Greetings Eddies!
I had an 'aha' moment last week. After two years of writing the OpenEd Daily and largely guessing what you want, I took a radical step and decided to ask you.
This week, I've got initial results of our survey on what kind of curriculum suggestions you want. A clear signal came through: it’s other parents you trust the most.
This edition also comes loaded with a 13-year veteran of OpenEd sharing her best curriculum picks on the podcast, a chance to get a year of free one-on-one tutoring, and a new tool we’re cooking up to crowdsource curriculum recommendations from the thousands of families in the open education movement…
PLUS: your answers to two informal Facebook polls (turns out your kids have some delightfully eclectic interests). And stick around to the end if you want to weigh in on the $6 million question: if the OpenEd Daily isn’t Daily anymore, why is it still called the Daily?
Let's get into it.
– Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)
P.S. Notice a new look? We're sending this from a new email service. If it landed in spam or a different folder, drag it to your main inbox and reply with one word, "Ed." That will add us to your contacts (and tell me who’s paying attention).
You told us what you want. So we’re building it.
Last week a 250-page Rainbow Resource catalog landed in a lot of our mailboxes - showcasing thousands of curriculum options, but still only a sliver of what's out there.
So we asked what would actually help you cut through the overwhelming number of options? We got over 60 responses, and here's what you said:
When it comes to whose recommendation you trust most, the most common answer by far was other OpenEd parents - more than YouTubers, more than teachers, and roughly twenty times more than big catalogs.
Then, in the free-form box, someone made this gem of a request:
"Could there be some kind of survey like the Harry Potter houses? Only for grade, subject, and learning style?"
Funny you should ask…
A few months back I had an idea for a kind of curriculum matchmaker - answer a few questions, and get “sorted” toward the style that fits your family, then swipe through the recommendations. Perhaps I should have called it the Homeschool Sorting Hat (for the Harry Potter fans), but I settled on shorter domain name: curricu.love. Because if you're going to spend a full year with something, shouldn't loving it be the bar?
We ran a brief internal beta test with our own team. But the ultimate vision is a community-driven platform where parents register their compliments and complaints, and the recommendations get sharper with every active user.
The beta still has bugs and the engine needs more data, but I’m tired of sitting on it.
Get sorted - take the quiz, find your "style," and swipe the picks at curricu.love
Leave reviews on any tools or providers you have a strong opinion about
Tell us what's broken - the friendly ‘Report a 🐛 bug’ button is right there in the app (you can also use it to suggest a feature).
We're putting up three $50 OpenEd gift cards to the swag store for the most useful reviews - not the most reviews, the most useful. It doesn't have to be an essay, but a few honest sentences will be given more weight than a one-word rating.
Featured this week
A free year of 1:1 tutoring - for 80 families. This fall, a research team from Brown and Stanford is looking for 80 elementary students to receive 40 minutes of personalized one-on-one tutoring every day for a full school year - free, no homework, and a free iPad or MacBook for each family. It's a real-world test of Benjamin Bloom's famous 1984 finding: that one-on-one tutoring lifts the average student past 98% of their classroom peers. Spots are limited and applications close July 1. Learn more and apply →
Math Academy - meets your kid where they actually are. The founder's whole thesis is that forgetting is what wrecks math: knowing it in October doesn't mean knowing it in April. So Math Academy tracks every sub-skill inside every problem and quietly folds review into new work - your kid moves forward and shores up the old stuff in the same 20-30 minutes a day. The payoff is real retention without the three-hour slog (and the afternoon back). It's what a great tutor does, for $49 a month - and it's how one 6th grader went from prealgebra to AP Calculus BC in a single year. It won our 2026 Eddy Award for Resource of the Year. See why it won →
Live this Thursday: the sibling conflict nobody warns you about. 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. Coach Meg Thomas has homeschooled seven kids, and this Thursday she's running a 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. Sign up →
In Indianapolis? Come find us. OpenEd is sponsoring the Midwest Homeschool Expo on June 13 at Ivy Tech Community College (2820 N. Meridian St.) - presentations, other homeschool families, and resources to get connected. New families can use code MHE2026OPENED for one of 25 free session tickets.
A few more finds
Trends
Fewer than a quarter of classrooms mix ages, but the real world does - here's the case that grouping kids strictly by birth year quietly holds them back. Forbes →
If you've ever panicked about your kid being "behind," here's an entire state that was, and then clawed its math scores back to where they started. The 74 →
Homeschooling is the fastest-growing model in the country - if you've felt like you're on the fringe, the numbers quietly disagree. EdChoice →
Tools
The NASA-engineer-turned-YouTuber (Mark Rober) just put his whole hands-on science program online for free, grades 3-8 - bookmark it before the summer slide. Class CrunchLabs →
A five-minute, zero-prep trick that turns any book you're already reading aloud into writing practice. Brave Writer →
A free, no-ads, no-frills site for drilling math facts to actual fluency - the antidote to gamified apps that reward everything except mastery. XtraMath →
Community Corner
Steal this: reciprocal museum membership.
If you've never heard of it - buy a membership to one science or children's museum, and through reciprocity programs it gets you free or discounted admission to a whole network of others across the country. Megan, a longtime OpenEd mom, stumbled on it while filling out a learning log and called it life-changing: "we travel a lot, and my kids have been to so many museums."
Pro tip: Search "[your museum] reciprocal membership."
What's your kid obsessed with right now?
On Monday we made the case that kids do most of their socializing through shared interests, not just proximity in a classroom - and listed 25 ways they find their people, from co-ops to choir to Discord servers. So this week I asked you on Facebook what your kid is actually into right now. The answers were more eclectic than expected.
A small, unscientific sampling:
Nuclear fusion
The renaissance faire that isn't until October
What garter snakes eat, what snails need to live, and the difference between red and orange ladybugs
Identifying birds with binoculars and the Merlin app
Kung fu, parkour, Stardew Valley, and Harry Potter
Roller blades and water play
Survival skills
And at least one budding entrepreneur planning to sell ice cream cones in the neighborhood
Where’s Ed? Plus: how many hobbies from the Facebook post can you find in this image?
PODCAST: One of our first families, 13 years later
Angela Rigby found MyTechHigh in its second year - before it became OpenEd, or most of us had heard of any of it. She had six kids, a gut feeling that she wanted to be there for their childhoods, and one year of a different online school behind her. That other school mailed the curriculum and told her which books to finish, by when.
"That was like public school at home," she said. "I was being told what to teach my kids. It just didn't work for us."
So she switched, and thirteen years later she's still here, which makes her about as close to a founding family as we have.
Prefer to read? We wrote up Angela's full playbook - here's the full story →
Ed’s Stable
Before you go - one more favor to ask. You might have noticed we moved from 5x to 3x emails each week. The name "The OpenEd Daily" has stuck, but it might be a little misleading now. So, a gut check:
To Daily or Not To Daily?
That’s it for this week!
