The one question
The Chronicle holds the whole year — every photograph, every note, every finished lesson. Three documents come out of it, and choosing between them takes one question.
Not what the document contains. Not how long it is. Just this:
Who is going to read it?
The Portfolio
One child, one year, and only what a reviewer needs.
The Family Record
Every child, everything, for your own files.
The Yearbook
The year as a book, photographs and all.
All three are included. All three are generated from the same Chronicle, so none of them asks you to enter anything twice. You'll find the Portfolio and the Family Record in The Chronicle → Exports, and the Yearbook on its own tab.
The Portfolio
One student. One school year. The document you hand to an evaluator, an umbrella school, or a district reviewer.
A reviewer is not reading for pleasure. They have a checklist and a stack of folders, and they want to know what one child studied this year and what evidence there is that it happened. Everything else is noise, and noise invites questions.
- Who reads it
- An evaluator, a reviewer, an umbrella school, a new teacher — someone who does not know your family.
- Covers
- One child, one school year.
- You control
- Every word and every photograph in it. Nothing is included unless you say so.
What's inside
A written summary of each subject
Drafted for you from the work you actually logged, then handed back for you to read, change, and approve. It names the curriculum and describes what was done. It does not grade your child, praise your child, or say anything the record doesn't support — and nothing appears in the finished document until you approve it.
The completed work, by subject
What was finished and when, with the book named and the pages or lessons given. Built from work that was actually done, not from everything you own.
Work samples
The photographs you took of finished work, each with a short formal description of what it demonstrates. Photograph the page; the description writes itself.
Tests and evaluations
Standardized test results and evaluator reports as you recorded them — the name, the date, the score or the qualification. Several states ask for exactly this and nothing else.
Instructional days
How many days of the year have recorded work. Stated as what it is: days recorded, not hours measured.
You see the whole thing first. Every drafted paragraph is editable, every work sample and record has a checkbox, and nothing is ticked on your behalf. If you approve nothing, the Portfolio still generates — it simply contains the completed work and nothing more.
The Family Record
Every child, one document. The copy you keep.
This is the administrative account of the year — who each child is, what they studied, how the schedule was built, and how much time it was given. It is not shaped for anyone else's checklist, which is exactly why it's useful three years from now when someone asks what your eighth grader covered.
- Who reads it
- You. Occasionally a co-op or an umbrella school that wants the whole household at once.
- Covers
- Every student, in one file.
- Reach for it
- At the end of a year, or any time you want the complete picture in one place.
What's inside, per student
- Learning profile — learning style, strengths, challenges, and accommodations.
- Subjects and schedule — every subject with its days and minutes.
- Completed work log — each finished task by week, day, subject, and detail.
- Planned time by subject — days with recorded work multiplied by session length, with a total.
- A handful of memories — up to ten flagged notes from the Chronicle.
It covers the whole family, and it includes the planning scaffolding — schedules, allocated minutes, learning profiles. Useful to you, beside the point to a reviewer assessing one child. Handing over more than was asked for is not the same as being thorough.
The Yearbook
The year your family actually had, made into a book.
Neither of the other two documents is any fun. This one is the point of keeping records at all: the photographs, the ordinary Tuesday afternoons, the thing someone finally got after three weeks of not getting it.
- Who reads it
- Your family. Grandparents. Your children, in twenty years.
- Covers
- Whatever span you choose — a term, a year, the whole thing.
- What it is
- A print-ready PDF. Download it and print it however you like.
How it's made
- 1 Photograph the days as they happen. A line about each is plenty; a photograph with no caption is a perfectly good entry.
- 2 When you're ready, open the Yearbook tab. Every entry is there and everything is eligible — you tick what belongs in the book.
- 3 Generate. It takes a few seconds and produces a finished PDF — cream pages, gold rules, your photographs at print resolution.
A yearbook wants a year in it. If you started in August, there isn't a book worth making until the days have piled up — which is the whole reason to log them as you go rather than reconstructing them in May.
Which one, when
Every row below points at exactly one document. If two seem to fit, take the one whose reader matches yours.
What feeds them
You never write for a document. You log the day, and the documents assemble themselves.
All three read the same Chronicle. Nothing is entered twice, and nothing is entered for a particular output. What changes is which parts each document reaches for.
Where each part lands
- Checking off the day's work — the completed work log in both the Portfolio and the Family Record, and the instructional day count.
- A photograph of finished work — a work sample in the Portfolio, with its description drafted for you.
- A photograph of the day — a page in the Yearbook.
- A note, typed or spoken — the Chronicle, and evidence behind the Portfolio's subject summaries.
- A test result or evaluator report — the Portfolio's assessment section.
The practical version: photograph the work when it's in front of you, say a line about the day when you have one, and check off what got done. Everything downstream is assembly.
Nothing is written on your behalf without your approval. Where Crow & Stone drafts something — a subject summary, a description of a work sample — you see it, you can change it, and it stays out of the document until you say otherwise. Your child is never graded, rated, or assessed by the app.