Keeping Track

The official end of the school year is in sight and I'll soon be making up final report cards.  We have decisions to make about what we'll do next school year, which resources I need to buy and what we already have, and what to do the things we're finished with.  Somehow, we need to organize all of it. And honestly, no one would accuse me of being well-organized.

While the books and school materials (and a lot of other things too!) tend to accumulate in stacks and boxes at my house, rather than in bookshelves and file cabinets, I do need to keep track of the schoolwork that we've done and be able to produce some documentation of it.  For me, the best tool for keeping a record of grades and transcripts and all of those fun things is TGHomesoft's Homeschool Tracker program.  A number of years ago, I tried the free version of the Homeschool Tracker and liked it very well.  As my oldest reached high school age and I realized that I might want to do things like produce my own transcript, or weight grades, I decided it was time to purchase the Homeschool Tracker Plus.  I absolutely love it! It has made lesson planning, grading, and other aspects of record-keeping relatively easy and - dare I say it - fun.

Anyway, that's how I keep track of school days, grades, lesson plans, hours logged (for P.E. especially), and resources we use.

My best advice (that I struggle to follow myself) is that if you're going to grade the work, do it every day and don't let it stack up.  I fail at this pretty regularly and find myself scrambling to grade several days' worth of math or language arts, which puts pressure on me to do a bunch at a time, and doesn't help the kids much either.  If they've been making a mistake that I don't catch in my skim through of daily work, we may find out that they need to re-learn something because they've been doing it wrong for a week before I catch it!

Speaking of... I have a stack of grading to work on, so I'd better follow my own advice!

How do you keep records?  Add to the comments, and visit the TOS Crew Blog Cruise (this link will go live on Tuesday, May 1st) to get ideas from other homeschoolers. In the meantime, go to the TOS Homeschool Crew blog homepage to see past cruise topics and TOS Crew reviews.