Our last official day of the school year is June 14th.

Here’s what we recommend for end-of-year wrap up!

Assessment Tests
Students should take the end-of-year assessment tests after they’ve completed the year to assess progress and evaluate your their academic needs for the next school year. All assessment tests are inside student accounts, and answer keys and results are available in the PTA (Parent/Teacher Account). If your student does not pass, you may want to test for prior school year knowledge using any of the assessment tests available from K-12th to gauge the best placement per subject for next year. Our curriculum is kept online year-round, and students can continue working/reviewing over the summer and may retake assessment tests at any time, if you wish. These are not standardized state tests, but do cover what students should know at grade level.

End-of-Year Transcripts
Upon completion of the year, we recommend creating an end-of-year transcript for each student showing their official grades for courses taken. The PTA upgrade has a transcript generator that can be used to create them.

See this blog post to learn more about how the transcript generator works:
Easily Produce End-of-Year Transcripts

Certificates of Completion
Certificates of completion for each grade level are a great way to reward students and provide them with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the year. A certificate of completion can be created for pre-k to 11th grade students in the PTA. There are also certificates of completion for specific courses in our extra curriculum such as, HTML and Personal Finance.

Diplomas for 12th Graders
For twelfth grade graduates, parents may generate a high school diploma inside the PTA. Many parents will use a frame or certificate folder from an office supply store to showcase the diploma and present it during a family graduation ceremony.

Saving Student Work and Records
We recommend saving all student work given to you throughout the year, organized by student, course, and day#. If you have a PTA, we recommend printing out all reports for the year (attendance, reading log, PE log, assignment counts, quiz/test/assessment results, and completed transcripts). Some parents will create a portfolio for the year of the best work completed in a binder for each student, organized by course, and include two of the best work samples for each month per course.

Check Your Laws
Be sure to check your state’s homeschool laws for anything they may require from you as a homeschooler.

Contact us by email if you have any questions on the above.

In this week’s STEM activity, students will learn about latitude and longitude and the GPS system while hunting down various coordinates on the earth to uncover what’s there.

The Global Positioning System (GPS), is a satellite navigation system that provides geolocation and time information to a GPS receiver. Every location on earth has a geographic coordinate where latitude and longitude lines meet. In this STEM project, students will go on a world wide hunt for what’s located at specific geographic coordinates and chart them on a world map. Supplies list, instructions, and worksheets are inside student accounts.

After completing Day 180 in our curriculum, end-of-year Assessment Tests can be taken for spelling, math, history/social studies, and science.

The tests can be found inside student accounts by clicking the Assessment Test link. You may need to direct your child as to which tests to take, since they are available for all grade levels. Tests can be taken at any time, and be taken more than once.

Assessment Tests are part of the Parent/Teacher Account upgrade (PTA). Test preparation is not required, but you may wish to review the answer keys in the PTA if you’d like to guide your student on topics to review prior to taking the tests.

Test results will display in the Parent/Teacher Account after test submission.

How to use the Parent/Teacher Account Transcript Generator

Maintaining student records is essential when homeschooling. Records are important for tracking student progress, showing academic accomplishments, and are necessary for students moving on to college, or going back into a school setting. The transcript generator in the Parent/Teacher Account makes it quick and easy.

The DK12 transcript generator is highly flexible and can accommodate a variety of homeschooling situations, and school calendar timelines. Transcripts can be generated by semester, quarterly, mid-year, and end-of-year to accommodate the traditional American school year, global students, or year-round homeschooling schedules. This post will focus on producing an end-of-year transcript.

The transcript generator takes just a few minutes to produce a transcript. A variety of options allow for any combination of courses taken, whether through Discovery K12’s curriculum or other sources. Each transcript produced can be downloaded and printed for your records. Featured below is a completed transcript.

Step 1 – Make sure your parent profile is completed before creating the transcript. The transcript generator will automatically populate all of your homeschool data from your profile such as your homeschool name (if you have one), and contact information. If you do not have a homeschool name, we recommend using your last name and the word homeschool, such as Smith Homeschool.


Step 2 – You will need the following data to produce a student’s transcript: course name, the grade for each course, standardized testing or assessment test results (if you have done them), other extra curricular activities or volunteer programs, and any comments such as areas of achievement and improvement. Once you have your data together, it takes just a few minutes to produce the actual transcript.

How to know what grade to give? We recommend reviewing/grading assignments throughout the year with daily review/grading as optimal, and weekly as the next best schedule. Not all parents like grade or grade everything, but we do recommend reviewing work on a regular basis. It’s really the only way to know how your child is doing, and be able to correct or provide guidance to any given situation. You can use any grading method of your choice. Some parents prefer a traditional grade scale such as A, B+, B-, etc. and other prefer to use marks such as O for outstanding, S for satisfactory, N, needs work, etc. To formulate a grade for each course, we recommend looking at the completed work given to you during the year, and any quiz/test scores in the Grade Book, as well as any Assessment Tests results that are in the PTA. We recommend issue the course grade based on that information. We also recommend saving all of that work and quiz/test results. If you don’t want to save all of the work, then we recommend saving select work samples for each course such as, one of the best essays and presentations for language arts for each month of the school year.

Step 3 – Access the transcript generator in the PTA by clicking the “Transcripts” link under the My Student’s area next to the student’s name that you will create the transcript for.

What credits do I select/issue?
We consider one credit to equal one course for a year. You can read more about the Carnegie Unit and Student Hour if you’d like to learn more about credits.

Step 4 – Now, fill in your information on the transcript generator. At the top, select “End-of-Year” in the dropdown school year field, and select the grade level of your student. We recommend selecting 1 for the course credit field for an end-of-year transcript.

Then, all you need to do is select or enter the course name and select its grade from the preset dropdown fields. If you are using DK12 curriculum exclusively, you can select each course from the dropdown fields under Core Courses and Extra Curriculum. There are five (5) additional “Other Courses” areas that let you enter courses taken outside of DK12’s curriculum.

You can enter any test results for standardized tests that have been taken (such as SAT or standardized state testing); and any comments about your students progress, volunteer/community efforts, extra curriculum activities, awards or other accomplishments you’d like to show on the transcript can be entered.

Select the number of Core Courses and the number of Extra Curriculum Courses taken at the bottom of the page, and the transcript generator will automatically calculate the credits and GPA for you. The grading table on the transcript app is a standard percentage-based system where above 90% is an A, above 80% is a B, etc.; and the Grade Point Average (GPA) of above 4 is an A and above a 3 is a B, etc.

Step 5 – Click “Create Transcript” and your new transcript will appear at the top of the page to print, sign, and save for your records.

You can create a test transcript inside the PTA to see how it all works!

Additional features of the DK12 Parent/Teacher Account can be found here.

We will officially start the 2021-2022 school year on Sept. 7th, the Tuesday after Labor Day. If you’d like to be notified about our open registration period, please join the email list.

The DK12 2021-2022 calendar is now available for download.

More announcements to come!