Legal requirements of homeschooling in each state may differ but most of them will ask you to keep some basic records to document what you are doing in your homeschool classroom. The three basic things that you may like to record for your own convenience as well as to facilitate your legal requirements include records of the lessons you conduct, the work that you have completed and the attendance register.
Lesson Records
You will already have lesson plans ready with you and these can be used to make lesson records. If you have written them down in a notebook, simply add a tick mark next to the lessons that have been covered. If you work out your lesson plans on the computer, just use the word processor’s highlight feature to showcase what has already been covered. You can take a printout of this document at the end of the month to create month wise lesson records for the academic session.
Work Completed Record
This is essentially a double for your child’s portfolio. You can store the worksheets and exam pages with ease in some binders. Use subject wise or academic year wise. Whatever best suits your needs. For three dimensional activities like art work, scale models, projects and poster boards you can simply take a photograph and add some written details about what all was covered in the topic. These images and descriptions can be added to the binders you have made.
Attendance Record
You can tack on the attendance record to the work completed record by merely adding the date on which the work was done. Since it was completed that day, it was a school day and the child attended school! Of course you could just get a printout of the 365 days in a spreadsheet and mark each day out with a green color for present and a red color for absent. A “year at a glance” calender can be easily generated in your word processor, or you could simply get some templates off the internet for free. That way you can see just how many days you have been homeschooling in the year at a single glance.
