Record Keeping-- Recording your Adventure!

As a school teacher for many years, I found the standard record keeping to be tedious but oh so helpful in keeping track of how your students are progressing. What I found in homeschooling though was that I didn’t need to rely so much on the percentage and/or letter grade.

More importantly, because I am homeschooling, my main goal or outcome is not an end grade or grade point average. Remember what we stated our goal to be at the beginning or our Adventure? The goal? A memorable experience where my student(s) gets the joy of learning, the life skills for success, a Spiritual foundation, and a sense of who they are and why they are here.

With that goal in mind, the grades take a back seat perspective in record keeping don’t they?(still may be necessary for state records and helpful in some subjects). Instead, I ask myself, what do I want to measure? What do I want recorded for memories sake? What will truly represent the education of my child?

So what is it I want to measure?

I need to measure progress.

I need to stay on track.

I want to measure growth.

I need to record memories.

I also need to meet those state requirements for record keeping.

Most of all, I want my student to have a record of all the knowledge gathered, recorded, learned and stored.

So, how am I to meet all these objectives? Let’s look at several options.

Standard Record Keeping

If I chose the School-at-home approach, it may be just as easy to keep records as a classroom teacher does. Using a grade book that lists each subject and each student with space for each assignment as well as the grade received. While you can use paper form of these record books, electronic versions are also available and very effective.

That doesn’t stop you from doing any of the other creative approaches as well! It's YOUR homeschool adventure!

For more information on grade books, programs, etc. visit our page on Resources: record keeping

Scrapbooking

Electronic scrapbooking is becoming more appealing and more accessible to homeschoolers. Many of our photos, now days, are taken with a digital camera of some kind. It only follows that we would edit, create and store them digitally. Check out www.pixelpaintpapers.com for electronic scrapbooking ideas and instruction.

Creating a “page” for a subject studied, or an event participated in is a great record of what was done, learned and accomplished. How fun is it to go back and recall the learning process and as well as the experience in all it’s forms.

If you have not converted to the digital realm, no worries, you can also keep photo records and incorporate them in the tangible form of paper scrapbooks. Either way, you have your memories, subjects covered, and it is an excellent form of review for your student to summarize what they have learned! To top it off, they are doing the recording! Learning early to put their “resume” together all through the school years rather than their senior year or right before they NEED that job! That’s my kind of learning! That’s part of the Adventure!

Portfolios

You can save all work that the student does and choose from that at the end of the year to show an overall of their progress through the year. At the end of twelfth grade, the portfolio is a comprehensive view of their progress and accomplishments.

This is great for memories and showing an overview of their education but can be limiting in helping the parent to monitor their advancement in each subject. In this case, I recommend that you keep another daily record of completion, grade (pass or fail), etc. to help you, the teacher, to keep on track during the year.

Video Journals

What a treasure when you have twelve years on one DVD for them to have the rest of their lives?! How powerful will that be for interviews?

Feeling a bit lost?