Curriculum · August 25, 2026 · 10 min read

You Are the Principal Now

A principal does not typically write the lesson plans. They decide what gets taught, in what order, and when a class is ready to move on. That is the job Primer hands you.

It is worth being precise about which job that is, because curriculum shopping is exhausting for a reason that usually goes unnamed. A packaged curriculum bundles two completely different decisions and sells them as one: what my student should learn and who writes the lessons. You almost never wanted control of the second one. Nobody starts homeschooling because they were excited to draft objectives on a Sunday night. But to get any say over the first, you had to buy both, and then live inside somebody else's opinion about pace and order for a year.

Primer splits those apart. You keep the plan. It writes the lessons.

Three words do the work, and they fit together in one direction:

That is the whole model. Once those three words are straight, every screen in the product makes sense, and more importantly you can tell at a glance which decisions are yours. Here is each layer, and where you hold the pen.

A skill is what a school would call a subject: Handwriting, Fractions, Geography, US History, Reading Fluency. You choose a focus area first, then check the ones you want. Nothing turns on until you add it.

Add Skills six focus areas, K through 12

Two things on this screen are easy to skim past and worth slowing down for.

The first is that each skill states its own scope. "Geography: maps, regions, physical features, human-environment interactions (K to 8)." You are not decoding a catalog number, you are reading a sentence and deciding yes or no. That is the difference between planning a year and shopping for one.

The second is the grade band filter, Elementary, Middle, High, All. It filters the list you are browsing. It is not a declaration about your student. Nothing stops you adding an Elementary reading skill and a Middle math skill to the same child, which is exactly the situation a great many homeschooled kids are actually in, and exactly the situation a boxed grade-level curriculum handles worst.

What you have switched on shows up as a short list you can edit at any time.

Current Skills add or drop, any time

Look at what is sitting in that list next to Fractions: Becoming a Horse Veterinarian. That is not a category Primer ships. It is a sentence a parent typed, and it now behaves like any other skill in the system, with its own path, its own progress, and its own place in the curriculum. To Primer there is no distinction between a standards-based skill and one you invented. If you have not seen how that gets built, it is the subject of You Decide What They Study.

Add Fractions and Primer breaks it into sequenced lessons, each resting on the one before: Fractions as Numbers, then Equivalent Fractions, then Build Fractions, then Fractions and Decimals, Add and Subtract Fractions, Fractions as Division.

Path Fractions

You can read your student's whole position in this skill from three visual cues, which is the point of the screen. Lesson one is struck through, so it is done. Lesson two carries the amber circle, so that is where they are working right now. Everything below is queued.

The most useful number here is the small one on the right of each row, which is the typical grade level for that lesson. Read down the column in the screenshot and it goes 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5. That tells you something a single grade label on a boxed curriculum never could: this one skill spans three years of school. Fractions is not a fourth-grade topic that a fourth grader finishes in fourth grade. It is a ladder that starts in third and finishes in fifth, and your student climbs it at whatever rate they climb it.

It also gives you a sanity check. If a path opens on a grade number well above where your student is, that is worth catching before they meet it, not after.

The order is a proposal, not a verdict. Every row on this screen can be moved, retired or added to, which is further down. The controls are the same ones used everywhere else in the Path view, covered in From Intake to First Lessons.

Opening a single lesson

Expand any lesson and you get the objective it teaches, in plain language, plus the decisions that are yours alone.

Lesson Add and Subtract Fractions, expanded

Read that objective again, because the register of it matters. "The student will add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators (including mixed numbers) by replacing given fractions with equivalent fractions in such a way as to produce an equivalent sum or difference of fractions with like denominators."

That is not marketing language. It is the flat, testable phrasing of a standards document, and it is written that way on purpose: an objective in that form can be checked. Either your student can do the thing or they cannot. Compare it to how a curriculum catalog usually describes a unit, which is with adjectives.

As the newsletter put it: you never have to write an objective. You do get to read every one before your student sees it. Those are different privileges, and the second one is the one that actually matters when somebody asks you in April what your kid covered.

Then the five buttons, which answer two separate questions:

• Where should my student be right now? Start here now and Start here next move the amber circle, either immediately or once the current lesson wraps.
• Does this lesson still belong in the queue? Mark mastered if they already have it, Skip if it does not belong in your lesson plan, and Moving on alongside them.

The distinction inside that second group is worth holding on to, because the two obvious buttons mean genuinely different things. Mark mastered is a claim about your student: they can do this, so Primer should record it as known and stop teaching toward it. Skip is a claim about your plan: this does not belong in what we are doing, regardless of whether they could do it. A kid who covered fractions of a cup all summer in the kitchen gets mastered. A lesson on a topic you have decided to handle another year gets skipped. Reaching for the wrong one does not break anything, but it does put a slightly wrong story into your records.

Reshaping the ladder

If you see a gap, you are not stuck with the ladder as generated. Add a missing topic sits between any two lessons and drops a new mastery topic in ahead of the one below it.

Add a missing topic between Build Fractions and Fractions and Decimals

Notice that the button appears in a position rather than at the bottom of the list. Where you click is the input. You are not filing a request for a topic to be added somewhere; you are saying "this belongs here, before that." Which is the right shape for the problem, since a missing prerequisite is only missing relative to the lesson it should have come before.

The order itself is just as editable. If the ladder has everything it needs but the sequence is not what you want, drag any lesson to a new position and the numbering resequences around it. Nothing about the generated order is locked, and nothing about your change is either: drag it back if you were wrong.

Worth being clear about why you would. The generated sequence is Primer's reading of what depends on what, and on the prerequisite question it is usually right. What it cannot know is that your co-op is covering decimals in November, or that a field trip next week makes Fractions and Decimals land better now than in six weeks, or that you would rather get Add and Subtract Fractions done while your student is still interested in it. Those are scheduling facts about your family, not facts about fractions. You are the only one holding them.

Between the two edits you can get almost any ladder you want out of a generated one: insert what is missing, drag what is in the wrong place, and mark mastered or skip what does not need teaching at all. What you end up with is a sequence you chose.

Your curriculum is every skill you have switched on, plus the paths running underneath them. Two skills in Mathematics, one in English Language Arts, a custom topic on horse veterinary work. Filter the Path view by subject, or choose All Subjects to see the whole lesson plan at once.

Which means the thing you are building is not a package you buy in August and follow until May. Drop a skill in October. Add Geography the week your kid asks about maps. Skip four lessons of a path because you covered them at the museum. The lesson plan changes when you change it, and it changes for one student, not a class of thirty.

That last clause is doing more work than it looks. The reason school curricula are rigid is not that educators like rigidity; it is that thirty students and one teacher make mid-year resequencing nearly impossible. Remove the thirty and the constraint evaporates. Most of what feels immovable about a curriculum is an artifact of class size, and you do not have a class.

When the plan looks right, you press Generate Lessons and the teaching starts. Primer writes every lesson against the plan you built, and writes them for this student: their interests worked into the examples, and the things they have already struggled with folded back in until they stick.

Who does what

The division of labor, stated plainly, because it is the thing to be clear on before you start:

The lesson planning is done for you. The decisions are not, and they should not be. You are the one who knows this student.

A twenty-minute first pass

If you are staring at an empty curriculum, the order that works is roughly this:

1. Add the non-negotiables first. Reading and math, at whatever band actually matches your student rather than their age. Two or three skills, not ten.
2. Add exactly one thing they asked for. A custom topic, in their words. This is what makes the plan theirs rather than yours, and it is the difference between a student who shows up and one you have to fetch.
3. Walk each new path top to bottom before anyone starts it. Read the grade numbers down the right side. Mark anything they already know as mastered.
4. Leave room. A first pass with four skills that actually run beats eight that quietly fall behind by Thanksgiving. You can add Geography in October, which is the entire point.
5. Then press Generate Lessons.

Step three is the one people skip and the one that pays. It is also this week's tip, because it is worth saying twice:

Tip of the day

Walk a new path top to bottom before your student starts it and mark anything they already know as mastered. Five minutes there saves a week of lessons they did not need.

What this does not save you from

One honest thing, since the pitch here is that the decisions stay with you: decisions you own are decisions you can get wrong. Primer will build a competent path through any skill you switch on, and it will faithfully generate lessons against a plan that has your student in the wrong grade band, or has nine skills running when your week holds four. It is not going to overrule you, which is the feature, and it is also the risk.

The mitigations are cheap and they are all in this post: read the grade numbers, walk the path before they do, start with fewer skills than you think you need. Twenty minutes of planning attention up front, and then Primer does the part that used to eat your Sunday nights.

You set the plan. Primer does the lesson writing, one student at a time.