It’s report card day here at Valley View Christian (that’s the name of our homeschool). Do you issue report cards to your children? It’s not a requirement here the state of Pennsylvania, it’s just something that I’ve planned to do so that my children can know their progress. There are a lot of forms out there you can download and print, including my pretty simple one that is on my printables page. You can certainly make your own report card. This is really just for you unless your state or your distance learning school requires something. My children spent K-6 and K-4 in public school so they are used to getting report cards and so I felt it was something I could continue to do. I already track grades so it’s just a matter of putting them into a form and handing it to them.
I’ll admit that doing quarterly grades can become a lot of work for me to add them up. The Homeschool Tracker Basic program (which I am not using this year) does that work for you if you set it up that way. That program however does not have the ability to weight grades, meaning, if you want tests to count as 30% of the grade, daily work to be 50% of the grade and reports to be 10% of the grade, that program can not do that. That program also does not round percentages so you would have to either do that on your own or use a decimal. I don’t use decimal grades. If you want a program that can weight assignments differently you can purchase the newer version of Homeschool Tracker, but I believe it’s something you would need to buy annually as its an online based program. You can also use this less user friendly, but still decent, free online based program 
Homeschool Skedtrack. I was going to use that until I found the Homeschool Basic program that was downloadable onto my computer. I prefer not to use online based programs, but this is personal preference. This year I have switched over to using a spreadsheet to track grades.
Here’s a snapshot of one of my children’s spreadsheets tracking. You can download the spreadsheet already formatted at FiveJ’s. Its very simple to use. You can’t alter it too much or you’ll mess up the formulas already entered but I did make a few changes. Mostly you just plug information in and the spreadsheet does the rest. This works pretty well for me though for my own needs it’s not a perfect system. Still I am extremely grateful for people like this blogger who took the time to make it and share it and offer it for free to other families. Interested in her program? You can find it here.
Information on Gradebook Plus from Five J’s
Click HERE for my free, downloadable, simple homeschool report card. You will need a PDF program to open it. If you are looking for a paper version of tracking your grades the one I found to work the best for me is from CopyCatBooks. Again you are going to need a program to open PDF files. If you have a highschool student you may want to also have a transcript form to keep track of your child’s scores. There are several of these online for free download. All of them are similar. To suit my needs I developed a transcript out of the ideas of several of these others. Next year my son will be in 9th grade and this will become something I need to use. Feel free to download my version of a transcript for your own personal use. You can download it HERE. (Note, I made this file in LibreOffice and saved it as a DOCX file (Word doc) ). You will need an office program to open the file.
The most important thing about homeschooling your children should be for all of you to have fun while learning. I hope these resources help you in your record keeping attempts so that you have more time to enjoy the journey.
My children and I try to make our learning experience well-rounded and fun while still obtaining the knowledge they need for their future and meeting the requirements set forth by the state of Pennsylvania.
In future posts I am going to try to put together suggestions for field trips, art projects, science projects and labs and also suggestions on teaching God’s word to your children.