Attendance and instruction days
Instruction days count themselves. Capture anything for a child on a given day and that day is on their record. You’ll only need this screen when something happened that you never captured.
Finding it
Open Records, choose the child, and open their attendance. The count for the selected school year sits at the top, and a calendar below it shows the year month by month.
Reading the calendar
Instruction day. A day with something on the record.
Break. A day inside a break you set up in Planner. Marking a break is a note to yourself, not a lock: if you captured something that day, it still counts as an instruction day.
A pencil mark. A day you added by hand rather than one that arrived from a capture. Worth being able to tell apart, because one is evidence and the other is your word for it.
Adding a day by hand
Use Add an instruction day beside the calendar, pick the date, and add it. It counts immediately. Days you have added are listed separately underneath so you can remove one if you get it wrong.
This exists for the honest gaps: the field trip you never wrote up, the week the app was not installed yet, the day school clearly happened and nothing got recorded. Reach for a capture first where you can, because a capture carries the evidence with it and a manual day carries only the date.
The count is per child
Each child has their own count, because each child’s year is their own. A day where one child did school and another was ill is one instruction day, for one of them.
What the count means
It is a count of days you recorded, and nothing more. There’s no target to fall short of, no percentage, and nothing turns a colour as the year goes on. It accumulates, and quiet weeks simply add fewer days than busy ones.
We don’t tell you how many days your state expects. Requirements change, they vary widely, and a number we showed you and failed to keep current would be worse than no number at all. Check yours with your own state, and use this count as your evidence of what you did.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to mark attendance every day? No. Capturing anything for a child marks that day on their record by itself. You only need the attendance screen for a day that genuinely happened and was never captured.
Does a day inside a break still count? Yes, if you captured something on it. A break is a note to yourself about the shape of your year, not a lock on the record, and the day counts because school happened.
Can I remove a day I added by mistake? Yes. Days you added by hand are listed separately underneath the calendar, each with its own remove control, so correcting one does not disturb the days that came from captures.
Where to go next
Exporting records covers turning this into something you can hand over.