>>>>A client writes: I want to give my kids credit for Bible…but I haven’t asked them to write a single thing down this year. What do I do?<<<<When we did Bible, I just had them read books, mostly. No tests. Rare papers. Sometimes one of them would teach Sunday School classes, or read scripture at church.
May I suggest that Bible may be one good area to count hours? Just estimate how many hours per day or week they spend reading and talking to you about these issue. 1 hour a day or 5 days a week would be a whole credit. 2 hours per week might be 1/2 credit (rough estimates are OK.) Once in a while, when I wanted “proof” I would ask them to write their English paper on something about their Bible or the books they were reading. They did it INSTEAD of an English paper, though, not in addition.
Do you remember all my stories about Alex and economics and Kevin and chess? They just did all this reading for fun (totally freaked me out, actually.) Now with Alex, I gave him CLEP exams in economics, and figured out real fast how many credits of economics he had learned. With Kevin it wasn’t so easy. Surprisingly there is no CLEP exam in chess! (LOLOLOLOL!!!!!) I still gave him credit for it. No tests (duh!) and no written work. I kept track of the books that he read, and the chess classes that he taught. When I wrote his course description, that was all it included 
You CAN cut out the busy work. Stop thinking in terms of how SCHOOLS evaluate learning, and think about how YOU evaluate learning. From what you say, it sounds like you do most of your evaluation by oral report, right? Oral reports are a perfectly acceptable way to evaluate. Alex’s college final in French yesterday was an oral report. It’s really fine to do that!
If you want “proof” and you just must have proof, then write a list of the books they read, and write the topic of your discussions. “Nature of Hell, 1 hour” or “Nature of Grace, 1 hour.” If that makes you feel better, than more power to you! Then you’ll have “proof” in case you ever wanted to use your proof. I just don’t recommend that you change what you’re doing, because what your doing is working!
Does that help?
Blessings,
Lee
–
The HomeScholar
www.TheHomeScholar.com
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