Why I Ask Educators To Review My Homeschool Learning Resources (And What It Teaches Me)
Last Tuesday, I was wiping blueberry muffin crumbs off my kitchen table when Mia knocked. She’s the 3rd grade teacher I used to work with at the city elementary, and she’d promised to stop by on her prep period to look over the new phonics resource I’d put together for beginning readers with dyslexia. She brought her own chipped ceramic mug, the one with a cat wearing a graduation cap, and pulled a printed copy of the resource out of her tote, red pen peeking out of the spiral binding.
I quit teaching three years ago to homeschool my son, who was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD halfway through 2nd grade. A year in, I got frustrated with the available reading resources. Most were either so crowded with glittery graphics that they overwhelmed my son, or so simplified that he felt like he was doing kindergarten work, and he’d shut down. So I started making my own, just for us. After I shared photos of them in our local homeschool co-op group, a dozen other parents asked for copies. I started posting them for free on my small blog, and now I get a few hundred downloads a month. But from the very first resource I shared, I’ve made one non-negotiable rule: I never post anything without a current K-8 educator reviewing it first.
She flipped to page 4, tapped the margin with her pen. “You sorted all the short a words on the left column and long a on the right here,” she said. “I see this all the time from new creators. What happens is kids don’t actually sound out the words. They just learn if it’s on the left, it’s short a. They’re memorizing the layout, not the skill. If you alternate them, one after another, it forces them to actually practice the vowel sound.” I jotted that down in my notebook. I’d sorted them that way because it made it easier for me to grade when I was working with my son, I never thought about how it changed what kids were actually learning. Mia also pointed out I’d crammed 15 words on a single page; she suggested cutting it to 8, adding an extra half inch of space between lines, which would help kids with fine motor issues too. I’d done the tighter spacing so the worksheet could fit on one page and save paper, but she was right. Most elementary teachers would rather print two pages than have kids check out because the page looks overwhelming.
This isn’t the first time a review caught something I’d completely miss. Six months ago, I put together a 4th grade reading comprehension resource all about hiking the local Appalachian trail section, since my son loves going hiking with my husband. I sent it to Javi, a 4th grade teacher at the local Title I elementary who reviews resources for me sometimes. He emailed me back three days later saying that more than half his students had never been hiking or camping at all, and the context clues I was asking them to use relied on knowing what a backcountry campsite or a blazed trail was. Kids who’d never experienced that couldn’t answer the questions, even if they could read perfectly well. He suggested adding a half page of photos with simple captions at the start, just to give everyone the same background. That change took me 20 minutes to make, and it made the resource accessible to so many more kids.
I once skipped the review step early on, when I was in a hurry to get a set of word problems up. A week later, a 2nd grade teacher left a comment saying the word problem about getting new dresses for the opera was totally unfamiliar to most of her students, and several kids got stuck because they didn’t know what an opera was. I felt terrible, I’d just picked a random scenario I was familiar with, never thought to check. That’s when I decided I’d never skip the step again.
I get a lot of messages from other parent creators asking how I find educators to review, and why I bother. It’s not that I think parents don’t know what they’re doing— I’m a parent, I know what works for my kid. But a classroom teacher sees 25 different kids every single day, from every different background and every different skill level. They know what works when you have 10 minutes left before recess, what feels patronizing to 8 year olds, what leaves kids out because of their life experience.
I don’t ask for vague feedback, either. I always send three specific questions to any reviewer: How long would this take a typical student in your grade to finish? Is there any wording or direction that you’d have to re-explain to most kids? Does this topic or context leave out any group of kids that wouldn’t be able to connect? That gives them a clear place to start, instead of making them guess what I want. I don’t have a big budget, since all my resources are free, so I just offer a $25 Target gift card and a coffee when they meet me, or just the gift card if they review it remotely. Most of the teachers I ask say yes, actually— most of them are just as frustrated with low-quality, one-size-fits-all resources from big publishers as I am. They’re happy to help make something that works better for kids.
This week, I’m rearranging the words in the phonics resource, cutting the extra problems, and adding that extra spacing Mia suggested. I’m still keeping a version with more words for my son, who can handle it, but the public version will follow her suggestions. I know there will still be something that doesn’t work for someone, even after review. No resource works for every kid, that’s just how it is. But getting an educator’s perspective before I hit post makes it way better than anything I could put together alone. Next month, I’m working on a set of narrative writing prompts for 4th graders, and I already have Javi on the schedule to review it. I don’t know what he’ll catch that I missed, but I know he’ll catch something. That’s enough for me.
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