What it's for
Every homeschool year is two years. There's the one you planned in August, and there's the one that happened.
The Compass holds the first: your children, your school year, your books, the pace you set. The Cache turns that into a daily list. The Chronicle holds the second — what actually got done, what you photographed, the Tuesday somebody finally understood long division, and the day everyone had a fever instead.
This matters in April rather than in August. When an evaluator asks what your eighth grader covered, or when you're writing a portfolio and trying to remember whether the volcano was September or October, the Chronicle is the thing that answers. It only answers well if you fed it as you went.
Catch it in ten seconds while it's in front of you. Sort it later, when you're sitting down. Nothing in the Chronicle asks you to write an essay in the middle of a school day.
Four ways in
On your phone, the + button floats at the bottom right. It opens four ways to put something into the Chronicle.
Photo
Choose a picture, pick the child, add a caption if you feel like it. A photograph with no caption is a perfectly good entry — the date and the child are what matter most later.
Voice Note
Speak instead of typing. It transcribes what you said and leaves the text in the Chronicle for you to file. Your words stay your words — filler trimmed, punctuation added, nothing rewritten or summarized.
Quick Text
A line of typed text when speaking isn't practical. Same destination as a voice note.
Add Resource
Something used today that isn't in your Compass — a library book, a documentary, a museum. It goes into the record without disturbing your plan.
The + button is a phone thing. At a desk, use the Capture the day panel in the Cache — type a line or record one, choose who it was for, then Save to the Chronicle. It lands in exactly the same place, waiting to be filed.
Filing what you caught
Anything you capture waits in Captures until you say what it was. The count beside the heading tells you how many are still sitting there.
Each one asks two or three small questions:
School moment, or memory moment?
School Moment is academic — it belongs to a subject and counts toward the record of what was taught. Memory Moment is the trip to the aquarium, the birthday, the first snow. Both are worth keeping; they simply end up in different documents.
A school moment wants a student and a subject. A memory moment just wants to be filed.
Then pick the child — or your family, for the ones that belong to everybody. Add a photograph if you didn't already. Then Confirm & File, and it moves into the timeline below.
If you leave a note unassigned, the Crow will read it and try to file it for you — matching a name it recognizes, guessing the subject, and only writing an answer when it's confident. It changes filing, never wording. You can correct anything it decides, and if you'd rather it didn't, the switch in Settings turns it off along with everything else.
The School Day Ledger
Most states count days. The ledger counts them for you, and shows its working.
At the top of the Timeline you'll find your school year's dates, how many days you've completed, and how many remain of the total you scheduled. The percentage underneath is the same number said differently — useful in February when you want to know whether you're behind.
- Days completed
- Days with work actually logged against them.
- Days off
- Days you marked as not-school — illness, travel, a funeral, a snow day.
Expand View absence details and every day off is listed with its reason and its date. This is the part that saves you in a conversation with a district or an evaluator: not just how many days you missed, but which ones and why. Reconstructing that in May from memory is miserable. Reading it off a list is not.
Your state, in the corner
Above the timeline sits a small card naming your state and how many things it asks of you.
Open it and you get your own state's requirements — notification, days, subjects, testing, evaluation, whatever applies where you live — with the statute linked so you can read the law rather than someone's summary of it. Where a requirement produces a document or a test result, you can record it there and it stays with the year.
These pages are read against the statutes themselves and dated so you can see when they were last checked. They are not legal advice, and a state can change its rules between one August and the next. Read the linked law before you rely on anything.
Photographing finished work
A worksheet, a page of writing, a finished project. These are the things a portfolio wants, and the things nobody enjoys describing in April.
On the Timeline there's a card marked Crow Vision with an Upload Work button. Photograph the finished work, upload it there, and the Crow reads what's in the picture and drafts two formal sentences describing what it demonstrates. It guesses the subject too. You correct both before anything is kept.
Work samples go in through Upload Work specifically. A photograph added through the + button is filed as a memory rather than a work sample — lovely for the Yearbook, but it won't carry a description into the Portfolio.
Described work samples are what you tick when you build a Portfolio at the end of the year. The photograph itself is printed in the document, with your description beneath it.
Where it all goes
Three tabs across the top of the Chronicle. Everything you've filed feeds all three.
Timeline
The year in order, with the ledger, your state's requirements, and everything you've filed. This is the working view.
Yearbook
The photographs and memory moments, assembled into a book you can print — cream pages, gold rules, your pictures at print resolution.
Exports
The Portfolio for an evaluator or umbrella school, and the Family Record for your own files. Both are built from what's already here; neither asks you to enter anything twice.
Which document goes to whom is its own subject, and there's a guide for it: Three records, three readers.