Greetings Eddies!
Many homeschool schedules borrow traditional school pacing without meaning to: a little of one subject every day, stretched across months. The catch is that a subject spread thin can be easy to forget. By spring, a lot of what they covered in the fall has gone fuzzy.
Some OpenEd families run the opposite play. We call it a learning sprint: one topic, two weeks - all in.
Your child picks something they actually care about - coding a game, building a working volcano, learning to bake real bread - and goes deep until they hit some goal or goals.
Here's how to run one.
Step 1: Plan it (a 10-minute family meetup). Pick a topic they're excited about, set 3 to 5 concrete goals, and decide how they'll show the result - a video, a presentation, a game they built.
Step 2: Check in midway (10 minutes). Quick progress review, adjust if something's stuck, celebrate the small wins.
Step 3: Showcase (20 minutes). Your child presents what they made. Celebrate the wins and the noble failures both, do a quick gut-check on what got mastered and what needs more time, and save a sample for the portfolio.
The whole thing runs on the finish line. School never actually ends - there's always another unit, another semester. A sprint ends. Your kid finishes something real, shows it off, and gets the rare feeling of having done it. That feeling is what makes them ask when they can start the next one.
A sprint is one move in a bigger shift: handing your kid more of the wheel. If that's the direction you're leaning, OpenEd founder Matt Bowman and CEO Isaac Morehouse wrote the whole playbook in Open Education - how to reimagine learning around your own child's curiosity instead of a standardized calendar. It's also one of the free bonuses in the book’s toolkit.
That’s all for today.
— Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)
P.S. Everyone talks curriculum and socialization. Nobody warns you about what happens when your kids are together for eight hours and one of them breathes wrong. Meg Thomas has homeschooled seven kids, and this Thursday she's running a free live session on sibling conflict with tools you can use the same day.
Thursday, June 11 - 9 PM ET / 8 CT / 7 MT / 6 PT