The answer is yes and no.
No—maybe not early on in your child’s education. Though, if you build it into the system, you’re getting grades every day. For math in particular, we would have our kids do a couple hours of math in two separate hour sessions and we wanted them to maintain a 90% or better over that material. If they dropped below it, we would reduce the number of problems they faced till they got their grades up. If they went too fast through their problems within the hour, we needed to add problems. So we had an ongoing daily grading system.
What you’re facing is when your child graduates high school, you’re going to need a transcript. You’re going to need some information, I’d say, especially for about 9th grade and on. You can check the laws in your area or the colleges you’re thinking of having your kids apply to if they’re going to go to college. But you will need some sort of report card, or transcript of what subjects they’ve mastered, to demonstrate their education.
The easy thing to do when your child is in middle school, is to go ahead and design a transcript for their future graduation. It should show each year, the subjects within that year, etc. Bear in mind that homeschooling has flexibility. We had reading time, but we would fill in books that they would study and maybe even use their writing time to write some reports to cover a subject area. So we had a frame of reading, writing, and math—math eventually became science in the course of time. Writing involved essay writing as well as other kinds of writing. With reading we could throw subjects in like world literature, history, etc. We found this format allowed us to build a transcript the way we wanted it to be. Start with the transcript first, and then just fill in your homeschooling along the way.
