When I pulled the kids out of public school in order to teach them at home, I decided (with David’s blessing) to postpone the traditional grade accumulation process until they began to tackle high school content. The primary purpose of report cards is to notify the absent parent of the student’s progress, and I was no longer detached from their education; so, I decided to avoid the extra work until it was absolutely necessary. I was fully in tune with their progress in every area of learning, so there was no need for busy work. Every homeschooling mom will agree with me that we have plenty of work to keep us busy day and night!

Fortunately, my state department of education does not require grade reporting; however, if your state requires report cards, you’ll have to comply.  Most employers, colleges, and universities require an official transcript outlining the high school curriculum and grades, so I began to keep track of grades once each child began high school courses. I recommend starting some high school level work during the 7th or 8th year of homeschooling if you think your teen is ready. For instance, in our home, the kids started high school Debate and Latin before the 9th year, so I started accumulating official grades during the middle school years. In the example above, you’ll notice that there is no grade for Algebra 1 because Connor hasn’t started this yet.

How you decide to gather grade info is really your personal choice. You can pay for software like Edu-Track, or you can shares forms with other parents on email loops like the Yahoo Group, Homeschool Form Share. My personal favorite tool for accumulating grades is a Microsoft Excel form called Grade Tracker that you can download for free. There are two great reasons to use Grade Tracker: it’s free, and the excel spreadsheet automatically calculates the cumulative GPA.

Our philosophy of learning has always been “master the material, or do it again” which means that we strive for excellence. Sometimes rework cannot be avoided, and sometimes we just don’t “get it,” but generally, we don’t move on to new material until we have mastered the old material. Fortunately we have the luxury as homeschoolers to set our own pace, and we can stop and work on a particular weak area of knowledge until we master it. We’ve had to do this several times with math which is a good reason to start the kids early on high school level work if you can.

Some material like literature and art history is fairly subjective in nature; David and I generally grade this content through Socratic Dialogue, narration, or written essays. Objective content like Latin 1, Laboratory Biology, and Introductory Logic include written examinations which can be graded more precisely.

I try to keep up with the grind of recording high school grades on a weekly basis although I have to admit this task is one of my least favorite chores of homeschooling! Usually by Friday afternoon, I am ready to start entering information about the course content and the related grade into the spreadsheet. Over the years, I have kept all of the kids’ work; at the end of the year, I pull out all the best examples and create a portfolio (really more like a scrapbook) and put the rest in a labeled box which I store in the attic. In some respect the annual portfolio serves as proof of each child’s homeschooling “grade” or progress that year until they get to high school when I then begin to keep official grades.

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Are you keeping grades yet? Please take a minute to share your methods in the comments section below.