Keeping a homeschool portfolio has more benefits than not. It’s a trip down memory lane, an encouragement tool, a record keeping tool and super helpful during the college admissions process. Plus, it helps you keep everything wrangled up in one place helping to decrease clutter.
Now, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of it all and talk about what to keep in your homeschool portfolio.
Lesson Plans
You may want to keep your daily lesson plan or a weekly overview. You can jot down page numbers from the book you were studying so that you know where you left off from the last time.You don’t need include grades for your child did on each lesson unless you want to.
Sample of Schoolwork
Keep samples of some of your child’s schoolwork. It isn’t necessary to put all of their daily papers into the portfolio. You only really need some of their best work to show what progress they’ve made throughout the year. The rest of the papers should be kept elsewhere for awhile – in case they need to be referenced at a later date. If your child’s assignment was an art or science project, take a picture of it and jot some notes down.
Field Trips
Keep a list of field trips you took your son or daughter on. You can then attach reports they may have done for assignments explaining what they learned on that field trip. You can also include photographs taken while you were on the field trips and show some of the things you saw or did while you were there. This will make for a wonderful keepsake later in life.
Daily Homeschooling Journals
My children kept a running homeschool journal. It’s such a great tool for reinforcing what they learned that day and encouraging curiosity (you can get your free printable learning journal here). I kept every one of their journal entries in our homeschool portfolio.
Organizing Your Homeschool Portfolio
First, check with your state to see if they require anything special to be placed in your child’s portfolio and if they have any special requirements for organizing and presenting. If not, you’re pretty much free to organize it anyway that makes sense to you. If you’re following a very structured program, organizing by subject would probably make the most sense. If you lean more towards unit studies and child-led learning, I’ve found that organizing everything chronologically worked best, accompanied by a “master list” of topics covered, books read, etc.
Don’t be scared or burdened by the idea of keeping a homeschool portfolio. It’s really easy and I even thought it was fun!
