I have been feeling convicted lately to start keeping better records of what we have done in our homeschool, particularly for my oldest who is grade 9 age this year. I have always wondered how to go about this since we use a Charlotte Mason approach. Like many other styles of homeschooling, we do not assign grades or give our children tests. We also have only a few subjects for which we can say, "Completed lessons 1-18 of such and such curriculum". In preparing for speaking at an upcoming homeschool conference, I stumbled upon
this organizer/scheduler. I dutifully watched all the intro videos. It seemed very compatible with the way we homeschool, so I am currently using the free 30-day trial. I love it, but it is seriously expensive - well, after the free trial, that is! One thing I really like is that it is very real-life friendly and guilt-free. If you don't finish something that day, it just moves it onto the next scheduled day. Woo hoo! I also like that it can generate 'reports' on what you've done for the last day, week, year, etc.
Someone also pointed me in the direction of a free program called, Homeschool Tracker. The way they make money is by offering a for-pay upgrade program with more features. I am going to have a look at it later today.
(I almost hesitated to post anything about either of these programs because I don't want this to ever be a 'product endorsement' blog. I'd love your opinions, though.)
How do you keep records/schedule your homeschool?
Photo Courtesy of odmayhea611
Posts
HI Christine
ReplyDeleteHave you seen www.donnayoung.org? She has tons of forms, etc just waiting to be downloaded and used. I started using some of her basic formats a few years ago and have tweaked it to suit our family. I use it so far just for scheduling and as a record of what we've done. No grades yet.
Laurel
Laurel,
ReplyDeleteI have definitely enjoyed that site for a number of years. It is fantastic -- a wealth of free goodness!
(I just liked the automatic-ness of the CM organizer. I'm just not sure we can put out the money to use it.)
Christine
I recognize you from Ravelry. I am ChristyH there and I also homeschool and I even used to lead a Charlotte Mason homeschool group. I saw your picture over at Simply Charlotte Mason
ReplyDeleteHi Christine,
ReplyDeleteI have used the SCM planner for a year. There were many features about it that I liked a great deal: its flexibility for CM-style school was great. There were features that I wanted that weren't there which made putting in resources very time consuming.
I'm doing without it this year, because of the cost and the things I thought were inadequate, and now I'm beginning to look for other options, more for the record keeping necessity than for the planning and scheduling.
Since reading your post I've spent some time playing around on the Homeschool Tracker which you mentioned, and it looks easy to use, and very adaptable to what I would want it for. And the upgrade to the 'plus' version isn't terribly expensive should I choose to go that way in the future. I'm definitely going to use the basic version for the rest of the school year and see how it fits with our lives. I love the fact that there is no subscription fee for either version, so the cost is either free or one-time.
Thanks for pointing me in that direction.
Jennifer
Christy: Great to have you here! It sounds like we have tons in common. :)
ReplyDeleteJennifer: I'll be interested to hear how you end up liking Homeschool Tracker. I still haven't had a chance to check it out, but will do so soon.
Christine