Greetings Eddies!

December always comes with trade-offs:

You get the lights, the music, the family time.

But you also get shorter days, cold snaps, and - if you're like me - major gift-giving decision fatigue. If your brain feels like 37 tabs are open, I feel you.

So we’re keeping this week practical. We’ve got a holiday gift guide for late shoppers like me, and a podcast highlight that offers a rare kind of permission: you’re allowed to build a personalized education for your child that doesn’t depend on you having unlimited energy, or even being your child's primary teacher.

And speaking of gift ideas, we are excited to announce that the OpenEd Store is officially live! Go tell your friends to grab their hoodies, backpacks, t-shirts and more.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Every year there’s pressure to give kids something “educational.”

OpenEd’s holiday gift guide uses a different filter: engagement. The gifts that keep teaching aren’t the ones that make the boldest claims - they’re the ones that get used again. They create habits: building, making, exploring, listening, moving. And they spark curiosity.

So this isn’t a “73 ideas” list. It’s organized into 10 categories, each with an OpenEd Favorite and runner-ups - built from what OpenEd families and teachers say their kids actually love (and keep loving):

If you’re stuck in the shopping spiral, this is the guide that gets you to “wrap it and ship it.”

Read in browser

Ela’s conversation with Dalena Wallace contains a blunt observation that explains a lot of hidden burnout:

“I’ve even talked to therapists who have said, ‘Our number one clients are homeschooling moms.’”

Dalena treats that as a signal flare:

“After 13 years of homeschooling, I was experiencing some burnout.”

She almost gave up.

“I thought, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’” she said.

What we love about Dalena's advice is the practical architecture: rebuild the week around support. Curriculum that grades itself. Tutors. Co-op. 

Perhaps most important is to build your "village" or support community. You don’t have to do it alone, and you don’t have to do it the hard way.

Watch the clip | Listen to the full conversation‍‍

Post-COVID “Normal” Isn’t School-As-Default — Hannah Frankman lays out four shifts that are having a permanent impact: Zoom school revealed the day-to-day reality, homeschooling lost its stigma, remote work broke the childcare trap, and policy is scrambling to catch up. (The Daily Economy)

Grade Levels Never Worked (And We’ve Been Pretending for 100+ Years) — A case against age-based “grade level” as anything more than an administrative convenience, backed by early data showing 30–50% of students repeating grades in major cities even in the early 1900s. (Above Grade Level)

College Remedial Math Is Getting Absurd — UC San Diego faculty report: between 2020 and 2025, the share of students below middle-school math jumped from under 1% to roughly 1 in 8—with remediation now covering elementary material. (AEI)

The “No” Approach vs the “Know” Approach to Safety — Peter Gray makes a clean distinction: “no” bans risk, but can also breed fear, secrecy, and low agency; “know” means discussion, learning the real risks, and building competence so kids can do more safely over time. He’s setting up the hardest test case next: smartphones and social media. (Peter Gray Substack)

The “Kitchen Phone Rule” (A Boundary That Actually Works) — The idea: one phone lives in the kitchen. Kids can take it when they go out, but it comes back downstairs. No phones disappearing into bedrooms. The most interesting part is the pushback: “If I don’t give my daughter IG she will vanish from the social orbit.” That’s parental FOMO driving decisions before kids even ask.

Magna-Tiles / Picasso Tiles — The "always works" building gift for mixed ages.

Wingspan — A board game that keeps game night alive and sneaks in science.

Birdfy Smart Bird Feeder — Camera + bird ID that turns your backyard into a nature show your kid directs.

National Geographic Rock Tumbler — A multi-week science project disguised as a box of "boring rocks."

Yoto Player — Screen-light audio for stories, podcasts, and history.

Cosmo JrTrack 5 × 1000 Hours Outside Bundle — GPS watch built for kids earning real independence.

EL10T Robot Kit — Hands-on robotics + coding that stays fun longer than a tutorial binge.

Wood Burning Kit — Real tools, real output, and a craft older kids take seriously.

Bambu Lab A1 3D Printer — A genuine "screen → make" converter for teens.

Teaching Textbooks — Self-grading math. (“Does it grade itself?” is a surprisingly sane filter.) 

Veritas Press — Classical history that can work great for older kids who want structure. 

The Good and the Beautiful — Gorgeous, but potentially parent-intensive—great if you have bandwidth; brutal if you don’t.

Outschool — Live online classes taught by real humans—useful when you need help carrying the load for a season.

The Tool of Memorizing for Lifelong Learning — Charlotte Mason’s order is the point: ideas first, then memorizing. Observe/read → tell/record → memorize → create. The argument is that “dry facts” without informing ideas feel like sawdust, and memorization works best as a short daily practice that serves meaning. (Simply Charlotte Mason)

Scratch — If you’re doing coding at home, this is still the on-ramp that teaches logic without the “learn to code” cringe. (MIT Scratch)

Tynker — Structured coding lessons for kids who like clear levels and gamified progression. (Tynker)

Favorite Historical Fiction Books for Interdisciplinary Learning (middle school-ish) — A parent is using historical fiction as the spine for ELA + history study (vocab, figurative language, evidence, then rabbit-hole research), and asks for the next “well-written” pick – considering Farewell to Manzanar, Weedflower, and Journey to Topaz. (Reddit r/homeschool)

Teaching your kids coding at home isn’t really about the code — A long-time programming teacher says the real win is cognitive: slow down, break problems into steps, treat mistakes as clues, and build patience with yourself. (Reddit r/homeschool)

COVID forced an accidental experiment: millions of families got to see school up close on their kids’ computer screens in their homes.

Appearing on the Minimalists Podcast, Isaac Morehouse describes what he heard over and over: parents looked at the online version of school and realized, “what they’re actually doing and learning in school is not that much.”

Even if they missed a week, nothing bad would happen.

Families didn’t just survive it. They liked it.

“It was actually really magical during COVID when my kids were home from school and we were all together,” he recalls.

The kids didn’t want to go back to being out of the house all day, every day. The parents didn’t either.

“All this heavy lifting that I thought the conveyor belt education system was doing,” he says, “It turns out, it wasn’t doing any of it.”

Watch the clip | Full episode