Keeping a record of readings and recitations you’ve chosen for your homeschooling journey is a good habit to adopt as your students get older. It not only serves as a comprehensive archive of your recitation choices but also prevents you from repeating selections in the future. In this post, I’m excited to share my method of keeping track of all the passages, verses, and poems we’ve learned for Recitation, as well as other readings I don’t want to duplicate in the future.
Recitations and Readings Log
Recitation has been a highlight of our homeschooling journey. Admittedly, in the beginning, I wasn’t sure how to implement it and used it more as a way to memorize whatever Bible verses or poetry we were reading at the time. However, after reading Maria Bell’s helpful articles (here and here) on it and then implementing her Recitation Log in my planning process each year, it has become a beautiful part of our homeschool.
Earlier this year, when my kids were reading their new recitation selections for the term, my daughter paused mid-way through her Psalm and said, “Mama, I already learned this one.” And I sighed. I was sure this was one she hadn’t done before, but when I looked back in her archive, sure enough, there was the same Psalm from a few years before. In the early years, keeping track of recitations and readings was relatively easy because I tended to go chronologically through these things. However, it became more complicated when my daughter was added to our homeschool, and my son entered Forms II and then III.
After I realized my mistake, I decided I needed to make some kind of record of our recitations and readings, and I am sharing it with you today! At the end of the post, you can sign up to receive an email link to the spreadsheet!
Sections
The spreadsheet is broken down into nine sections. These include our recitation pieces:
- Old and New Testament sections: This is broken down by book and then passage.
- Psalms: This is pretty straightforward, with a row for each of the 150 Psalms.
- Poetry: This is divided by poet and then the title of the piece.
- Hymns and Folksongs: These are divided by the song’s title, and I only keep track of the year we learned these as we did them together.
I have also included sections for readings that I want to keep track of as well:
- Shakespeare: This includes all of the plays scheduled in the AmblesideOnline rotation.
- Plutarch: This includes all of the lives scheduled for AmblesideOnline. (While making this, I realized there are some we won’t get to, so I want to be more intentional about the ones we choose in the next few years before my son finishes high school!)
Each section contains columns where you can track when your students have learned or read the items. For instance, my son learned Psalm 4 in the first term of Year 6, so I put “6-1” in his column for that row.
As with the other resources I’ve offered over the years, I hope this helps in your homeschooling journey! To get started, you can just enter your email address below to receive a link to the spreadsheet, which is hosted on Google Drive. Make a copy and save it to your own Google Drive account, where you can edit and add to it however works best for you!
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