Forms :: How To Move Around From Record To Record Collecting Corresponding Data

The school director is going to input a date (by default today) and a subform will display all of the students who started before that date and haven't been closed as of that date. Next to each name, there will be 4 radio buttons (present, absent, holiday, hospitalized), which by default will be set to present. The director will go down the line, only needing to click when a student isn't present. At the end, she'll push a save button and the new records will be added.

My proposed method:

1. When the textbox with date input is changed, the subform (or just form and I put the textbox in the header?) will populate itself with a query based on student names whose corresponding startdate and enddate work with the inputted date.

2. The subform will be in continuous view so that it kinda looks like a data sheet but it has radio buttons rather than just spreadsheet cells.

3. When the save button is pushed, some visual basic code in the background will look at record 1, grab the student name and selected radio button value, and add a new record to the AttendanceRecords table with the name, attendance type, and date. Then the code will move to the 2nd record, rinse and repeat until it goes through all of them.

Questions/problems:

1. At its core, is this the Access way of doing something like this? Is there a simpler, more efficient, or generally smarter way of doing attendance?

2. How is step 3 going to work? I can look up how to add new records to a table, but I'm not sure how to move around from record to record collecting corresponding data.

3. Since the AttendanceRecord table uses studentID and typeID rather than actual names and actual attendance types, what's the easiest way of adding the new records with that data efficiently? I'm thinking of making the RecordSource of the subform some sort of linked up set of tables such that if I'm looking at record 1 and the name in the textbox on the subform is "Bob" I can just reference studentID in the background without needing anything on the form at all with studentID?