What Bowerstead does
Bowerstead keeps the record of your homeschool year as it happens, so that the day someone asks what you taught, the answer is already written. It’s a filing cabinet and a calendar, not a curriculum.
The four things it holds
A plan. Subjects, terms, breaks, and a weekly rhythm. The plan is a backbone, not a schedule you can fall behind on. Nothing in the app compares what you planned against what you did.
Captures. Short records that learning happened: a note, a photo, or a grade. This is the part you’ll use most, and it’s built to take a few seconds.
Records. Attendance and instruction days, grades and averages, and a per-child view of what has accumulated. These update themselves from your captures.
Exports. PDFs you can hand to someone: a grade report, a records bundle, and for a high schooler, a parent-issued transcript.
What it deliberately doesn’t do
It doesn’t supply lessons or curriculum. There’s no library of content to work through, and we don’t write or host any. If you add a lesson outline, it’s yours, typed by you, and the app treats it as a list to tick rather than a syllabus to enforce.
It doesn’t grade your year. There are no completion percentages, no overdue markers, and nothing that turns a quiet week into a warning. Counts go up as you record things and never down.
It doesn’t tell you what your state requires. It helps you keep the records your state asks for, and it counts your instruction days accurately, but the requirements themselves are your state’s to state and yours to verify. Check your current rules with your own state rather than with us.
Whose account this is
Yours, as the parent. There’s one login, and it’s the adult’s. Children don’t have accounts, don’t sign in, and have no screen of their own. That’s a deliberate privacy decision rather than a feature we haven’t got to yet, and it’s why we ask for so little about them: a first name and a grade level is enough to run everything above.
You can add as many children as you like on one account. Everything below is per-child, and what each child’s view offers changes with their grade: a seven-year-old’s record has no credits or GPA in it, and a high schooler’s has all of it.
Frequently asked questions
Do my children need their own logins? No, and they cannot have one. You are the only account holder, children never sign in, and there is no child-facing screen anywhere in the app. That is a deliberate privacy decision rather than a feature we have not built yet.
Does Bowerstead come with lessons or curriculum? No. We author no lesson content and host none. If you keep a lesson outline it is one you typed, and the app treats it as a list to tick rather than a syllabus to enforce.
Will a young child’s record show credits and a GPA? No. Grade level decides what exists for a child, so a seven-year-old’s record carries none of the high-school machinery. It appears when a child reaches high school and not before.
Where to go next
If you’ve just signed up, your first ten minutes walks through setup in order. If you’re already set up and want the part that matters daily, read capturing work.