Free homeschool portfolio builder

List what is in the binder and this builds the front of it: a cover sheet and a contents page, grouped by subject and ordered by date, ready to print. It also reads the dates and tells you what a review would notice. Free, and no work is uploaded anywhere.

The student and the year

Student name

Grade level

Homeschool name

School year

What is in the binder

One line per piece. Say what it is in the words you would use out loud, because the description is the only part an evaluator reads before deciding whether to turn to it. A photo of a model, a recording of a narration and a worksheet all count equally.

Subject for piece 1
What piece 1 is
Date of piece 1
Subject for piece 2
What piece 2 is
Date of piece 2
Subject for piece 3
What piece 3 is
Date of piece 3
Subject for piece 4
What piece 4 is
Date of piece 4

Notes

Your contents page

Pieces: 4
Subjects: 4

4 pieces have no date on them. Dating is the difference between a portfolio and a box, so they are worth going back for.

You have seen the count above. We ask where to send it after this.

A portfolio is not a craft project

The word makes it sound like one, and that is why families dread it. A homeschool portfolio is a dated, organised selection of work, assembled so somebody else can look through it and see that a year happened. Nothing more. Where a portfolio review is required, an evaluator typically wants a log of what was covered, samples from near the start and near the end so growth is visible, and any test results.

Which means the gap between a box of paper and a portfolio is usually one afternoon and a contents page. That is the part this builds.

Why it asks for a date on every piece

Because dating is the entire difference between a portfolio and a box. An undated sample proves far less than a dated one: it shows something was made, but not when, and therefore not whether anything changed over the year. Growth is what a review is actually looking at.

So the tool counts undated pieces and says so, and it checks whether each subject’s pieces are spread across the year or bunched into a few weeks. A subject where everything comes from one fortnight looks perfectly fine in a list and is exactly what an evaluator notices. One older piece fixes it, and it is a much easier fix in April than in June.

Do not curate out the ordinary

The instinct is to include only the best work. Resist it. A portfolio of nothing but highlights looks staged, and a normal one is more convincing: it shows a real year, with the ordinary weeks in it. Evidence also counts in any form. A photo of the model bridge, a note about a conversation on a walk, a recording of a recitation. These document learning as truthfully as a graded worksheet, and they belong in the list.

Nothing is uploaded here

This tool indexes a binder, it does not hold one. You type titles and dates; the work itself stays wherever it already is, on your shelf or your own computer. We are not going to ask families to upload a year of a named child’s schoolwork to an anonymous web form, and you should be wary of any free tool that does.

The rest of what an evaluator sees

A portfolio usually sits alongside an attendance record and, in high school, the course records that become a transcript. Our attendance tracker and transcript generator are free too. For the full list of what to keep and how long, read our guide to homeschool record keeping.

What we do with your email

We send you the contents page and occasional homeschool advice, and you can unsubscribe from any email in one click. The names and titles you type are used to render your PDF and are not stored on our servers. See our privacy policy for the full detail.

Typing this list in April means remembering what happened in October, which is the part that makes portfolio season unpleasant. Bowerstead keeps the work dated as it happens, so the list is already written. Free for 30 days, then $9 a month or $79 a year.