Keeping Homeschooling Records

by Katharine Houk

A topic that frequently comes up at homeschooling support group meetings is record keeping. For those whose homeschooling approach is interest-initiated and far-ranging, it can be a challenge to write quarterly reports for submission to the school district, when learning is expected to be pigeonholed into subject areas.

When our family first started homeschooling, the New York State Home Instruction Regulation was not in effect. Homeschooling was permitted, but was handled differently by each school district, with guidelines from the State Education Department offering suggestions on how to handle homeschooling.

Our district gave us a checklist to fill out periodically, and that was the extent of our reporting. But at that time, I kept daily logs of my children’s activities, even though I didn’t need them for reporting purposes. I was fascinated with their learning processes, and had great fun documenting all the wonderful things they did. Most of their learning was through play; they played intensely, happily, and for hours and days at a time. My challenge was in translating their activities and our conversations and experiences into a form that would fit in the subject area boxes in my log book.

When the need for reporting came along, with the passage of the current regulation, it was easy for us to make that transition; we had already been keeping records. Besides the requirement that as homeschoolers you must keep an attendance record (!), there is no specific requirement for record keeping in the regulation. But I knew that having a written record of our activities would be helpful to me in writing reports. Besides, I was already in the habit of doing it, and enjoyed creating a record of my children’s learning.

I used a loose leaf notebook for each child. In the front were pages that looked like a lesson plan book, with subject areas listed down the left side of the page, and the days of the week across the top of the page. I included Saturday and Sunday, because learning doesn’t stop for weekends. In the notebooks I also included a place to record field trips and keep photographs, pocket pages for papers, etc. It served us well, and the children enjoy looking back at them, laughing at the spelling in their early writings, and reminiscing about trips and other activities from years ago.

As the children grew older, I grew weary of sifting their learning into subject area categories. Their learning is all of a piece, and it became tedious to chop it up into artificial compartments on a daily basis. Therefore, I changed the notebook to include lined paper, where each day I would write a few sentences about what was done that day. At the end of each month I would make a synopsis of the month by subject area. Then when it came time for a quarterly report I would have something to work from.

Now that the children are so much older (12 and 15), it is unnecessary for me alone to do all the record keeping. Also, my offspring are such independent learners and I am so busy that often I am not aware of their activities or of what books they are reading. I do jot things down from time to time that I am aware of and that I find especially noteworthy. But I ask each of them to keep their own notebook, and to write down the books they are reading, their activities and whatever else they care to put in their journals. This way, I am not invading their privacy, and they have a record in their writing of what they have done. At report time, they share with us the parts of their journals they want in their reports. Privacy is an important issue, one that is sometimes not taken into account when school districts want to know everything that is happening with our children.

Some families I know use a spiral bound notebook for record keeping, and store papers in a separate portfolio. Also, there are commercially distributed record keeping systems you can purchase. Night Owl Press markets a book called Plan-It that was intended for teachers in schools, but could be used by homeschoolers. A system created especially for homeschoolers is the Home Schoolers Journal. For those of you who, with the proliferation of home computers, no longer use paper and pencil, there is a computer program especially for keeping track of your homeschooling. It is called The Home School Organizer Made Easy (HOME) and was created by a parent of five homeschooled children. The program is for IBM and is available through Diligent Software.

Whatever method of record keeping you choose, the results will help in writing reports and complying with assessment requirements, and will be a wonderful chronicle of your children’s growth and development.

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