ABC's and Sweet Tea: Homeschool Record Keeping by MySchoolYear.com ~ A Schoolhouse Crew Review

I am not good at keeping records for school. It's not that I don't want to do it, I'm just not good at organization and I'm not afraid to admit it. It's just not a gift I was given. What makes it worse is that in Texas, they don't check anything for school so, I just go along doing our own thing. Now that my kids are getting into high school though, I feel like I need to get it together and really start doing something proactive with records. It will make my life a whole lot easier while making their transcripts. I have been reviewing My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) by MySchoolYear.com to see if it would help me in my record keeping. MySchoolYear.com was very generous and gave me the annual membership to review.

MySchoolYear.com is an online homeschool record keeping program. It offers several different tools to help with organization and tracking in your school. Here's a few of the things they offer to help with organization.

Automated Grading - this automatically tracks a student's class average when a lesson is finished
Automated Attendance Tracking - it will automatically keep track of attendance and hours
Teacher's Aid - friendly reminders that take out guess work in planning, recording, and tracking
Lesson Plan Generators - You can create lessons in bulk
Lesson Rescheduler - Reschedule lessons for your student if your behind or ahead

For tracking, reviewing and reporting they offer things such as:

Activities Tracking - This is a great feature because you can track awards, extra curriculars, volunteer work, events, reading logs, and even standardized tests if you need to.
Reports - You can create transcripts, report cards, lesson plans and more
Class Grade Review - Review all graded assignments to see how your child is doing on their class average
Dashboard - This is where you will go for easy access to everything you need for your student's school year
Lesson Plan Sharing - you can save time by finding, copying, and sharing lesson plans

Upon receiving my membership, I found that sign up was super easy to do. It was quick and simple to add each student that I wanted to keep track of.

One of the things that I can appreciate is that you can schedule your school year to fit your needs. You can schedule days off for breaks etc. I found that you can add classes, and even specific times for classes. This is not something we personally utilized, because our school days change from day to day especially with times.

I probably didn't use this program in the way that it was designed to be used. For one, we school year round and we are about to start our "new" school year in July. I just tried it out with what we were working on and reviewing. I'm going to go in and change it up a bit when we start in July and see how it works for me on a regular basis. Rather than going through all of their lessons and adding them into it, I added them everyday AFTER we worked on them. This way it still kept track of things, it was just after the fact. That way I was able to see what we did. To me it still works the same way.

I love the Homeroom portion of this program. It keeps it simple to see everything you need for each child, and it's easy to switch between students here. The Homeroom is like an overview of everything right there on one screen.

As you can see on the picture above, everything Gavin was working on is laid out for me. Now, when I use this program for real, I will most likely try to input some of his subjects like I did his Science Shepard. With that one, I went through all of his lessons and did an automatic lesson planner. It numbered all of his lessons for me. The numbers are a bit off, but that's because we had already been working on the program.

It's very easy with a click of the mouse to see the classes, attendance, awards, readings, extra curriculars, and tests.

There's even a graph for attendance.

Another awesome feature is that you can keep a reading log. I think this is great even for kids to be able to see their accomplishments with this.

I can see where this program is a huge benefit for making transcripts which I'm about to have to do for my son. I did a practice run until I can sit down and enter everything for him. He hasn't been homeschooled but the last 2 years so I will need to go back and look at his public school records also. I have to say it was SUPER easy and looks completely professional!! I will take the time to sit down and enter everything just so I can make his transcripts. It will be worth it! Like I said, this was just a practice run, but I wanted you to see how good they look.

All in all this program can be a great asset to any homeschool. It will definitely make organization so much easier. I am looking forward to using it more efficiently starting in July when we start our new school year. If you are in need of organization please check out My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) by MySchoolYear.com.