Homeschool Record Keeping Strategies

By Author: Charles Benjamin
Total Articles: 7
Comment this article

Although there are a variety of different methods for keeping track of your homeschool experiences, most homeschool parents can be classified as either tubbies, cubbies, or binder queens. While those descriptions might make you laugh, they’re really pretty accurate! Which one do you think you are?

Tubbies are people who have a giant rubber-made tub, and everything in their entire homeschool goes in there. Tubbies put all of their homeschool records into the tub for all of their children for all twelve years of school. This is a perfectly acceptable method of record keeping. If you have a box and fill it up, you can recreate a lot of your homeschool work when it comes time to make records and transcripts.

Then there are homeschoolers who are cubbies. They have cubbies with drawers, and each drawer is used for one child for one year. This record keeping has the advantage of knowing things like whose test is whose, and is a good way to keep things straight amongst multiple children.

The third kind of homeschool parent is the binder system parent, which is the method I used. Treating the binder system as ...
... a hobby, like scrap booking, may make it a little bit easier to wrap your mind around it. It’s the same strategy, where each section is labeled and you put things where they belong. The joy of a binder is that you will know what you are missing. When you throw things in a tub or a cubby, you know what you throw in there. But when you throw things in the binder and each section is labeled, you will eventually realize if you have nothing in one subject--say, Math. The joy of the binder is that it will tell you what you don’t have.

There is a fourth kind of record keeping, and it is (sadly) for people who don’t have a clue. These are people who have no idea that any records are going to be required, or who don’t have any idea that they’re going to need to make a transcript. This record keeping strategy does not work; people using this strategy have done crazy things like forget that they did four years of Latin. This strategy leads to no college scholarship money, and sometimes even no college admissions.

But there’s hope! Move up the food chain! If you have been a tubby, move up to become a cubby. If you’ve been a cubby, try your best to become a binder queen. Each year try to get better and better at your record-keeping, so that by the time you are ready to make a transcript with your senior or junior, you’ll be perfectly able to do that and not be nearly as stressed! What are you waiting for?!

Realize more about homeschooling curriculum. Have a look at their website, where you can get enough details on homeschool that may helps you to understand more about your children’s education and learning.