My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) Review

A new school year is about to begin. Yup its that time of year again where I begin to prepare for the new year. I love trying out record keeping programs to see what they can do for me and my family. I think I try a new one every year. This time we are trying My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping). You can find it here MySchoolYear.com. It has lots of great goodies so I hope you will stick around all the way to the end of the review.

I would like to point out that MySchoolYear.com is designed to work on tablets and smart phones as well as computers. It's an on the go kind of program. You can use it for as many students as you want, it has secure cloud storage and its affordable. I started out by getting logged in and getting my school set up. This included setting up the length of our school year, holidays and length of school day. This was a snap and only took me about 20 minutes. The hardest part was deciding what holidays we wanted and that took up most of my time.

Next I got my students set up. I have two students this year a 2nd grader and a 4th grader. I entered there names and info then I selected what classes they were going to take this year. Once your classes are assigned you can then begin putting in assignments.

With my new work schedule having all my assignments laid out for the year is a big deal for me. There are two ways to input assignments using the create-a-plan section. There is the rapid repeat and quick split.  Rapid repeat will create a pre-selected number of lessons. Quick split will divide up material into evenly spaced lessons. You would use this if you were assigning something like a book that had X amount of chapters. I mostly used the rapid repeat feature. Rapid repeat has a place to put in the starting lesson # and ending lesson #, a place for pre text and post text, type of grade ie test, homework etc. Amount of time spent on lesson and materials used. Once you fill out these areas you can then choose to share the assignments with another student. After that you get to take a look at the lessons and then assign them. I have two classes that the girls share assignments on. This made my lesson planning go so much faster. I completed an entire years worth of assignments for two classes in under 30 minutes. I am stoked that my lessons are planned and assigned before the first week of school. You also have the ability to copy classes/lessons/ reading logs/reschedule classes/lessons and track attendance.

The next feature that is super important to me is the Reading Log. This little gem is straight forward and super simple. You go to your students name in the upper right of your screen click Reading Log. When it opens you hit New Reading. This gives you a place to put in the book title, type of book, reading level, and completion date. My kids read a lot so this is a great tool to keep track of all the books they read during the school year.

Now for my most favorite part of the hole program. I love reports, they just make my life easier. MySchoolYear.com offers some wicked cool reports.This thing will make a report for awards given, course descriptions, events, extra curricular activities, instructional hours, lesson plans, materials-lesson plan, materials-reading log, reading log list, report cards, standardized test, and transcripts. See it does everything but the dishes.  I personally use the reading log list, the lesson plans, course descriptions, materials, and instructional hours reports. The lesson plan and the instructional hours are the most important for me. The instructional hours report breaks down the class/assignment hours by core and non core hours. It gives you a total for each and then gives you an over all total. My state requires so many hours for core and non-core classes and then an over all total number of hours. I love love that MySchoolYear.com went out of the way to add this break down in the reports for us. It saves me hours every year from having to add up my core and non core hours by hand. Reports download as a PDF file and print nicely. The reports are easy to read and should fit most state homeschool requirements.




Home Room is a place in MySchoolYear.com that you can go to get an over all look at your child's progress. It shows a graph for attendance day, attendance hours, events, awards, reading etc. It makes it easy to check on progress for the year with out having to generate an actual report.



There are also places for you to enter the extra curricular activities your kids do and a place to add events. I use the extra curricular activities section for things like summer camp classes that they take and volunteer work. I use the events area to track the field trips we will be taking this year.

Over all I am very please with MySchoolYear.com the price is affordable. I love that they have a price lock guarantee on the annual membership. If I order it this year I will get it at the same price every year guaranteed. You actually save quite a bit by doing the annual membership and and as a single mom that savings means some extra fun stuff for my kids.

Don't forget to click the banner below, every Crew Member liked something different about the program. So you are going to want to read them all. I would love for you to share this review with others. Don't forget to follow my blog so you can keep up with all the great Schoolhouse Review Crew reviews.

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Homeschool Helper App

As some of you know I homeschool my two girls. On challenge of home schooling is record keeping. I am lucky enough to live in a state that doesn't require a lot for record keeping. That being said I keep track of more than what my state requires mostly so that I can see there progress. We do a lot of on the go learning and hauling my laptop around is not always the best of options. I also find my self spending an hour or more every night logging lessons, time and grades for just one child. I will have a second grader and a kindergartner next year. With my current system that would mean 2 hours or more a night just for logging hours grades and assignments. Not counting the time that I will have to spend pulling together the next days work. I knew I needed an easier and faster system if I am going to survive next school year.

Home Page and super cool steaming coffee cup

I have had an android tablet for a couple years now. I mostly just use it for reading. I really don't have that many apps on it but it seems to go every where with me so I will always have a book. One day it hit me wouldn't it be great if there was a Homeschool app. Guess what I found the HomeSchool Helper App. Its available for both android and Ipad, and nook color and you can get it in the amazon store for Kindle.  It sells for only $4.99.  I immediately sent them an email and they agreed to let me review it.

The price is amazing  for less than meal at McDonalds I could get a HomeSchool app that would make my day easier. You just can beat $4.99. Its a one time cost including all updates.

Grade Calculator 

Some of the key features of the HomeSchool Helper are: the ability to track an unlimited number of students, manage students over multiple school years I love that I will be able to use this for years to come. You can duplicate students for effortless setup of similar students, record grades and track lessons for up to 14 different subjects, per student.  It has a grade calculator with (pasting ability) that makes figuring our grades so much easier. You can do a separate grading scale for each student and you can use a grade based or pass/fail based for your grading. Create lessons for any subject, the Lesson viewer provides calendar view of all lessons, with drilldown, You can auto create batches of lessons to save you time gotta love time savers. It has great lesson features that allow you to bump lessons, copy lessons and mass delete lessons. You can auto create grades from any lesson to avoid duplicate keying.  HomeSchool Helper has the ability to do lesson reports with parameters that can be emailed to students. You can also manage book list, field trips, task list. You can track daily attendance with no keying. It gives me the ability to Track time spent on each lesson with reporting this is  an important feature as it is a state requirement for us and I was very happy to see it. Reports can be viewed, saved or emailed for storage or printing. and you can do reports for just about everything (ex: report cards attendance, summary's and more)

Attendance Calender 

This app is beautiful It looks like a fancy planner when you open it. You click the steaming coffee cup for your settings. There is a sticky note for your help button. The eraser is the edit button. Click the pencil to add a new student. There is even a ticket you click for family field trips. The opening lay out is beautiful and so easy to use. I had both girls listed as new students with in minutes.
The grade calculator is probably one of my favorite features. I love that I can use it with out closing the assignment I am working on. It makes putting in grades and assignments so much easier.  I can add as many school years as I need to. There is no limit on the number of students. So I can use this baby forever. We do a lot of field trips and its great that I can log them while we are there and make notes. Being able to print off my records is also an important feature for me. I feel the need to have hard copies of everything, it makes it easy for me to print and store this years records with this years portfolio work that I am required to keep. The only feature that might be missing is the ability to create transcripts for high school students.  For us its not a big deal, there are lots of programs to help you write transcripts when the time comes.
HomeSchool Helper keeps everything together in one nice neat package. It keeps track of everything I need. Its easy to use and it looks beautiful. Best of all the price is fantastic for my classroom budget.  Below you can see the HomeSchool Helper App Trailer it shows you some of the great features of the app.

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A big thanks goes out to HomeSchool Helper for providing me with a free copy of the app to review all opinions are my own.