Those who have been reading this blog (and those who know me) will know by now that I am such a sucker for planners, be it a paper-and-pen one or the digital type. I'm happy that before our SY 2019-20 kicks off, I received the Annual Membership Plan from My School Year Homeschool Record Keeping . And even better, doing this review forces me to plan out our coming school year much, much earlier.
My School Year Homeschool Record Keeping is quite feature-heavy, and definitely can do more than keep records. It's a great way to track appointments, extracurricular activities, reading lists, and even chores.
The downside for me is that it has such a steep learning curve! Naturally, as with any organizing system, getting your initial structure in is always a lot of work. In this case, you have to set up your students, your school terms, your subjects, classes, and lessons. I didn't find My School Year intuitive. But that could be just me.
For example, I wanted to generate lesson plans for Mystery of History, which both girls study together. First you have to make a class for it, before setting up the lessons. But I discovered that you can't make a class without assigning it to a student. For a shared class, you need to assign it to one student, then share it before you generate the final lessons. You can also copy the class after you generate the lessons, which is most likely the better option, which I learned the hard way. When you share the class before generating the lessons, any edits you make after are not reflected in the shared class.
I also had a hard time figuring out how to generate the lessons with the specific parameters I had in mind. We're currently in the last weeks of Mystery of History Volume 1--weeks 28 to 36--and each week has three lessons (lessons 82 to 108) and a quiz or exercise. I wanted to do one lesson a day, and the quiz on the fourth. You could easily generate lessons using the Create-A-Plan function, but I couldn't quite figure out how to do it exactly how I wanted it. They do provide a Cheat Sheet, but it wasn't making sense to me.
I am not sure if there is a way for the lessons to be generated like: Week 28 Lesson 82, Week 28 Lesson 83, Week 28 Lesson 84; and then a Week 28 Quiz. In the end, I made two separate lesson plans using the Create-A-Plan function. First, I generated the entries by lesson number, scheduling them for Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Then I created a second lesson plan for the weekly quizzes, and scheduled them for Thursdays. After I generated the lessons, I edited the entries to add the specific topics. This worked out fairly well. Or so I thought.
I noticed that further down the schedule, some quizzes were not appearing together with the three lessons of the week. Then I remembered that once a month, we don't have school on certain Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays because I have scheduled business trips. So the lessons for that week were moved to the following Monday, with the rest of the lessons adjusted accordingly. Normally, this auto rescheduling is a great feature, but in my case, it messed up the quiz schedule.
Fortunately it was easy enough to remedy. I edited the dates of the affected lessons and quizzes--et voila! Solved. I do wish there was an easier way to do it though.
I am, however, starting to get into the groove. Our school year officially starts mid-September, so I'm happy for the time to learn how to maximize My School Year. So far, I've put in all the subjects and classes that Raine (Grade 7) and Breeze (Grade 4) will be taking. I'm slowly putting in all the lesson plans. Another great feature is that I can reuse Raine's lesson plans for Breeze later (you can also search the database for lesson plans created by other users).
I also like fact that you can add a reading log, extracurricular activities, and events to your calendar. If you make yourself a student account, you can also add your own activities to the calendar.
You can also add everyone's chores or to-do lists to the grand plan. You will need to treat chores or to-do lists as a class, and then the lessons are the individual tasks.
The girls can each login separately, and since they do have Kindle Fires now, I'm glad that they will be able to check on their schedules and tasks on their own.
There are so many aspects that I haven't even begun to explore, such as the Reports generator to the attendance tracker. I am looking forward to learning how to use these and other features.
Other homeschooling families have also tried My School Year Homeschool Record Keeping . Click below to read about their experiences.
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