My Home School Grades-Mosaic Reviews

Homeschooling is tough.  It is great and I love it but it is tough sometimes.  Some of those tough times center around grades and record keeping.

One of the reasons that it is a problem for me is that I'm bad at keeping grades and records.  I haven't really worried about it until Bethany was in 8th grade getting ready for high school but by then I was floundering.  I tried a few options and didn't like any of them.

I tried a paper record book.  Okay, okay, I have tried them before and failed miserably.  I thought it would make me more official if I used one of the kinds of grade books my teachers had in school.  Epic fail.  They weren't a good fit for our homeschooling but I felt guilty about not using them.  So I kept trying to find a record book.

I tried a few other planner/record/grade books through the years and finally just gave up.  I did find a few computer programs that would track grades, records, and lesson plans but they were so complicated I needed to read a 200 page manual just to enter lessons.  not gonna happen.  There were a few others that were less complicated but still more complicated than I cared to deal with.

I really had given up until I got this review.  Brenda, one of our leaders, had been raving about this program for several days and when I looked it up I was hooked.  I watched the videos and pretty much begged to get the review!  Thankfully I did get the review and I have been doing the happy dance ever since.

My Home School Grades is a fantastic program for tracking grades, transcripts, lessons, and extra curricular activities.  It is easy to use and the Customer Service is superb.

Let's get down to it, shall we?

Founded in 2012, My Home School Grades was born out of the need to gather in one place all the information about your family’s home school experience and to help manage and then export that content in a relevant, user friendly way.

My Home School Grades is the product of a home school dad (John Echols) and a home school graduate (Jordan Shute). Though separated in age by more than two decades, their combined passion for the home school community and what it represents for the future brought them together to form a partnership and create My Home School Grades.

These guys are great.  We were able to talk with them on a conference call and they are friendly and very willing to help if you need it.  I have emailed multiple times and they have responded within a day with the help I needed.  They really do have a passion to serve their customers.

Now on to what you really want to know!

My Home School Grades is intuitive and very easy to use.  Once you sign up (you can get a FREE 14 day trial btw) you are ready to begin.  It's that simple.  You sign in and start putting in the information.

After you log in you will see on the left-hand side of the screen a button that says Add Student.  Click on it and you will see the the screen below.  Simply fill it out, select a picture, and click Create Student.  Once you have entered your Student you are ready to enter their Classes.  I have only a few so far for one student and almost all for the other I'm tracking.  It has been a breeze putting the classes and grades into My Home School Grades.

This is the screen you will see to enter a Class:

You can see the options of Class Title, Credits, School Year(awesome if you have back records to enter!), Semester, Subject, Grade Level, AP/Honors Class, Pass/Fail, Lesson Plan, Single Grade, and Dual Enrollment.  That's a lot of options, right?  I thought so too.  Some of them I didn't even think of until I saw them here.  I love the Pass/Fail option for some of the classes we have at our homeschool group that don't assign grades.  The other absolutely amazingly fantastic feature is that you can enter numbers like 98, just the letter grade or the fraction like 18/20 and it will be accepted in the program!  Let me tell you, that is very helpful to this harried mom of 5 homeschooling kiddos.

Once you have filled in all of those options it is time to Choose a Publisher.  Yes, that's right.  They already have some of the curriculum providers in their program!  What does that mean?  Well, for our Math U See levels all I had to do was choose them from the Publisher list and the lessons were already filled in.  Holy cow that is cool!  They are getting more all the time too.  If you don't see yours, just ask and they will see if the publisher will allow it.

Sweet, huh?

Okay, so once you have your Student and Classes entered here is what you will see.

This is the list of classes with grades (no, i don't have them all completed) and when they took place and if they were a full year or a semester.  On this page you can see the GPA, Credits, and the Activity Button.
This page is a quick view of what is going on.

If you want a Transcript just click on the Transcript button on the left hand side and you will see this.

On the second page you can list their activities.

You can also choose to put the student's SSN and Graduation date on the transcript.

Then all you have to do is print and you have your Transcript.

My Home School Grades is so easy to use yet has everything you need.  Well, not quite everything I want.  I want a Reading List section and they said they are working on it!  I am just completely thrilled with MHSG and have been telling everyone about it.  Seriously, I am.  I just love this program.  I am so excited to have this for they younger kids.  My older two are already in high school so I'm a little behind with their records but with MHSG I can catch up in a snap.

If you want to know more head over to their website and check out the How To Videos.  They are very explanatory and worth your time.  If you want just a quick overview head over to This Page and read all about it.  You can also check out their Blog to find out more and read great articles.

Wanna know how much this is gonna cost ya?  That just might be the best part!  My Home School Grades is only $49.99 for a LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP.  I'm not kidding here.  That is really all it costs for all the great options I have talked about.

Here it is directly from John Echols: "Now, home school families pay one price, one time, for complete access to My Home School Grades. All future updates and enhancements will be included at no charge."

Woohoo!  isn't that fantastic?  I think so.  I think you will really like My Home School Grades so go check them out.