Dear @WithOdyssey_ and @DanielM_Warner, Please fix the search feature in the Texas Education Freedom Accounts marketplace. It can’t currently put the most popular book for teaching reading on a page one result using an exact title.

The biggest cost of homeschooling is the absence of one parent's income, not the materials you need to buy. Homes with a stay-at-home parent should strongly consider homeschooling since they have already made the main financial sacrifice.

I feed my Grok Bot topics my kids struggle with to make them helpful printables. Here's the prompt I'm using for my middle schooler. "Attached are problems and topics my middle schooler is struggling with. Make a one-page printable for each. Make the top two thirds the lesson, written as explicit direct instruction. Make the bottom third a single practice problem. Put the answer at the very bottom of the page, since I'll fold it under before I give it to my child. Keep the design minimal, and match how the curriculum the problems come from teaches the topic." My hypothesis is that he doesn't need more work to do. Instead, he needs documented, clear, direct explanations of the topics he's scored low on in a format that we can review together.

I had the naive assumption that publicly funded Texas schools hired only American citizens. Boy, was I wrong!

The education unlock: pretest -> micro lessons and practice -> mastery test This should work with phonics instruction. I published the tests you'll need here: storyhouracademy.org/tests

Here's a big unlock in education. A student takes a pretest, a parent feeds the wrong answers into AI, AI builds micro lessons and practice questions for what was missed, the student uses the new study materials, and then the student retakes the test. Repeat to mastery. Here's the prompt to use: "I'm attaching questions my [grade]-grader missed (or a list of skills they're struggling with). For each one: 1. Figure out the skill being tested and why my child likely got it wrong. 2. Make a printable 2-page worksheet: - Top half of page 1: a short, kid-friendly lesson with one example that fixes that mistake. - The rest: new practice problems (don't copy the test), easy to harder. - Bottom right of page 2: a small dot-to-dot as a fun reward. 3. Make a separate answer key. Use big print, lots of writing space, soft colors, and a blank Name line."

Hey @WithOdyssey_ and @txcomptroller. Did you know the TEFA marketplace search feature barely works? Full write up below. Please fix this for Texan homeschooling families.

With a student in the Alpha Anywhere program, I can let Grok Bot log into the parent portal, see what my youngest is struggling with, make her print outs with micro lessons and practice problems, and incentivize the work. I could let Alpha Anywhere circle back to these things, because it will, but I like being involved and accelerating things a bit.

It's not enough to touch grass while staying connected to our agents. We need to be able to swim with them, too.

A lot of things can get between a homeschool student and their study plans. Most planners make homeschoolers feel behind when that happens. I built Lesson Hollow to get rid of that feeling. With Lesson Hollow, students plan their homeschool day in the morning by selecting which activities in each of their curriculum sequences can get done before bedtime. The promoted activities become the day's checklist instead of some outdated idea for the day that was planned weeks or months ago. It's 10x better than traditional planning. If you know a homeschooler, please tell them about this.

Imagine being a 12-year old girl, bored at your family's weekly chess club activity. You create a story world of characters that live in your head for the next four years. You write about them, draw them, model avatars after them, and creatively repurpose them every which way for the fun of it. Then, generative video comes along. It's just another toy in the creative process. Your school, @Alphaschool, gives you generous access to tokens. You're still writing stories and drawing characters. But with generative video, you get to watch your story come alive on the big screen. The girl is @lolstella. Watch her AI short past the first minute, or don't watch at all. youtu.be/UGLBOHTNbHU?si=sT1Z…

Coming October 15th...

The future of gaming is here…

Simple steps kid can take to learn single-digit addition facts: 1) Learn +0 and +1 facts. 2) Memorize the doubles such as 1+1=2, 2+2=4, 3+3=6, and so on. 3) Learn that changing the order does not change the answer, so if the child knows 3+8=11, she also knows 8+3=11. 4) Memorize the +2 facts. 5) Memorize the remaining facts below. Use short, repeated retrieval practice until the answers become automatic. 3s: 3+4=7, 3+5=8, 3+6=9, 3+7=10, 3+8=11, 3+9=12 4s: 4+5=9, 4+6=10, 4+7=11, 4+8=12, 4+9=13 5s: 5+6=11, 5+7=12, 5+8=13, 5+9=14 6s: 6+7=13, 6+8=14, 6+9=15 7s: 7+8=15, 7+9=16 8s: 8+9=17