Getting Started · The Compass
Configure your Compass.
The Compass is where you set the frame for your whole year — once. Everything after it, the daily schedule and the memory-keeping, hangs on the decisions you make here.
Think of it the way you'd think about the first week of a new school year before the children sit down: you decide when the year runs, who's learning what, how each day should feel, and which books you're teaching from. Do that thinking once, on purpose, and the rest of the app can pace the days for you and keep the record as you go.
You won't have to guess the order. A Setup Stepper walks you through it and gently enforces the sequence — each step stays locked, with a small padlock, until the one before it is done. That's on purpose: you set the calendar before you place work on it, you create your child's profile before you assign their subjects, you give a subject its rhythm before you load its books. Follow the stepper and nothing will ever ask you for something you haven't set up yet.
This guide groups the setup into four natural moves. The stepper tracks a couple of them as separate checkpoints — creating your child's profile and choosing their subjects happen in the same place, so don't be surprised if one action ticks off two boxes. The four tabs across the top — Family Profile, Students, Subjects, Library — are how you get around once you're set up; the stepper is how you get there the first time.
Four steps, stacked like stones. Each one steadies the next — by the last, the whole year stands on its own.
Set your year
This first tab defines the container everything else lives inside: the shape of your academic year and the way your family likes to work. Under School Year Configuration you're telling the app when school happens and how much of it there is.
What you'll do
- Set a Start Date and End Date for the year. If you school without a fixed finish, tick Year-round (no end date) instead.
- Choose a Tempo — Traditional (36 weeks) for a standard calendar, Year-Round, or Sabbath (6 on / 1 off). A line beneath shows what your choice means in school days.
- Under Active School Days, select the days you actually teach. The schedule adapts to the days you choose — if you don't school Fridays, nothing will ever land on one.
- Set your US State (for standards) and your Curriculum Preference so recommendations fit your family.
- Pick a Teaching Style — Traditional, Eclectic, Charlotte Mason, Classical, and so on. Not sure? The Pathfinder Quiz will help you land on one.
- Add your Weekly Anchors — the recurring commitments that anchor your week, like a co-op, a lesson, therapy, or a service day.
- Press Save Changes.
Only a Start Date is required to move on — the rest you can refine later. But the more you set now, the better everything downstream fits, so it's worth a few minutes here.
Why it works this way
Every day the app plans for you is measured against this calendar. The dates decide how long the year is; the active school days decide which squares on the week are even available. When a subject later needs to be spread out, the app spreads it across exactly the days you school here — no more, no fewer. Get this right and the pacing downstream simply works.
Weekly Anchors come first for a reason that every homeschooling parent already knows in their bones: real life is fixed, and school flows around it. Co-op meets Wednesday whether or not it's convenient. By naming those commitments up front, you're telling the app where the immovable stones are — so when it fills in the week, it builds the schoolwork around your life instead of on top of it.
Build each learner
Now you create each child's learning profile. The Compass plans per child, not one lesson plan stretched across the whole family — so this is where you tell it who each of your students is and what they're studying.
What you'll do
- Press Add Student to open the Create Student Profile dialog. You'll see how many slots your plan includes as you go.
- Enter a Student Name and Grade Level.
- Choose a Primary Learning Style — Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, or Reading/Writing — and, if it helps, tick any Learning Considerations like dyslexia or ADHD for more tailored recommendations. These are optional.
- Mark the child's Strengths, the things that come naturally to them.
- Under Assigned Subjects, tap the subjects this student is learning. Only the subjects you select here will appear in scheduling — so choose deliberately.
- If you select World Languages, a Which Languages? picker appears beneath. Choose every language this child studies — Spanish, Latin, whatever applies.
- Under Name Your Electives, add each elective by name — Poetry, Logic, Public Speaking — one per child, exactly as they study them.
- Add any Additional Notes that capture how this child learns, then press Create Profile.
Choosing subjects happens right inside this same dialog — so creating the child and assigning her subjects tick off two stepper checkpoints at once. That's expected; you haven't missed anything.
Why it works this way
Your children aren't studying identical loads, and the app doesn't pretend they are. Assigning subjects per student is where your judgment as their teacher enters the plan — one child takes Logic, another doesn't; one is deep in a language, another isn't there yet. This is the first place you set the standard for each learner individually.
The rule to remember is the one printed right on the screen: only selected subjects appear in scheduling. The subject grid isn't a menu of everything that exists — it's the specific shape of this child's year. Electives and languages live one layer down, under their umbrellas, so the top level stays clean and every button means something.
Set the rhythm
With your students built and their subjects chosen, the stepper takes you to Set Cadence — the Subject Settings for each subject, where you decide when it meets and how long a sitting lasts. You can view everything at once with All Students, or filter to one child at a time.
What you'll do
- Let the stepper take you to Set Cadence — no need to hunt for it. (It's also reachable any time from the Subjects view.)
- Choose a view — All Students, or a single child — to focus on.
- For each subject, tap the days of the week it should meet. This is that subject's weekly cadence.
- Set a Session length — 15m, 30m, 45m, 1h, or 1h 30m — so the app knows how much of a day it takes.
- Open details on any subject to fine-tune it further.
Two kinds of scheduling, kept separate. Weekly Anchors back in Family Profile are your life commitments — the co-op, the service day. The cadence you set here is academic — when a subject meets and for how long. They live in different places on purpose: one anchors the week, the other fills it in.
Why it works this way
This is the information the auto-pacer needs to do its job. Once it knows which days a subject meets and how long each session runs, it can take a book's worth of lessons and lay them out sensibly across your real, available time — instead of dumping everything on day one. The rhythm you set here is what turns a stack of curriculum into a walkable week.
Add your curriculum
The final tab is where your actual books and programs meet the plan you've built. Use Add Curriculum for a single resource, Bulk Add when you're loading several at once, or Find Curriculum to search. When you add something, the first thing you'll tell the app is what kind of resource it is.
Purchased
A boxed or published curriculum that comes with its own lesson sequence. The app knows the lessons are already laid out — you're just placing them on your calendar.
From the Nest
You're the curriculum. Plan your own lessons ahead — or leave days blank and fill them in as you go. This is the home for everything you build yourself.
Digital & Adaptive
An online platform that paces itself, like Khan Academy. The app tracks it alongside everything else without trying to schedule the lessons for you.
What you'll do
- Press Add Curriculum and choose the type that matches how you're using it — Purchased, From the Nest, or Digital & Adaptive. This choice decides what comes next.
- Give it a Title, choose its Subject, and set a Grade Level if you like.
- Under Students, tap everyone who uses this resource — you can assign one book to several children at once.
- Open Optional Details if you want to add the author, publisher, format, a total count (lessons, pages, or units), a link, or a cover.
- For a Purchased resource, press Save & Set Pace → to choose how it's paced (next section). For anything you just want on the shelf, Save & Log Manually saves it without a pacing step.
Choosing how it's paced
Here's the part that trips people up if no one tells them, so let's be clear: the pacing step only appears for Purchased resources. That's by design.
Add a From the Nest or Digital & Adaptive resource and you won't see the pacing choice — instead you'll read "This resource is time-based. Scheduling follows your subject cadence." That's correct, not a bug: these follow the rhythm you set back in Set Cadence, so there's nothing more to pace. Only a purchased book with its own lesson sequence needs to be spread across the year.
When you do reach pacing for a Purchased resource, you'll choose between two modes. If several children share the book, each gets its own pacing card, so you can pace the same book differently per child.
To a Deadline
Best when a subject has a set scope and an end date. You set a Target finish date — pre-filled with your Compass year-end — and the app shows a live estimate like "≈ 1.2 lessons/session" so you can see whether your pace is gentle or brisk before you commit. Give it a finish line, and it spreads the lessons across your school days for you.
Your Pace
Best when you'd rather set the rhythm than chase a date. You pick what you're counting — Lesson-, Page-, Unit-based, or Flexible — enter the total, then set a Work Span: how long one lesson should take, from a single day up to a week. The app lays the work out to match the standard you set.
Why it works this way
The difference isn't whether the app lays out the work — both modes do that for you. It's what drives the pace. A deadline works backward from a finish date. Your Pace works forward from the daily rhythm you decide is right for your family — the way you'd look at your child and simply know that a lesson a week, or two pages a day, is the standard. That Work Span control is exactly that judgment made concrete: you're telling the app how much time a piece of work deserves.
And whichever you choose, every assignment stays editable, so real life fits. If they go on a tear and do three pages instead of two, wonderful — mark it and move on. If a day runs short and they only manage one, that's fine too. You adjust the card and keep going. What you actually complete is the truth of the record; the plan bends to the day, not the other way around.
Crow & Stone plans your year, paces your days, and keeps the records. $139 a year for your whole household.
Start your yearThe frame is set.
You've stacked the cairn: your year is shaped, your children are known, every subject has a rhythm, and your curriculum is in place. That's the whole job of the Compass — the deliberate part you do once.
From here, the rest of Crow & Stone takes over. The daily schedule paces your work across the week you've drawn, and the record keeps itself as your children learn.