Documenting Our Family: School Year Round-up

Each year I do the kids a round-up of their school year. I just put it in the standard stationery store scrapbooks. It won't last forever but I don't think it needs to.

The title page has a list of all their teachers etc for the year. The following pages follow the same format each year modified slightly as they get older and content changes, but essentially it follows the list below. I always just choose samples of work which I feel are representative of that year of school. Like the first and last spelling list, the last week and one other of the reading log, a few pages from the maths book and so on.

I keep the list in their school folder in the filing cabinet.

Story writing is always the hardest one to whittle down there are always so many stories that I really enjoy or that speak to me about that kid.

All the little low key certificates go in this book as well. And some carefully chosen art works including the Calendar Art for the year. I write at the bottom of each page what the item is EG Topic Term 4- Space

(Except schools don't do "Space" anymore there's always some flouncy feel good question/topic like "Who's out of this world?" and they have an enduring question and a key competency and a bunch of other crap... which then all boils down to the good teacher teaching the kids how to think, question, research, and learn using SPACE as the example of choice and the poor teacher teaching kids about space. And in many cases the teacher is teaching the same stuff as when s/he taught 'Space' as a beginning teacher it's just 'wearing another hat'... probably one of de Bono's thinking hats. And then doing a truck load more assessment for what purpose? Um to tell where the kids are at? Didn't we do that before? (Yes) To see where the kids need to go next? Didn't we do that before? (Yes) So we are spending so much time on assessmnet for what reason then? Um it make the school and the Snr management feel/look good??? Maybe. Bleh! (I think maybe I have some issues surrounding this.)

Here's the list each item may represent one or more pages (the order isn't important);

1. Title page
2. Homework
3. Handwriting
4. Maori
5. Spelling
6. Topic Term 1-4
7. Language Activities
8. Reading Activities and reading log
   
9. Maths
10. Story writing
11. G.a.T (if applicable)
12. Misc
13. Certificates and awards
14. Art

I use a combo of sello tape, double sided tape and staples for this... as I said I don't need these to last and be archivaly sound. The kids like looking at them now and when they are bigger and have kids of their own who are studying Space (or some derivative of it) I expect they may get pulled out and giggled over. They actually take up a lot of space already and we only have 10 of them at the moment so extrapolating from that.... hmmmmm.

Ah it's all good! Really.
♥