This week on Homeschool Highschool Podcast: High School Graduation Celebration Ideas. This post is running concurrently on the Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network.
High School Graduation Celebration Ideas
The day finally comes. Your homeschool high schooler has earned all the credits, completed all the tasks, and planned their next steps in life. It’s time for graduation!
Congratulations to your teen…and also to you, homeschool moms and dads. High school graduation is a wonderful time, and it is emotionally complicated, as well. The end of an era of parenting and of homeschooling has come. The beginning of a new phase of life is about to begin.
We 7Sisters understand. We have graduated a couple of dozen of our own homeschoolers, so we understand the highs and lows. That means we have also held lots of graduation celebrations.
With that in mind, in this episode of Homeschool Highschool Podcast, we (Sabrina, Vicki, and Kym) are going to share some of our favorite graduation celebration ideas!
Two categories of graduation celebrations
As you know, there’s not ONE right way to homeschool. Along with that, there’s not ONE right way to celebrate your homeschooler’s graduation. We will share what has worked for us.
First category: the graduation ceremony
One of the funny things about homeschooling is graduation! Our first generation of high schoolers had never been to graduation ceremonies. So, when it came time for them to graduate high school and we started talking about graduation ceremonies, they said, “What’s the big deal?”
None of our teens were into showy stuff and wondered why they needed to have an official ceremony. Vicki remembers that she informed her teens, “Listen, you may not have any idea, but I need to see you walk across the stage. And I have earned that, so you are going to do that.”
Parents have that need for closure, and a ceremony gives us that feeling. When our teens walked across the stage in caps and gowns, and we flipped the tassel on their caps, we felt we had the closure we needed on our teens’ homeschooling journey.
After all, homeschooling is a family process. Teens are not isolated in their education. We are there with them, instructing, guiding, and supporting them. So graduation ceremonies are not just for teens. They are also for us.
So you see, the graduation ceremony is a validation of our family’s homeschool education and a gathering with other people to say, “We did this. We did this. We did high school.”
Our teens came to enjoy the graduation ceremony process, so it turned out well.
Our graduation ceremony ideas
There’s not one right way to hold a graduation ceremony. Some people have the event in their backyard. We borrowed a church for the day. (BTW- learn more how-tos in this Homeschool Highschool Podcast episode on planning graduation ceremonies.)