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It’s beginning to look a lot like…back to school?!
Well, maybe for the rest of the country but we don’t actually start school in our house until mid September (after we get back from the beach). With two ADHD school aged kids gearing up and starting homeschool just to turn around and go on vacation for two weeks just sets us up for failure when we get home. It’s much less headache for everyone if we just push it back until our heads are in the game…or…books. Whatever.
However, that doesn’t mean our household is totally school free right now. Yes, I’ve been hitting the back to school sales, planning unit studies and creating worksheets. But I’ve also been trying very hard to get our record keeping organized. It was so much easier with one school aged kid to just download some stuff to the computer, send it to a specific folder and forget about it until next year. This year, my anxiety is getting the best of me and I would just feel so much better if I had a better system since I’ll be in charge of TWO school aged kids this time around.
Enter: the binder.
I love binders. I love the way the crisp, clean pages look and smell and feel. I love hole punching and lining up pages. It makes me feel like I’m doing something productive. For this project, binders hit all my marks. Now onto the details.
What I Used
1″ clear view binders
Sheet protectors
Packing tape
Permanent double sided tape
White cardstock
Heavy duty hole punch (this was a new purchase for this project and holy crap, I love it!)
I also designed a cover page, spine, divider pages and divider tabs to make everything look nice and professional. If you’re interested, I have them listed as an editable Canva bundle for purchase in my Etsy shop – all the text, font and colors are editable. They are currently 50% off until 8/22/26.
What I Did
After I customized my kids’ pages, I printed everything out on white cardstock. I trimmed the spine to fit the binder and slid it and the cover page into their respective pockets on the outside of the binder.
For the divider pages, I slid each one of those into a clear sheet protector to help with longevity. I carefully cut out the divider tabs, folded them in half, covered them with packing tape to provide some additional stability and then taped them to the sheet protected divider pages. Kinda janky assembly process, but it works and it looks great! See below for visuals on how I did the divider tabs.
Finished!
(almost – I haven’t done all 13 tabs yet, but you get the idea)
What I Include
I am not one for overdoing record keeping, especially since we use Miacademy. It literally saves everything in your account: grades, exactly what practice and assignments were done, how long they spent on each item, literally everything. It’s easy for me to go back years and pull up everything if I ever need to.
I do include each years printed gradebook from Miacademy, a printed version of each child’s Google slide presentation from that year, the accepted letter of intent from our county public school system and the yearly evaluation letter stating work is adequate.
Everything else gets put into our handy, dandy…homeschool file boxes! Which is a post for another day. Stay tuned for homeschool record keeping part two: file boxes.
