Thread: Weekly Poll: How do you handle record-keeping for your homeschool?

Record-keeping and portfolios have come up a few times on the forums in the last week, so I started to get curious about how everyone handles these kinds of things. Weigh in on this week's poll!

(you may choose more than one answer in this poll)

We aren't really "official" yet so I haven't really had to worry about keeping a record. I have kept every worksheet and completed workbook from this year. Though in a few weeks I think I'll go through everything and set aside some of it to be recycled. There are big paper recycling dumpsters by the firehouse by my grandparents, and I'll go dump it all in there. They fire station is suppose to get some money from recycling the paper.
Next year though we'll be using Calvert with ATS so I'm sure I'll have to do some sort of record keeping through them, and from what I have access to now it looks like I'll have a grade book online.

We only have to keep track of 180 days and even then no one is allowed to request to see it. So we don't really have to keep records.

I do keep track of the 180 days, do yearly progress resports and goals. I also have a blog where we do weekly reports of what we are doing and how we are progressing.

We aren't required to keep any records in Texas but when we first started last fall I did anyway. More for my piece of mind than anything else. I was pretty paranoid that we were going to be missing something or not be doing enough. Over the past few months I've pretty much let that go LOL

I'm not required to keep any records (NJ) and we're not yet legal school age, but I tend to be overly organized at least on paper thanks to almost 20 years as an Executive Assistant. Considering I don't have to do any of this, it really makes me seem kind of uptight when I'm really a very laid-back person. :-D

So, what I do currently (we're doing unit studies for Social studies/Science/Art/Music) - I have a Word document with each topic we are going to cover listed along with any books I want to use or resources we own. I have this planned through the end of 2010. The week before we are going to do a topic, I copy the booklist into another document, go through all my printouts from the internet and set up a Lesson Plan in detail. Read pg 23 - 25 in this book, do this coloring page, discuss this, do this experiment, etc. In detail. So, our recent Plant unit I had broken down where we read the books, did the activities and experiments dealing with seeds first, then parts of plants, then flowers, etc. I try to alternate sit down/reading activities with writing/coloring/creative activities and active/experiment/physical activities/games since my kids are so young. For Reading and Math, I just do whatever pages we come to next in our books (MEP and ETC with Progressive Phonics) along with extra fun pages and games. Each days work is put up on a bulletin board (each kid has one hanging on the wall).

After our unit is done, I date any worksheets/workbook pages we did. The worksheets/coloring pages/experiment reporting pages I put in a binder with the Lesson plan page at the front of it. Crafts/experiments I take pictures of (for my blog mostly but also for a record) but don't print out usually and the actual piece is usually thrown-out (I don't have room to store a lot of big stuff). For my youngest, I have a 3-prong file folder and only put in a few samples of writing/coloring/crafts so I can compare as she gets older (for nostalgia mostly).

I have considered starting to use Homeschool Tracker but wasn't sure it would be worth it. The main reason I've started thinking about it would be to help me see what time we're spending on which subjects and in the future for transcripts etc. For those of you who use it - what are your thoughts on it?