HOMESCHOOLING BEGINS WITH HOMEHOMESCHOOL RECORD KEEPING
Homeschooling Articles series themes:
Easy homeschool record keeping for the middle school years (5th to 8th grades) will ease your workload and your mind!
You are welcome to download these free homeschool printables or use the ideas to create your own.
To keep my tracking time to a minimum (around five minutes per day), I’ve simplified the record-keeping process to two simple steps and two simple journaling forms:
- Form 1:
MONTHLY HOMESCHOOL JOURNAL
(This journal also serves as our attendance record)
- Determine the subjects you want to cover, either based on your school system’s requirements and/or your own. Type (or write) those across the top of your monthly columnar journal sheet.
Download this Zip File Document
(Edit to your specifications):
Monthly Journal Template
- Each day at a routine time convenient for you (I do it right before preparing supper), type in the first initials for the subjects that your children covered that day. For example, you’ll see on my sample journals that my children’s names begins with I, L, A, and E. If you have children whose names all begin with the same letter, you’ll need to devise a different coding system, obviously.
You can keep it simple….
Simple Monthly Journal Sample
…or you can fancy it up a bit and add comments underneath the columns too. I add comments for these reasons:
- Field Trip
- Doctor or dental appointment (noted under health)
- Biking and nature walk (noted under phys ed)
- Attending or doing something out of the ordinary
(for example, we watched a business make maple syrup—not our usual weekend outing)
- Tracking hours, if needed (see In-depth Homeschool Record Keeping Sample below)
- Beginning or completing a season of study
(i.e., spelling, foreign language, science)Once I note in the comments section of the journal that the child begins a new workbook or textbook, all I have to do is initial the journal to show that the child completed the work that day. Then the workbook or the lessons/tests from the textbook serve as the child’s record for that particular subject.
In-depth Journal Sample
Notes:
- Since we homeschool year-round, we don’t cover every subject every quarter. Instead, we often enjoy more in-depth art and music appreciation as well as geography during the summer months when there is more time to focus on completing hands-on projects.
- Health and physical education are daily real-life activities during the middle-school years. Simply exercise, actively play outdoors, and eat healthy.
- Form 2:
BOOKLISTS AND/OR RESOURCE LISTS
After we read books during our family reading times, I type each title into a journal with comments that will help me to make wiser choices the next time I cover that period of history.
History Booklist Sample
I also keep the booklists that I prepared during the planning stage in my Homeschool Journal packet.
And so with these two steps and two forms, I end up with three sections in my Homeschool Journal for each academic year:
- Monthly Attendance and Homeschool Record Keeping Journal
- History Booklist
- Resource List for other subjects covered (which is similar to the History Booklist)
To round out my homeschool organization process, I file these three things in boxes for the year:
- completed workbooks for each child
- lessons from textbooks (bound together) for each child
(Sometimes they make fancy covers for their work, if they want)
- one combined photojournal of the children’s projects and daily life
(Actually, I keep this journal handy so they children can revisit past years)
Let all things be done decently and in order.
~1 Corinthians 14:40
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