We’re starting to try to do a better job with keeping track of grades and assignment, and were recently given the chance to try the online program My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) from MySchoolYear.com.
You are able to easily set up their account within a few minutes, and then the information can be edited and accessed quickly at any time.
Getting started is easy. Simply go to My Homeschool and click Setup and then Students.
You can add in your students here and also choose to send daily and/or weekly emails to them with their assignments and planned events.
Next you can set up your terms. For us, I went ahead and scheduled off our vacation days and everyone’s birthday, as well as some time off for Thanksgiving. I also put a 3 week winter break in there. After the last two years, I just know no one will be able to focus then, anyway! You can then enroll your students in there. Note that you can have multiple terms and enroll students in whichever one you’d like. This might be helpful if you have one student in a 2 day a week program somewhere and another student at home full time. They could have totally different terms, and it would make scheduling their work a lot easier.
Now, it’s time to add in the classes. You can also edit which subjects are available if you need a different option to choose from when assigning classes. This is where you select how often your student will be doing this class, what time they’ll be completing it, how the grades will be determined, and more.
This is the part that will undoubtedly take the longest, as you’ll have to enter it in for each class.
HOWEVER, once you’ve gotten all of the information put in there, it’s just awesome! You choose how to add the lessons into the calendar, and there are different choices for this:
Overally, I feel like MySchoolYear is a great online planner option for homeschoolers. For me personally, we tend to fly by the seat of our pants more often than not, so I honestly think I would have a hard time sticking to whatever was scheduled. However, assignments can be moved around and rescheduled at any time, so there is the flexibility aspect built into the program already.
I think we might use this to track our core subjects, since those won’t be changing throughout the school year once we get started. This would give the kids an email letting them know what to work on each day and they would then know their exact expectations. That’s convenient for my older kids!
I’ve also thought about adding chores in there. I could assign specific chores to them, and THAT would be part of that “to do” email. It would be a lot easier for them to remember to do laundry or scrub their toilets if they had a good reminder sent to them!
I’m not the only one that had a chance to review MySchoolYear.com. Check out what other homeschooling families thought by clicking on the banner below:
