Planning without dates with the Flex Planner

Every school year in Homeschoolerly is planned one of two ways, and you choose when you create the year.

• Calendar Planner puts work on real dates. You see the year by day, week, or month, drag anything to another day, and attendance counts itself when scheduled work is completed.
• Flex Planner turns each class into one ordered list. Nothing is due on a particular day — your students work down the list and check items off at their own pace.

This article is about the second one.

Who it is for

Flex Planner tends to fit if you work through a boxed curriculum in order, your kids move at different paces, you school year-round or on no fixed schedule, or last year's calendar mostly made you feel behind.

It is not a smaller version of the Calendar Planner. It is a different answer to the question of what a plan is: in a Flex Planner year, the order is the plan.

Creating a Flex Planner school year

1. Go to Settings, then Add School Year.
2. Choose Flex Planner when you are asked how you want to plan the year.
3. Add your classes as usual.

You still give the year a start and end date — that is what reports and transcripts are built from — but assignments inside it never carry one.

Adding assignments

Open a class and add assignments in the order you want them worked: lesson 1, lesson 2, lesson 3. There is no scheduler step, because there are no dates to schedule onto. Bulk-add tools still work, so a full course can be created in one pass rather than one item at a time.

To reorder, move items in the list. Nothing else needs adjusting — no other assignment shifts, because nothing else was anchored to a day.

Seeing what is next

The dashboard shows an Up Next card: the next item waiting for each student, in each class. Two students at different points in the same course is the normal case here, not a problem to reconcile.

Students see the same list in their own app and check items off as they finish them.

What is different from a Calendar Planner year

• No Calendar view, no Kanban board, and no external calendar subscriptions. These are all views of work on dates, so they have nothing to show. Their links do not appear in the sidebar of a Flex Planner year.
• Attendance is recorded by hand. Finishing an assignment does not count the day, because the assignment was not scheduled for a day. Mark attendance days yourself in the attendance screen. If your state requires you to report attendance days or hours, weigh this before choosing.
• Nothing is ever late. There is no overdue state, because there was no due date. Falling behind on Tuesday leaves nothing to move on Wednesday.

Everything else is unchanged: classes, grades and grading scales, feedback, report cards, school year summaries, high school transcripts, and the student app all work the same way in both modes.

Changing your mind

You are not locked in. A school year can be switched to the other mode from Settings at any time — and switched back if you change your mind.

If a switch needs dates added or removed to make sense, Homeschoolerly tells you what it found before anything changes. Your other school years are never touched.