This Week in Homeschooling — August 9, 2026
Week of August 9, 2026
Jen Mackinnon at Practical by Default had to reconstruct her son's high school transcript years after the fact. The Trello system she describes is her answer to that problem: seven lists covering attendance, grades, work completed, skills, notes, resources, and goals, with an attendance card you tick off daily. What makes it worth setting up now is so that you can record everything as it happens. Several other items this week also address homeschool systems and processes: a parent going back to work who needs her eighth grader to run more of her own day, and a free college history textbook restructured to carry a full year of high school without a teacher at the front of it.
The Headline Pick
Using Trello for Homeschool Record Keeping (And Why I Finally Built a System)
Practical by Default
The useful turn is reverse planning. Rather than committing to a September plan you have abandoned by October, you record lessons as they happen and let the file assemble itself. Mackinnon sells a prebuilt board, but she describes the structure plainly enough to rebuild in an afternoon.
Practical Corner
American Yawp modified for high school
WTM Forums: High School & Self-Education Board
How to stretch American Yawp Volume 2, a free open-access college text, across a high school year: two weeks per chapter over roughly 40 weeks, discussion questions as biweekly written responses, exams dropped since they are only timed essays. The open problem is reading volume, because the primary source reader runs as long as the textbook.
How to Teach Kids to Spot Online Scams Before They Click
Mamateaches
Three red flags to teach directly: manufactured urgency, unexpected winnings, and any request to keep a conversation from you. The best exercise is also the simplest, pulling up a real address beside a fake one, since single-letter substitutions are what children actually miss.
The Best Free Science Curriculum Options for Homeschool
Organized Homeschooler
Ten free options sorted by grade band, including Core Knowledge for K-8, OpenStax and the Smithsonian Science Education Center for high school, and Guest Hollow across both. The author taught kindergarten in a classroom and marks where each needs supplementing instead of selling them as drop-in curricula.
Perspectives
Independent Learning for grade 8
WTM Forums: K-8 Curriculum Board
A parent heading back to work needs her eighth grader to run more of her own day. The complication is that the daughter left school in fifth grade behind in math, so independent has to mean below grade level without reading as a demotion. The reasoning travels further than the specific picks.
Cold feet about kindergarten in school - pondering making switch
r/homeschool
A parent writes down what her five-year-old's kindergarten day actually contains: 8:00 to 3:15, recess twice a week, twenty children, ten subjects, a weekly homework packet, no centers. She is recording what she sees rather than arguing a case, which makes it the more useful comparison.
Quick Links
- Term Planning: How I Plan Weekly Readings in a Charlotte Mason Homeschool (Joyfully Domestic) — How one Charlotte Mason homeschooler turns a term-length booklist into weekly assignments, with one habit worth stealing: plan lessons for ten weeks of a twelve-week term and keep the last two for catch-up and exams.