Go (Almost) Paperless in Your Home School: The High School Years

A large percentage of home schoolers give up as their children enter the high school years. It's too bad really, because it's during these years that I've had the most impact on my children, at least since they were toddlers. Awash in term papers, geometric theorems, and the opposite sex, many high school kids drift away from the things that seemed very important to them only a year or two prior; like the environment and their parents' values. For these reasons we chose to see it through.

I realized a number of years ago that I was throwing out a lot of paper. It seemed an unnecessary bit of waste. After all, here in Texas we aren't required to keep many records and there are no paper requirements. Why exactly was I creating Mead Mountain?

I gave the kids a week off of school so that I could think. Was it even possible to go paperless at the high school level?

I think that it is possible to have a paperless high school home school. It requires some creativity and adapting but it can be done. Here's how I did it.

Ideas to Help You Go Paperless in Your Home-school High School

1. Look for computer programs for the subjects your teen wants to learn. Some people love Switched-on-Schoolhouse, a completely computer generated curriculum. I despise it and my kids don't think much of it either. However, saying that, the idea is a good one. There are a ton of software based curricula available to home schoolers. All of the work is done on the computer, and the program keeps track of grades, weak areas, and assignments. Some are full curricula while others allow you to learn a language, algebra, or other skills.

2. Rather than having your student write reports and term papers have them start a blog and keep it going for the whole year. Require that they post a certain number of posts per week, if you like. When they design it themselves and choose their own subjects to write about they are much less likely to drag their feet. Many sites like Blogger and Wordpress offer free, easy to use blogging platforms.

3. If you do decide to require reports and term papers they can easily be written on the computer and stored in a file. Images can be added to the files for a very professional looking report.

4. Math can be done in a word program and then saved to a file on the computer. If it ever needs to be used as evidence that you are home schooling you can save the whole thing to a disk.

5. Science and lab notebooks can be replaced with a computer file.

6. Rather than having lots of writing for your student to do, consider letting them do a 9 solar projects, and other eco-science projects.

7. Test papers can be scanned and done on the computer, or a Word file opened and the answers typed out.

8. You can keep track of the records you need to keep in a spreadsheet.

9. You can also keep your lesson plans in a word file.

Read Books Online

Another way to save paper, and money is to take advantage of the books available online for free. Sites like Page by Page Books and The Gutenberg Project have hundreds of books available for you to read. A quick Internet search will turn up even more.

The advantage is obvious. The books are available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There is no cost to read them and no paper is needed to print them. The disadvantage is that the vast majority of the books were printed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. If your teen likes more contemporary fiction you may want to look into something like Amazon's Kindle. You can download books, magazines, newspapers, and even your favorite blogs on it are read for a very low price.

My favorite benefit of having a nearly paperless home school is the lack of paper clutter I have to deal with. With a large family we have enough clutter without adding five or six math papers, two term papers of forty pages each, and a social studies quiz.

While you may not be ready to go totally paperless, you can implement some of these steps and cut down on your paper consumption quite a bit. It all makes a difference. Save money on home school supplies, save time, save space...Going paperless is a great way to tame all kinds of chaos.

If you don't think you can do it try just going paperless for a week. Once you see that you can do it you may be hooked on the simplicity of a paperless home school.

Also read Go (Almost) Paperless in Your Home School: The Elementary School Years.

Got a tip or a post idea for us to write about on Planet Green? Email pgtips (at) treehugger (dot) com.