The full case

For centers & schools

See the full case — licensing, reports, and the program-by-program comparison.

The summer gap

Diagnosis goes quiet when school lets out.

Schools spend all year finding each child's gaps. Then June arrives, the diagnostic tools go dark, and the practice stops. AcornSmarts is the friendly, low-pressure app that keeps kids working on the right things — in a parent's reach, on a device they already own.

🎯
Points at the real gapsA quick "find my level" places each child; teachers and parents aim it at what school already found — no new test to run.
🧠
Adapts to each kidDifficulty rises and eases on its own, and a Mixed Review resurfaces skills right before they fade.
❤️
Kids actually like itA warm orchard, forest friends to collect, 🎯 daily quests, a 🛍️ shop where earned acorns buy hats and tree charms (never real money), mystery chests, and celebrations that feel earned — the opposite of drill-and-kill, with none of the paywall nagging. And things no other app has: 🧑‍🏫 kids TEACH a grown-up with cue cards, 🎨 build their own quiz to test YOU, and 📖 ride one story across all five subjects.
How it works

One app, three people it helps.

🎒

Kids

Grow an oak by earning acorns across math, reading, science and more. Each round they predict how they'll do and see how it went, set their own weekly goal, collect forest friends, and climb an adventure trail — with hints and a step-by-step "here's why."

👨‍👩‍👧

Parents

A no-guilt weekly digest: days practiced, minutes, mastery and streaks — plus one plain "try this together" idea. See which standards your child is practicing, print a shareable Certificate of Practice for the fridge, and follow up to six kids in one tap.

🍎

Teachers

Assign skills by standards strand with a class code, then see who did it and who needs a boost. Print a conference-ready progress report, a standards-coverage report, or a certificate for any student in a click. Near-zero setup.

How kids answer

Hands-on, not multiple-choice.

A question is rarely "pick one of three." The same skill arrives through whichever interaction teaches it best — so a session keeps feeling like something new to do. Twenty-two activity types, each with instant check-and-X feedback.

✍️ Finger-trace letters
🧩 Build-a-sentence
🟡 Ten-frame builder
🐸 Number-line hop
🔤 Tap-to-spell
🔢 Tap-to-count
🗂️ Sort-into-bins
🌱 Label-the-diagram
🧮 Type-the-answer pad
🔗 Match & pair
📍 Tap the grid point
📊 Tap the bar
🍕 Tap the fraction picture
🎯 Tap the spinner
🕐 Tap the clock
🪙 Tap the coins
🧱 Tap the base-10 blocks

And it never asks the same exact question twice — a no-repeat engine rotates and rewords, so it doesn't get stale.

Why it works

Built on what the research actually says.

The joyful wrapper is the delivery. Underneath is the practice education research ranks highest — put to work for a six-year-old.

1.44
🎯

Predict, then compare

Every round opens with the child's honest guess — "this is new" · "I'll try" · "I've got this" — and closes by holding it against how they actually did. It builds a self-aware learner, not a passive score-taker.The highest-effect-size practice in Hattie's synthesis of 90,000+ studies (self-reported grades, d ≈ 1.44).

🌱

Their own goal

Each week the child picks how many days they want to practice and watches their progress fill in. A target you choose yourself builds ownership — not a chore you're nagged into.Goal-setting research: student-chosen goals drive intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy.

📚

Real decodable reading

New readers get connected, sound-it-out text held to the phonics they've been taught — the Science-of-Reading practice a literacy plan already calls for — beside sight words, comprehension and writing.Science of Reading: decodable connected text, not isolated word lists.

🔁

Fluency & retention, gently

Interleaved fact practice builds automaticity with no timer and no high-stakes pressure, and a Mixed Review resurfaces mastered skills right before they fade.Retrieval practice + spaced repetition — without the anxiety of timed tests.

What we won't do: promise score gains — and you should be wary of anyone who does. What we guarantee is provable: the practice gets done, and you can see exactly what each child worked on.

See it

Made to be loved on the couch.

Audio-first for the littlest learners, big friendly targets, and a celebration that feels earned when a skill is finally mastered. Every round ends with a kid-friendly "here's why," and it reads aloud for kids who aren't reading yet.

🗣️
Truly bilingualA full Spanish edition — interface, narration and content — with Spanish-NATIVE tracks the big programs don't offer: sílabas, decodable stories, dichos, figurative language and poesía, not translations.
📲
Installable & offlineAdd to the home screen; works with no internet and no app store.
🧑‍🏫
Your child teaches YOUTeach-Back turns mastery into cue cards your child walks you through — the "protégé effect," the strongest move in learning science. With Question Maker they build their own quiz and put YOU in the hot seat. And Reading Buddy listens while they read a story out loud and lights up every word it hears — on your device only, nothing recorded, nothing uploaded, no cloud AI.
🌍
Built for less screen timeShort sessions that end on purpose, a weekly goal your kid sets, a streak that forgives a missed day — and Real-World Quests: 40+ screen-FREE challenges done out in the real world, then checked off together. New: 🌙 Done for Today — the learning app that wants your kid OFF the screen. Set an optional daily target (10, 15, 20, or 30 minutes) and Done for Today ends the session with a smile and hands your kid a real-world mission — a warm closing ritual, then practice rests until tomorrow. Never mid-question, never with guilt, and a grown-up can always unlock more. And Car Mode reads questions aloud on the drive to school — your kid answers out loud, zero screen in the back seat. And Gentle Day — one tap makes today's rounds shorter, no penalty, for the days your kid just needs less. And the Fridge Quiz prints a quiz sheet built from exactly what your child needs to review this week. Short, purposeful, and side-by-side — the pattern pediatricians actually recommend.
✍️
Written by people, verified by machinesEvery question, hint, and explanation is written by a person — in English AND Spanish — then an independent checker recomputes every math answer on every release: 13,460 answers, zero errors, or the app doesn't ship. Zero generative AI at runtime — no chatbot, nothing improvised in front of your child. In the age of AI slop, that's the whole point. Authored and verified by the AcornSmarts team — full adversarial fact-check pass 07JUL2026 — and the app now carries a small “Written by people ✍️” provenance mark wherever grown-ups read about their kid's skills. Spot an error anywhere? Email info@acornsmarts.com — we answer within 2 business days.
An AcornSmarts multiplication question with the friendly acorn guide and a number pad
What's inside

Serious learning. Joyful wrapper.

🔢
79 leveled skillsMath, Reading, Word Power, Science & Social Studies — Pre-K through 5, mapped to Common Core, NGSS & C3 standards.
📈
Mastery & trendsSmartScore growth and over-time charts for parents and teachers, on device and in the cloud.
🖨️
One-click progress reportsPrint a parent-conference-ready one-pager for any student — strengths, what to work on, how to help.
🗺️
Journey, friends & a gameA collectible forest, an adventure trail, and a quick reward game — the reasons kids come back.
⚔️
Acorn Duel — play togetherMultiplayer on one device — or on two, linked directly with a share code, no accounts. Each player answers at their own level, so a kindergartner can fairly duel a 5th grader — and it's the only multiplayer in this category with zero open chat: sticker-only cheers, never free text. Synced arenas, one-tap rematches, a 🎲 surprise-mix mode — and 🧑‍👧 Play Together, a cooperative round where a grown-up (or a sibling coach) plays alongside the child on one device.
✍️
Real writing practiceAdd Details, Fix & Improve, Figurative Language, Idioms and Poetry — plus finger-tracing that checks real stroke order, not just the shape. Craft most practice apps skip.
🗓️
Today's PlanEach day opens to one adaptive mission — the teacher's assignments, the skills due for review, and a fresh challenge, in a single follow-along checklist. So the highest-value practice actually gets done, not skipped.
🏆
A challenge that forgivesPractice adds up over weeks toward a printable "Learning Champion" certificate — and a missed day never wipes the progress out. Built to reward showing up, so a rough week doesn't end the habit.
🧩
Names the mistakeA wrong answer doesn't just say "✗" — it names the specific misconception ("you added the bottoms too") and offers one try-again, so kids fix the thinking, not just the answer.
💌
The home–school loopTeachers assign skills with due dates and send a note home; families see both on their dashboard, kids see due badges.
🌱
Kindergarten Readiness SnapshotFor Pre-K families and preschools: the placement check prints as an honest, research-based readiness snapshot — the academic half of kindergarten readiness, on one friendly page. No other program in our comparison offers one.
🔴
Watch practice liveThe parent dashboard updates in real time — a 🟢 “practicing now” signal appears the moment your child starts a round, and the acorns land on your phone as they finish (in the next room, or at the other parent’s house). On the family device, even a half-finished round shows honestly as “answered so far today.”
🪑
Sub-Day & take-home packetsTeachers print a substitute-day packet — a personalized review sheet for every student plus a teacher-only key — and one-tap 🏠 home packets: a Mastery Receipt (skills proven, not minutes watched) with tonight’s practice sheet.
☁️
Optional cloud syncReal parent and teacher accounts with cross-device sync and a class join code — or stay fully on-device. 👨‍👩‍👧 Family sharing: invite a co-parent and both logins see the same kids, live.
🔒
Private by defaultRuns on the device with no account and sends nothing anywhere. FERPA/COPPA-minded. No ads, no tracking.
Honest about the lane

Next to the big programs.

i-Ready, IXL, Lexia, DreamBox, ST Math, Zearn, Khan, Freckle and Renaissance are strong at what they do — keep them. Here's where AcornSmarts fits, plainly — and the full program-by-program table is one tap deeper.

🌰 AcornSmarts District diagnostics
i-Ready · Star/AR		 Math programs
DreamBox · ST Math · Zearn		 Reading programs
Lexia Core5		 Practice banks
IXL · Freckle · Khan
Cost to a familyFree to try at homeNot sold to familiesSchool-first; classroom free tiersSchool-first; home via reseller~$79–159/yr (IXL) or gated free
SubjectsMath, reading, writing, science & social studies — Pre-K–5Math + readingMath onlyReading onlyBroad / multi-subject
Parent in the loopTeacher assigns, child & parent both see it + a note home — one linked accountReport onlySeparate / noneReport onlySeparate account, not the teacher's class
At home & over summerYes — free for families, offlineIf the district keeps it onSchool or classroom account firstDistrict-scheduledPaid family plan or gated free site
SpanishFull app, free + a Spanish-NATIVE reading trackYes (school-provided)Yes — in mathNone (English only)Yes (add-on / partial)
Works offline✓ Installs like an app, no internet needed————
Who can buy itFamilies, centers & schools — no minimumsDistrictsSchools & classroomsDistrictsFamilies & schools; district minimums
Structured daily lesson✓ 📚 Today's Lesson: warm-up → learn → practiceAssigned paths & reading goalsLesson & puzzle sequences — Zearn's signatureProgram sequenceTargeted practice
How concepts are taughtTap-through worked examples — active, not watchedInstruction modules; read + quizGuided lessons, learn-by-doing, CPA videosDirect instructionExamples, videos — Khan's signature
Hands-on & visual math✓ 🧩 Puzzle Play + 🧰 tools drawer, 22 activity types—✓ Their signatures — ST Math puzzles, DreamBox manipulatives——
Uses your screener scores✓ Seed starting levels from any recent screenerThey ARE the screenerOwn placementOwn placementMAP / Star integrations
Real-book reading log✓ 📕 My Bookshelf — log any real book, earn acorns✓ AR — Renaissance's signature———
Prefer the full program-by-program table? Open it — all nine, side by side.
i-ReadyIXLLexia Core5DreamBoxST MathZearnKhan DistrictsFreckleRenaissance (Star/AR)🌰 AcornSmarts
Built asDistrict diagnostic + instructionComprehensive practiceStructured reading programAdaptive math lessonsVisual math puzzlesDaily math lessonsVideo lessons + district servicesAdaptive practice bankAssessment + reading ecosystemSupplemental practice kids love
SubjectsMath + readingBroadReading onlyMath onlyMath onlyMath onlyMath-led, gr 3+Math + ELA (+)Reading-ledMath, reading, writing, science & social studies — Pre-K–5
Who can buy itDistrictsFamilies & schoolsDistrictsSchools firstSchoolsClassrooms (free tier) / schoolsDistricts, 250-seat min.Schools firstDistrictsFamilies, centers & schools — no minimums
Language-free visual puzzles————✓ Their signature————✓ 🧩 Puzzle Play — wordless, animated why
Virtual manipulatives———✓ Their signatureWithin puzzlesWithin lessons———✓ 🧰 Tools drawer + 22 hands-on activity types
Structured daily lessonAssigned paths—Program sequenceLesson pathsPuzzle sequence✓ Their signatureCourse masteryTargeted practiceReading goals✓ 📚 Today's Lesson: warm-up → learn → practice
How concepts are taughtInstruction modulesExamplesDirect instructionGuided lessonsLearn by doingVideos (CPA)✓ Videos — their signatureQuestion feedbackRead + quizTap-through worked examples — active, not watched
At home & over summerIf the district keeps it onPaid family planDistrict-scheduledSchool account firstSchool accountClassroom-tiedFree site; district features gatedHome companionIf the school keeps it onYes — free for families, offline
SpanishPartialPartialReading-focusedLesson translationsLanguage-free by designLimitedPartialQuestion audioPartialFull app + Spanish-NATIVE reading track
Works offline—————————✓ Installs like an app, no internet needed
Uses your screener scoresIs the screenerOwn diagnosticOwn placementOwn diagnosticOwn sequenceGrade-based✓ MAP integration✓ Star onlyIs the screener (Star)✓ Seed starting levels from any recent screener
Real-book reading log————————✓ AR — their signature✓ 📕 My Bookshelf — log any real book, earn acorns
Cost to a familyNot sold to families~$79–159 / yrSchool-first; home via resellerSchool-first pricingNot sold to familiesFree = 1 classroomFree (district tier paid)Not sold to familiesNot sold to familiesFree to try at home

And the family favorites? Keep the ones you love.

Prodigy is a great game — math-only, and the game sells memberships; our play has no paywall nag and every minute is practice. SplashLearn is our closest cousin — we add writing, science, social studies, a Spanish-native reading track and offline. ABCmouse is a media library for littles — we're the adaptive practice that moves skills. Epic! is a wonderful bookshelf — and 📕 My Bookshelf logs reading from ANY library and pays acorns for it.

We complement diagnostics and core curriculum — we don't replace them. Details reflect each program's typical published model; the comparison is category-level, not a knock on anyone's tool. (79 leveled skills across the catalog; 78 appear in English — the 79th is a Spanish-native reading track.)

Who it's for

Families. Centers. Schools.

One product, two ways in: families start free at home, and centers and schools license the layer that lets them run it across students — teacher accounts, class rosters, cross-device sync, and reporting.

👨‍👩‍👧 Families

  • Start free in seconds — no account required
  • A plain weekly digest, plus printable progress
  • English & Spanish, on any tablet or phone
  • Keeps summer learning alive without the battles
  • Up to six kids, each with their own progress
  • Homeschooling? One tap turns practice history into attendance calendars, instruction logs, and a portfolio — your records live on your device

🏫 Centers, daycares & tutoring

  • No district IT, no rollout — assign, share a code, go
  • See who practiced and who needs a boost, per skill
  • Conference-ready reports for parent updates
  • Fully bilingual for your Spanish-speaking families
  • Your families use it at home too, included in your license
  • Flat, affordable licensing — no per-seat lock-in

🎓 Schools & districts

  • Complements your diagnostics — no overlap fight
  • Mapped to Common Core (Math & ELA), NGSS & C3 standards, Pre-K–5
  • Science-of-Reading decodable text for new readers
  • Strong privacy posture — on-device, no trackers
  • Built for accessibility — keyboard, screen-reader & color-blind friendly (WCAG-AA statement)
  • Start with a single group; your data is always yours
Why parents can say yes

Safe by design, not by promise.

No ads. No tracking. No account required to start. Built by a parent who wanted this for his own kids first — so the defaults protect your family, not a data business. For scale: private tutoring runs $35–80 an hour and Kumon $150–200 a month per subject — the core practice moves a tutor makes (worked examples, feedback that names the exact mistake, spaced review) are what this app does, free to start.

🔒
Nothing worth stealingLearning data lives on YOUR device — the app makes zero third-party calls (no analytics, no trackers; open your browser's network tab and watch for yourself). Optional school cloud stores a nickname only — your child's real name never leaves the device. After a year of school-data breaches, the safest database is the one that doesn't exist. And leaving is a button: the Forever File prints your child's whole learning history as a keepsake, and a one-tap backup takes ALL your data with you — readable forever, with or without us. And for homeschool families: one tap turns that on-device practice history into attendance calendars, an instruction log, and a work-samples portfolio for your records — honest, printable, and never leaving your device. COPPA & FERPA-minded, always.
📱
Works with no accountPlay fully on-device. Turn on cloud sync and it stores only a nickname — a child's real name never leaves the device.
🌱
Built by a local parentA dad of two built this for his own kitchen table — not a faceless edtech giant. The founder answers the phone, not a 1-800 number.
🤝
Complements schoolWorks alongside i-Ready, IXL, Lexia and the rest — it owns home and summer, never a rip-and-replace.
🌎
Natively bilingualQuestions, hints, and step-by-step help authored in English and Spanish — not machine-translated after the fact.
♿
Built for every kidKeyboard, screen-reader & color-blind friendly, plus a dyslexia-friendly reading mode — easy-read font, larger text, high contrast, and read-aloud on every question. Read the WCAG-AA statement.
🧾 Where it all comes from
✍️
The contentAuthored in-house for AcornSmarts — every question, hint, and explanation written by a person, in English and Spanish, and machine-verified on every build (13,460 computable math answers recomputed, zero errors, or the release doesn't ship). Never scraped, never licensed from another program.
🎯
The standardsSkills map to public grade-level standards — Common Core (Math & ELA) plus NGSS and C3 domains — the same public standards school-year tools target. That's exactly what makes it compatible with your school-year program; a mapping, not a certification.
🔬
The researchFeatures are grounded in named, published studies — Berkowitz et al. (Science, 2015), Rittle-Johnson & Star's comparison-of-methods work, Bowers, Kirby & Deacon's morphology research, and more — cited where each feature is described on this page and collected in our ESSA Tier-4 logic model, available to schools on request.
🔒
The student dataLives on the device and goes nowhere — see Network Silence and the Sunset Pledge, plus the app's own "Where your child's data lives" privacy receipt.
🌰
“I’m a dad of two. I built AcornSmarts for our own kitchen table first — then realized other families might want it too. That’s still who it’s for.”
Craig · founder
📵 Network Silence

Don't take our word for it. Turn on airplane mode.

Right now, mid-session — flip your tablet to airplane mode and keep playing. Everything still works, because everything about your child lives on your device, not our servers. No cloud app can pass that test; ours is built to. Independent research by Internet Safety Labs found 96% of school apps send student data to third parties. AcornSmarts sends it to no one: the app's own security policy allows connections only to itself and — if you choose to sign in — our own cloud, and even then it syncs nicknames and progress numbers only, listed field by field. Open the app's “Where your child's data lives” privacy receipt to read the exact list — it's generated from the sync code itself and locked by an automated test, so it can't quietly drift from the truth.

🪦 The Sunset Pledge

The app that works even if we're gone.

Ed-tech startups shut down, and cloud subscription apps die with their servers — taking a family's learning record with them. AcornSmarts can't do that to you, by construction. The learning app runs entirely on your device: practice, progress, the Almanac, and every printable need no server, and there is no license check — the app never phones home for permission to run. Our test suite boots the whole app with the network dead and completes a practice round before any release ships. And your data's file formats are published as an open spec — the backup file is plain readable JSON, the Backpack code's grammar is documented character by character, and every printable is ordinary paper — so your child's record outlives any company, including ours. Read the spec: the AcornSmarts open file formats. The honest exception: optional cloud extras (device-to-device sync, the weekly email digest) do need our server and would stop — your child's record would not.

🕰️
The Old-Device floor — the hand-me-down tablet is welcomeYou shouldn't have to buy a new tablet for a kids' practice app. AcornSmarts is built lean on purpose — no 3D engine, no video streaming, no ad tech — so the whole app is a smaller download than a single short video clip, and an automated ceiling fails our build if it ever bloats. It runs on 2020-class browsers (Safari/iPadOS 14, Chrome 87, Firefox 78, Edge 88) — and iPadOS 14 reaches iPads sold as far back as 2014. Every release is scanned for newer-than-floor features before it ships. Honest limit: we haven't benchmarked every old tablet by hand, so we claim the floor our tests prove — small download, 2020-class browser support — not lab numbers we don't have.
📖 Read together & 🎲 play on paper

The best learning tools here are paper.

📖
The Read-Together Coach — question cards for ANY real bookDialogic reading — the child talks, the grown-up listens and expands — is among the best-evidenced parent-delivered reading routines, and recent research found it works better led by a parent than led by a machine. So we coach the parent instead of replacing them: pick tonight's book type (picture book, early reader, nonfiction, chapter read-aloud) from My Bookshelf and print a card deck built on the classic PEER loop (Prompt, Evaluate, Expand, Repeat) and all five CROWD question types — plus a say-exactly-this scripted version for nights you want the words handed to you. It works with any book you already own or borrowed: the app never needs to know the book, never asks the title, and logs nothing. Coaching for you, not a chatbot for your child.
🎲
The Acorn Race — the number board game research keeps replicating, on purpose on paperIn randomized studies, about an hour of playing a LINEAR number board game measurably improved preschoolers' understanding of numbers — a finding replicated across incomes and countries. The effect lives in the physical part: a real token traveling a real line while the child says the numbers, counting on from the square they're on. Circular boards didn't produce the gains, and a screen tap travels no distance at all — so we deliberately built no digital version. One tap prints the 1–10 board (the research board), a 1–100 big-kid extension, a spinner sheet (a coin works), and the parent rule card that carries the effect. Tokens: buttons, beans, bottle caps. An optional "we played" tap warms the Family Hearth — no points, no streaks, nothing tracked.
🧾 For ESA families & 👵👴 grandfamilies

Paperwork that tells the truth.

🧾
The ESA Receipt & Usage Ledger — reimbursement paperwork from honest recordsFamilies in Education Savings Account states carry the documentation burden: itemized receipts, proof of use, program audits. One tap in the Family Almanac prints a reimbursement-support bundle — a vendor & purchase record for the plan you actually have (published price only, with the billing name your card statement will show), a dated usage attestation drawn from the real practice log on your own device (days used, recorded minutes, per-subject only from the day we started recording it — never inflated, never back-filled), and a plain-language explainer of what ESA reviewers look for. Honest limit, printed on the document itself: your device holds no payment records, so the exact amount paid lives on your Stripe email receipt — attach it. We never invent a number. General information, not legal or tax advice — your state program decides what qualifies.
👵👴
The Grandfamily Start Kit — raising your grandchild? Start here.About 2.5 million U.S. children are being raised by grandparents and other relatives. The Start Kit is a calm, large-type path with zero education jargon (we test every sentence against a banned-words list, in English and Spanish): three small first steps, a printable one-page guide with words you can read out loud at a school meeting, the child's 🎒 Backpack Record to hand the teacher, one-tap bigger text everywhere, and a predictable same-order mode if surprises aren't welcome — plus who to call, with names and addresses for Generations United, grandfamilies.org, and your state's Kinship Navigator program. Paper first, no account needed, nothing tracked.
📬 Practice by mail & 🚸 the third-grade gate

For the families the big apps can't see.

📬
The Far-Away Parent Kit — practice by mail, no device needed on the other endSome parents are far away — deployed, working away, incarcerated, or simply living at a distance. The kit never labels which: to the child, the pages only ever say "your grown-up who is far away." One tap prints a complete mail round-trip built from your child's real current skills: a plain-language page for whoever mails it (with honest mail-safety guidance — plain white paper, no staples, and always check the destination's current mail rules first), a warm letter for the far-away grown-up, your child's own letter page with a drawing box, the real practice pages, and a grown-up copy with every answer, a coaching line, and a write-back line so encouragement travels home with the pages. The far-away grown-up needs no device and no account — ever. Their entire side is paper and a pen. When the envelope comes home, returned pages are marked in the app one day at a time and join the same practice record as on-screen rounds.
🚸
The Third-Grade Gate Navigator — the retention law, in plain language, plus honest evidenceSome states can require a child to repeat third grade based on a reading test — and many parents find out late. For a grade 2–3 child, one tap prints a plain-language primer (what a reading gate is, what good-cause exemptions generally are, and where your state's official rules live — it names no individual state and reproduces no state's rules; general information, not legal advice) plus a good-cause evidence portfolio from your child's real recorded reading practice: practice days, literacy minutes from the day recording started, the literacy skills actually practiced with real attempt counts, mastered skills with dates, and your real-book reading log. The printout says it plainly: it documents practice — it never asserts your child's reading level or predicts any outcome; that belongs to your state's own assessment process. A reading-focused practice packet prints alongside, so preparation is practice, not paperwork alone.
🏫
One-Room Schoolhouse mode — a mixed-age pod is a first-class classroomMicroschools and learning pods run 5–15 kids across several grades on one roster — and the big vendors' per-seat, grade-banded licenses simply don't fit. AcornSmarts already runs mixed-age households, and a pod is a big household: when your roster genuinely spans two or more grades, the teacher dashboard shows the real grade spread drawn from the children themselves (there is no class-level "grade" setting to contradict it), every child keeps their own grade and their own working levels, and mixed-grade views never assume one grade per class. One tap prints the 🧾 pod evidence pack operators improvise in spreadsheets — per-child practice days, recorded minutes, subject coverage, and skills mastered in the window, for the whole pod in one honest document built from real recorded practice only (a child with nothing recorded gets an honest empty line, never an invented number). The printout says it plainly: it documents supplemental practice, makes no state-specific compliance claim, and is not legal advice — check what your state or program actually asks for. A 🗂️ pod week pack prints in one job: a personalized review sheet for each child at that child's own level, plus a teacher-only answer key. Pod pricing is the flat Classroom & Daycare tier — the whole site, never per-seat.
Simple pricing

Priced to say yes.

Flat licensing for classrooms, daycares, centers and schools, sized to your enrollment — no per-seat counting, no lock-in. Every quote is a custom proposal, your enrolled families are always included, and it lands well below what the big platforms charge.

Classroom & Daycare

Single classrooms, home daycares, preschools, tutors & after-school programs

Custom

Tell us about your group — flat yearly license, proposal within a day

  • Teacher accounts & a class join code
  • Assign skills, progress reports & class summary
  • Circle-time printable packs & take-home sheets
  • Kindergarten-readiness snapshots to hand parents at conferences
  • Fully bilingual (English & Spanish)

Every enrolled child included. A full year typically runs about one month of a curriculum-kit subscription ($150–350/mo).

Most popular

Learning center

Centers, clubs & enrichment programs

Custom

Request a proposal — one flat license covers every site and student

  • Everything in Classroom & Daycare, at center scale
  • Multiple classes & cross-device cloud sync
  • Conference-ready reports for parent night
  • Curriculum scope & sequence on request

School / building

Charter schools, buildings & districts

Custom

Request a district proposal — priced to your enrollment, pilot cohort first

  • Whole-building license, all classrooms
  • Full teacher & admin reporting suite
  • Science-of-Reading decodable text included
  • Private by default — FERPA/COPPA posture
🤝
The No-Tricks Billing pledgeAgainst an industry with a $10M FTC order for cancellation traps, ours is simple: the price and renewal terms are shown on the secure Stripe checkout before you pay; you get an email receipt for every charge and a reminder email before an annual plan renews — and every billing email includes a manage-your-subscription link, one tap to the same portal that cancels; your plan is spelled out plainly inside the app — “Your plan, plainly,” no fine print; cancelling is one tap in the billing portal, no phone call, no retention maze; and the guarantee no cloud vendor can make: cancel and your kid's progress stays — it lives on your device, not our server, so nothing is ever deleted and everything is waiting if you return. Your kid never sees an upsell, a membership nag, or an ad. Ever.
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The No-Timers PledgeNo countdowns. No timers. Anywhere. More than 1 in 5 elementary teachers describe their students' math anxiety as severe — and racing a visible clock is one of the ways apps manufacture it. In AcornSmarts, fluency is measured quietly by the work itself — never by a clock your child can see. Fact practice is self-paced, duels score right answers (never speed), and even the just-for-fun acorn game fills a basket instead of racing a countdown. Timer-built drill apps can't sign this sentence; we just did. And every skill also has a 🎪 Rehearsal Mode — "just practicing, nobody's watching": a full pressure-free round where nothing is recorded, ever, so an anxious kid can try before it counts.
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The Backpack RecordOne button prints a one-page record for the next adult in your kid's corner — strands mastered, working levels, comfort settings in use, and one honest line on what to try first with this child — plus a short typed code that re-creates their levels and settings on any device. The code carries no name and no history — the record belongs to the KID, not an account. Built for the families the cloud forgets: foster and kinship placement changes, military moves, migrant families, any handoff between caregivers. Cloud vendors can't build this — portability works against their subscription; it's the whole point of ours.
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Unplugged WeekThe learning app that packs itself into a backpack once in a while. One tap prints a full paper week — seven daily pages mixing a real-world quest, a family square, one practice question from your kid's actual skills (answer keys on a separate grown-ups page), and a field-note box for drawing what they found — and then the app rests for seven days: your child sees a warm camping story ("the acorn is camping this week — your adventure pages are on the fridge"), plus ears-only Car Mode, while every parent page stays open. End early any time from the grown-ups gate — no guilt either direction. When the week ends, the paper practice comes back through the same mark-the-paper flow as the Fridge Quiz, and the quests count on your word. National Screen-Free Week is the first full week of May — join it, or pick any week that suits your family. An app paid to maximize screen time can never ship this button; a flat-priced one just did.
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Dinner Table NumbersOne 90-second math story a night, read out loud in YOUR voice — the app never reads it for you, because the human voice is the whole point. Each story is four warm sentences of real-kid life (a pancake stuck to the ceiling, a dog with a secret sock stash) plus questions in three sizes — 🐣 wee ones (Pre-K–K), 🐿️ little ones (grades 1–2), 🦉 big kids (3–5) — so ONE story serves every kid at your table at once, mixed ages included. And here's the part built for the parents nobody builds for: the app asks how YOU feel about math, and if the honest answer is 😬, you get the fully-scripted version — the exact words to read, every answer printed right where you need it, because you cannot get this wrong — the reading is the win. Built on Berkowitz et al., Science (2015): in a 587-family randomized trial, brief family math stories raised kids' math achievement — most of all when the parent finds math stressful. 48 human-authored stories and growing, English and Spanish, every answer machine-verified, a new one every night, printable by the week for screen-free dinners. No scoring, no tracking, no streaks — just a story and your voice.
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Worked-example openersEvery hard skill starts with a worked example, faded step by step. The first time your child reaches a genuinely multi-step skill — regrouping, long division with remainders, order of operations, percents — the session opens with a fully narrated example they tap through (honestly framed on screen: "this part isn't scored at all"), then hands the pencil over gradually: they finish the last step of the next problem, the last two of the one after, then solve one alone. Stumble, and the app quietly shows a fuller example again — the research calls it backward fading; kids call it "oh, I see it now." Live on 10 multi-step math skills, in English and Spanish, and every number in every step is machine-checked before it ever reaches a child.
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Two Squirrels Solved ItHere's the thing almost no app does: your child doesn't just get the answer — they judge two ways to solve it. Ivy 🐰 and Leo 🦁 each work the SAME problem side by side, and your child is the judge. Sometimes one squirrel makes a REAL mistake kids actually make — adding the bottoms of fractions, going left-to-right on order of operations, subtracting the smaller digit in a borrow — and your child taps who's right and why. Other times BOTH squirrels are right but took different roads — counting up vs. subtracting in parts, the 10% trick vs. just halving — and your child decides which was the smarter shortcut for THIS problem. That's strategy flexibility, the thing that separates kids who "did the steps" from kids who understand. Built on Rittle-Johnson & Star's comparison-of-methods research. 22 authored contrast pairs to start, English and Spanish, every correct method AND every mistake machine-verified — it appears as an optional "brain stretch" only after a skill is mastered, never a gate, always skippable.
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Word MachinesOnce a child can sound words out, the next leap is seeing that words are BUILT from parts — and that's the part almost nobody teaches. This is the app that teaches word families, not just words. Your child assembles words on a little matrix — re + build → rebuild; sign → signal → design → assign — and, before the meaning is revealed, guesses what the built word means from its parts (a wrong first guess is just the brain warming up). They meet high-yield prefixes and suffixes and the big Latin base families — port (carry), act (do), struct (build), dict (say) — and play a spot-the-family game that teaches the trap most apps fall into: signal belongs to the sign family, but sing only looks similar. Built on Bowers, Kirby & Deacon's morphology research — teaching word parts lifts vocabulary, spelling AND reading, most of all for younger and struggling readers. 60 human-authored morpheme matrices to start, and the Spanish track is authored natively — Spanish prefixes and suffixes, plus the real cognate bases (portar, actuar, visión) that bridge the two languages honestly, never forced. Every base family's etymology hand-checked, so a child is never taught a false root.
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Targeted mindset — done rightEvery app slaps up "mistakes help you grow!" posters. The research says posters don't work — the mindset science done right, not posters does. So this waits. Only when your child hits the same mistake twice in one round does the app step in — never on a win, never as empty "good job." It names the mistake as the famous one almost every kid makes on the way to getting it, and hands over the next move: "line up the ones under the ones, one column at a time," or "reread it and ask — does that make sense?" Built on the wise-intervention research (Yeager & Walton) and Mueller & Dweck's finding that praising a child for being "so smart" after a win actually backfires. 10 human-written strategy lines, two per subject, English and Spanish — and because a wise nudge only works when it's rare, it shows at most once every few days, never daily. Your weekly parent email even gets ONE "say this, not that" script for exactly the subject your child wrestled with — the strategy to say, and the trait praise to skip.
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The Butterfly BoxThe math app that helps an anxious kid set the worry down first. Right before a checkpoint, some kids carry a knot of worry that quietly eats the very working memory they need — the effect Ramirez & Beilock measured in the lab. So the app offers a 60-second worry offload: little kids tap a worry-face, bigger kids type one sentence, and the box "holds" it while they work, then lets it go after. Here's the part no engagement-funded app can copy: it's offered only to the kids who need it. A quiet signal watches whether your child keeps predicting they'll do worse than they actually do — the under-confident pattern — and the box appears just for them, never for a kid who's already sure of themselves. And the worry itself? We never keep what a child is worried about — it's written to nothing, sent nowhere, gone the moment they move on. Optional, before checkpoints only, at most once every couple of days. Built on the research — promising for anxious kids, honestly not a cure.
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Plan–Do–ReviewTurn it on for a child and every session gets two tiny bookends. A 10-second plan at the start — "today I'll give it my best, and I think it'll feel tricky" — and a 15-second look-back at the end — "did your plan happen? which part was trickiest?" No scores, no pressure; it's the planning-and-reflecting habit that good learners build without noticing. And it quietly sharpens the same self-awareness signal the app already tracks: a child who predicts "tricky" and then aces it is learning to trust themselves. Your weekly email gets a story no dashboard tells — "Ivy predicted fractions would be tricky and pushed through." English and Spanish, opt-in, off by default.
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Sneak Peek — guess first, then learnEvery other app opens a new skill with a screen your child is meant to get right. We do the opposite, on purpose. The evening before a brand-new skill unlocks, the app invites your child to take 2–3 wild guesses about it — before anyone's taught it — because guessing, missing, and then learning beats studying straight (the pretesting effect, one of the most-replicated findings in the science of learning). Wrong guesses are celebrated as brain warm-ups, never marked wrong. The next day, the lesson replays your child's own guess beside the real answer: "you guessed 3 — it's 4! your brain was already reaching for it." It costs nothing, scores nothing, and shows up only when there's a genuine new skill on the way. English and Spanish.
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Predictable Mode — the same shape every timeMost learning apps run on surprise: mystery chests, random confetti, features that pop up out of nowhere. For many autistic kids — and plenty of others — surprise isn't delight, it's dread. Predictable mode for kids who need the same shape every time: one toggle in the Almanac and every session opens with a First/Then picture plan that checks off as your child goes, the session shape never changes, the mystery chest is replaced by a steady practice-jar acorn worth exactly the same over time (no lost value — and no slot machine), the celebration is one calm glow that never varies, and anything genuinely new gets a gentle "something new today" heads-up first. Printable First/Then boards included. English and Spanish.
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Show what you know — test out of what you already knowGrade-level packaging is how the big programs sell — and how they trap a kid who's years ahead in one subject. Here, a parent can start a five-question "Show what you know" check at the top of any strand. Pass it and those skills are marked tested out — honestly labeled with the date, visibly different from mastered, because your child skipped them, not finished them — and practice starts where they really are. Math level and reading level float independently: a 4th-grade-math, 1st-grade-writing profile is fully supported, and the reports say so plainly — asynchronous profiles are normal for many learners. English and Spanish.
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Body Breaks — movement breaks between practice chunksWiggly bodies learn better when they get to wiggle. Turn on movement breaks and between practice chunks the screen dims and a 30–60-second illustrated card appears — ten frog hops, trace a giant S in the air, push the wall like a slow wave. Sixteen cards, all safe to do beside a desk with zero equipment, in English and Spanish. No clock is ever shown (our No-Timers Pledge holds even here) — the card simply moves on, or your child taps done. Teachers get the whole deck as printable cards in the Sub-Day packet.
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Squirrel Plan — goal-setting that names the obstacle, not just the wishEvery goal-setting feature in every app asks your child what they want. The research (Duckworth, Gollwitzer & Oettingen's 5th-grade trial) says the wish is the inert half — the part that actually changes behavior is naming the obstacle and making a plan for it. So once a week, grades 2–5, the Squirrel Plan walks your child through all four steps: the wish, a five-second picture of how it'll feel, then the honest obstacle from a deck written for real kids ("I want to watch TV after school," "I forget," "it feels too hard"), and finally a fill-in if-then plan built to beat that exact obstacle — "IF I grab a snack after school, THEN I do AcornSmarts before TV." It prints right onto the Fridge Quiz, so the plan lives where it actually works. No scores, no points — just a plan on the fridge. English and Spanish.
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The Learning Year — a learning year your family keepsCloud programs aggregate your child's year into a score and delete the rest. We keep the artifacts. Every practice day, the app quietly saves one tiny keepsake — the skill, the level, the honest score of that day's first round — into a reel that lives on your device, and one tap prints it as a little book. Early books are honestly titled a Learning Season; only a reel that truly spans a year earns the name Learning Year. And once a week, a question from the family bank — "teach me what a fraction is," "what was the hardest thing you learned this month?" — invites your child to type an answer that lands in the Forever File as Interviews with a six-year-old, printable, in their own words. No audio is ever recorded. Nothing is captured that wasn't already there. It starts the day you start — nothing is faked backward. English and Spanish.
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The Family HearthOne household screen with everyone's effort as logs on one fire — your kid's practice days, your read-together nights, a grandparent's cheer note, this week's Squirrel Plan, a family bingo line. The units are deliberately incommensurable — days, nights, notes, plans — so nothing can be ranked and nobody loses; when more kinds of showing-up land in a week, the fire simply burns cozier. A leaderboard app structurally cannot build this: there's no score here to sort by, and that's the point. English and Spanish.
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Community Edition — works at the library, the laundromat, and summer camp — no accounts, no broadband neededA device flag turns any tablet into a zero-login kiosk: a child picks a grade band and an animal friend — no name is ever asked, no account ever exists — practices on the real adaptive engine, and leaves with a printed continuity card (a levels-only, name-free code any AcornSmarts can pick up from). Guest progress evaporates from the machine; the card IS the persistence. For camps, clubs, and 21st-CCLC programs, Summer Site Mode runs 20-minute staff blocks with a first-names-only device roster and prints a counts-only grant report — sessions, kids served, attendance, practice volume — with a methodology footnote that claims nothing it can’t support. Kids never see a clock; that pledge holds here too. English and Spanish, prominently both.
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An app that suggests rest days — Learning Weather, garden weeds, and a family jarEvery morning the orchard reads your child’s last two days — computed on the device, from real practice, never a guess. After two genuinely hard days the sky turns to gentle rain and the app itself proposes easy wins: a review of strengths and a pre-offered Gentle Day, while you see exactly why (“Ivy’s had two hard days — today AcornSmarts suggests easy wins”). Nothing is ever locked — a kid who wants to stretch on a rain day just does. Fading skills appear as at most two little garden weeds (“the 7s patch got a little overgrown 🌼”) — a 30-second tidy and the patch blooms; never shame, never loss, never a notification. And the Family Jar turns overshoot effort — a fixed miss, an extra round — into tokens toward a promise you define (“full jar = camping trip”): flat, capped, and paid out in the real world, not the app. Engagement-funded apps cannot ship a single one of these.
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Vista para abuelos + the 2-Week PacketVista para abuelos is a Spanish-FIRST caregiver view — authored natively in warm plain Spanish, never translated app-speak, with an enforced jargon ban and large type by default: today’s one thing ("Hoy: 10 minutos de los números. Toca aquí."), the kid’s week in words an abuela actually says, a nightly léelo-conmigo script, and a printable warm carta para la familia. No new account — same local profile, a kinder lens. And for no-broadband, one-device families, Packet-Ahead prints the next two weeks of the child’s ACTUAL practice — item-coded daily pages, answer keys separate — and when the family next has the device, each paper day logs back through the same tap-grid marking flow into the same mastery engine. Personalized paper, not a static PDF.
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My Hills — race only your own past selfNamed hills, one per strand — Regrouping Ridge, Fraction Falls, Sight-Word Sprint — where the only rival is your child's own earlier best. "March-you got 4 of 6 on Regrouping Ridge — today-you got 6 of 6." No sibling boards, no class ranks, no clocks (the No-Timers Pledge holds: hills are climbed by accuracy, never speed). The first climb honestly "sets the flag" — nothing is invented from before the feature existed. English and Spanish.
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Do It With GrandpaAny practice skill becomes a two-player call: one tap prints a companion sheet — the exact problems your child will see, in the exact order, with the answer key and coaching prompts written for a grown-up who loves them ("Ask her: how did you know?" "Count to five before helping — thinking time is the gift"). Then the family provides the call — your own phone, your own FaceTime — and we provide the synchronized content. No video infrastructure, no accounts for grandma, no moderation surface to trust. English and Spanish.
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Echo Me — fluency with expression, not a stopwatchReading fluency isn't speed — it's phrasing, and the big programs measure it with a words-per-minute clock. Echo Me does what a fluency teacher does instead: every decodable story (all 41 English and 31 Spanish passages, hand-marked by phrase) lights up one natural phrase scoop at a time — "Rosa found / a small green frog / by the pond" — a fluent voice (you, or the app's own narration) reads it with expression, and your child echoes it back. Spanish stories are scooped by Spanish phrasing, never mirrored English. Nothing is recorded — no microphone, no speech AI; your ear is the judge. After a few days of echo practice the story graduates to a one-time finale: read the whole thing, best voice, to a grown-up. Applause is the reward. English and Spanish.
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Interest Packs — practice wearing your kid's favorite topicSome kids will do anything if trains are involved. Pick a pack — 🚂 trains, 🦕 dinosaurs, 🚀 space — and everyday math starts speaking their language: "3 train cars joined 4 more at the roundhouse. How many cars now?" Same questions, same adaptive learning, same answers — only the stories change (36 hand-written bilingual story frames across addition, subtraction and multiplication; the plain equation stays visible under every story, so the numbers are never a reading test). Built autism-first — special interests are the most reliable engagement lever autistic families know — and it works for every obsessed five-year-old. Where competitors sell theme packs, ours are free. Forever.
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Field Guide of Ideas — a bestiary you fill by learningMeet the Borrowing Beetle 🪲 — it sneaks a ten from next door when the ones run out. Every big idea in the app is a creature in the Field Guide: 2 chapters, 20 creatures, each with its own lore. A page fills in the moment your child genuinely meets the idea in practice — first multiplication, the first borrowed ten — and until then it's a silhouette. A couple of creatures hide off the beaten path, found only by wandering the Subjects shelf. Small chapters so finishing is always near, a gentle "8 of 10" and never a nag, nothing timed, nothing missable — and pages award nothing, because the pages are the reward. No assignment funnel. Just discovery.
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Variedad — because your Spanish is real SpanishIs it guagua, camión or autobús? Yes. Pick your family's variety of Spanish — México/Centroamérica, Caribe, or neutral — and practice starts honoring the words your child actually hears at home: friendly margin notes on real questions ("En el Caribe también se dice «guagua»", from 60 carefully-verified vocabulary pairs), and spelling that validates home speech while teaching the standard form: "En casa decimos 'cansao' — así se escribe: cansado." Never a correction of how your family talks — a celebration of it. Plus a printable "Nuestras palabras" sheet for the fridge. Default is neutral; every dialect claim was verified, and when we weren't sure, we left it out.
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Mnemonic Margins — a different hook for the fact that won't stickEvery kid has one: 7×8, the b/d flip, the word "said." Drill apps just repeat the same card harder. AcornSmarts carries hand-written memory hooks for the classically-sticky facts — 13 facts, 35 hooks, each in a different style: a picture ("b has its belly out front"), a story ("5-6-7-8: 56 = 7×8"), a chant. One hook appears right at the moment the fact is missed — never spammed. Miss it again another day and a different style tries. When the fact finally lands, the app keeps a private note of which style worked for your child and leads with it next time — a preference, honestly labeled, not an AI claim. And your family can write its own: "8×7: Grandpa was 56 at your 8th birthday" — kept on your device, inherited by every sibling, printable for the fridge. English and Spanish, with Spanish hooks written for Spanish sticking points (al vs la, bra vs ba) — not translated English ones.
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Bridge Plan — for the family that's movingMilitary PCS, a foster placement change, a new city: every move hands a stranger your child's education with no notes attached. One tap in the Almanac prints the whole hand-off: a one-page "for the receiving teacher" summary of where your child actually is (by strand, with supports in use and what to try first), a four-week practice bridge built from your child's real record — the skills due for review first, then the ones that need the most love, answer keys on separate grown-up pages — and a family checklist of the records to hand-carry, with the typed Backpack code that re-creates your child's levels on any device at the other end. No account required at the new school. It works between any two states because it's grounded in your child's own record — not in a standards table we'd have to invent. English and Spanish.
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Draw It First — word problems that start with a pencilThe strongest move on a word problem is drawing it before solving it — and generative drawing only works on paper, so that's exactly where we put it. Word problems on the printed Fridge Quiz and packets now carry a "Draw it first!" box with a started bar-model or grouping frame matched to that problem's actual family — combining, taking away, comparing, equal groups, or sharing — never a generic blank box. Lower levels get a fuller started frame; higher levels get just a faint outline, until the child owns the whole drawing. Each box ends with one parent-checkable line — "Does the drawing show BOTH groups joined together?" — and the same one-tap paper marking flow feeds the same mastery engine. English and Spanish.
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The Concreteness Ladder — from counters to pictures to bare numbers, on purposeLearning science calls it concreteness fading: hands first, pictures second, symbols last — with the hand-off made explicit. For the five skills where our content truly has all three forms (addition, subtraction, make-ten, even-odd, place value), early levels tap real counters, middle levels see ten-frames and number lines, and the top goes bare — and at every hand-off the round opens with a bridge moment: "the acorns are hiding inside the number line now." Skills missing a form are honestly queued, not faked. And mastery is honest too: a ladder skill only counts as mastered at the symbolic top — while any badge already earned stays earned, forever. English and Spanish.
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Same Math, New Costume — transfer practice that waits until your child is readyRecognizing one idea under many surfaces is the real test of understanding — but research is equally clear that variation overloads beginners. So this waits: only once a skill is genuinely fluent does a round open with the same deep idea in three or four deliberately different disguises — bare equation, missing number, number-line hops, a squirrel story — then one playful reveal: "Same idea, new disguise — can you spot it?" Five structure families, nineteen authored variants, gated and test-enforced, switched off in predictable mode. English and Spanish.

You're paying for the practice the big programs can't reach — home and summer, the youngest learners actually wanting to log on, a Spanish-native reading track, and mistake-aware teaching, not just more multiple choice. Start with a single group, no RFP and no per-seat lock-in, your data always yours, and the founder on the phone — not a 1-800 number. And it's still a fraction of what schools pay for i-Ready or Lexia — and less than IXL's family plan, while being free to begin and the only one that puts the parent in the same loop as the teacher.

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