Greetings Eddies!

If you're one of the many families launching your open education journey this fall: welcome! This is Ed's weekly roundup of the best in open education - stories, tools, and ideas from families like yours.

This week we have a day in the life narrated by a 10-year-old roboticist, a classic economics essay narrated by… *checks notes*… a pencil? Plus a big new bet on personalized learning from a co-founder of Netflix.

Let’s dive in.

- Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)

P.S. Quick reminder for new families before we get into the good stuff - enrollment packets are due by Monday, July 13. If that’s on your weekend to-do list, stop reading this and go finish!

"But what about socialization??"

It's the question every homeschool family gets at gatherings - and it deserves a better answer than a shrug. Our guide makes the case that the age-segregated classroom might be the strangest social environment a kid can grow up in, and shows what building a social life by design - co-ops, mixed-age groups, friendships built on shared passions - can look like in 2026.

But you don't have to take our word for it. Let's look at an actual 10-year-old's daily schedule.

Our latest podcast features Finley, a 4th-grade competitive LEGO roboticist and one of nine siblings. Because open education swaps rigid bell schedules for deep focus, Finley dials in and knocks out his core academics before lunch.

Here’s what a typical day for Finley looks like:

When it comes to social time, Finley notes that the problem actually runs the other way.

"It's a lot harder to play with the public schoolers," Finley notes, "because they get home at like 3:30."

From where he sits, his "band of buddies" is doing just fine; it’s his traditionally-schooled peers who lack the time to come out and play. Tune in to the full episode to hear his engineering workflow, his take on the French Revolution, and the five words he used to settle the great socialization debate with a friend.

Ben Somers - founder of Recess.gg, and a past guest on our podcast - just announced the most ambitious education study in decades.

Funded by the co-founder of Netflix, the project aims to recreate a famous 1984 study known as Bloom's 2 Sigma experiment. The original study proved that students who receive consistent one-on-one tutoring completely outperform those in traditional classrooms.

To test if this holds true today, they are spending up to $100,000 per student per year on elite personalized instruction. The goal is to see if one-on-one learning really does produce the largest academic gains ever recorded—and they have promised to publish the data whether it succeeds or fails.

Watch the announcement

The unbundling of education continues, with microschools now fielding their own sports teams. (Kerry McDonald, Forbes)

A longtime unschooler explains how to tell exploration from drift, when everyone worries the method is simply not doing school. (ClarifiEd Podcast)

The twelve objections every self-directed learning family eventually hears. (Tyler Thigpen)

Lenore Skenazy on what Toy Story 5 gets right about kids, screens, and loneliness. (Let Grow)

A few tools we've built for OpenEd families:

Know a family who'd use one of these? Forward this email along.

Fresh curriculum picks for 2nd, 4th, and 8th grade curated by an OpenEd mom to keep you sane while teaching three different age groups. (Home-Centered Learning)

Julie Bogart’s boredom-busting screen-free reading list for the rest of summer. (Julie Bogart)

A 15-minute method for planning an entire high school homeschool year. (Alicia Hutchinson)

What every mom homeschooling boys wishes someone had told her sooner. (Christy-Faith)

That’s the opening hook of I, Pencil, a classic 1958 essay by Leonard Read - narrated, brilliantly, by the pencil itself.

The writing utensil walks you through its own sprawling family tree: Oregon cedar cut by loggers using saws forged by total strangers; graphite mined in Sri Lanka; an eraser built from a complex chemical reaction; and a brass ferrule requiring zinc and copper dug up on the other side of the world.

What was Read’s point in tracing the pencil’s autobiography in such detail? To show how decentralized networks solve massive coordination puzzles using price signals.

None of these workers are employed by a centralized "Pencil Czar," and the zinc miner isn't thinking about school supplies. They are all simply responding to fluctuating market prices, which act like a global logistical nervous system. Without any mastermind running the show, prices naturally coordinate the timing of thousands of strangers across continents - resulting in a hyper-complex product you can buy for literal pocket change.

That's a lot of economics for a middle schooler, but the format makes it easy to grasp, which is probably why teachers are still assigning it nearly 70 years later.

If you want to read it, it’s one of dozens of free resources on Lexandria.

Think of Lexandria as a modular antidote to top-down curriculum design. Instead of a bureaucratic committee mapping out a rigid textbook, Lexandria curates raw primary sources—founding documents, classic essays, and sharp history courses—and maps them directly to state standards.

The model is catching on. In its first year, Lexandria scaled to 1,848 classrooms—and 774 of those were homeschools. Check out the essay and create a free account.

We asked our community: what made you nervous about homeschooling before starting? The veterans delivered a comforting message:

"Failing my children... I'm 15 years in now and a lot more confident. I still have my moments of doubt, but I think that's probably normal with anything you do that matters." - Amanda

"Everything!!! I wasn't qualified, I'm not smart enough, I'm not patient enough - and honestly none of those things mattered like I thought. If I don't know it, I learn it, and if I'm not patient enough, we take breaks and enjoy one another until we can all relax and start again." - Misty

And when a first-year mom admitted she's "very nervous I won't know what I'm doing and fail my child," the replies filled within the day:

"None of us did at first... If it's not working, move on - don't force it, find it! You got this!!!"

We also asked: early bird or night owl? The consensus leans morning, roughly 9 to noon - "If we wait until afternoon, nobody (including mom!) is in the mood for seat work." And one family does "weather schools": outside whenever it's decent, seat work saved for the dreary blocks.

Want in on the next one? Follow along on Facebook.

Monday's deep dive covered the testing effect: students who quiz themselves retain up to 80% more than students who just re-read the material. Schools mostly use testing to grade kids; at home, you can use it to help them remember.

The full breakdown, including the classic experiment, is here.

We’ll give Ed an E for Effort.

That's all for this week!

- Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)