Record Keeping Tips for the Home Educator

For those of you considering the option of home schooling your child or children, the task of record keeping can be daunting, especially for those with high school age, college bound students. The average post secondary educational institute will require a copy of the student's transcripts, detailing the Carnegie credits earned, weighted and non-weighted Grade Point Average (GPA), and a brief synopsis of courses and material covered.

Before you begin pulling clumps of hair from your scalp, fearful of how to create and organize your son or daughter's home school career into a college acceptable package, relax and read on. I use some very simple, cost effective and practical methods for tracking and maintaining the key documentation most University and collegiate systems will require.

Attendance / Assignments

A relatively inexpensive, handy way of keeping your child's attendance and daily assignments organized is by utilizing a weekly/monthly academic planner. These little books come in compact sizes of approximately 3-1/2" x 6-3/8", up to larger 8-1/2" x 11".

The typical layout consists of a two-page monthly overview calendar, where simple stickers or X's can be used to mark off each day your son or daughter completed schoolwork. In addition, there are ruled pages labeled with Monday through Wednesday on one page, followed by Thursday through Sunday on the other. Each day contains the date and enough lines to jot down brief daily assignments. I found this to be space saving and the ideal way to keep my teen on track with her studies.

Each weekend, I spend about two to four hours creating the coming week's lesson plan. I list each course and its daily assignment, including due date if it is a longer, more involved project, on one to two lines of the ruled weekly pages. On Sunday evening, we sit down to go over the tasks for the following day. The book then remains with my daughter and she uses it as a log for herself, checking off each subject's assignment as it is completed. During the week, when I come home each day from work, we sit down with that book and begin going over the work from the day, correcting worksheets, reports, tests or projects. At the end of the school year, I have a small, organized journal reminding me of the days she was ill, on vacation or completing course work, and a clear record of what material we covered during the month's class was in session.

Logs

The older and further along in course work your child gets, the more helpful and important it is to keep record of things such as the text books used, reading material, field trips, and science experiments conducted. Having this sort of information recorded is definitely necessary later when creating transcripts for college. Since a good list of these educational tools can nicely supplement grades and GPA, I highly recommend keeping logs of this information to include.

Obviously, any notebook or binder will work to record reading lists, textbook titles, and their copyrights. I choose to create log sheets for each separately using Microsoft Word, printing them out at the end of the year. Nothing fancy is required, just be sure to include specific information with regard to each log. For added effect, when I first began home schooling my daughter, I asked her to think of a school name. I include that name on the heading of each log page, which gives it a more professional appearance.

Examples of individual logs and what each would track are:

1. Books read, including title, author, copyright information, number of pages and date used. "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens, copyright 1997 Signet Classics, 400 pages. Completed reading in May 2008.
2. Textbook utilized, author(s), copyright information, chapters/units, grade(s) used.

McDougal Little Math Course 2 by Laurie Boswell, Timothy Kanold, Ron Larson and Lee Stiff, copyright 2007. Algebraic Thinking, Decimals, and Data; Fractions and Integers; Algebra, Proportions, and Percents; Geometry and Measurement. Grade 8.

1. Field Trip, location, subject, grade visited. Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago , Illinois . General Science. Grade 6.
2. Science Lab/Experiment, date conducted on, grade. Constructing and reading a Barometer, April 21 to April 25, 2008. Grade 8.

Grades

Grading itself can be intimidating, but keeping track of the grades should not be. As with other record keeping, there are several different ways of doing this, each entirely up to you as the parent-teacher. Actual grade books, completely ruled and ready to use, are available at stores such as Staples.

Although these provide a nice guideline and ample pages, I find having yet another book to keep track of in the house a bit cumbersome. I chose to create a grade book electronically using Microsoft Excel. I have a titled tab for each course, color coded for easy locating, and used some simple Excel formulas to calculate, automatically, the grade percentage based on points possible versus points earned for each assignment, quiz, project or test. With the ability to save the spreadsheet both to my hard drive and disc (CD) I am able to have an up-to-date record of my daughter's progress and easily convert it for coming years.

Transcripts

One of the most daunting tasks I had as a home educator was how to ensure my daughter's future college acceptance would not be hindered by our choice to home school. As her parent and instructor, I wanted to be prepared to provide her with all of the proper tools she would need for applying to and entering post secondary life.

Carnegie credits are the total number of credits each course per year is worth. This equates to English 9 equaling 1.0 credit, Algebra II equaling 1.0 and having an end total, after four years of high school, which meets or exceeds your state's graduate requirements. Ours happens to be 24, with a required of 4.0 credits in English as an example. These credits must appear on the transcript, along with the annual and cumulative GPA.

In order to keep information clear for myself, and readily available, I turned once again to Microsoft Word. First, I created a Word document to act as an outline or syllabus for each year of high school. I performed an online search to determine what courses were required by our state in order to graduate and tailored the layout of the syllabus to include a breakdown of each year. I then created a second, more detailed outline to serve as my guide for the current academic year. This document contains the titles of all books utilized, and a general unit-by-unit breakdown of each semester per course. Using the Excel grade book and these Word documents in conjunction with one another, I can now easily locate and calculate the necessary transcript information needed.

There are several formats to choose from, limited only by how professional and aesthetically appealing you desire the transcript to be. Just be sure to include the pertinent information, such as student's full name, school name, clear and concise course title and bibliographic list of texts within a two-page document length.

Your child's education is an invaluable tool he or she will benefit from the rest of his life. Choosing to educate at home is no less valuable than a public or private school it is simply different. Don't be afraid to try, and don't allow little things such as documentation scare you into thinking you aren't capable. Be creative, you can do it!