What to Keep in Your Child's Homeschool Portfolio

A portfolio is an excellent way to keep track of how well your child does throughout their homeschooling years. It shows their progress and alerts you to any issues that you may need to review at a future time.

A homeschool portfolio can also be the key to having your high school student accepted into a college. Most colleges ask for transcripts, but if you homeschool without using a distance education program with a proctor, you won’t have official state documents to share with them.

A portfolio of exam grades, projects (pictures are always a great accompaniment to this), and essays – as well as a record of daily grades taken in ninth through twelfth grades can help the administrator lean toward signing an acceptance letter.

Have a list of all of the training materials you’re using or have used to educate your child. For textbooks, include the publisher along with the title. Include a list of books that were assigned to your child for reports.

Write down some goals you and your child set for each year. This is a great evaluation tool you can use mid-year to see if your teaching skills and their level of absorption are meshing well.

If not, then you can switch gears and help them reach their goal before the semester is up. Your child can gain a tremendous amount of pride and self-confidence by seeing that they were able to reach those goals.

You may want to keep a record of your daily lesson plan.  You can jot down page numbers from the book you were studying so that you know where you left off from the last time. It isn’t necessary to add how well your child did on each lesson unless you want to.

Keep samples of some of your child’s schoolwork. It isn’t necessary to put all of their daily papers into the portfolio. You only really need some of their best work to show what progress they’ve made throughout the year. The rest of the papers should be kept elsewhere for awhile - in case they need to be referenced at a later date.

Keep a list of field trips you took your son or daughter on. You can then attach reports they may have done for assignments explaining what they learned on that field trip. You can also include photographs taken while you were on the field trips and show some of the things you saw or did while you were there.  This will make for a wonderful keepsake later in life.
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Make sure you check with your state to see if they require anything special to be placed in your child’s portfolio. Your child can decorate the cover and get involved in the maintenance of their own school portfolio to showcase all that they’ve achieved.

The Annual Record Portfolio is a printable, downloadable form for purchase in the Homeschooling One Child's store, available here. This Annual Record Portfolio is designed to serve as a homeschool report card, documentation of the year, and to be included in a homeschooler's annual portfolio or saved work from the year. Designed by a homeschooler, it features places to document quarterly, semester, and final grades in a multitude of subjects, as well as standardized or advanced placement testing. This Annual Record Portfolio is appropriate for middle and high school grades.
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