Homeschool Organization for Record Keeping
Your state is likely to require attendance records and may require curriculum plans, assessments, grades, and other information for each child in your homeschool. You may want to keep homeschool records in a standard teacher’s grade book, such as you can purchase at an office supply store. You may also wish to create a spreadsheet yourself in a program such as Excel, or find or purchase a homeschool record keeping system, either as forms, downloadable forms, or software.
As another alternative, you can also try out online homeschool record keeping programs, though with software or online services, it is recommended that you always keep at least one hard copy of your data. Of course, before you purchase any record keeping solution, you should make sure that it covers all your needs (i.e., that it meets both your desires and your state’s requirements), and that you can get information out in exactly the formats you require.
Homeschool Organization for Your Meeting Place
Homeschool organization of your physical location involves both having a pleasant and neat workplace and have supplies, books, records, and other materials stored in a way that makes them both readily accessible and well-organized and out of the way of the household’s tasks.
How this will be best accomplished may be partly a matter of experimentation. It may not always be clear whether you want children to do all work in a common area or, perhaps, sometimes work in their own rooms. The arrangement of the house – for example, where comfortable chairs for reading aloud are situated, what room the family computer is in, and what other obligations you may have to take care of while teaching – may help determine where schooling takes place.
Bookshelves and binders may be the best method for books, records, and completed school papers. Supplies may be sorted by subject area or by child, with each child’s materials kept in his or her own locker, tub, chest, or shelf. It may be more convenient to keep all materials used for schooling in one place or not – especially depending on whether any of them have other uses in the household.
Organizing Your Homeschool Schedule
Organizing your homeschool schedule depends on your state’s requirements, as well as family factors and demands, and the developmental level of your children and the type of subjects they are studying. Your state may require a number of school days, school hours, or both, as well as a plan of how you are planning to fulfill them.
While you have some leeway in organizing how your school time is arranged, homeschooling is bound to take up a good deal of your time, and with this much of your time involved, you’ll have the best chance of fulfilling the requirements if you have a schedule.
It’s important to think about your homeschool schedule in several different ways: first of all in broad terms: the number of required days and how you will organize this each week (Monday through Friday?). But it’s also important to plan your days individually, making sure that subjects have sufficient time, but not too much time, and hopefully allowing your children to move from one type of schooling task to another, both as appropriate to the subject and allowing children to engage in different ways and avoid boring repetition of one kind of task all day.
In addition, it’s important to consider individual children. Since you have the flexibility to arrange your school day to help children be at their best, it is recommended that you take advantage of this in planning your time for starting school, for breaks and recess, and for homework, as well, if you choose to give homework. For more information, see the article “Homeschool Schedule.”
