Who built this, and why
YourHomeschool was built by a team of college professors, software engineers, and child psychologists — all of us parents. We built it because we kept watching the same three things stop families from teaching at home, and none of them were about the child not being capable.
The three problems we set out to solve
The language barrier
A parent who thinks in Spanish cannot help with homework written in English — and the child ends up translating the lesson and learning it at the same time.
Not knowing the curriculum
Parents are told to teach "grade five," but not what grade five actually contains, in what order, or how anyone would know it was covered.
Not knowing how to teach it
Knowing an answer and being able to teach it are different skills. Most parents were never trained in the second one, and the subject gets harder every year.
So the product answers each one directly. Every lesson is taught in English and Spanish, and a bilingual parent helper will explain the lesson to the adult, not just the child. The entire scope and sequence is published — 1,376 lessons, each showing the exact standard it teaches — so you can read the whole year before you pay for any of it. And the tutor does the teaching, so a parent who has forgotten long division is not the bottleneck.
How we teach — and who developed these methods
We did not invent our teaching methods. They come from established research, and we think you should be able to check them rather than take our word for it. Here is what we use and who it comes from.
The Socratic method
Teaching by asking rather than telling: the student is led to the answer through questions that expose what they already know and where the reasoning breaks.
In the product: the tutor is instructed to guide, not to hand over answers. Ask it to do your child's homework and it will walk them through it instead.
The Orton-Gillingham approach
A structured, sequential, multisensory way of teaching reading and spelling — seeing, hearing, saying, and writing a sound together — originally developed for children with what was then called "word-blindness" and is now known as dyslexia.
In the product: K–5 foundational reading and spelling follow this structure, including the say–tap–write routine parents can do alongside the lesson.
Worked examples
Novices learn more from studying a fully worked solution than from being turned loose on problems, because their working memory is not yet free to both solve and learn at once.
In the product: every lesson gives the explanation, then a worked example, then practice — in that order, deliberately.
Distributed review
The same total study time produces far better retention when it is spread across days instead of massed into one sitting.
In the product: study plans build in end-of-unit reviews plus mid-year and end-of-year checkpoints, so earlier material is revisited across the year instead of studied once and dropped. To be precise about what this is and isn't: it is distributed review built into the plan, not per-item spaced-repetition scheduling of the kind a flashcard app uses.
Scaffolding
Support is given at the edge of what a learner can already do alone, and withdrawn as they take it over — the gap between solo ability and assisted ability is where teaching does its work.
In the product: the placement check locates that edge for each subject — the grade where a child moves from working independently to needing help — so you start teaching there rather than above or below it. The tutor then supports with questions and hints instead of answers.
What we deliberately don't do
No punishing score. Our placement check returns a starting point, not a grade. A child who misses a question late in a set does not watch a number collapse — we think that teaches children to fear the assessment rather than the subject.
No real names. Children are tracked under animal nicknames, and homework photos are read once to identify the topic and then discarded. Progress records stay on your device; you attach your child's real name at print time, not on our servers.
No advertising to children. There are no ad or analytics pixels in the tutoring experience, and we do not track a child across other sites.
What we're not, yet
We are new. We do not have the decades-long track record or the shelf of third-party reviews the big names have, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong way to start. What we can offer instead is that everything is checkable before you spend anything: the full curriculum map is public, the placement check is free and needs no account, and we say plainly on our comparison pages who should buy someone else's product.
En español
YourHomeschool fue creado por un equipo de profesores universitarios, ingenieros de software y psicólogos infantiles — todos padres de familia. Lo construimos para resolver tres problemas: la barrera del idioma, no saber qué contiene el plan de estudios, y no saber cómo enseñarlo.
Cada lección se enseña en inglés y español, y el Asistente para Padres le explica la lección al adulto, no solo al niño. El plan de estudios completo — 1,376 lecciones, cada una con su estándar — está publicado para que lo leas antes de pagar. Los métodos que usamos vienen de investigación establecida: el método socrático, el enfoque Orton-Gillingham, los ejemplos resueltos de Sweller, el repaso distribuido de Ebbinghaus y el andamiaje de Wood, Bruner y Ross.
Check it before you trust it
Read the whole curriculum, or find your child's starting point in about 20 minutes. Neither one needs an account.
Take the free placement checkMethod descriptions above summarize published research by the named authors; we are not affiliated with them or their estates. Orton-Gillingham is an approach in the public domain, and we are not accredited by the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators.