Our Homeschooling Journey: Homeschool Portfolio Making

Just a few more days and we're going to officially start our Grade 2! Yes, my daughter has completed her Grade 1. We received an email from our homeschooling provider congratulating her for a job well done. I can still remember how overwhelmed I felt when we were still starting. Aside from the lesson plan and the grading, portfolio making was one that I find really troublesome.

What is a portfolio

When I first started a formal homeschooling setup, I have no idea that there were portfolio submissions being done by homeschooling parents. During our kindergarten years, a portfolio was done differently. All I had to do was scan all the exam papers with my daughter's answers, then send them to the teacher in charge. Our homeschooling back then was more like a modular distance learning style. That's why I felt strongly against portfolio making. It ate up a whole lot of memory in the computer and it's all just papers. I felt it was too much work.

Portfolio making was one of my most dreaded admin tasks when we started our Year 1 with our current homeschooling provider. In my mind, the kindergarten portfolio was a lot of work already, I am mentally preparing myself with all the things that need to be recorded for this year's portfolio. I needed to always remind myself "Ginusto mo yan, diba?." (You wanted this, right?)

A homeschool portfolio is a collection of your child's work, usually their best work, to showcase everything that they learned throughout the year/quarter.

It means I'll have to not only make a lesson plan, execute the plan, I'll also have to make sure I keep photo, video, and audio records of everything we will be doing throughout the year. At least that's what I believed I should do. I thought I could just sift through her work come portfolio submission time, then put it in the file, then that's it. Oh, I was wrong. I was very very wrong.

I did this on the first quarter of Year 1. This system got me too overwhelmed. Well, everything on the first quarter was really overwhelming for me. I totally over planned, I over-exerted, I overworked. In the end I was exhausted. It got me asking why do I need to build this portfolio anyway? What's the need for it when I already got the lesson plan and the grades? Isn't it just a redundancy?

Why build a portfolio

When I saw that the homeschooling provider we have right now only requires 1 portfolio for the whole year, I was sold right away. I will only have to go through that portfolio building just once a year. That's a gift from the universe! But then come start of the schoolyear, DepEd suddenly required for us to submit per quarter. We should also attach the quarterly lesson plan we used.

One of the reasons a homeschooling parent needs to create a portfolio is that it's a requirement from DepEd. We still need to follow the curriculum they set. We are free though to add anything and everything else we want to in our curriculum. For our homeschooling journey, we don't have any textbooks that the DepEd uses but we have a lot of literature books for English, story books for Social Studies, Math workbooks and oral practices, Filipino Literature for Filipino and Philippine studies (which also falls under Social Studies), and so on and so forth. We are free to use any book and lesson we thing could fall under the DepEd required subjects. And we need to show those in our portfolio at the end of every quarter.

Another reason it is important to build a homeschooling portfolio is for when you want to transfer from one provider to another. If traditional schools look for clearance and report card when you transfer to a different school, providers look at the portfolio. They need to see how you do your homeschooling. The grades on the report card doesn't really give a full story of your child's learnings. The portfolio completes the puzzle for the homeschooling provider.

How to build your portfolio

Given that your portfolio is somewhat a storytelling tool for your homeschooling, the question remains. How does one build a homeschool portfolio? I thought I'd just get the best pictures, the best artworks, the best narrations, and that's it! Of course, it is always advantageous to showcase her most outstanding outputs, it also valuable to add a glimpse of her daily homeschool scenario.

By saying Education is an atmosphere, it is not meant that a child should be isolated in what may be called 'child environment,' especially adapted and prepared...
-Charlotte Mason

Keep in mind that when you are building your homeschool portfolio, the end goal is not to impress whoever is going to view it, but to simply collate everything that your child learned throughout the quarter. As parents we will always get caught in the tangle of wanting to show the best parts of our kid's learning.

As for me, I wanted it to be a proof that we chose right by homeschooling our daughter. At first I wanted it to look as "clean" as possible. I wanted to hide the messy study table, the unkempt mini library, the chaotic background of the house still waiting to be cleaned after all the lessons are done. As a homeschooling mom, I wanted our portfolio to show that we got it all together even when in reality, we are just hanging by a thread. I learned as I went through our homeschooling journey that it's not about what other people will say, it's about how we are enjoying our homeschool setup. And that's what I should always keep in mind when I'm creating my daughter's homeschool portfolio.

Tips in building your portfolio

You don't need to document everything. Yes, it's true, we sometimes need to provide proof that we are indeed teaching our kid. But with the Charlotte Mason method, the moment a kid is able to explain the lessons or the stories very well using their own words, that is proof enough that the kid is learning. Especially for first graders, seeing their parent-educator constantly taking pictures or videos or audio recordings can be very distracting.

Don't dwell to much on making each photo IG ready. There is no need in trying to tidy up the study table first before taking that snap. It is much better to show the real life scenario of your homeschooling journey rather than having to take the time to clean up first then taking a photo. Afterall, education is a life according to Charlotte Mason, and as such, it is preferrable that we show how life is in our homeschooling journey.

One day at a time. There is a lot to cover in a quarter. I got too overwhelmed at first. This is why I came up with a system. I check my kid's work everyday, grade her work every day, then see if there's anything that I'd like added in her portfolio. If there is, then I'll take a photo of it and dump it in my portfolio folder. Come portfolio submission time, my daughter and I will select which ones will land the portfolio.

Let your kid participate in the selection. Our homeschooling provider has a yearly portfolio gala. Last January, we joined the portfolio gala for the first time. I had my daughter select the notebooks and books she wants to showcase in the gala. I also had her choose the artworks and projects she wants to include. It gave me the idea of involving her in the selection process for her quarterly portfolio. It's her learning after all, she should be the one to choose which ones stuck the most and which lessons and activities made the most impact on her.

It is not just a requirement, it is a celebration of your child's work

_{All of her projects are made by her, her design and her vision is what she executes in all of her output.}

In truth, I never really thought I'd enjoy creating our homeschool portfolio every quarter. At first it felt like an additional admin task. It still is, but now I am having fun compiling everything that documents my daughter's homeschooling journey. While I am creating the file in Canva, it never fails to put a smile on my face.

To me, it is now more than just a requirement. I still have to comply to DepEd requirements but I have an inner motive in creating it. To me it's not just a requirement, it is a culmination of all the work that my kid has done throughout the quarter. It gave me so much joy when I received the email congratulating my daughter for completing Grade 1. It's not just because we have completed all the required paperwork and submitted all the grades. It was because we know that we had a really fruitful year. I am sure of that - because I have 4 portfolios that show how we progressed in our homeschooling journey.