We recommend documenting extracurricular activities on an extracurricular sheet, not on your transcript or other records. A separate sheet is how colleges, trade schools, the military, and employers will want to see these activities listed. If your teen uses the Common Application to apply for college, they will be able to enter up to 10 activities on that platform, and having your sheet to refer to will be greatly helpful!

What is an extracurricular sheet?

The extracurricular sheet is a record of your student’s dates of participation in each activity with specific, concise details such as: approximate number of hours of participation; coach’s, director’s, or instructor’s name; skills acquired; responsibilities performed; and awards or honors earned. You might consider organizing the activities chronologically within categories. (For ideas for developing your student’s extracurricular sheet, you can download the sample below.)

These activities are an essential part of your student's college, military school, and/or employment applications. They add perspective to the academic information, give an indication of your student’s value-add to the college environment, distinguish your student from other prospective students that may have similar academic profiles, and demonstrate skills that may be transferable to a job!

What else does the extracurricular sheet do? It also provides your teen with a source of data about their high school experiences that may come in super handy in a variety of situations.

  • When your student (or graduate) applies for their first job, the extracurricular sheet might provide skills, experience, accomplishments, and references that they can include on their resume.
  • If applying to college, your teen can mine their extracurricular sheets for experiences to use in answering college application and essay questions. (For more, you can check out this College Board article: The Extracurricular Edge.)
  • If your student enlists in the military, they can select activities from the extracurricular sheet to demonstrate their teamwork experience, personal accomplishments, and physical conditioning.

Unless your teen began a significant activity in middle school and continued it through high school, the extracurriculars listed should be limited to those from grades 9–12.

Be sure to keep a time log

Some applications will require you to enter the hours of participation per week, as well as weeks per year for each activity (i.e., 4 hrs/wk for 32 weeks of the year—remember this is an average so don’t stress too much if it varies week to week!).

An activity log is a handy tool to keep track of those hours. You might create your own, find a template online, or order one from Amazon or another provider. If you are already in the high school years and haven’t been keeping track, don’t worry! Start tracking now, and approximate your student’s hours for the time that has passed.

This sample extracurricular sheet can give you ideas for developing your teen’s extracurricular activities sheet. The sample activities are listed “resume-style”, but your teen can describe their activities a bit less formally, depending on the application (whether for college, job, or military), letting their personality shine through the way they talk about the things they enjoy doing.