Monday, February 28, 2011

School Days, School Daze! Record Keeping

Kris at My Story: Life with the Engelman Family asked me about record keeping.  I can only answer this for myself, because each state's requirements are so different, but since she lives in Colorado too, maybe this will help.  I keep two records- school days and work done.  For school days I use a calendar and mark off each day that is done.  Now, I don't DO this everyday, I just do it every couple weeks or so, basically whenever I think about it.  In Colorado we are required to have 172 4-hour school days in one school year.  I and marking off every school day and when we get to 172, our year ends.


Here are the calendars I made for my attendance records.  
Feel free to print and use them.  








For records of work done- almost all of our units include either lapbooks or notebooks.  I keep everything that we do for those. That is our record for science, geography, and history.  Our math has one test for each lesson, and I keep those.  I am not keeping any record of phonics/reading.  I think next year I will be starting a book list, but for right now I am not concerned with that.

So what do I DO with all those papers?  I have a binder with dividers for Bop and CJ, and all of their papers that I want to keep for this year go in there.  Math tests, some special handwriting, a few of their worksheets for phonics.  At the end of the year I will go through that, decide what I want to keep and put them in a big three-ring binder, one for each kid.  I will probably only keep 20- 30 pages for each child or less.

Lapbooks are a harder question.  For right now I have them stored in a file-folder drawer.  They fit nicely in there and the kids can get them out and look at them.  Last fall I decided to try putting our lapbooks into Bare Books instead of file folders.  I like how organized and neat they are.  Those can just sit on the shelf like the other books, and I love that.

What about projects, things that are too big to stuff into a binder?  The only idea I have for this is to take pictures and add them to your notebooks.  So far we haven't had too many big things, but we are planning to make a clay pyramid next week, and we will be doing a lot more things like that as they get bigger.

Do you have any ideas for keeping bulky things that your kids make for school?

1 comment:

  1. For the lapbooks, we use a cardboard magazine holder, then it is easy for the kids to pull out one. After the portfolio is reviewed for the year they are given all their lapbooks to do with as they please. They tend to put them in a backpack or on one of their shelves to use when playing 'school' with each other. It makes for great review!

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