How do you handle attendance?

[lendingheart]

I know every state is different for how many days of school there is a year. But now that you homeschool, how do you do it?

Meaning.... lets say the law is 185 days a year for school.
Your public school counterpart allows 5 days absence a year. = 180 days year
Maybe 4 field trips a year. = 176
Do those days include, or exclude holidays?

We have always just made up for sick days, even took less off for holidays then the public school, sometimes work on the weekend... of course we work on snow days because they dont effect us.

But what do you do?

Do you count so many field trips as days in school?

Our new curriculum has exact lessons per unit... so im wondering about adding and taking away lessons.

Please share what you do!

[wife]

I don't keep track of days. Every day is a learning day. We make up missed days too. They usually finish up the year on time so I don't worry about if it took up 180 days or 160 days...

[ChayilWoman]

I don't know...my state requirements for HSing are a certain number of hours. Days don't matter. We are required to have 400 core hours (math, science, language arts and reading, and history & geography) and then 600 extra curricular hours. (We are doing Spanish, computers, music, art, home sciences, and Bible.)

If your state requires a certain number of days, I would just go with the greater number. That way your requirements are guaranteed to be covered and if your ever checked out you know you're safe. Besides, what's a few more days?

[HSmomto4]

We don't have to do, so I don't

[LupusMommyto5]

We don't have to really keep an attendance record we only have to comply with matching days of education to public school days of operation so I usually make a sheet each day up that lists our learning hours and and my instruction hours, another words if we did say Home Ec for 2 hours, and Language Arts and Math took another 2 hours then we did a total of 4 hours of learning that day. I also am one to believe everyday you are capable of learning when you are a child, so we also count Sunday for Church and Sunday school as part of our HomeSchooling, there are lots ways to learn and not just with books. If on a Satarday we go to the Chidlrens Museum - that's not only fun but also another day of learning for us, and all I do is jot down the day and time we were there.

However, I do wish I had a good program that I could use already set up that I could get for free where I could enter the info in and hit print and have a nice page to display everything for the month instead of having to use my notebook paper----sometimes I get tired of writing....and even though I have microsoft works on my computer I am not good at making spreadsheets with running totals or anything. So if anyone has any program links for homeschoolers that can do our record keeping or I can use please send em' to me.

God Bless and Love to all,
Nannette (a.k.a. LupusMommyto5)

[Josh]

When I was homeschooled, we used to get snowdays off. It was always fun to wake up when the flakes were falling, and listen to the radio, hoping our district was cancelled.

Completely unnecessary, but definitely a fun childhood memory!

[wife]

When I was homeschooled, we used to get snowdays off. It was always fun to wake up when the flakes were falling, and listen to the radio, hoping our district was cancelled.

Completely unnecessary, but definitely a fun childhood memory!

Hey!! We do that. I love snow days as much as my kids do