Homeschool Portfolio Samples | Field Trip | Life Skills Learning

I love seeing all the colors that are popping up around here. It's just so beautiful this time of year. We are starting to work on our homeschool portfolios. We took a really fun field trip this week that I want to show you and in general our homeschool is moving outside as we're learning more life skills. I am seeing some periwinkle. We're seeing our tulips. They are in full bloom. Our cherry tree just opened this week and it's glorious. We have three cherry trees right in front of our house and they are so brilliant. You'll see a little bit later in the video them in full bloom and we're just spending more time outside in general. The kids are taking their schoolwork outside and then when they get little breaks. This week it was a game of baseball with this woofel ball and bat and we're just enjoying all of God's beautiful creation. I know some of you are on my channel for the very first time so I always like to introduce myself. My name is Sheri. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom to 10 kids married to my high school sweetheart Nelson. We've been married for almost 25 years. We're finishing up our 15th year of homeschooling and I love encouraging other moms and families on my YouTube channel and on the blog Our Life Homeschooling.com. Now we've been spending a lot more time outside because the weather is so nice but I will say that the nice weather is also pretty distracting. So there have been a couple times where for a certain child who maybe is a little bit more distracted I've had to have them go in my bedroom or in their room where their desk is and just sit and focus for a short period of time on the lesson that they're working on so that they can just get it done and then go outside and take a nice break. I realized this even just today with my six-year-old son. He didn't have a lot of work to do. It was just a short math assignment and then a little bit of copy work but I just noticed he was out with everyone in the kitchen and it was just taking forever for him to get this done and he kept writing a couple words and then getting distracted and so I realized that he just needed to have some time away completely focusing on what he was doing and it was just so much more efficient than he could get it done quickly. He could be done with his work and he could go outside. I think I've told you guys before that it seems each week my kids get into something different. Last week it was Monopoly. They were playing endless games of Monopoly. This week it's baseball with this waffle bat and ball and this was really fun. They did a couple days of this. We have these amazing cherry trees that are in full blossom in front of our house and it's for such a short period of time that they look so beautiful like this so I just have to capture it every year. I wish it lasted longer. They're just so brilliant and honestly the video doesn't even do it justice. They are just beautiful. I don't know if this has anything to do with them being in bloom but it seems like the kids are more attracted to them this time of year. I've come outside just to see them climbing the trees in their own imaginary world making up stories just several times this week. One thing I spent a little bit more time on this week was checking up on my kids work. Our whole family came down with a virus about a week ago and it just kind of shut us down for a little bit and during that time some of the kids that are well are doing work and of course the kids that are sick are not and I just felt like I needed to catch up with each of them and see where they are, see if there's things they need help with, and if they're making good progress on their checklist as we come to the end of the year. Back and forth, back and forth, they rocked. There's mom. Where's Michael? There's Michael. Where's boat? I always try to take a little bit of time every day to read to my younger kids. Usually it's before naptime in the afternoon after we come in from being outside. Sometimes it's in the morning because they just need me more in the morning so it's just a perfect time to sit down with them and read a book. What he was worrying about. Do you know what Danny was worrying about? He was worrying because his tail is so short. Yes sir. That's all he was worried about. Now that the weather is nicer I've been wanting to take the kids out on more field trips. We're part of a co-op and usually about this time of year moms do plan more field trips. So today we went to the James Buchanan house that's in Lancaster City. James Buchanan was our 15th president so Pennsylvania can claim one president. I guess some people might also consider Biden to be from Pennsylvania. But James Buchanan was the president right before Abraham Lincoln. So it was very interesting to come here. We've come here once before but I want to say it was like maybe eight years ago with my older kids and so my younger kids don't remember any of this. She is sometimes referred to as the first lady of the United States. This door is here and here's the bookcase in front of the window. Last year in our simple morning time notebook we learned all of the presidents in chronological order. We learned it by a song. So they really did have a good concept of where James Buchanan fits into history. My kids mentioned that they really loved this field trip and I think some of it might have been because they just have some prior knowledge about the presidents and specifically about James Buchanan where he fits in right before the Civil War and that just might have made it more meaningful to them. We have finished up The Last or The Silver Chair and we are now reading The Last Battle. This is the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia series and then we're gonna have to pick something else to read over the summer. I still usually read over the summer. But when she noticed that she was lying on a bed of heather with a furry mantle over her and saw a cheery fire crackling as if newly lit on a stone hearth and farther off morning sunlight coming in through... As I mentioned before I spent a little bit more time this week checking up on my kids work. Because we were sick sometimes things can just slide and I wanted to just catch up and see where everyone was. You have one five zero zero. That's two hundred and thirty plus eighty is three hundred and ten. Good. Eighty one six... Another thing we did this week was to pull out the kids portfolios and I always let them design the cover page so that was what they were working on. I'm gonna show you some samples of our portfolios from the past just to give you an idea of what they look like. How many threes, fours, fives, and does a sixty count? I only have six, twelve, eighteen, twenty four, twenty four, thirty, thirty six, thirty six, forty two, fifty four, fifty four, sixty. Good. Have they had you working on your sixes in here? No, I just know them. Can you say your sixes to sixty and back again? Six, twelve, eighteen, twenty four, thirty six, thirty six, thirty, yeah twenty four, eighteen, twelve, six. Good. Now in Pennsylvania we are required to keep a portfolio for each of our kids but I will say that even if it wasn't required by the state it's something I would still do and I think it really is beneficial for moms. I don't keep a lot in my portfolios. I keep it very basic and simple but just having a collection of a lot of the work that they did from the past year just gives me a boost of confidence as a mom when I can see it all in one place all that we've accomplished. I think it's really easy for moms to get to the end of the year and think what did we really even do this year but when you sit down and take the time to write it out to just pull out some samples of work and collect it I think you will be surprised as I have many years to see how much we really did over the span of a whole school year. One thing that's been taking up more of our time is some of our outside work. This was a strawberry patch but it's the fourth year it was getting super weedy so we pulled out some of our strawberry plants and tilled the ground, replanted them. I'm plucking the flowers off so that it will give more strength to the plant and hopefully next year we'll have strawberries in this bed again. More and more of our work is picking up outside with our garden and our kids help us with all of it. They help us with planting and with preserving. Just as our book work is ending our life skills work is picking up. I thought you guys might like to see some of my kids old portfolios. This is Afton's from fifth grade and she studied George Washington for part of the year. The eagle was a poem we memorized. We were studying the cell so she did a model of the cell. Some of the books she read. I always let the kids design their covers. The first paper is one where I type out their name, their grade, year, and then each subject just put a little description of what they did that year. This is really helpful for me to just go back and see all that we've done. I always think it's not that much but then we get here it is some field trips that we went on. The next page is their checklist from the year. So this was her checklist for that year. Up to there is the daily checklist. Down here are just some books that I had assigned her. Some of the co-op classes she was in and some things she wanted to do with her free time. It's the book list page. This is something that I keep with their checklist on their clipboard throughout the year. So they're supposed to be adding to this themselves. Writing down the books they read. Writing down the books that I read to them. And then the last part of the portfolio is samples of work and I try to keep a sample from the beginning, middle, and end of the year. So this is some copy work she did from Animal Farm. Autumn Fires by Robert Louis Stevenson. Here is a page from her grammar notebook. I have a couple pages in there probably beginning and end. This is another copy work. She was working on chemistry. So this is a project she did on the periodic table of elements and she copied it and has each of the elements and their abbreviations here. Here's a little sample of math for her. Something from the beginning, middle, and end of the year for math. Now this isn't everything that she's done all year. I don't have samples of every subject but that I just refer back to this beginning page where I wrote down some of the things she did in music, art, apologetics. She took that class in co-op, science, geography, other history things we've done, field trips, French, and then some of our family studies. This is Brindley's from fourth grade and it looks like she studied maybe Civil War history that year. Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln. She did a little Pennsylvania history unit study that year. Here's her checklist, her cover page, her book list, and then samples of work for her. Copywork. Here is a model of the cell for her. Here are some Bible verses that we copied together in morning time. More on the digestive system. Here for her is one of her history tests that I printed out. She got a really good score on that. Some artwork in the back. So just samples of work. This is Jenna's from seventh grade and she just wrote some of the books she read. Here's her cover page, her book list, her checklist, and she has some random artwork in here. This is a project she did on the Dome of the Rock. And then here is some map work she did from co-op. Samples of her math. Samples of her grammar. And she was in an Envirothon contest and so she just has some of her work from being in the Envirothon where they had to identify random plants and animals that are native to our area. And then just some more of her artwork in the back. If you want to see more examples of how I put together our portfolio, I did a post on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com how to make a simple homeschool portfolio. I'll link it below. I go step-by-step through our portfolio. I think one of the most important things really is to just keep it very basic. If you try to do too much it's overwhelming and I think you just won't end up doing it at all. But if you keep it really simple, just put a few pieces of work from the beginning, middle and end. Have a nice cover page, a book list. I go through all of this in the blog post how to make a simple homeschool portfolio. I'll link it for you below. A couple weeks ago I showed you guys how my kids have made these woodland homes in a small section of our yard that's overgrown. It's kind of like a wooded area. And they're just adding to these. You can see the pink blossoms from the cherry tree in there and just different things they find popping up all over the yard they take to these little homes. And they've been spending a lot of time out there imagining and playing together. I'm reading The Wind in the Willows here to my younger kids. This is such a fun book and these kids are enjoying it just as much as my older kids did when I read it to them. Reading to my kids is a very big part of what we do in our homeschool. I've just found that whenever I question myself or if I think some things are slipping through the cracks, reading aloud covers so much ground and it's just been a great foundation for my kids. Kind of a springboard that makes them want to learn about other things and read things for themselves. Our school year is wrapping up the academic part at least. We're going to be ending in a couple weeks but I am still going to be around offering a lot of homeschooling encouragement. In fact, I think it will be really fun for you to see how things change. We're still learning but we're doing a lot more life skills. We grow a lot of food on our property and we raise all the meat that we eat here right on our land. So the kids are part of all of that and we have more time for projects, for some sewing, for just different arts and crafts type things. So I'm excited to share that with you. If you enjoyed this content, I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.