Ted Felix
Maryland Law,
COMAR
13a.10.01 sections
00
- Title page
01
- Home Instruction Program (this is the most important one)
02
- Voluntary Participation in Standardized Testing
03
- Noncompliance with Requirements
04
- Placement in Public School
05
- Home Instruction Under Supervision of Nonpublic School
Maryland Home Education Association - Watchdog group for Maryland.
Maryland GED - And the GED Testing Service. Also check out amazon.com for plenty of GED prep books.
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McGraw-Hill's GED with CD-ROM (Patricia Mulcrone 2005) - Most popular and highest rated GED prep book on Amazon (as of 4/2006). |
Every county handles homeschooling differently in Maryland. You'll need to look for resources specific to your county to get started. If, like us, you live in Frederick County, here's what we learned when we started in 2005. (All of this still applies in 2006.)
The first thing you'll need to do is fill out and mail in the homeschool registration form. The Frederick County Public Schools website has the form in the Department of Student Services area. This needs to be sent in 15 days prior to starting homeschooling.
Next, you'll want to plan your curriculum. Hunt around a bit on the FCPS website and you can find course catalogs for each grade level to get you started.
Frederick County uses a "Home Instruction Profile" form to keep a record that an education program is in place. This can be filled out and sent to them in advance, or you can bring it to your first review. Given that they have to work with 1600 kids, filling this out for them will save them a lot of time. They'll fill it out anyway during the review if you don't. The curriculum and schedule sections of the form are the most important.
The curriculum section provides large boxes for Language Arts/English, Math, Social Studies, and Science. Smaller boxes are provided for Art, Music, Health, PE, Field Trips, and Projects or Activities. For each subject, you list the materials used and grade level. We filled in the names of the textbooks we were using and the grade levels for each. If you aren't using textbooks, you can just as easily list whatever materials you are planning to use for your program.
The schedule section asks you to list your basic home instruction schedule. For this, we listed each subject and the time that would be spent per day. For instance, 1-1/2 hours on English. If you plan to unschool, this one might be a little tricky, but you should be able to keep track on a daily basis, then figure some averages and put them in here. I would imagine that unschoolers would bring this to the first review (instead of mailing it in up front) so that they would have some data to use to characterize the program more accurately.
The FCPS site has an older version of the Home Instruction Profile form. It's pretty similar to the current one.
The key is to make sure you've got something for every box on this form. This will make the review go more smoothly. This form is geared more toward the law than the school system, so you'll find it a bit interesting to teach to the school system requirements (which is important if you intend to move back into the public school system for High School) and fill out this form. I suggest having some small classes to cover the law's requirements, but focus primarily on the school system's requirements if you are going in this direction. Since we aren't planning on going back to the public schools, my approach has been to focus on the "Three R's". Our English and Math programs are top priority.
We had our first portfolio review 9/30/2005. It went very well. We found out that as of 2005, Frederick County has 1600 homeschooled students. And there are only two portfolio reviewers.
For our first review with Frederick County, we put together a looseleaf binder (as described on the Anne Arundel County Portfolio Requirements page) including a divider for each subject, a sample weekly planner page for each subject, and samples of the work for each subject.
Our reviewer was primarily interested in making sure that we had everything we needed, and gave us some information on programs that might be of interest, like co-ops, and Community College classes. The review went very smoothly.
We had our second review 9/21/2006 and it went just as smoothly as the first, perhaps even more so since we knew exactly what to expect, and the reviewer knew we were "veterans" at this. As of 2006, Frederick County has just over 1500 homeschoolers.
For our second review, we brought a folder (one for each kid) with an English weekly planner and one sample assignment from each subject. Since it was so early in the year, we just went with something recent.
It's kind of funny looking back and thinking that "portfolio review" was the thing we were most concerned about. Now we know that we should have been much more concerned about how to work with children who hadn't learned anything in the public and private school systems. They needed a gentle introduction to the level of Math and English expected of students their age along with a gradual increase in difficulty to get them up to speed. It isn't easy at all, but it isn't impossible either. As time goes by, we realize how successful we've been. It's real hard to see that when you start out.
We had our third review 10/17/2007 and it was super smooth as usual. As of 2007, Frederick County has 1640 homeschoolers with approximately 60% using the review process and 40% using umbrella programs.
Our portfolio was just like last year's: planner sheets, and sample work. No problems. Teaching kids is the real challenge. Focus on it.
Maryland requires a portfolio review. The only requirements for the portfolio are that it shows "regular and thorough" instruction in the appropriate subjects. It's up to you to meet this vague requirement, and there are many ways to do it. Many other states also require portfolios, so there are plenty of portfolio related resources to be found on the Internet. Search on homeschool portfolio for more.
Homeschool Weekly Planner Page (Word Document, 21kb) - This is the planner page that I developed. We use this for each subject every week to record what we've done, and to plan what we will do for the next day. It looks very impressive in a portfolio review and gets us positive comments.
Anne Arundel County Maryland Portfolio Requirements - J. Gibson was kind enough to publish her experiences with Anne Arundel County's portfolio requirements and portfolio review process. I based my first portfolios on these guidelines and passed with flying colors.
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The Homeschooler's Guide to Portfolios and Transcripts (Loretta Heuer) is a really great book. I haven't read it completely, but I did browse it and use it to develop our first year transcript. Just browsing it was enough to realize this is a really great book. It helped me clarify exactly how I wanted to present our homeschool program on a transcript. |
CMSL's Portfolio page - Maine. General portfolio information.
CHASE SC's Portfolio site - South Carolina. Covers many different types of portfolios.
EduSpeak Glossary - Make your portfolio more impressive with a smattering of $0.25 words. Not needed in Frederick County as the reviewers are more personal. Other counties that don't do one-on-one portfolio reviews would probably be better swayed by edu-speak.
My homeschool page has more information on our approach to curriculum and working with children.
HomeschoolFrederick.com has all sorts of information about homeschooling in the Frederick Maryland area.
<- Back to my homeschool page.
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