Questions, answered.

RubyLou is a homeschool companion for parents. You tell us how you want to teach — Charlotte Mason, Classical, Montessori, a blend of your own — and RubyLou turns that philosophy into a real, livable week: lessons, books, activities, and rhythms shaped to each of your children and to your family's actual capacity. Around your week, RubyLou quietly handles the rest: your state's compliance requirements, your records, and (on Bloom and Garden) your ESA documentation. You have the last word on everything. RubyLou plans; you teach; your child never needs a screen.

Families teaching at home in any form — full homeschool, hybrid (some days home, some days at co-op or school), supplementing alongside a school, or summer learning. We support learners from preschool through high school (ages 3–18), Bloom and Garden include your first two children, with each additional child $79/yr; Seed covers one child.

No — and that's deliberate. RubyLou is a parent tool. There are no child accounts, no child logins, and no child-facing screens. Your child's learning happens where it should: with books, materials, nature, and you.

**Seed ($299/yr, one child)** — the complete curriculum for one child: the philosophy selector, the full curriculum engine (lessons, assignments, and daily teaching guidance, generated weekly), your weekly plan with activities built in, the Library, and your state's compliance tracker. **Bloom ($399/yr)** — everything in Seed, and built for a growing family: your first two children included (additional children $79/yr), each child's Learning Twin, subject-by-subject pacing and milestone tracking, on-demand activities that know your house, faith & heritage layers, ESA documentation and management, and the Teaching Academy. **Garden ($499/yr, founding membership)** — everything in Bloom plus the verified parent community, local family discovery, live sessions, and educator office hours — and a hand in shaping what comes next. Every plan starts with 14 days of Bloom, and you can change plans anytime.

RubyLou generates your actual weekly plan — the lessons, the sequence, the daily rhythm — built around real books and materials. Many weeks use things you already own (you tell us what's in your supply drawer during setup) plus library books; when a plan calls for a specific book, we tell you exactly which one and favor library and used copies over new purchases. You'll never open a week and find a vague "teach math today."

Cancel anytime; your access runs through your paid period. Your records — compliance logs, portfolios, ESA documentation — are yours: export them whenever you like, before or after cancelling. We never hold a family's own records hostage.

A chatbot gives you a plausible-sounding answer and moves on. RubyLou is a system built around one job, with structure a chat window can't have. Your plan starts from your philosophy and your child's profile, draws on a curated knowledge base of real books, methods, and materials (not the open internet), and is generated inside strict guardrails: every week must pass a fixed structural contract, a set of deterministic checks, and an independent quality review before you ever see it. Weeks are generated a few at a time and adapt as your child grows — informed by your check-ins, not locked to a September guess. And the founder still grades generated weeks by hand against a published rubric; when the system and a discerning human disagree, the human wins and the system is corrected. You can absolutely ask a chatbot for a lesson plan. You can't ask it to know your state's law, remember your child's reading level from three weeks ago, stay faithful to Charlotte Mason's actual method, and prove its work passed inspection.

Several layers, all of them boring on purpose. Every generated week must match a fixed structure before it can be saved or shown. Deterministic checks catch broken or rule-violating content. An independent automated reviewer grades pedagogy quality — and it's regularly tested with deliberately bad weeks to prove it actually fails them. Cost and generation limits prevent runaway behavior. Human review is built into the development process, and the parent has the final word on every block of every week: accept it, edit it, swap it, or skip it — no guilt, no questions.

During setup you tell us your real teaching capacity — hours per day, days per week, your confidence level — and whether your week includes co-op days, school days, or a working parent's schedule. The plan is built inside that reality: a family with ninety minutes a day gets a rich ninety-minute plan, not a guilt-inducing six-hour one. Your daily check-ins ("good day / some friction / a hard one") quietly teach RubyLou when the load is wrong, and the plan adjusts. Rest is scheduled with the same care as lessons.

Overwhelm in homeschooling usually comes from three places: planning load, uncertainty ("am I doing enough?"), and isolation. RubyLou takes the planning hours off your plate, replaces the 9pm Pinterest spiral with a week that's already built. The compliance tracker answers "am I doing enough?" with your state's actual requirements instead of anxiety. The Teaching Academy builds your confidence as a teacher, the check-ins keep your load honest, and the Garden community means you're never the only one. And we never use pressure tactics, rankings, or red warnings — there is no such thing as falling short in RubyLou, because the plan bends to your family, not the reverse.

Short, practical parent training matched to your philosophy: how to run a narration, what a Montessori work cycle looks like at your kitchen table, how to teach a subject you're nervous about, how to recognize and protect your own energy. It's included with Bloom and Garden — because the biggest variable in home education isn't the curriculum, it's the confidence of the person teaching it.

Tell us what you're using during setup — Saxon Math, The Good and the Beautiful, anything — and whether you plan to keep it or transition away. If you're keeping it, RubyLou plans *around* it: your math slot stays yours, and RubyLou builds the rest of the week to complement it. Deeper integration (picking up exactly where you are, chapter by chapter) is on our near-term roadmap.

The Library is a living-books collection matched to your philosophy and your child — real titles, not worksheets — with local library availability so most of your reading list is free. It feeds the curriculum: when your week includes a read-aloud, it's a specific book chosen for your child's level and interests. Included with Bloom and Garden.

On every plan, your weekly plan includes activities built from your philosophy, your child's interests, and what's already in your supply closet. On Bloom and Garden you can also create an activity on demand ("we have an hour and a rainy afternoon"). Yes to multiple children: each child gets their own level-appropriate thread, and the week deliberately includes shared moments — morning baskets, nature walks, read-alouds — where the family learns together.

If your state has an Education Savings Account or similar program, RubyLou (Bloom and Garden) helps you use it correctly and calmly: we track your receipts, check purchases against your state's actual published rules, flag anything uncertain for review — honestly, not optimistically — and prepare organized documentation packets for you to submit. Every state's rules in our system carry a "last verified" date and are re-verified on a schedule. You always submit to your state yourself; RubyLou organizes, you stay in control.

RubyLou tracks your state's homeschool requirements — hours, subjects, notices, assessments — and keeps your records ready, with plain-English explanations and links to the actual statutes. Every state page carries a "last verified" date, and your state's published regulations are always the authoritative source.

Yes. Homeschooled students go to college every year, and RubyLou's High School Track (add-on) is built for exactly this: course and credit tracking, and a transcript that builds automatically as credits complete. Your records, work samples, and portfolio live in RubyLou all along, so nothing needs reconstructing senior year.

No — if anything, the opposite. RubyLou has no child accounts and no child-facing screens; it's a tool for you, used in the minutes you'd otherwise spend planning. The weeks it builds are full of the analog things home education does best: real books, handwork, nature, conversation. Pediatric guidance increasingly emphasizes that what matters is content and co-engagement, not just minutes — and RubyLou's whole design keeps the screen in the parent's hands and the learning in the real world.

RubyLou is currently in English. Foreign-language *learning* can be part of your child's week — language practice appears in plans where it fits your approach — though we don't yet generate full foreign-language curricula. Both are on the roadmap; founding families help set its order.

This is where being a parent-only platform matters. Children never have accounts, we collect the minimum about them (a first name or nickname and birth month — never full birth dates, never medical records; learning-difference fields are optional, from a fixed list, and exist only to personalize), every family's data is isolated at the database layer with automated tests guarding that isolation on every change, we never sell data, we show no ads, and your family's information is never used to train AI models. You can export everything and delete your account at any time.

The Garden community is a verified network of homeschool parents: every member passes a third-party background check before joining, discovery is parent-to-parent (children have no presence on the platform), and matching is based on your philosophy, your children's ages, and your area — so a co-op day or park meetup starts from real compatibility, not a cold Facebook post.

Most tools give you one piece: a curriculum in a box that doesn't know your child, a planner that doesn't fill itself, a compliance app that doesn't teach, or a chatbot that doesn't know your state's law from a lullaby. RubyLou is the whole garden — philosophy-faithful curriculum that adapts weekly, compliance and ESA handled, a library that feeds the plan, training that builds your confidence, and a verified community — designed by people who believe the parent, not the platform, is the teacher. And it's built calm on purpose: no pressure, no rankings, no red. The plan serves your family; your family never serves the plan. ---

That's not a problem to fix — it's how children actually learn, and RubyLou is built for it. Each subject carries its own level: a reader two years ahead and a mathematician right on rhythm can be the same child, and the week honors both without ceremony.

We hope so, and we built with your family in mind. During setup you can (optionally, always optionally) tell us what helps us fit learning to your child — ADHD, dyslexia, sensory needs, and more — and plans adapt in practical ways: pacing, format, movement. We never ask for diagnoses or medical records, and "prefer not to say" is always a first-class answer.

Faith-integrated education is one of our nineteen supported approaches today, and a richer faith-and-heritage layer — weaving your tradition through any philosophy's materials — is in design. Founding families will shape it.

About fifteen minutes to set up, and about twenty seconds a day after that — the daily check-in is three taps. The whole point is to give you hours back, not add a dashboard to manage.

RubyLou was founded by Kaitlin Ruby — built in Boulder, Colorado with a conviction that home education deserves tools as thoughtful as the families who choose it.