I love bees, but you do have to look into some best practices for keeping them on campus. There are so many schools that do it, I'm sure there are a million web resources. It would also be good to see about finding a parent in the community who is also gung-ho about it to start building a coalition for support of the idea.
Record keeping is a can of worms.
There are so many different ways. I'd start with the end in mind: At the close of each semester, what do you want to be sharing with parents? What will a final transcript need to look like to facilitate matriculation to the local high schools? What feedback will students need all along the way on their work (what feedback is helpful?)? What will be the triggers for parent meetings if a student is not meeting expectations? How will an advisory system support students with all the challenging work and keeping it organized?
Will there be letter grades? Will students see them or will they just be on transcripts sent on to schools? You can easily do no letter grades on daily work and only give them at semester reporting time. You can also skip letter grades entirely for 7th grade and only introduce them for 8th grade. You'll want to have some kinds of scales (never observed...always observed) to indicate progress and development kind of like a "presented" "practicing" "mastered" scale. There are lots of right answers as long as you can explain and justify WHY you do it the way you do.
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