Storyboard Brilliance: An alternative archiving process for making a 'homeschool portfolio'

I am celebrating that I have arrived at a sustainable way to archive our family learning lab practice. This has been a nearly 3-year experimentation process. It started out with me trying to figure out the simplest, softest way to meet the portfolio requirement for the homeschool registration in our state. But it felt so disingenuous to me, to my children, to our way of life, to center the documentation process around an arbitrary mandate. Where’s the freedom in that?

So, I sat with this question for a long time. It has always been important to me to archive the experiment of our familymaking so that the munchkins can witness their becoming, and experience the creation of their personal stories in a way that is uniquely possible because we spend so much time together as a family. When they grow up and want to understand why their lives were so different from many of the people in our family, I want them to have pictures, videos, diaries, tangible memories that they can comb through and piece together the meanings for themselves.

I want our commitment to nurturing liberated learning spaces, amplifying curiosity, and living with kindness to shine through the way our story is gathered and told. The more I feel into what we need to fully capture our story, the less of a “portfolio” is actually being made. Rather I have come to a clarity about what this archive I’m creating really is: a storyboard. A storyboard is a thoughtfully curated visual + textual retelling of significant moments that shape an experience. Our storyboards at Wildseed bring light to the nuanced ways we embrace creative opportunities to learn in all our family moments.

*Wonder experimenting with gravity, again.*

Yes, I am still figuring out how to put a portfolio together. But the storyboard is the central focus of my archiving labors. The portfolio (when it comes together) will be more like a footnote, a (compulsory) summary of the requested “academic record” that must be “on file." I am using the storyboard to guide the completion of the portfolio, and not the other way around. This is critical to me, and the distinction around this brings me great joy! Everything we do comes back to our story as a family, and that story is too expansive to be abbreviated in the name of a portfolio.

But where to begin? In the 6 years that I’ve been consciously cultivating our family learning lab, I have documented so much already! Photos, videos, recordings, writings—I have things everywhere! On every device, in closets, in bins, in multiple inboxes, on flash drives and Google drives, there are pieces of our story. I am reminding myself to breathe through the labor of unraveling and untangling what we have journeyed through so far. I’m (slowly) learning how to live more minimally, and especially as it relates to digital clutter. And right now, I’m still wading through the thick of it all. This is going to take some time!

In the last few years since I started to sort out a documentation process, I have tried out various templates and cataloguing systems. I once attempted to retroactively record everything we did at the end of the day—when I’m exhausted!— in a day planner. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t last long. I began collecting voice notes about our days and then really did intend to transcribe them later. I filmed hours and hours of our mundane life moments, thinking if I could “show” the way we really do “learn all the time,” that would be translatable enough for the portfolio. I wrote notes to myself in journals, in emails, on looseleaf paper, and within the folds of colorful composition books. I created albums of photos for each munchkin, over the years, from our story times, experiments, field trips, and family fun days with other homeschooling families. I have printouts and book logs and worksheets. All together, I have a fabulously wild mashup of the evolution of our family learning lab. And I am now ready to form it into something someone other than me can decipher.

One of the tools I started using in this documentation experiment was Canva. I LOVE CANVA!!!! Canva makes you feel like you can do all things! There is a layout or a vibe that you see, and then you can make it your own—just like that! It really feels like magic! I’ve always enjoyed visual design. I’ve been creating websites and putting together virtual programming materials for years. So finding Canva was like the digital design dream come true!

*Embodied alphabet play with munchkins before dinner time. Can you tell what letter this (almost) is?*

One reason Canva really works for me is because I can do Canva from my phone! THIS IS ESSENTIAL! Life on the move with munchkins means I cannot be stationary on a computer most days. And since the vision I have for our storyboard requires continuous archiving, being able to easily upload content into the templates I’ve generated for each munchkin’s storyboard is AMAZING!

After years of trying and trying and trying again, I have activated a seamless integration that flows with the way I naturally document our lives. In the many stops and starts, and frustrations and explorations that it took to get to this synergy point, I realized at the heart of any sustainable archival system has to be its ability to complement what you already do in life. For me, it was the photos. I take photos to mark our moments. Then, when I come back to the pictures from that moment, I can write the story about what we did. This works for me because I love taking pictures for myself. Even before motherhood, I captured images as a way to trace back through my experiences dancing and creating in different places, sometimes moving with new people everyday. Photography became a way for me to remember what time and memory might otherwise erase.

In coming to our storyboard process, I was able to apply my well-practiced art of photographing our lives to the documentation of our family learning lab and the collection of materials that can also be used for the portfolio. The images are placeholders for the stories. The stories give me space to remember the details of our moments. And then I can sift through the bounty of details in the story and pull out the highlights that are relevant to the portfolio. I will also use Canva to make the portfolios. Even though I still roll my eyes a bit at the mandate, the designer in me is curious about creating a visually dynamic and intelligently designed portfolio as well.

What excites me most about this whole adventure is that I followed my Yes! If I had only worked to meet the portfolio requirement, I wouldn’t have felt so deeply into this more abundant story sharing creation and archiving practice that is the storyboards. I’m grateful for the long labors of discovery. Something beautiful is born every time.