A few days ago I mentioned that I wanted to share some simple tools that we use to make our homeschool more organized.  This is one of them.

In the state of Wisconsin, we are required to educate our children for 875 hours during the school year.  That’s a lot of hours, and just thinking about going through the calendar, keeping track and then adding them up is exhausting!  Instead of manually keeping track, I’ve found Homeschool Tracker to be the ideal tool for this homeschool.

The Basic Edition of Homeschool Tracker is the one we use, because the only thing we need to track here in Wisconsin is subjects learned and hours learned.  The added plus is that the Basic Edition is also a free download.  There aren’t fancy bells and whistles, there’s nothing super special about it, but it works great!

Each week I go through and put in each child with the number of hours they school each day.  Some days it’s just a little, some days it’s longer.  When we go on a field trip on a Saturday, I am able to add in the time spent on a Saturday to our schooling tally.

With just a click of a button I can look and see how many hours we’ve done so far for the year.  Right now Abigail sits at 823 and Zander sits at almost 760.  I think we’ll have no problem reaching our target.  Then, at the end of the school year, I can print off a simple report that shows our school year at a glance, and file it away for the school year.   That way, should the state ever come knocking on our door, it’s a simple matter of opening up the right binder to show them that we’re doing everything we’re required to do.

For those who wish to keep track of more information, Homeschool Tracker Plus is reputed to be an excellent investment, it’s just not something I need at this time.  Now, come high school, when we’re needing to generate transcripts and grades, we will look at upgrading to the new edition.