Unschool Record-Keeping

Our state requires very little record-keeping of homeschoolers; we have to record attendance (!) and preserve (but not report) the results of a yearly nationally administered standardized test of our choosing.  That's it.  I'd like, however, to keep more extensive track of what N. is learning.  This blog is one way to do that, along with reading lists and paper files of his number and writing exercises.  But I wanted a daily record too.  During N.'s kindergarten year, Tim experimented with keeping a log of the day's activities, topics of conversation, and ideas explored in a running Word document but his standards for this were too high and it quickly became a burden to craft a daily narrative report each evening; the log was abandoned.  We needed to come up with a simple and efficient method.  

We don't organize the day's activities by traditional academic subjects because we like to stress the interconnected nature of learning, that one learning experience can encompass history, math, reading, social studies, etc., so the homeschool record notebooks you can buy with subject categories wouldn't work for us.  I liked Melissa Wiley's "Rule of Six" as a way of thinking categorically about a day's learning without being bound by arbitrary academic subject distinctions so in September I made up a notebook (above picture, left) of pages with five categories cribbed from Melissa: "Meaningful Work, Imaginative Play, Living Books, Ideas to Ponder and Discuss, Encounters With Beauty."  Tim dutifully wrote in the notebook every day, so it was successful in the sense that it actually got used.  But he chafed at the categories, which sounded cool (to me) but did not organically arise from our family rhythms.  So in January I gave up on that format and offered a small, plain notebook instead; now he happily makes a quick daily list (above picture, right) without any fancy categories.  For example:

Wed. April 27, 2011

• Chapter in Madame Curie, "Four Years in a Shed" about the isolation of radium
• drawing
• writing sentences about the Curies
• reading aloud
• Proper and common nouns discussed and demonstrated
• tornado warnings -- talked about twisters
• piano practice
• long walk

The moral of the story is: simple is better (for us), and other people's systems, neat though they are, are just that -- other people's.