Record Keeping

Assessment in the early grades: how to know a K-3 homeschool is working without importing the apparatus of a school

The curriculum is chosen and the day is assembled, which leaves the question that arrives once a family is actually teaching: is it working. The early grades answer that question differently than a school does, because a parent teaching one to three children sees the evidence directly and does not need the testing machinery a classroom uses to see thirty children at once. This issue describes what progress actually looks like in kindergarten through third grade, the light records worth keeping and the ones a state may require, and the placement and readiness checks that tell a parent whether to move a child up, hold, or adjust. Plus the policy dispatch and the first full purchasing cycle on the Texas accounts.

The prior issue assembled the K-3 day, and this issue takes the question that arrives once a family is teaching it, which is how to know the early grades are working. The answer begins by setting aside the instrument most families arriving from a school reach for first. A classroom assesses constantly through quizzes, unit tests, and standardized batteries because a single teacher cannot otherwise track thirty children individually, and that machinery is a solution to a problem a home does not have. A parent teaching one to three children sees each child directly and daily, hears the reading lesson, watches the math worked, reads the writing as it is produced, and therefore knows where each child stands without a formal test. Assessment in the early grades is mostly disciplined observation, and the issue describes what progress actually looks like, the reading that moves from sounding out to fluency over the K-2 span, the math facts that shift from counted to automatic, the handwriting that becomes legible and the sentences that lengthen. The formal checks worth running are few and purposeful, a periodic reading-fluency read, an occasional math-facts check, a placement test when a program offers one, used to answer a real question rather than to generate a grade. The records worth keeping are correspondingly light, a running list of finished books, a dated folder of work samples that shows growth across the year, a simple log of what was covered, and on top of that whatever the family's own state specifically requires, which ranges from no records at all to annual standardized testing or portfolio review depending on the jurisdiction and must be checked against the state's own rules. The assessment that genuinely earns its place is placement, the decision to advance a child to the next level, hold at the current one, or adjust the pace, and the issue gives the concrete readiness signals that answer it for reading and for math. The failure mode named plainly is the family that imports the school's constant-testing apparatus into a home that does not need it, subjecting a young child who is visibly learning to quizzes that measure what the parent can already see and teaching the child that assessment is the point. Plus the policy dispatch, which carries continued reporting on the Texas Education Freedom Accounts as the first full purchasing cycle unfolds and the record-keeping the accounts themselves require of participating families.