Homeschooling in the great state of Florida definitely has it’s advantages. Florida’s homeschoolers have the huge advantage of having lobbyists, living in Tallahassee who protect and improve our rights to homeschool. There are 3 main requirements for parental homeschooling in Florida. The first is to submit an intent to homeschool form upon commencement of your homeschool program. The second requirement is to submit a yearly evaluation, performed by a certified teacher, or test scores, to show “progress commensurate to the student’s ability”. (Sorry, I “do” evaluations.) The third is to keep a portfolio of the student’s work.
Each family has their own way of keeping a portfolio. Some keep only the tests from each subject, others keep a few pages from the beginning, the middle, and the end of the school year. And then there are the people like me…I keep everything.
My main reason for keeping all of my kiddos work is that I sign off on my own evaluation. Because I am a certified teacher, I am allowed to do so, but the paranoid part of me thinks, “One day, “they”(the mysterious they) are going to come out to my home and demand to see proof that my children are actually doing something.” So, I keep everything. It’s not so bad, except when it gets like this…
Hmmm…three months of paperwork to catch up on. This was one of my Saturday projects this past weekend.
It all starts here…
This is the “inbox”. All completed and checked by mom work goes in this box.
Now, the plan is that weekly I go through and file the work in the kiddos individual binders. Each binder is separated by subject, math, language, handwriting, spelling, etc.
I keep last years binders handy, in case I need to reference back to anything.
Previous years work is filed in a bankers box, like this…
which already has all the dividers in place from the binder.
All-in-all its not too bad, and it gives me the peace of mind I need.
Hopefully, over the next few weeks, I will be able to show you other homeschoolers methods of record keeping.
GREAT WORK MAMA!
I want to know if you also do EVALUATION for other homeschool kids beside your own kids.
We just move from Fort Lauderdale and I’m looking for a certify teacher to sign off my son’s 3rd grade evaluation form.
Please cotact me as soon as possible by email or cell phone