in that same school district. Eliminate it at the very first strike. Also, look specifically to eliminate scholarships that may be school specific. If that scholarship is just for a university that your child is not going to be applying to, then don t bother. Eliminate it immediately as well if it requires skills that your child does not have. For instance, it would have been lovely for me to have giv-

9 College Scholarships for High School Credit 9 en my son, Alex, a scholarship that was making a YouTube video about economics; he knew economics but didn t know how to make a video for YouTube. It isn t going to make any difference if he s going to fill out an application for skills that he simply doesn t have. Once you ve gotten that far and eliminated anything that has that first negative; you ve already checked off to make sure it wasn t school specific to a university that you re not possibly going to, and that your child has all the skills that are required, then read the fine print. Read the details to see if there s an exclusion for homeschoolers. That rarely happens; but, if it does happen, you would want to find out that they ve excluded homeschoolers before you take the time to fill it out. Not all scholarship applications are essays; some of them can be videos, art, photography, some are strictly an application. There are also some that are based on chance; but, they re usually tied to advertising. The next step in filtering is to look at the cost benefit analysis. Sometimes, the smaller essays are easier to win; so, smaller ones might be better for you. Sometimes local scholarships are easier to win because they have fewer applicants. You should compare how much work it is against how much money you might get for it; how many words are required in this essay and how much money could you potentially earn? If it s a 3,000 word essay on a topic your child doesn t love, and they re only going to give you a $50 amount, that may not be worth three weeks of work. On the other hand, if it s a 150 word poem and the money reward is $2,000, it might really work to your favor. Weigh the interest in your child versus the motivation to fill it out. Some of you have younger teens and may be blissfully happy with your children; however, when children get older; sometimes it can be more and more difficult to convince them to do things.

10 College Scholarships for High School Credit 10 When you re thinking about that interest and motivation in a teen, you might want to think, Is that really their area of delight, directed learning, or do I just think it s their area? For example, my son, Alex, was very interested in politics and economics; but, he wasn t really that interested in writing anything about Democrats and Republicans; he really wanted to write about economics. I had a great deal of trouble talking him into writing essays based on politics; but, I had an easier time talking him into essays that were involved in economics, even though they seemed very similar to me. Think about their skills and abilities and how easy is it for them to complete the assignment in order to win the money because it all boils down to the fight factor: Is the scholarship worth the effort required to convince my child to do the work and to have them do the work? Format Most of this boils down to keeping track of them and making sure they re in by the required due date. Keep notebooks and file folders for each of those applications. What I did was, I had a notebook and I printed-out of paragraphs I found from fastweb; I cut and pasted paragraphs from fastweb to a piece of paper; then, I printed them. In my folder, I printed the application itself; sometimes, I would even print some of the previous winners so that my children could see what a previous winning essay looked like. I arranged that folder so that the scholarships were in order of due date, with the most immediate due date first. When formatting, think about estimating the time required. As your children are writing during the earlier years of high school, think about how much time it takes them each thing that they re doing. I noticed that for my children, in order to write a pretty good paper, it took them a whole week because they would have to brainstorm, write; then we had to edit, and they d have to fix the edits that we gave them. We estimated 500-1,000 words per week that would work for my family.

11 College Scholarships for High School Credit 11 Also, set aside enough time to fill out the application or to complete any other projects that are due, like helping the elderly, and write about an experience doing that. They may also have some other requirements that could take time; most commonly, those are letters of recommendation, or perhaps they want your student s transcript. Transcripts are not something that can be generally whipped up in an hour, and letters of recommendation are not something that just materializes in thin air. Spend some time figuring out who s going to write the recommendation; asking them to write the recommendation, giving them time to write it, and getting it back. The other thing about formatting is that it can help if you have a piece of paper that you could show your child, so that they ll know what you want from them. From my binder, I had that one brief overview page; it had that paragraph from fastweb: It would give them a dollar amount, which is sort of like dangling a carrot in front of their faces; it would say what was required; it would give a word count and a due date. Set the due date way ahead of the prescribed due date. This will help your student get it done well before the due date. Follow through This is the most difficult part. You, as the parent, have control over the finding and formatting; but you have very little control over the follow through. The detail here is that the students actually do the work, and that can be the weakest link. Make sure that you and your child read the application thoroughly because there can be some details that you have to fill out. For example, if they say you have to include a transcript, and your transcript isn t ready, that s going to be a problem. If they re going to ask you for something specific like that the letters of recommendation should be mailed separately to a particular address and that it should have your student s phone number on it, then, you have to follow the details for that.

12 College Scholarships for High School Credit 12 Make sure that you apply on time and accurately. One of the things that I did immediately after I stopped homeschooling, was to join the board of our homeschool organization. I was in charge of their scholarships and one of the things that I noticed was that we had very few applicants, even though the application was very easy and only required a 250 word essay. When we got our first few applicants, I wanted those first few people to win it because they turned it in early, while the people who turned it in later, I just didn t have the fondest feelings for them. So, apply on time and as early as possible. When you re filling out these applications in terms of follow through, you want to make sure that your student is writing the essay and doing the project, but after they ve done that the first time, it s a really good time for you to go back and review previous winners after the first draft. Look at the tone, voice, content, and the format of that winner. That s actually a skill that you can teach your children for when they go to college. You go back and see if your college professors can give you an example of the kind of writing that they like, it s sort of the same thing as looking at a scholarship winner from the past. Look at what kind of writing appeals to the person who s making the judgment. If the winning essay has been in the first person or third person, then that s the kind of writing that they want. If they really like a very youthful tone with sassy or immature statements, then that s the kind of writing that they re looking for. If the requirement is very specific and you noticed that the content of the winners has been an extremely liberal bias, then that s the kind of writing that they re looking for in a winner. Even look at the format. Was it a 12 point Times New Roman font? Did they justify the side of the documents on both sides or was it simply justified on the left? Make yours as similar as possible in format but make it unique in content. That uniqueness in content is why you write the application first, so that they re not biased by what they see in the winners. After your child has written some-

13 College Scholarships for High School Credit 13 thing, then you look at the previous winners and try to modify your unique content so that it is similar to the prior winners. Complete the application form with your child. You ll be surprised at the things that your children do and do not know on an application form, and each one of those things is a teaching opportunity for you and for them. It s okay for you to edit that essay just as you would a regular English paper in your own homeschool; also make sure that you do the follow through. Read the details carefully because each and every detail is very important. Submit it early, and keep your focus on the actual learning because as part of your homeschool, it s not just to get the money; it s for the learning. Sometimes your children may be writing an essay on something they didn t know before. One time, my children did an essay on osteoporosis and learned a lot about osteoporosis as a health condition. If you focus on learning and not on winning, you will win in the overall game. Even when you follow through perfectly and submit it early, you still may not win a scholarship-- even if it s a perfect fit for your child. I know this because that s what happened to us; we found the absolute, perfect scholarship essay for my son, Alex, to apply to, and he wrote a gorgeous essay; but he didn t win. Even if it is a perfect fit, that doesn t mean that your student s going to win because they re only going to choose one winner; if they have five perfect fit applicants, you still have a one-out-of-five chance of winning. Keep a file with each one of your applications. Also, keep a file on your computer, because you can use those essays and application information later on as they re applying to colleges.

14 College Scholarships for High School Credit 14 File This all becomes part of your homeschool portfolio. First, save all the essays or any other work that they did; not just save it in print form, but also save it on your computer. If you turn your computer on, have a file on your desktop that says scholarships or schoolwork and save all of those essays in there; you ll be able to use those same essays later on, for different purposes. Give them English credit whenever you get hours of work, so if they re writing about an hour a day on these application essays as well as reading for them, then you can call that a whole English credit. It may also be a specialization course. For example, if they really love a particular subject, say economics, and they fill up application essay after application essay on economics, then you may have a whole credit of economics. You may be actually picking out quite a few art credits if they require photography or YouTube videos or artwork of any kind, then you can include that into an art class. Sometimes homeschoolers forget that photography is actually an art; it was an art class when it was offered in my public high school when I went to school. If you have a very techy sort of student, you can get art into them by using photography, because most of the photography now is digital photography, and it really appeals to the techy sort of kids. Determine your grades the regular way by looking at what they did, and finding grading criteria for each paper or each project that they did. Each one of those essays might get a grade for their completion or for research. There were some papers that my child filled out and I didn t give him a very good grade on it; but those were the ones that ended up getting the scholarships. If that happens to you, you might want to get back on that and get your student an A for that, be-

15 College Scholarships for High School Credit 15 cause somebody else has graded it and thought it was pretty good; so if your student wins something, make sure that you give it an A. When you re determining credit, one hour a day is one credit. Also, when you re filing these on your education records, make sure that you put anything that they win on any activity on an awards list. It s also good even if they re just mentioned as a commended student. If you have a senior and you re starting to receive information on winning scholarships but didn t win the money, and you re finding that out during senior year when your child has already applied for colleges, that is one of the pieces of information that you can use to contact the school. That s a way for you to touch base with that college and say, I really like you as a college. Look at how valuable I am: I m still winning things. My application isn t really complete because I m so good, the goodness just keeps coming. Winning benefits Sometimes people do win and sometimes they even win money. There are monetary benefits you might win money for college; you might win a gift certificate to different schools that you can use to stock up for things for college. Even if you don t win money and simply win, there are some non-monetary benefits of winning. When you win and get recommended, you can put that under activity and awards list. You can say that your students were winners in different things right on their transcripts; or, on their activity and awards lists, you can say that they were recommended. It s important to remember that sometimes, even though you ve won something that didn t have a lot of monetary benefits or none at all, that small award can lead to big and bigger awards. For example, when my children won the $25

16 College Scholarships for High School Credit 16 award for the Veterans Foreign Wars, it actually put them in the running for the next step up. That small award was the first cut-off to winning a bigger reward. You can also have non-monetary benefits because they may choose to publish what your child has written, and that was one of the biggest things that happened to my son, Kevin; they took his essay and published it. My other son, Alex, wrote an essay on economics and it was published in a magazine; he won some money, and his essay was published in Liberty Magazine. Some of the non-winning benefits might not win you a lot of money; but you can also earn high school credit. Your children learn a lot on the particular subject that they re writing about. It s a very inexpensive English program. It s an opportunity for your children to practice their writing skills; the children learn how to read and follow detailed directions; they learn about application forms, and they become very familiar with them. It gives some good experience with some concrete and inflexible deadlines. I know a lot of parents worry about how to get their child to turn things in, but those scholarship application deadlines are completely concrete and inflexible, much like tax day; if you don t get it in, you don t get the money. It will help them be project managers because they know that they need to get their assignments done on time or else they won t win the money. It can help parents realize that a transcript is needed at some point because if you fill out a few of those scholarship applications, sooner or later, you re going to need a transcript, and that can actually help you to get it done because it becomes that stimulus which pushes you to do it today. My favorite non-winning benefit is that you can use and re-use those essays, because we did re-use the essays that we used for scholarship applications; we re-used them for applications for college. One of the most common scholarship essays that they ll ask you for is What are your goals in life? or a variant of

17 College Scholarships for High School Credit 17 that subject What are your long term goals in life? It s very hard for kids to come up with long term goals because they re thinking Ice cream on Sunday would be good, and the whole long term thing is difficult for them. Once they ve written them, keep those essays and you can go back next year when they re applying to college and say Here s one, you wrote, about how to solve long term problems in engineering. They can re-use those essays again even years later. To be honest, three years after my children had written their college scholarships for high school credit, we went back into that file and took one of their essays and re-used it again for a different scholarship later on in college. It can help you remember those letters of recommendation;. Once you have that letter of recommendation, it s easier for you to go back to the same person and say a year later, Remember when you wrote that letter of recommendation? Do you think you could freshen that up and write it again for this college? because it s easier for them to simply update it rather than start from the beginning. There is one non-winning benefit that I wanted to mention; it has to do with that picture there on this slide of the book Goodnight to Illiteracy 11 th Edition. My son, Kevin, filled out an application for a scholarship for Half-Priced Books in the Washington state area. He applied and wrote this essay, and they said they wanted a short story, and so he wrote a short story about children. He went back and read some of the winning essays from the past; that s when he found out that they didn t really want a children s story, what they were really looking for was a children s poem. All of the previous winners had had poems and most of them were rhymed poems, which was far different from a short story. Kevin decided that he wasn t going to write at all; he didn t want to be bothered with it so he went back to his educational file on the computer and looked at a poem that he had written in 5 th grade, and he cut and pasted it on a new Word

18 College Scholarships for High School Credit 18 document and that was the one that he submitted to the Half-Priced Books Goodnight to Illiteracy scholarship program, and he won. The winner of this scholarship received a $50 gift certificate to Half-Priced Books; so, it wasn t really money that he won. However, they did take all of those winning essays and published them. Because he was published, the nonwinning benefit of that was that we got 11 copies of the book and I got to send a copy of the book to each of the colleges that we applied to. It is very valuable to be a published author, whether it s on a book or a magazine or online. We re going to do the demonstration. I just want to mention that I m going to go to the find and filter portion of it. We re going to go to I m going to show you how to complete the profile and how to keep notes from each section as you go through it. We re going to talk about filtering, how to take out every scholarship that isn t perfect using that one-strike-you re-out rule, and we re going to try to arrange them by due date. When you re doing this, look at the personal attributes and keep notes so that you can use it later on. This is the fastweb website. When you first log in, they re going to have you fill out your profile. This is what it looks like: This is a student who has already filled it out. Even after you ve filled it out, you can edit it and edit it. It s easy to do; you just go in as I showed you to the My Profile and you can hit edit. If you re going through this for the first time, it would ask you questions like this: Are you a high school junior? and you re looking for scholarships for college freshman year. You can type in the different colleges that you re interested in. Maybe your child is interested in something different like archeology; just type in archeology and fill in your career objectives. One of the things that I put down in here was engineering, but you may want creative writing: so that you can get more of those writing scholarships that come to you.

19 College Scholarships for High School Credit 19 For your education experience, they do have a place to put homeschooled either current or previous. I did put in honor student even though we were homeschooling independently and we didn t have AP courses because I wanted to somehow get some of the tougher stuff. Academic honors are something that you may not have unless your child is going to community college; maybe they re in the Dean s List or something. When you fill out that section, you hit submit. For personal information, they re going to be asking you things about disabilities and your heritage; don t discount anything. Look through this disability list: if your child has arthritis or ADD, that s when you want to take notes on it. I popped up my Notepad here, on my desktop, so I might type in that my son has asthma, maybe ADD, or maybe arthritis. These are all little pieces of information that I m going to store because each one of those might be a topic for your college application essay or for other scholarships. They are going to ask you a bunch of questions; don t hesitate to fill out any of these things because it can only help you in the long run. When it asks you about sports, you can put down things that you just do for fun. It doesn t have to be serious sports where only varsity applies. Look carefully through the personal attributes, and really think about each one. These may be things that you don t normally tell people, like maybe you ve never mentioned before that your child is adopted. It may be things that don t seem like they should be important, but could, ultimately, be very important. Make sure to click each one of those and every time you do, you put it on here. When you go into the student activities, they re going to ask you a bunch of things. Here s where 4H Club comes in, and that could give you some ideas for things that you haven t considered before like My child has done bible ball. Why hadn t I thought of that before? I better write that down, and all of a sud-

20 College Scholarships for High School Credit 20 den, you re going to remember things that are just as important. Make sure that you read each and every one because each one is very important. They re going to ask about memberships-- not just for the student, but also for their parents. You can see here that it will ask you Is the parent employed by the 3M Company? or Are they a member of the Air Force? On the other screen, where they ask you about the information about parents, they re going to ask the same things but they re going to ask you Are you a member of the Teamsters? and Has your parent ever gone to college? because they re scholarships that are just for children who would be the first person in their families to go to college. Remember that filling out the profile can take you hours. When you re all done with that, click on this place where it says scholarships. You need to know where it says see your scholarship matches now, you can click down there or click up here, where it says scholarship matches. The reason why I wanted to show you at least one of these websites is to show you how Fastweb can sort by due date. The way that you do that is right here at the top where it says Deadline. If you click on the word deadline, they will all show up in the order that they re due. Let me just go through a few of these things, so you can see what it s like to filter them and decide whether a particular scholarship is right for you. This one says has teamed up with Change for the Children foundation to award projects grants to individuals for taking action in their community. Do you have a sustainable community action, community program or idea that focuses on things like the Special Olympics, Diabetes Awareness, or volunteerism? Then these grants are for you. If you have a child who has done some volunteering, then that might work for them Click on the link that says website to do some further testing; read the details: it has an online

21 College Scholarships for High School Credit 21 project that says optional videos, and you can read the Frequently Asked Questions. This is something that would work for people. Sometimes, with grants, you have to be careful that it doesn t actually apply for giving money for college, so check the Frequently Asked Questions to make sure that it would apply for homeschool students that would go to college. After you ve decided that, add it to your Favorites, then go back to the whole scholarship matches. Click on deadline again so that it gets back in order; that s where you can see that it s a favorite. Let s look at the next one: the Castle Ink Green Scholarship. It s available to students who demonstrate a commitment to recycling and the environment. You have to describe in 100 words or less the things you have done to encourage and support recycling, and protect the environment. It s also acceptable to use a video describing your recycling activities; a minimum of 2.5 minutes is required. You don t have to be an incredibly good writer, 100 words is very short. In fact, an incredibly good writer might be frustrated by only having 100 words. It s hard to write anything of any substance in 100 words. For a person who doesn t write well, this is a great scholarship. Even if your child is very artistic and writes very poorly, you could do a video instead, and that might be part of their art credit for the year. It s a very easy to fill out application, and the amount is quite large, which suggests that it has probably more to do with a lot of redrawing. When you go to the website, you see that there s not a lot of hard work involved; they don t have a big application. Go back to your matches and order them by deadline again. Notice that they don t have scholarships evenly throughout the year. Most of them tend to be due in the first half of the year, so make sure you check back over and over. You have a high school student, you don t have a college student, so quickly

22 College Scholarships for High School Credit 22 determine that, when random questions pop up. When applying for academic high school student scholarship pops up, it would work for your student so, keep reading to see if it s a simple online application. When it says that it s available to high school students, it doesn t mean it s only available to public high school students; it s also available to you, as a homeschooler. You can see that you can go through them; however, when we went to the page with all the matches, each page has 20 on them, so we have about 60 scholarships that we re choosing from. Each one of them is going to take time to get down to 30 or 20, so it does take time to weed through them. Fastweb also has a good news-bad news kind of thing: They give you a lot of advertisements; they send you a lot of s, such as when they send you s saying things like The scholarship that s your favorite is due in a week. Based on the data that you already put, they ll send you that will say We just got a new scholarship, and we think that you re going to like it. It only requires a video and we think that you can do it. Even though they do bug you with advertising, it seems to help in the long run. Make sure to use sites that are specific to finding scholarships. Use those sites and: filter them, follow the one-strike-you re-out rule, format them, try to get those one page summaries so that you can give them to your children, and organize them by due date. The follow through is the important thing; the details matter. Get compliance from your children because your whole work isn t going to help if they actually don t do the job. And file that whole experience to their academic records in their transcripts or in their activity and awards list. Question and Answer Question: What are your suggestions for sources of letters of recommendation?

23 College Scholarships for High School Credit 23 Answer: Since we homeschool, we don t have access to counselors, teachers, and principals. The first thing to do is to ask one of the pastors whom you know quite well to give a recommendation of your child. If you share information about your children with another homeschool parent, that other homeschool parent might be able to write an academic letter of recommendation. Sometimes, homeschoolers are involved in activities that have a leader. If you re involved in a co-op, or if your child does boy scouts or civil air patrol, usually there will be an adult leader of those groups, whom you can ask for those letters of recommendation. Try to think outside the academic box and try to think into the activities. When you re in a regular public high school, kids are asked to give letters of recommendation from family and friends to different activities that they re involved in. They even have a letter of recommendation from their school councilor. It s okay for you to have most of yours from the activities because you don t have one from the councilor. Question: What did you call the English credit class if you used essay writing for scholarship purposes? How did you write the course description? Answer: I would write it as English Composition or Literature and Composition because that was my standard, but you could also put English Essay Writing as a way to include that. I don t remember how I wrote my course description. It is on my book and it is in my third year, if you wanted to look that up and see, but I can t remember exactly off-hand. One of the things I talked about is evaluating each application that they turn in; you can give them a grade for each application. You can even go further than that and give them a grade for doing research necessary for the application and the actual application itself. If they did an application called George Washington, then it would be a grade for the essay and for the research. You can eva-

24 College Scholarships for High School Credit 24 luate them based on each one that they complete, so if they completed 30 of those, they would have 30 different evaluation criteria on your course description. Question: Can you explain the filter one-strike-you re-out? Answer: Think about baseball and it s three-strikes-and-you re-out rule, but with the scholarship essay, it s one strike and-- you re-- out. The very first thing that you read that says it s not for your student is the very first time that you put that essay completely out of your mind and throw it away. If that intro paragraph says This scholarship is for Harvard University or it s only good for high school seniors and you re child is a junior, don t read it any further. Immediately throw it away and go to the next one; it s one-strike-you re-out. You start with so many scholarships but your goal is to cut it down as much as possible. Remember that they continue to give you scholarships throughout the whole year.