My School Year {TOS Review}

As my children are getting older, I'm finding the need to keep more detailed records of their schoolwork, activities and books they've read. I want to have a really nice transcript to present to a college or at their "graduation". When I was chosen to review MySchoolYear.com, I was anxious to see what they offered for record keeping. I was given the My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping)  Annual Membership.

WHAT IS MYSCHOOLYEAR.COM?

MySchoolYear.com is a website that offers many different tools to help keep you and your homeschool organized. In simple terms, it is an online lesson planner and record keeper! Here is a list of the things MySchoolYear.com provides along with a short description:

• Automated Grading: tracks the student's class average
• Automated Attendance Tracking: keep track of attendance or hours
• Teacher's Aid: friendly reminders for planning, recording and tracking
• Lesson Plan Generators: use Rapid Repeat or Quick Split to create lesson plans
• Lesson Rescheduler: reschedules lessons if you're behind
• Activities Tracking: tracks awards, reading logs, volunteer work, sports, and more
• Reports: creates transcripts, report cards, lesson plans and more
• Class Grade Review: review all graded assignments
• Dashboard: gives you access to see everything at once
• Lesson Plan Sharing: find, copy and share lesson plans

HOW I USED MYSCHOOLYEAR.COM:

I used MySchoolYear.com mainly to track extra-curricular activities and reading logs for my children. I planned on using the Lesson Plan Generators to create lesson plans for my children. However, we don't use a "do the next lesson" type of homeschool, so the Quick Split or Rapid Repeat options wouldn't work for us. {Quick Split divides a book into sections by days or lessons; Rapid Repeat repeats an assignments with new lesson numbers.} It was too time-consuming to try to type in all of the details and information for each lesson for my each of my children. If your lessons consist of diving a book into sections or doing the next lesson each day, it would be quick to generate lesson plans.

I added each of my children and their "classes" for the year. Once I did that, I realized I wasn't going to add the lessons or create lesson plans. So  I just started tracking books read and volunteer work. I tried tracking some of their sports, like karate, and it was too confusing. I had to put some information in that wasn't relevant, like "Total Hours" and a "Start Date" and "End Date". They've been taking for a while, and I don't know how many hours they've taken! They haven't ended it yet, either. So I was a little frustrated trying to figure that out, because you have to input that information.

The Reading Log was pretty easy. There is plenty of information you can type in, like page numbers, start and end dates, type of book, price and more. There is also the option to just input the book title and completion date, which is what I did.

The Volunteer Work was easy to keep track of, and I hope motivating to my kids to get out there and do some more service work! Seeing it in print always makes you want to do more.

WHAT I THINK OF MYSCHOOLYEAR.COM:

Honestly, I am not very impressed with MySchoolYear.com. It doesn't fit our homeschool needs at this time. I found it inconvenient and unnecessary. I like the idea behind this program - I love the idea of keeping a reading log for each of my kids, tracking their volunteer work and extra-curricular activities, and keeping records of their attendance and hours. It would be very helpful to have all of this information in one place, especially as my children grow older and have more things to keep track of. It is mobile-friendly, which is a plus if your family is on the go quite a bit.

The Teacher's Aid that provided the helpful reminders did help me figure out quite a bit. I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing at first. The Teacher's Aid gave me some suggestions, like "Does Mikaela have any extra-curricular activities to add?" or "Eli needs lessons for America the Beautiful."

My overall opinion is this: If you have children with a "lesson-a-day" type of school-work, this would work for you. However, we don't, and it will not work for our family. Take a look for yourself, though! Check out MySchoolYear.com!