Welcome back!

Last Friday was the last day of what I determined was our 1st quarter. I issued report cards. I’m still working out the best possible grading system. Last year I just averaged all the grades together in each subject to get a final grade for each subject. That meant quizzes and tests had the same weight as daily work. I didn’t like that method so much but it was the easiest way. The Homeschool Tracker Basic program also does this with no option to weight grades. The pay for version has that option. I’m not ready to buy a program every year so I wanted to find another method. Using a spreadsheet is the other method I am trying out this year. It’s not as streamlined or as organized because I have two separate files, one for each child, opposed to just having one program that records grades for both. However, since I am not that good at making spreadsheets, yet, I found a free template and it works well enough. There is a bit of tweaking I did and more I’d like to do. Here’s the link, Gradebook +. The blogger who made this did an awesome job and I know she put a lot of work into it. It works well for me that I can  give more value to tests and quizzes than to the daily worksheets and reading that they do.

You should definitely be giving them a score for all that daily work but for me I didn’t think all the assignments should hold the same value on the overall grade. This is my last year to really work this out before my son begins high-school when I need to start making his transcript. Many parents don’t bother with grades especially in the elementary levels and that is perfectly fine. I only decided to track grades to prepare for high-school and to give my kids some idea how they were doing since they spent all or most of their elementary years in public school (K-6).

Whatever method of keeping track of progress and grading all those assignments, try to keep it consistent. Grading is by far the most time-consuming for me. I keep track on paper in a notebook which has proven to be very useful for me since sometimes I forget to enter into the computer. I can use that paper copy to fill in the blanks. As I’ve said in the past, I try to be very organized, but maybe too much. Sometimes I over-organize which makes things harder than it probably needs to be. I’m trying to simplify keeping track of my children’s assignments and grade record. Any grades prior to 9th grade typically do not go onto a transcript, so essentially it doesn’t matter how you go about tracking progress, but you should have some kind of record.

Although I like the simplicity of the Homeschool Tracker Basic program and I’ve used it for the 1st quarter this year, I’m switching over to the spreadsheet method. I spent the better part of yesterday making the transition. There are other spreadsheet templates out there that you can use or if you are an experienced Excel (or similar) user, you can make your own.

Look through the templates here, there are a couple in there.

Here is another one, from MIT, which I admit when I downloaded and opened to try it, it confused me but it possibly could work.

Finally, here’s a brief example of weighting assignments:

20% Daily; 25% quiz; 30% Test; 25% Reports/projects – this isn’t going to work exactly this way for each subject. Math, for example, may not have any reports or projects. English is a little harder to grade if you choose to grade any writing assignments. My children’s writing course is primarily composition with some grammar and vocabulary work. The publisher does not give a method for grading. The program contains checklists, rubrics, unit reviews and mastery tests to check progress. I’ve developed my own method for awarding points or grades for these as well as assessing their writing assignments which in most cases is done through the rubric.

That’s all I’m going to talk about homeschooling today.

I hope that if you’re homeschooling in PA right now that it’s going well and you are feeling blessed and not overwhelmed or stressed. This is only my second year but if you’re reading this and have questions please comment and I’ll respond as soon as I can.