We make records and paperwork for Christian families teaching at home. Transcripts, course descriptions, attendance and reading logs, portfolio indexes, and the state law sitting underneath all of it. There is no ministry behind us, no publishing house, and no testimony we are about to open with, because you did not come here for ours. What matters is whether the files hold up when a college or an evaluator looks at them.

So here is how to judge that without taking our word for anything.

We are not a homeschooling family, and we will not pretend to be

Almost everyone selling in this market opens at their own kitchen table, usually with a verse hanging over it. We cannot do that honestly. We would rather say so on the first page than have you notice the gap in month three and start wondering what else here was arranged for effect. We are Christians. We are not raising children at home. There is no morning basket to show you and no story about the year we gave up on the curriculum in October.

What we are is stubborn about documents. The paperwork side of home education is badly served, and the faith side of it worse. Requirements are scattered across fifty state codes plus the District of Columbia. The summaries circulating in groups are often years stale. A fair amount of what gets sold into that gap is a formatting exercise with a verse on the cover, at a markup. Fixing that does not require us to have taught your child. It requires reading the statute carefully and building a spreadsheet that does not break, and those we can do.

Where a question belongs to your family and your church rather than to us, we stay out of it. We will not tell you which translation your family should read, how your devotions ought to run, when a child should be fluent, or whether you are behind. We do not know. Neither does anyone who says so in an advertisement.

How to check our work

Every state requirement we publish carries the statute, a link to the code, and the date we last read it. That is the most useful thing on this site. Pick your own state, open the law beside our summary, and see whether we read it correctly. If we did, you have learned something real about how carefully we work. If we got it wrong, you caught us in about a minute, which is exactly why the citation is printed.

We also tell you when the ground moves. Ohio's assessment requirement is gone: House Bill 33 in the 2023 budget replaced the old scheme with a notification-only rule at Ohio Rev. Code 3321.042, effective 3 October 2023 (codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-3321.042), and plenty of what you will find in a search still describes the old requirement. Ours will go stale the same way eventually. The review date is there so you can tell how fresh it is, and our state pages are not legal advice. Read them, then verify with your own state before a filing deadline.

Public domain translations only, and why that is honesty before it is licensing

Scripture in our files comes from the King James, the World English Bible, or, in the Catholic edition, the Douay-Rheims. Nothing else. No NIV, no ESV, no NLT.

The licensing reason is simple enough. All three are under copyright, and each publisher runs its own permissions policy with a verse ceiling attached and no right to change the wording: Biblica for the NIV (biblica.com/terms-of-use), Crossway for the ESV (crossway.org/permissions), Tyndale for the NLT (tyndale.com/permissions).

The honesty reason is the one we care about. Every file we sell is editable, and we tell you to edit it. You will rewrite our course descriptions to match the books on your table, and you may well swap the verse headers for the translation your family actually reads aloud. We cannot hand you a document under someone else's permission terms and then tell you to change it freely. So the text that ships is text nobody has to ask about, and we name which one it is on the page rather than leaving you to guess. One pedantic note we would rather volunteer than have you discover: the King James is public domain in the United States, while in the United Kingdom it sits under Crown letters patent, administered in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland by Cambridge University Press as the King's Printer (Cambridge University Press, "The Queen's Printer's Patent," cambridge.org/about-us/who-we-are/queens-printers-patent). If you are printing for sale in Britain, that is worth a look.

Bible was a real subject in your house, so we book it like one

This is the part of the work we are proudest of. Where Scripture is daily work and not an extra, with real reading and real memorization behind it, it earns a real line on the transcript and a description an admissions officer can read without flinching. The Protestant edition ships twenty-six such descriptions and the Catholic edition thirty, from a survey of the Gospels through apologetics, church history, and a first year of Koine Greek. Each one is written in the register that office reads, then handed to you to make true.

The rule we hold to is that the record tells the truth. Mark Honors when the year genuinely went deeper. Do not write AP unless the course is authorized through the AP Course Audit, because AP is College Board's trademark and the audit is the only thing that grants permission to use it on a transcript (apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-course-audit). That is a checkable claim, and it gets checked. Family devotions can carry an elective half credit when they were sustained and documented, and not otherwise, which is partly why there is a devotion schedule and a reading log in the pack. A faithful year is full of real work. Naming it accurately is enough.

The transcript itself is a working spreadsheet. Weighted and unweighted GPA and total credits calculate from the grades you enter, and the formula cells are locked so a stray keystroke cannot quietly wreck the arithmetic. Arithmetic that does not agree with itself is an easy thing to get wrong on a transcript, and a locked cell is a dull answer to it.

What we will not do

No subscription. You buy a thing once and keep it, and corrections to something you already own come to you.

No urgency. No countdown timers, no seats remaining, no August panic. If you are reading this in August, it will still be here in September.

No guilt, and no scaring you about the culture to make a sale. If a page here ever preaches at you, we have failed at our own job, which is paperwork.

No denominational sleight of hand. Distinctives belong to the edition you choose, not to a shared voice trying to be everything at once, and we will not fudge a doctrinal position to widen a market.

No kitsch. The illustrations are public domain engravings, an ortolan bunting cut by Fornazeris among them, chosen one at a time with the source of each recorded in a provenance log. A real burin line does something no generated image does, and we think it shows even on a page nobody is studying.

The name

The wren stands in for the sparrow of Matthew 10:31, "Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows" in the King James. The psalter is the family's daily song and its honest record of ordinary and hard days. Small faithful days, seen and sung. A transcript is a record of a thousand ordinary mornings that added up to something, and not one of them fell unseen.

If something is wrong

Write to support@wrenandpsalter.com. A person reads it.

If something you bought does not work for you, say so within fourteen days and we will refund it. You do not have to explain yourself, and we will not ask you to delete anything first, which we could not verify anyway. It is the only honest way to sell a file that cannot be returned.

And if you find an error in a state page, tell us. We will fix it, cite the correction, and reissue the pack to everyone who owns it.