How to Evaluate Your Homeschool

Let me tell you how I feel about assessments.

As a child I loved them because I always received accolades for scoring off the charts. I loved testing week because I could hurry through each test, then read while I waited for the time to expire.

As a parent and homeschooler I feel like they are a complete waste of time unless you need a benchmark to place your child into a particular curriculum.

Government schools evaluations are based on their test scores. Your homeschool is not.

Thank goodness!

What a waste!

You can only fairly assess children who have been taught the exact same things. So when little Johnny is obsessed with motors and wants to learn everything about them he can’t because there isn’t time for a 3-month detour.

Thankfully, the two states where I’ve homeschooled, Utah and Texas, do not require testing. If they did, I would comply out of necessity, but not even take a second look at my children’s scores nor tell my children what their scores were.

Testing students is not a good way to evaluate the success of highly individualized learning, which is what homeschooling is all about.

You work with your children regularly and understand exactly how well they know their multiplication tables. You don’t need tests.

My reasons for evaluating my homeschool are to celebrate progress and to see where changes would be helpful. Instead of failing or passing different aspects of our homeschool, we get to look at how things worked, why they worked, memories we made, what we learned and challenges we overcame. I like to use the following process:

3 Steps to Help You Evaluate Your Homeschool

I abhor paper clutter. I keep lists in an app on my phone, in spreadsheets, and my children’s portfolios are stored as photos in my google drive.

I only call them portfolios for lack of a better term. When my kids produce excellent quality work that I’d like to remember, I take pictures of it and file it under their name in my google drive. We call that their portfolio, but I don’t really keep anything.

1. Define the homeschool areas you want to evaluate.

• Spiritual growth
• Social skills
• Academic subjects
• Attributes developed
• Life skills learned
• Physical skills, growth and development
• Relationship growth, especially with siblings and parents
• Memories made

3. Keep a list of the things that work well or aren’t working.

• What motivates each of my children? How can I better use their motivators to help them learn?
• Does your child’s curriculum hold his interest? How is it working for you? Because I know that if something requires too big a commitment from me it’s not going to happen.
• What learning method worked best for each subject? Online, literature-based, hands-on experiences, multi-sensory projects, private tutoring, etc.
• What time of the day do your children learn best? Does your homeschool routine accommodate this?
• How about your homeschool space and organization? Do you need to rearrange things? Do you need more storage space? Do you need to purge or de-junk? Does it feel comfortable and inviting?
• Do your children enjoy learning in general?
• What subjects or interests would your children like to incorporate into their studies?
• Examine your children’s academic progress. This one shouldn’t be done too often, and it should not involve tests. Rather, it should involve a heart-to-heart conversation about how your child feels about her progress and whether or not she enjoyed the learning materials. Sometimes academic progress can only be measured in years, and that’s okay.
• Observe your child’s learning process. When they don’t understand something, do they know where to look or ask for help? Are your children eager to learn? Or are they reluctant?

You will see patterns in your lists and the answers to your questions as you evaluate your homeschool. You can use that information to improve.

You probably don’t need to make great big changes to your homeschool, but can just make little course corrections that add up. Even after 17 years of homeschooling, I’m still continually re-evaluating our homeschool and making tiny improvements.

It’s not that hard to tweak a routine or do something different. Sometimes the same old stuff is just, well, old. It takes very little time or effort to add in a poetry tea time or homemade popcorn and a read aloud or some creative art time, and it can make a world of difference to a little persons attitude toward learning.

I don’t believe we parents have to make learning fun. Learning is fun and rewarding all by itself! But we can create a leaning atmosphere that is conducive to building a love of learning, and learning to evaluate your homeschool is a step.

Homeschooling Related Reading:

How to Homeschool: A Beginner’s Guide

What is Homeschooling and How Does it Work?

Pros and Cons of Homeschooling

Homeschool Statistics: Do homeschoolers Measure Up?

Pin this information about how to evaluate your homeschool for later!