Making Home School Records Simple for Parents

Maintaining home school records is necessary to document all the skills and knowledge your child has learned throughout the home school curriculum. This is also necessary when you need to transfer your child to another school. All the information that is kept will allow you to create yourhomeschool transcripts(although you don't have to start that until 9th grade). The information below will give you guidelines on how to do this.

The best way to keep home school records . . .

What are your state specific guidelines to keep records? Some states require that you keep vaccination and assessment records. Some states require quarterly or daily attendance reports. If you go to HSLDA, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, you will find all state guidelines listed there.

Find out how you will organize your records. For those who love technology, you can purchase software that will assist with record keeping. Homeschool Tracker and Edu-track are two examples of this. For a simpler approach, there are free downloadable forms for record keeping.

Keeping a portfolio will help you to keep records, but also organizes work that has been completed. If you choose, you can also keep track of credit or working hours by adding dates and times. If you are utilizing credit hours, you can take 120 hours of work time to each one credit earned.

I just put all papers completed in a folder and then sort the folder at the end of the year.

The best home school records start at the beginning of the year when you are planning on what to study and what to purchase. Here's a free homeschool planner that you can use every year. It's the one have used for many years. I hope you like it.

Keep a record of books your child has read as well as the score of each assignment. One method of scoring an assignment is by taking the amount the student has correct out of how many problems there are and score it with a percentage. Another method of scoring is called the rubric method. There are 4 points all together. You get 3 points on how to solve question but the answer is incorrect. 2 points for coming up with the correct answer, however the explanation is incorrect. 0 points for not being able to explain or get the correct answer. The other method is just pass or fail.

As long as you have the student's papers, you really don't need to have a fancy scoring system. If you enjoy scoring and writing down the score, then do it. But if you hate scoring and writing down results, then just keep the papers and let an assessor look over the work if that is what you use at the end of the year.

You can provide as much or as little detail as you want when keeping home school records. You can keep records of experiments your student did, photos you took, and video clips of work. These records can come in handy applying for a job or going into college study but are not really necessary before 9th grade.