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If you have to track homeschool hours for your state requirements like we do, you might want to check out homeschool hall
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I just finished my first year using homeschool hall. And dare I say, this was the first year I actually enjoyed tracking my homeschool hours
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So now that I'm getting things wrapped up for the year, I'm going to show you how easy it is to pull the data I need from homeschool hall
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And I'll also show you how easy it is to make sure we're ready to go for the upcoming school year
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Thank you so much for checking out my channel, Blessed Home School
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I'm Sarah, and I hope you'll subscribe and stick around for homeschool reviews, tips, and encouragement
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So I'm going to go ahead and show you my screen so you can see exactly what I'm doing to make
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sure homeschool hall is ready to go for us when we need to begin tracking again on July 1st
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So this is the page of the journal of one of my kids
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With it being the end of the year, I took a screenshot of this. page and I did so for all of my kids. And then I also went into the report section and I was able to
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download a spreadsheet of all of their core hours, non-core hours, home versus away, all the time
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that I tracked, the activities that I added in there and things like that. It's not as pretty
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looking being in a spreadsheet, but it's there in case I need the data. The other great thing is
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I like to download that and take the screenshot just so I have it
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it, but it doesn't go away from here once we move on to the next school year
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So at any point, I can come back here if I needed to check on data or I needed any kind of
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information is going to be here. So I love this page because it allows me to see at a glance where we're at with our hours
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for the year and how many more we need to do when we're completed, things like that
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So since we're getting ready to start a new school year, I thought I would go in and just show you how easy it is to set up I really don have to do too much to set this up to continue for the next school year So I just going to go in to each of these and it looks like I can enter her birthday
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She's going to be in fifth grade next year. You have an option to give your student an account and login
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And that would just allow them to log in and make edits to their own journal without affecting any of your other kids
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So if you wanted them to help you with their record keeping, tracking their hours, you could do that
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I don't have that done for my kids. So we'll go to Luke and he'll be in sixth grade
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And then Emma. Yes, all three of my older kids have the same birthday
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Only one set of twins. Couldn't have planned that if I tried
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Okay, so there we go. I believe that should save automatically too
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Yep, it's all still in there. Okay, my report, so this is where I generated that report
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So you can see any past reports that I've done. I just did one for last school year
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and if you wanted to generate a new report, you would do so by clicking that button right there
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Okay, I just want to make sure all my subjects are still in here how I want them
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These are ones that I set up last year. So I think I'm going to be keeping everything pretty much the same
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We're not really adding anything new this year. And I do want to show you, let's say if I go into math, you can change the color, how that course
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will appear on your journal and then if it's important for your record keeping you can
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mark whether it's a core subject or not. So we're going to leave all of those
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alone for now but creating a new subject would be really easy if you want to just hit that button and then add in those details there Okay don think that added anything All right Quick entries this is where if you have an
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activity that happens weekly, daily, something that you just want to be able to add quickly to your
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journal, you can set these up. So I've got a few things in here like violin lessons, Sunday school
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those happen every week. I am going to see if I can remove this because currently we're not doing
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children's choir. So I'm going to take this off. It says journal entries created using this quick
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entry will not be deleted. So things that I've created in the past won't be affected. I just don't need
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that on there anymore. So we'll click yes for that. So choir practice. I'm going to delete some of these
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We've got gymnastics. We're going to delete. Some of these were old co-op classes
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And I just don't like a lot of things cluttering this up
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So we're going to take some of these off of there. Okay, the rest I'm going to keep the same
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I'm not sure if I'm going to add anything else, but for now it looks okay
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Recurring activities. I don't use this feature very much just yet for a couple of different reasons, but if you wanted to set up recurring activities, you could do so here
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Journal settings. So here's where I would track and set my goals that we need. So for our state requirements, we need a total of a thousand hours each school year
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600 of them have to be in core classes. And then we also have to have 400 hours at the home location
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Okay so all of that looks good I don need to change any of that All of these I going to keep the same I want to show all of these And then my school year you can change the date that your school year starts Ours always starts on July 1st per our state requirements is when we can start logging hours for the year So that all looks good My homeschool is just personal information about our school And then reminders and notices So this is I love this because I
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get a text message every day that reminds me to fill out my journal. So typically I try to fill it out
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as we're homeschooling and it's happening. But if I forget, it just sends me a reminder. It's much
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easier to enter the activities on the day of than later. So I get that reminder and we're good to go
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So that's it. Setting up the journal is really easy. I know I had a lot of information in there already
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because we've used it before, but even if you're new to this, just a few minutes and you're
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all set up ready to track your activities for your homeschool year. So one thing I didn't show you is
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that under the My Home School tab, you can also set up your grading scale, which is helpful if you
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want to use a journal to record grades and create your homeschool transcript. We don't use this feature
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yet, but may possibly in the future. And as you may have heard me say before, I do also use
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an online homeschool planner called homeschool planet to plan out our homeschool activities
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You can check out the video I did to review that tool. Home school hall is working on some planning features, but for now I really prefer to use
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homeschool planet for my planning and homeschool hall for tracking our hours
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Homeschool Planet does have some hours tracking features, but I much prefer the interface
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and functionality of homeschool hall for this. Check out the description below for links to these resources and please drop a comment
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if you have any questions. And don't forget to like and subscribe if you found this helpful
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It truly helps me reach more people with my videos. So I really appreciate that
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Thanks again and I'll see you next time
