Wednesday, September 23, 2015

My Student Logbook

My Father and Mother in law just retired as pastor and pastor's wife and settled at a new church.  It's a great church in McMinnville with many homeschool families.  My husband and I went to visit one Sunday.  I of course didn't make it through all of service with Adam and ended up in the back area with a few of the other moms.  We got to talking about homeschooling of course and one of them mentioned her business to me.  She has designed a logbook that was intended for older homeschool students to use as they work through their day.  A way for them to keep on schedule and to be self motivated.  This is of course super helpful for these families which had a minimum of 7 children.  What blessed families!  They really are.  So I don't mean anything bad when I mention their family size.  Just that, when the children are old enough, teaching them to be self motivated and self disciplined is not only important, but I imagine, it's necessary.

When I saw the My Student Logbook I wanted one!  Yes I did.  Not for Lachlan to use, but for me.  I really like having a list of goals for the day.  Something to check off.  I had been using a dry erase list that I would check off every week and then wipe off.  But I am really starting to not like dry erase.  This logbook was the ticket.

I just ordered 2.  I ordered one that is dated for this school year and one that is blank.  The dated one is for Lachlan.  He is in 1st grade this year and we are trying out a new thing, Dallas Community School, which is a homeschool charter school.  We will be checking in with our Educational Guide every 2 weeks and she is going to want to know what we have been up to.  I thought this would be a great way to give her a rundown along with work samples of course.

Here are the covers the boys picked out.
Peter's is on the right and Lachlan's on the left.

This is the inside of Peter's.  Across the top the row is blank, so you can write in the dates or just day 1 through day 5.  Which ever way you want to use it.  I chose this for Peter because he is only in Pre-K and really doesn't have to do school every day.  So I can just label this 1 through 7 and fill it out when he does school.  
This is Lachlan's which is dated across the top.  I love that they
have it set up for 7 days a week.  We all know homeschooling can happen everyday of the week.  But it's also intended to list not just school work but life work, like chores, which happens daily.  You can see the Time column where you, as the Mom can put the time of day you would like this done by or you can write an approximate number showing how long you think that task should take. 
Let me walk you through how I set this up for Lachlan.  But don't get too board.  You have to get through to the end to see the best part!

Here I listed all the subjects and resources we are using this year.  In the Time column I wrote the number of days we will cover this subject.  This is a direct reflection of our ILP (Individual Learning Plan) that we have set up with our Educational Guide.  This is how they formatted the goals for the week, so I thought it would be a perfect way for me to do it as well. 
Here is a closer look at the top section.  As you can see, Monday was rough and we didn't get much done.  I originally had us teaching these subjects 5 days a week but changed to 4 to give us flexibility, now I just have to tell our Educational Guide that.  :) (Cindy, if you are reading this . . . ).

We still all do Mother Goose Time together, the MM&ML is the More Math and More Literacy workbooks from MGT.  We are going to do Saxon math but we don't have the workbook yet, same with Handwriting with out tears.  But we do have How to teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons.  I have been not only checking it off but writing in which lesson we accomplished.  The squares are big enough to make little notes like that.
For Bible lessons we do Experience God from Mother Goose Time once a week on Wednesday.  So I Xed out each box but Wednesday.  Then we fill in through out the week by working on memorizing our Awana verses. 
At the bottom I put chores, which I will add to.  For now, they are in charge of taking care of the rabbits 7 days a week. 
Now here is the best part of her design.  If your schedule stays the same week after week, you don't have to rewrite it all.  The list part lifts up and there are even lines under there for addition notes.  
 Then you turn the page to the next weeks grid. 
 And it slides under the list flap.
If you do want to change the schedule up, you just grab another list page from the beginning of the book, cut it out.  Glue it to the back of the week you are going to start the new schedule.
 If you change your schedule a lot, you can photo copy the last one of these and keep on going. 
Here is the back side of the week I started with.  I didn't cut the page out, just ripped it out and glued it on.  I guess I was excited. 
I have to say, it's a little hard to describe it all in photos.  So here is a video created by My Student Logbook explaining the system.



If you want to see more of their videos click here.

So head on order to their site and get one for yourself.  Oh and guess what. They didn't give one of these to me for free in exchange for this post.  I bought these two with my own money and just loved them so much I had to share!

1 comment:

  1. I love that you love these! We use My Student Logbook with our older son. I have never tried it with our younger children. After reading your post I will have to use it some with my younger kids too! I like the covers your boys picked! Thanks for sharing:)

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