It is quite obvious when you have decided to homeschool your children, you simply focus on teaching your children the subjects needed for complying with the educational system. At this crucial stage, you forget to keep the records of your children’s progress. Having no records can create difficulties in evaluations and can lead the parents to believe that they have done little in a year when in fact, they have provided good and varied education to their children. Thus, it is important to keep homeschooling records of each day. Such records provide all information when your child is ready to attend a school or college later.

There are many alternatives available today to keep homeschooling records. It is essential to know the need of keeping such records. If it is for legal purpose, you need to know the kind of requirements you must meet in your country, state or province. Whether you simply need the attendance sheet or full accounting of activities should be ascertained. And if on a personal note, you might simply need to know where your family stands by checking in the records that you had maintained.

Check out to see whether your state has record keeping requirements. Keep a cumulative file or portfolio of your child who has just begun schooling. You can purchase a case of 1" binders from an office supply store. Keep plenty of loose-leaf and printer paper on hand. You can organize a notebook according to subject. You can put in the work of each child in their respective workbook, according to subject, with most recent work on top. A record of child’s progress in each subject is important and this can be achieved by preparing a progress or report card. You might need to keep a record of your child’s health and immunization details. Necessary forms are easily available with health departments. Attendance records which are generally required can be accomplished by keeping a calendar or planner of days your child attends school at home.

Computer or online planners are also available and can be easily downloaded. You can make use of them if you spend fair amount of time on computers. You can do a similar approach by saving work in a series of "folders" on the computer. At the end of the year, you can save all the work to a disk.

You can record field trips on scrapbook pages and add them to the notebook. You can even add photos of the trip to make it more appealing. Older children can keep their own records, if they are organized and self-motivated.

You can make use of index cards and keep them in a file box which is an easy and inexpensive method.