We are done!

Yep, another homeschooling year has come to a close for us. I will admit this year was one of my hardest years, but I thank the Lord He got us all through. I already know of some changes that we will be making for next year that hopefully will help things smooth out a bit. Sarah finished school on Thursday night, Paulie finished school on Friday. I didn’t finish school until Saturday night. 😉

There are certain things I do at the end of every year that helps me when we start back up in August. Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that I try to get everything related to school finished up by the end of May, and I don’t even look at school things again until after the first of August. I like to have 2 whole months of not worrying, scheduling, correcting, organizing or any other school ‘ing’. 😀 This year I was a bit worried that I wasn’t going to be finished with what I needed to get done before the end of May. But here it is the last week of May, and I am done.

I have already written myself some notes of what we are going to be doing for next year. I have our starting and ending weeks and vacation weeks already marked off on the calendar. We’ve gone through book shelves and got them cleaned up. And the biggest and most time consuming for me, was getting their portfolios and transcripts done.

Usually I go through their papers throughout the year keeping the best for their portfolios. Well like I said, this year was a bit crazy and I didn’t go through them like I usually do. Finally the other day I could ignore the pile no longer. This is what I brought down off of our homeschool bookshelf.

I figured if I dumped it all on my desk then I would get it done faster because I hate piles of papers on my desk. 😉 It took about a whole day to go through these, keeping what I wanted throwing out the rest. Then I had to 3 hole punch everything and get it ready to put in their portfolios. I would have had them all put together quickly if it wasn’t for their transcripts. As I was working on Sarah’s cumulative GPA I realized that I hadn’t figured her GPA or cumulative GPA correctly for the past 2 years. 🙁 First of all Idaho counts credits completely different than every other state, so that didn’t help at all. Plus I didn’t realize the program I was using was counting the credits even different than I thought. Add those two issues together and it was a mess. It took me a whole day of reading and contacting my local homeschool groups to fully understand how the GPA and cumulative GPA should be figured. I was only off on the cumulative for last year just a bit, and hardly off on her GPA at all. Thankfully the only thing we have turned her transcriptions in to is for our car insurance, for the good student discount, which wasn’t affected by the changes.

So after about 2 or 3 days of working with those piles of papers, learning more about GPA’s and finishing everything else up I finally finished their portfolios by Saturday night! 😀

I started doing portfolios for the kids when they were in 4th & 6th grade. I love being able to go back and look at what they’ve done over the years. The only finishing touches I need to put on their current portfolios is their first day of school photos and their graduation photos. I have their first day of school photos printed out. Our homeschool groups graduation isn’t until June 3rd, that’s when I’ll get their graduation photos. I’ll put them on the first page in their portfolios and they will be done. 😀

We have a fun and full summer planned. Anniversary, birthdays, family visits and fun at our local lake. It should be a great summer, and I’ll be sure to share lots of photos from it.