Records.

Last week I had several homemade record books spiral bound at Kinko’s:

Each record book is for one quarter of the academic year. The front of each book has ten “week pages” for me to write my plan for each week. The left half of the week pages is organized by subject, the right half by day.

After the week pages come the daily pages. There are enough for every day, plus a few extra in case we mess some up.

I tried this system at the end of last year, and it worked fabulously.  The idea is, the daily pages serve as Oscar’s to-do list.   Each day we have “lesson time” (when I work with him) and “independent time” (when he works independently from his list).  During lesson time, we create the to-do list together on the daily page.  He checks off each item as he finishes it.   Then these daily pages serve as my school record.  I have space at the top and bottom of each page to make notes or write evaluations.

This method doesn’t produce neat and tidy records organized by subject. But it does give me the day-to-day data that I would need to produce neat and tidy records with a few hours’ work, should they become necessary — say, if the school district were to request them. Much more importantly, it gives me detailed records that I can use to adjust my child’s instruction from day to day and week to week.

 Best of all, once the notebook is set up, this method requires almost no extra work. I would be writing this list out every day anyway (and indeed I was, and throwing the lists away at the end of the day, until I realized that what I was throwing out was a valuable record of our daily accomplishments.)