Vermont Homeschool Attendance Log, Daily Log, Curriculum Tracker, and Lesson Planner Templates

Vermont requires the equivalent of 175 instructional days per year. You attest to this on your Notice of Intent. If you're ever questioned — in a custody dispute, a DCF inquiry, or a public school re-enrollment — you need records that show how those 175 days were met. An attendance log is the most direct way to prove it. But most generic attendance templates aren't designed around how Vermont home study actually works, which is why they create more frustration than they solve.

Here's what Vermont-specific daily and weekly tracking looks like in practice, and what to include in each type of template.

The Attendance Log: What It Actually Needs to Track

Vermont law doesn't prescribe the format of your attendance log. It specifies the requirement: 175 days equivalent to public school instruction. Your log needs to be able to answer: "Did instruction happen on this day?"

The minimum useful attendance log is a dated calendar or spreadsheet with a daily indicator (yes/no or a subject note) for each school day. Some families keep it extremely simple — a physical wall calendar with a checkmark each day school happened. Others use a spreadsheet where each row is a date and columns track whether the child worked on Math, Language Arts, Science, History, and so on.

Neither format is more "legal" than the other. What matters is that:

• Every entry has a clear date
• The log covers enough days to account for 175 instructional days across the school year
• It's consistent — gaps of two or three weeks with no entries require explanation

Vermont public schools typically run 180 instructional days. Home study families hitting 175 days have significant flexibility in scheduling, including year-round schooling, seasonal adjustments for ski season or sugaring, and summer learning. The 175-day requirement is a floor, not a rigid calendar structure.

The Daily Log: More Than an Attendance Record

A daily log goes beyond a checkmark. It briefly records what subjects were covered on a given day and what the child worked on. This serves a different purpose from the attendance log: it's the building block of your End of Year Assessment (EOYA) portfolio.

A practical daily log entry looks like this:

March 4 — Math: completed long division practice pages, reviewed 3 problems with errors. Reading: chapters 6-7 of My Side of the Mountain. Science: continued bird identification unit, added 4 new species to nature journal. VT History: read about the Battle of Hubbardton, drew a map of the campaign route.

This takes three to five minutes to write. Over a school year, these entries become the raw material for your parent narrative in the EOYA. Instead of trying to remember what you covered in October, you have contemporaneous notes.

Daily logs are also particularly valuable for unschoolers and nature-based families where the learning looks different from day to day. A log entry that says "spent the morning at the sugarbush — measured sap volumes, discussed evaporation ratios, identified three sugar maple diseases" is a legitimate science and math record. Date it, keep it, and it becomes a work sample reference.

The Curriculum Tracker: MCOS Alignment Across the Year

A curriculum tracker is different from a daily log. Where the daily log records what happened, the curriculum tracker maps your planned or completed instruction against Vermont's statutory Minimum Course of Study subjects. Think of it as a coverage audit.

Vermont's MCOS has age-based requirements. For children under 13, the required subjects include reading/writing/math, Vermont and U.S. history and government, natural sciences, literature, physical education, comprehensive health education, and fine arts. For students 13 and older, PE, health, and fine arts drop off the mandatory list — only the core academic subjects remain.

A curriculum tracker organized by these subject categories — with columns for planned coverage, resources used, and evidence collected — lets you see at a glance whether you're on track. If it's February and your Natural Sciences column is sparse, you have time to adjust. If you discover at the end of April that you haven't formally covered Vermont history, you can address it before assembling the EOYA.

The tracker also protects you against the most common compliance mistake Vermont parents make: unintentionally neglecting a required subject because it's not built into the curriculum they purchased. Many popular homeschool curricula are designed for other states and don't explicitly flag Vermont and U.S. history or Vermont-specific civic content. A curriculum tracker keyed to Vermont's statutory subject list catches those gaps.

The Lesson Planner: Forward-Looking Scheduling

A lesson planner is a planning tool, not a compliance record. It helps you map out what you intend to cover over a week, month, or term — before the instruction happens. For families using structured curricula, it keeps you on pace. For eclectic and unschooling families, a loose weekly planner can set intentions without constraining child-led learning.

The most useful lesson planner for Vermont home study has a few specific features:

• Subject coverage built around MCOS categories, not generic school subjects. "Language Arts" is fine as an internal shorthand, but knowing it maps to Vermont's "Basic Communication" requirement helps you verify compliance.
• A 175-day counter or term-based schedule that makes it easy to see whether you're on track to meet the instructional day requirement.
• Space for notes on what actually happened — because lesson plans and reality diverge, and the deviation is often where the best learning occurs. A planner that has a "planned" column and an "actual" column keeps your documentation honest.

For families where one parent plans and a co-parent or tutor delivers instruction, the lesson planner becomes a communication tool that also creates a paper trail.

The 15-Minute Friday Batching Method

Trying to maintain all of these records in real time every day is unsustainable for most families. The most practical approach is the Friday batching method: set aside exactly 15 minutes at the end of each school week to update your records.

During that 15 minutes:

1. Fill in the attendance log for the week (checkmarks or dates)
2. Add entries to the daily log for any days not already noted
3. Update the curriculum tracker with subjects covered and any resources or samples collected
4. Pull out the best work sample from each subject for the week and file it in the portfolio binder by subject

This weekly rhythm means you're never more than five days behind. At the end of the year, your EOYA assembly is a matter of organizing what's already there — not a desperate reconstruction from memory.

The Vermont Portfolio & Assessment Templates include all four of these record-keeping tools — attendance log, daily log, curriculum tracker, and weekly lesson planner — formatted specifically around Vermont's 175-day requirement and MCOS subject categories, with the age-13 subject threshold built in. The templates are updated for Act 66's current requirements and are designed to work together as an integrated system rather than standalone documents.

If you've been piecing together record-keeping from generic planners or free AOE forms, a Vermont-specific system saves significant time and removes the compliance uncertainty.

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