The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [69]
Advantages
Written narrative description can provide specific and useful information about the student’s strengths and weaknesses and can be used effectively for any and all subject areas.
As your children get older and become more conscious of what they are learning, they can take a more and more active role in keeping records of their learning.
In the absence of conventional grades, descriptive evaluations can provide useful information for school officials, even though it is in a form less familiar or convenient than letter grades or numeric scores.
Drawbacks
Journals and diaries can be quite cumbersome and time-consuming to keep up, to the point that the record keeping interferes with the learning process. Many a homeschooler has been brought up short by a child’s “Mom, can you stop writing so we can play?” and realized that the journals had completely taken over.
Journals and diaries can be difficult to translate into conventional transcript terms because the activities they describe are not segmented into easily delineated subjects.
One useful adjunct to almost any form of record keeping for homeschoolers is simply to keep a list of books your children read. Over the years, most homeschoolers develop quite an impressive reading list, and the accumulated titles can give you a good start at evaluating what’s been learned over the years. With a little bit of organization, you might even be able to build a transcript from a reading list.
No grades—how do you grade life? I have started keeping a journal of things done. It helps with the umbrella school and it is nice to look back at. I am lousy at it.—Lisa, Alabama
I keep a log of sorts. There are sections for each subject, with books read, activities done, and an average amount of time spent for each. Grades are, in my humble opinion, stupid. The only measure of learning is how well someone functions in society or if they feel themselves that they know something. Emily does not need to prove to anyone but herself (and maybe me) that she has learned anything.—Anne, Illinois
I was never much of a record keeper. I find it impossible even to record the books my children read. I do supply them with lots of books, resources, and experiences, but I have not been able to actually sit down and record their progress on a daily, weekly, or even yearly basis.
What surprised me was when I read my past editorials and stories and realized that I do keep a journal. I have recorded our experiences and ideas in The Drinking Gourd and other publications. Phew! It’s good to know that I will be able to read about our family’s homeschool odyssey after my children grow up and leave home.—Donna, Washington
Learning to Speak Educationese
Although the learning records you keep for your own use can be written in whatever form and style suit you, a more formal approach is often useful for records kept for compliance with state or district requirements. A bit of educational jargon can go a long way to making your program sound impressive to those accustomed to more traditional approaches, and translating everyday activities into the more exaggerated versions of “educationese” can actually be a lot of fun.
Imagine, for instance, how much more impressed a bureaucratically minded evaluator might be by “interactive student-oriented teacher methodology” than by plain “one-on-one tutoring.” Or consider the recent classroom favorites: “sustained silent reading,” which is reading done for its own sake without threat of future worksheets or quizzes, and “daily oral language,” which, though actually a classroom exercise finding errors in a written sentence, sounds to most of us suspiciously like “talking.”
Most families will not have to go to this extreme, of course. But if you have to keep records of your children’s activities, learning and using a few of the more ordinary bits of educational jargon can make the entire record-keeping