Greetings Eddies,
This week, many homeschool families (mine included) received a thick volume in the mail: the Rainbow Resource Center 2026 curriculum guide & catalog. What's wild is that, at 250+ pages - with thousands of books, boxed curricula, science kits, and educational games - this represents just a sliver of the resources now available.
For some, the timing of this mailing might feel like the neighbor who puts up Christmas lights before Halloween - summer hasn't even started, and we're already planning for the fall??
But if you're feeling behind, fear not. We took an informal Facebook poll, asking when do you actually start planning for the next year? The answers varied:
Bethany: "I already bought half of it."
Rachel plans in January. So does Amanda, who said: "I get the blahs mid-winter, and planning next year - with all its freshness and possibilities - brings me joy."
Kristen, refreshingly honest: "When I get tired of the current curriculum."
Theresa: "Trying to figure it out."
There's no right answer here.
I ask because we're cooking up our own guides for navigating the overwhelming diversity of resources, and we want to know what would help you most. Would you take two minutes?
Alright now, let's get into it. It's a jam-packed edition: we've got Niven Singh's system for homeschooling with a full-time job, a dispatch from a hybrid-schools conference, two great reads from our partner Savvy Learning, the biggest homeschool-research review in 45 years, and a stack of low-lift summer ideas.
- Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)
P.S. The OpenEd application window for the 2026–27 school year closes July 1. We're in 15 states now.
ICYMI: How to Homeschool While Working Full Time
On Thursday we released our conversation with Niven Singh, who runs ecosystem marketing at Atlassian. Her husband works full time too, and they've been homeschooling their daughter for two years without either of them stepping back from work.
The TL;DR:
A "minimum viable baseline" borrowed from her tech job - the two subjects she refuses to skip (math and reading), with everything else flexing around her calendar.
A reading wall, three weeks in, solved not by a better phonics program but by her sister-in-law, a volunteer reading coach, 30 minutes a week.
Unit studies driven by the kid - a submarine obsession that turned into a WWII lesson, a sink-and-float experiment, and a family museum trip.
The charter school treated as a business partner, not a substitute.
But this is the part that caught our attention. Niven tried the wake-up-at-8, write-the-date, write-your-name routine for exactly one week before scrapping it - and realized that school at home and homeschool are two different things:
"When you realize you don't have to be on a 9-to-5 schedule, you can homeschool anytime. We homeschool on the weekends, in the afternoons, in the evenings. We read and do literature discussions every night at bedtime. When you start to realize learning can happen anywhere, in any pocket, it gives you a lot of flexibility."
Watch the clip on Instagram, or read the full episode write-up. Niven also makes a free WanderLit story-exploration guide that works with any book your kid already loves.
Listen next
If Niven's episode lands for you, two more from the archive that pair with it:
Best Links
Featured Trend: a declaration of interdependence
Did you know there's a National Hybrid Schools Conference? Neither did we, until Eric Wearne's writeup crossed our desk. One speaker reframed the whole movement as not a declaration of independence from school, but a "declaration of interdependence" - families and microschools pooling what they have instead of each going it alone. The room ran from ten-student living-room microschools to programs with hundreds of kids meeting two or three days a week.
Sounds to us like a declaration of open education.
Trends
A new national survey found most parents of young children don't have the work or childcare arrangement they want, and what they say they miss most is simple time with their kids. (The 74)
Eighty percent of reporting states saw homeschooling climb last year, and the families behind the numbers look less like the old stereotype every year. (EdChoice)
A new review pulling together 45 years of studies found homeschoolers outperforming their peers in the majority of the research - on academics, on social and emotional growth, and on long-term success alike. (NHERI)
A Florida teaching intern saw enough from inside the public-school classroom to walk out and start her own microschool, which is full two years later. (Cato)
Peter Gray spent three years reading every study on children's mental health since 1950, and his new book Restoring Childhood saves its longest chapter for what any parent can actually do about it. (Peter Gray)
Featured Tool: Savvy Learning
Two pieces this week from our Marketplace partner Savvy Learning land on the same idea - the obstacle is usually the method, not the kid:
The first reframes why times tables won't stick as a working-memory problem: when a child has to stop mid-problem to work out what 6 x 7 is, there's no room left to think about the actual math.
The second, on tutoring ADHD learners at home, swaps rigid schedules for routines and short blocks, and argues that two to four focused hours can beat a full school day.
Tools
Nir Eyal, the best-selling Indistractable author, calls it "the most comprehensive guide I've ever seen on [homeschooling]." Manisha Snoyer wrote it for the parent who says "I don't know where to start," and it covers the whole arc from curriculum to socialization in an evening's read. (Teach Your Kids)
The reason your kid is guessing at words instead of reading them may have nothing to do with your kid. (Education Next)
A longtime educator makes the uncomfortable case that the extra time and accommodations we fight to get can, past a point, hold a struggling kid back. (Joanne Jacobs)
For the kid who struggles with writing, a handful of low-fuss swaps: oral drills, dictation, spelling traced in a tray of rice. (Simple Homeschool)
Three small switches that pull a restless neurodivergent kid back into the work without adding a single worksheet. (Raising Lifelong Learners)
A working mom's honest audio diary of keeping homeschool going on no sleep with a newborn in the house. (Christy-Faith)
Fewer than one in a hundred American adults ever got fluent in a language they studied in school (which is a decent argument for not leaving it to school). (Teach Your Kids)
A Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, built a free video game called iCivics where kids run a constitutional law firm. It has been teaching civics since 2009, and it still holds up. (Modulo)
For the summer
If you need permission to ease off, Cassie Shepherd's year-end review names the feeling - she calls these "the crowded years" - and makes the case that homeschooling lightly through the summer is pacing, not falling behind. (Home-Centered Learning)
One family already mapped out their whole 8th-grade lineup for next year, if you want a running start on the planning. (Joyful Noise Learning)
Measuring a plant's height counts as math and watching it respond to sun and water counts as science, which makes the backyard the cheapest curriculum you'll buy all summer. (The Natural Homeschool)
A free daily summer-learning calendar you can print once and stick on the fridge. (critikids on X)
And if you want the full old-school experience, you can request the Rainbow Resource catalog by mail. (Rainbow Resource)
From the OpenEd community
ICYMI - last week's wins. We asked for your kids' biggest wins of the year and you filled a bulletin board. Check it out!
Speaking of student success, scroll through the Community Padlet to see the full year's worth of student work.
Ed's Stable
Ed considers Fall curriculum for foals.
You have no idea how hard it is to take a selfie with a plastic horse mask on. Yes, those are my cows in the background and no, this is not AI!
On a more serious note: we're quietly cooking up our own answer to that 250-page catalog - something more curated, built for OpenEd families. It's early days, so we'd rather shape it around you than guess.
Parting Thought
A friend of OpenEd, Dr. Claire Honeycutt - who many of you know on X as @HippyMomPhD - wrote this week about sitting down with three friends: one with a kid in a microschool, one in private school, one homeschooling. All three had complaints. None of them had found the setup with no downside, because there isn't one. The question was never which option is perfect. It's which 20 percent of the problems you can live with, and whether the people around you make the other 80 percent lighter.
Her Substack, ClarifiEd, makes a compelling case that you don't have to choose between rigor and joy.
If there's one thing you take from today, let it be this: you don't have to do it all, and you don't have to do it alone.