Question 1

How does Inglenook work?

Accepted Answer

You add your children, then add what you're teaching them. Inglenook builds the lessons, keeps the calendar and writes the record as you go.

How much you plan is up to you. Some families map out a full year in August. Some open the app in the evening and log what happened. Most do both in the same week, and that's fine.

What makes it different is what comes out the other end. Everything you do lands in your records automatically, in the format your area asks for. You're not keeping a planner and a portfolio and a spreadsheet of hours in three different places. It's one place, and the paperwork becomes a by-product of the teaching instead of a second job.

You choose your country when you sign up, and US families choose their state, so your dates, spelling and reporting formats match where you live.

Question 2

I've never homeschooled before. Where do I start?

Accepted Answer

With a conversation, not a blank page.

Plan with Pearl asks about your children and what you're hoping for, then builds you a first plan you can change. You don't need to know your teaching philosophy, your subjects or your schedule before you start. Almost nobody does. You can say "decide later" at any point and come back to it.

It also explains the main approaches in plain language, from Charlotte Mason to classical to unschooling, so you can see which parts suit your family instead of trying to work it out from an argument on a forum.

And you're allowed to change your mind. Most families do, more than once. Inglenook is built to be changed.

Coming as we grow: a community of home-educating families to compare notes with, and guidance built from what actually works across thousands of households.

Question 3

How does Inglenook fit into your homeschooling?

Accepted Answer

It fits underneath whatever you're already doing. It doesn't ask you to change your approach.

A week in our house might have a formal maths lesson on Monday, a museum trip on Wednesday, a child who won't stop reading about volcanoes on Thursday, and nothing much on Friday because someone was ill. All four of those go into Inglenook, and all four come out as records.

The maths lesson was planned in advance from a textbook. The museum trip was logged afterwards in one sentence. The volcano obsession became a small unit of its own. The sick day got moved, and everything after it shifted along.

That's the point. You don't have to pick one style and hold to it, because almost nobody actually lives like that.

Question 4

We already have curriculum. Can we use it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it's one of the things Inglenook is best at.

Tell it what you're using and it turns that book or programme into a plan spread across your weeks and terms. You keep the curriculum you chose. You just stop spending Sunday evening working out what happens on Tuesday.

Then it flexes with you. Say you're on week eleven of a maths programme and your child hits a wall on fractions. Give it another fortnight and everything after it moves along; the plan stays accurate and so does the record. Take two weeks off for a family visit and the same thing happens.

This matters most with a full done-for-you curriculum, because there what you need to prove is what was covered and when. Tick it off as you go and the evidence builds itself.

Coming as we grow: photograph a curriculum's contents page and have Inglenook lay the whole year out for you.

Question 5

How does Inglenook help with records and reporting?

Accepted Answer

This is the part it was built for.

As you teach, Inglenook keeps the lot. Every lesson and whether it happened. Photographs of your children's work, attached to the day they did it. Hours and attendance, where your state counts them. A portfolio for each child that fills itself as the year goes on.

Then when someone asks to see it, Inglenook arranges that material into the shape your area expects. In the UK that's a written account of the education you've provided, ready for a local authority enquiry, or for the Children Not in School register when it commences in England. In the US it's whatever your state asks for: attendance and hours, a dated portfolio, subject-by-subject progress, and templates for things like a New York IHIP or a quarterly report.

Here's why it matters. Most families keep bits and pieces, then lose a weekend before a deadline scrolling through camera rolls trying to remember February. I did exactly that for years in New York. Inglenook captures it while it's happening, so producing the report takes a few minutes instead of a whole weekend.

Question 6

What if we don't want a curriculum at all?

Accepted Answer

Then you don't have one, and Inglenook works differently for you.

For wildschooling, unschooling and freeform families it doesn't hand you a timetable. It works with the things your children are already interested in, and helps you build real learning around them. That's Catch the Learning, and there's a fuller answer about it on this page.

In practice it does two things. Before an activity, it offers ways to make it educational if you want them: an experiment to run, observations to record, a worksheet to work through afterwards. After an activity, it helps you identify what your child genuinely did and learned, and suggests a follow-up while it's fresh.

What it won't do is inflate. A day at the beach is not automatically geography, and Inglenook won't record it as such. It will show you what's actually there, and what you could add if you want it to count for more. That honesty is the point. A record that overstates what happened is no use to you when your local authority asks, and no use to your child either.

And none of it reaches into your children's day. No reminders about lessons you didn't plan, no days marked incomplete, no nudging towards a schedule you didn't ask for.

Question 7

How does Inglenook help with exams, university and college?

Accepted Answer

By making sure both the coverage and the evidence exist before you need them.

Turn exam preparation on for a course and Inglenook weaves the exam work into what you're already teaching: past papers, revision weeks, and a view of which syllabus topics you've covered and which you haven't. That last one settles most parents. You can see the gaps in October, while there's still time to close them, rather than discovering them in April.

For older children it tracks independent study, coursework and experiments, which matters because a lot of exam-year work happens without you in the room.

And it builds the transcript: courses, grades, and the evidence behind them, in the form a university or college will ask for. If you've kept records as you went, that's a straightforward export. If you haven't, it's the worst fortnight of your year.

You can switch exam mode on for one subject and leave the rest of your homeschool exactly as it is.

Question 8

How does Inglenook plan around each of my children?

Accepted Answer

By child, not by year group.

Each child has their own courses, their own pace and their own record. Where it really earns its keep is with several children at once. You can teach one thing to all of them and set it at a different level for each, so a nine-year-old and a thirteen-year-old work on the same project without you planning it twice.

That's what happened with the matchgirls. One film, four different pieces of work, each pitched where that child actually was.

You can also record what you know about how each child learns: what they're strong at, what they find hard, when in the day they do their best thinking. It's there so the plan fits the child in front of you rather than an average one.

Coming as we grow: Inglenook using that picture to suggest what might suit each child next.

Question 9

What is Catch the Learning?

Accepted Answer

It helps you find the real learning in what your family is doing, and add to it where it's thin.

There are two ways to use it.

Before something happens. You tell Inglenook what you're planning. The children are baking at their grandmother's on Saturday. It comes back with ways to make it genuinely educational, if you want them: a worksheet on doubling the recipe, observations to write down about what happens when the bicarbonate meets the vinegar, questions worth asking, a measuring job the child does herself rather than watches. You pick what you'll use. The learning happens because you built it in.

After something happens. You describe what your children actually did, and Inglenook asks about the parts that matter. Did they measure, or did they watch? Did they read the recipe themselves? Did they notice the rise and wonder why? It records what they did, at the level they did it.

Then it offers the follow-up, and this is the part that does the real work. Half an hour at the table while it's still fresh, going back over the recipe: the fractions in doubling it, why those two ingredients together make a cake rise, writing down what they saw. That is when the afternoon becomes maths and science, and it's recorded as exactly what it is, a follow-up activity, on the day you did it.

We are careful about this, and it matters. If your child spent the afternoon stirring while her grandmother did the reading and the measuring, that was a lovely afternoon and it was not a maths lesson. Inglenook will not call it one. It will tell you what is genuinely there, and show you what you could add if you want more.

Anything else would be dishonest to you, and worse than useless when someone official asks what your child has been learning.

Here is what it looks like when the learning is real. My girls watched Enola Holmes 2. The story underneath it is true: the matchgirls at Bryant and May, and the strike in 1888 that helped start the trade union movement. They were interested, so we followed it. Catch the Learning gave us the history properly named, and three ways to go further: an op-ed about conditions in the factory, research into how unions grew out of that strike, and the chemistry of why white phosphorus was so much more dangerous than red. Each of my children took a different thread, at her own level, and did the work.

That is a real unit of study. It started with a film, but it did not stay a film.

Question 10

Does Inglenook work for both UK and US families?

Accepted Answer

Yes. It's built for both, and you choose your country when you sign up. That sets your spelling, your dates, your terminology and your compliance templates, so what you see matches where you live.

US families also choose their state, because that's the level at which reporting rules are set.

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