Good record keeping is the least fun part of homeschooling and one of the most important. Here's a practical rundown of what to save, how long to keep it, and how Lumi Academy generates most of it for you automatically.
Try Lumi Free for 48 Hours →Some states require homeschoolers to keep and sometimes submit records; others don't ask for much at all. But even where it's not required, good records protect you — they're what you'd need if you ever enroll a child back into a traditional school, apply to a program with prerequisites, put together a transcript for college, or simply want to look back and see how far a child has come. It's much easier to keep records as you go than to reconstruct a year after the fact.
A safe rule of thumb: keep the current year's records plus the prior two to three years easily accessible, and hold on to high school records — transcripts, course lists, grades — permanently, since colleges and employers may ask for them years later. Digital records solve most of the storage problem; just make sure you have a backup somewhere other than a single device.
Lumi tracks instructional activity as your child works, building an attendance record without you having to log it by hand.
Every completed lesson is graded instantly and saved to your child's history — a running, dated record of exactly what was covered and how they performed.
Generate a formal report card any time, organized by subject and organized by grade-level skills — ready to print or save as part of your permanent file.
Each child on your account keeps a fully separate history and report card, up to 8 kids on one account — no mixing up records across siblings.
Beyond the automatic logs, the parent dashboard has tools for the jobs that usually eat a weekend. Everything below is built from what your child actually completed in Lumi.
Lumi High builds a printable transcript from completed courses, with credits and a GPA on the standard 4.0 scale. You can add courses your child took outside Lumi, such as a community college class or a co-op course, so the transcript covers the whole picture. Check your state's rules and the colleges your teen is applying to for what they expect.
Mark vacations and sick days so streaks and pacing stay fair, set a school year end date, and see whether your child is on pace to finish. You can download the schedule as a calendar file for Google, Apple or Outlook calendars.
Download attendance, lesson history and test scores as CSV files that open in Excel or Google Sheets, handy for a state filing, an umbrella school or your own backup.
Print a practice sheet drawn from the lessons your child has not mastered yet, or a guide for one unit with what each lesson covers and an answer key for the questions that work on paper.