After 120 days of officially homeschooling for 2020-21, I realized we needed to upgrade our record keeping.
Depending on state laws and local public schools, homeschooling parents need to keep records demonstrating the academic progress of each child being homeschooled.
According to one Texas organization for homeschooling families, records should include:
- Grades
- Curriculum used
- Subjects mastered
- Standardized testing scores
- Work samples
- A reading list
- Extracurricular activities
- Volunteer work
Readers of Poet Ponders know we’ve been following the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards. We have printed copies of the TEKS for kindergarten through Grade 5. We’re using these as checklists for both girls. The workbooks we use, the Shell Education series, conveniently include matrices showing how their contents align with the TEKS.
My wife, Susan, maintains reading logs for both girls, and has since they started school. Not everything is logged because the girls both read for enjoyment and there’s no reason to log everything. In fact, I worry that the reading log approach used by schools too often makes reading about page counts or minutes instead of learning.
We have several plastic bins that contain the schoolwork from 2019-20 and 2020-21. We kept the 2019-20 work, though the girls were technically receiving public education via remote learning. We knew during that experience that we had to supplement activities and reinforce the learning objectives.
Until last week, I felt confident we were doing fine. We have lots of records, which means we have lots of potential data on the progress being made by our daughters.
We needed more than just bins of work with grades marked. We needed a gradebook for each girl.
As I recently posted when we reached day 90, assessment is an important aspect of teaching and should not be dismissed as “busy work” or mere administrative compliance.
Creating the gradebooks in Microsoft Excel, I automated as much as I could. The workbooks have one sheet per subject, a general sheet for attendance and non-graded work, and a top summary sheet that gives us report cards. When life returns to normal and when the girls are ready, we will have records to present to our local K12 schools.
We now are going back through the plastic bins of work to record grades.
Sure enough, the gradebook revealed trends and gave us insights.
Recording grades for daily work, activities, reports, and tests allows Susan and I to quickly see trends as the girls learn.
The spreadsheets reveal specific patterns: the girls do really great work or nothing. There are a lot of “A” grades and some “F” / “Incomplete” grades, with not much falling between on the scale. The girls leave a lot of work blank, and it isn’t difficult work.
The data also reveal challenges with reading comprehension. No matter the subject area, if work involves reading a passage and answering questions, they both struggle. This pattern surprises me, since the girls love books and reading. However, reading is not the same as decoding and applying knowledge.
Entering data into gradebooks has already led us to consider changes in how we teach. We need to spend more time discussing reading passages with the girls. We need to ask them more questions about what they read, probably before they try to complete worksheets or tests.
Gradebooks also help the girls. Now, when we say we need to spend time on a skill, we can show each girl the data.
Grades shouldn’t be the purpose of any teaching or learning. Grades are a tool, nothing more. By analyzing the grades, we determine what to review. We can also determine when to advance to new, more challenging content.
I had assumed the online program with which we began was sufficient. When we moved from online to physical books and paper, we did so without a gradebook.
We should have created and maintained a gradebook from the first day of this experience. We will now enter the online work into our gradebooks, too.
Susan and I are learning lessons about homeschooling and teaching in general.