May is looming and with it the end of the school year. If you’re not a year-round-schooler, you may be looking forward to tossing everything in a box and locking it away for the summer before collapsing into a chair and heaving a huge sigh of relief. Don’t. Not yet.

I know you’re probably tired, but there really is no better time than right now to close out this school year properly and prepare for the next. So think of yourself as a teacher for just a little bit longer and get ready to do what those other teachers do; have a couple of in-service days after the students are “gone.”

Prepare by selecting a special notebook or notepad to keep with you at all times and use this to record those helpful thoughts that always seem to pass through our minds when we’re in the middle of other things. Were you never able to get around to that one, special read aloud? Make a note to read it first next year. Did your math curriculum give your youngest son fits? Think through and record exactly what was wrong with the program, what didn’t work, as well as what was right. Taking these notes with you to the next curriculum fair will make choosing math curriculum much easier.

Now pull out all of the schoolwork and projects that are lying around. You will want to keep samples of your children’s work, but not everything they’ve done, so go through and choose the best representation of what they’ve learned, then discard the rest. As you do this, you will naturally refresh yourself on their accomplishments. You may also, while looking at a whole year’s worth of work, see weaknesses that you’ve missed before. For instance, it may have escaped your notice that your teenager writes in the passive voice much of the time, but now that you’re rereading a year of essays, you see it clearly. Make a note to work on active versus passive voice next year. (Note: In my experience, abuse of the passive voice is one of the most common writing mistakes adults make.) Of course, you may have noticed this already and forgotten. This is why you’re writing it down. As long as you hang onto this helpful set of notes, you don’t have to worry about remembering; it will be on hand when needed.

Each state has its regulations where record keeping is concerned. If, like me, you live in a state where record keeping isn’t required at all, you may be tempted to stop here. Don’t.

As I discovered when my oldest abruptly decided to go to college, even the sketchiest records can be a huge help with transcripts. Because he unschooled high school, I had almost nothing to help me and building a transcript took more hours than I care to think about. So, even if it is not required, take time to record this past year’s work today. This is especially important if your student is in high school, but if my junior high student were already doing high school level work in some areas I would definitely record this as well. And don’t just record academics.

If your children do volunteer work somewhere, make note of the work and at least a good guess at the number of hours invested. Do the same for anything else they’re involved in from sports to private art lessons to... You may think, today, that you will surely remember to include it on a transcript when the time comes, but what if you don’t? Or, worse yet, what if something were to happen to you and someone else were left to figure it out on their own? This is something none of us want to consider, but many homeschooling families have lost their mothers unexpectedly, leaving the dads to cope on their own.

The so-called extra-curricular things can be a little confounding. Perhaps it would help if I shared what I did.

My oldest was in our church choir. He also took private voice lessons and taught himself to play the electric guitar. Every year, our music ministry put on a major Christmas production, and he participated in this at every level from singing and acting to building sets to helping with promotion. As you can see, there is a lot here. When working on his transcript, I looked at hours before determining credits, meaning that for every X hours spent working in an area, he earned a credit. He got credits in choir, theater arts, guitar, and citizenship/service/volunteerism. In looking back, I could also have given him credits in “voice” if I’d thought about it; he certainly had enough hours between his private lessons and home rehearsal. The citizenship/service/volunteerism was part of this production, to which he gave hundreds of hours, as well as other service projects and volunteering weekly at our church.

This is where notes come in handy. Your church may also do a Christmas production, but such a small one that you don’t know if your child does enough to earn a full, or even half, credit. Count the hours. By the time I added up the hours spent just on the Christmas production, hours spent in group rehearsals, hours spent in personal study, hours spent designing and building sets...he had more than enough racked up for a full year’s worth of credits. The key here, of course, is that he was involved in virtually every aspect of putting on such an event, so I could honestly record it as a theater arts credit rather than simply adding his choir work to his choir credits and leaving it at that.

Record those hours spent even on things you might not normally think of as “school.” You never know; they just might come in handy on a transcript later.

When it comes to end-of-the-year organization and cleaning, you inevitably face the, “What do we do with the art and projects?” question. I suggest, if you can make yourself do it, that you hang onto the best and ditch the rest. Of course, you define “best.” The handprint flower picture may not be perfect artistically, but in using his own hand your son has captured a moment in time; to me this makes the project fall clearly into the “best” category.

Projects are not as big of a problem as they seem at first glance. The fact is you simply cannot keep them all or you’ll eventually (surprisingly soon) be overrun. Sure, you may want to keep one or two, but in most cases I advise taking photos of the projects and their creators and saving those.

You’ll want to organize everything you do keep, of course. You can find endless pages of advice for this on the Internet and in books; I will only say that you do want to take time to organize what you keep and you want to do it today – even if you think you don’t. The fact is that “round tuits” are hard to find once you’ve walked away and, considering the busy summer ahead of you and all you’ll do to get ready for next year, the odds of you getting around to it later are pretty slim.

So you’ve sorted and organized everything you’re keeping and, as you have, you’ve been filling your notebook with thoughts, ideas, and plans. Now sit down and organize these. If you’re like me, you probably literally scribbled things down as they came to mind. This is the time to assign them to different topics, to rewrite them so that you can reread them later, and to store them where they’ll be handy when you need them whether it be on your computer’s hard drive (Now would be a good time to back up your hard drive too!) or in an actual file folder. You’ll want a file for transcript-related information of course. You will also want a curriculum file in which you place notes that will help when it comes time to choose next year’s curriculum, and a lesson plan file where you will store reminders about things like read alouds and student weaknesses. You may think of other helpful folders too, of course, and if a note belongs in multiple categories be sure to store it in all of the appropriate places. This is one time when redundancy can pay off.

Okay, having done all of this, now you can lock this school year away in a box and collapse into that chair. Well done!