Our first homeschool portfolio review was in May and I started worrying about it in March.
I'd love to tell you I was calm and organized about it. What actually happened is that I bought a three-inch binder, twelve dividers and a box of sheet protectors, and I spent two weeks of evenings building something that looked like a legal exhibit.
Our association looked at it for maybe four minutes.
Not because she didn't care. Because most of what I put in there was never what she needed.
What South Carolina homeschool record keeping actually requires
I'm in South Carolina, so that's what I know. Check your own state, because this varies wildly and a mom in Pennsylvania has a completely different list than I do.
Here, under the third option, the law asks for four things:
- A hundred and eighty days. That's it. Days you did school. Not hours, not a bell schedule.
- A plan book, diary or record showing subjects taught and activities.
- A portfolio of the kids' work.
- A progress report twice a year with attendance and how each child is doing in each subject.
Read that list again and notice what is not on it. No grades. No test scores. No GPA. No lesson plans written in advance. No hours logged per subject.
I had built spreadsheets for three of those four things nobody asked for.
What she actually looked at
The attendance count. Right away, first thing. She wanted to know we'd hit 180 and she wanted to see how I'd counted it.
The subject list. Not what we'd covered in each one — just that each child had the subjects the state expects, and that there was something real behind each name.
Maybe six pieces of work per child. Not sixty. She wanted one from the beginning of the year and one from the end, so she could see the handwriting change, the sentences get longer, the math get harder. Six pieces told her more than my sheet-protector cathedral did.
And she talked to my kids. For ten minutes, about nothing in particular. That was the real evaluation and no binder was going to help me there.
The mistakes I made, so you don't
I counted days at the end. In May. Going backward through a paper calendar trying to remember whether the museum trip in February counted. (It did. Field trips are school days.) Count as you go or you will do this to yourself too.
I saved everything. Every worksheet, all year, in a bin. Then I had to sort a bin. Pick a piece a month per child and put it in a folder. Twelve pieces is plenty and it takes four seconds at the time.
I assumed sick days didn't count. They did, the way I'd set our year up. I short-counted us by almost two weeks and panicked over nothing.
I made it a binder instead of a stack. She was fine with a folder. The three-inch binder was for me, not for her, and what it was really doing was giving my nerves something to do in March.
What I'd tell a first-timer
Ask your association what they want. In September, not April. Mine had a list and would have handed it to me the day I signed up if I had thought to ask. Every one I have dealt with since has been run by homeschool moms who have been on your side of the table and remember exactly how it felt.
And keep the count as you go. That one thing removes about ninety percent of the dread, because the dread isn't really about the review. It's about not knowing where you stand until somebody makes you look.
These days our attendance and our subject list come off a printer in about a minute, because our homeschool planner keeps the count as we go. That is the main reason I stopped tracking any of it by hand. But even on paper, counted weekly, it would have saved me those two weeks in March.
The review itself took forty minutes. We had tea.