Unlock Your Parent Potential
As an public school educator and leader for over 20 years, I have learned that you—the parent—will have the most impact on your child's education and success. It’s not from digital learning apps, tutoring sessions, or anything external.
It comes from you.
We know you are busy. Those emails keep pinging, but once you put the phone down, this is easier than you think!
The Parent Potential is a structured, time-efficient program that equips parents to confidently support their child’s academic growth in kindergarten through third grade.
With just 20 minutes of focused, positive interaction 2-3 times per week, parents can meaningfully reinforce learning at home—without needing teaching expertise or extensive preparation.
Like sunlight helps a flower grow,
YOUR
positive attention
will help your child reach their full potential.
Our flexible routines encourage higher-level thinking based on Bloom’s Taxonomy and are adaptable to everyday situations, like commuting in a car ride or settling in at bedtime with a story.
Want to learn more?
Or visit our It Takes Village blog to explore why real learning still starts with a human, a notebook, and a pencil.
Here’s How It Works
The Parent Potential toolkit includes:
A set of Learning Target Cards
A Notebook
Training on the 5 Routines
These resources help you support, introduce, and explain every Common Core standard for your child’s grade level in a way that feels natural for you.
With the purchase of the kit, you will have access through a QR code to a wealth of training videos, resources, and tips from teachers at your child’s grade level.
Our 5 Routines
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You may have already built a space to read stories together as they fall asleep. Using this routines, you will develop questions and prompts that siblings can even ask each other as they build their higher level analysis of literature and informational texts.
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Using principals of Socratic Seminar, you will be able to use careful questioning and prompting to develop understandings of certain concepts. Sometimes these are around bedtime stories, but sometimes they make for a great car talk.
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sing an old school teacher framework of “I do”
”We Do” “You Do” you will be able to model your thinking out loud and prompt your student to become independent on certain skills. -
This might be the most fast moving routine of them all. It is important to find your preference, some parents enjoy using the encyclopedia or dictionary, some prefer Google, and others want to model how to prompt AI resources. These are all options within these routine cards.
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You speak, they listen and write. From letter names and sounds to writing grammatically complex sentences, there are many skills covered by this routine that help your student be the best reader and writer they can be.
The Parent Potential program provides video tutorials on each of the five routines.
These guided activities are designed to enhance your work together.
You will witness a deeper bond with your child as you engage in their educational journey together. You'll notice their confidence soar in the classroom as they become more comfortable with concepts that may have previously seemed daunting.
Learning Target Card Deck
The Learning Target deck is available for students in Kindergarten through 3rd grade. Each card is aligned to a Common Core Standard, but structured to translate the requirements into accessible and specific activities, to acheive these standards.
The visual design of the cards uses icons, symbols and color coding to guide you to quickly sort and select the right card for the right time. For example, the routines for the learning activity are represented by an icon on the front of the card, as you may want a storytime card for bedtime or a discussion card for the next car trip.
Some cards feature an anchor symbol, indicating that they align with a Common Core essential standard. These standards focus on key concepts that are foundational for future learning. Essential standards are addressed either through a Project series of cards, or a Habit card, which is designed to be revisited throughout the year.
The back of the card provides a ready-to-use script to guide your conversation and a carefully designed activity that you can use to present and practice the skill or knowledge required to acheive the standard.
It’s important to realize that these are guides to start your journey. You bring the potential to encourage exploration and to build on the knowledge and skills in a way that fits your family.
The Notebook
Our notebook is designed to give you a flexible space to a work on and practice the activities in the Learning Target Cards.
Our program is based on the principles of Universal Design For Learning, a teaching theory that embraces the understanding that every student learns in a different way.
The front inside cover of the notebook is a calendar. It is where you and your child can schedule meetings and set goals for each month. It is important to note that we set goals based on how many cards you tried together, not how many you mastered.
The notebook is divided into language arts and math by “Anchor” learning target checklists for each subject.
In the Language Arts section, the page design is perfect for journaling, practicing the Listen and Write Routine, and drafting longer writing activities.
In the Math section, the graph paper provides a place to model and practice a range of problems and capture thinking behind topics like place value, area and geometry and fractions.
At the back of the notebook is a page where you can celebrate your progress.
Every time you complete a card, you can place a sticker on a space. Fill in all spaces to complete a sticker puzzle for each academic term.
Using the Program
Choose a card
Use the notebook to make a few “appointments” for the month with your child. Use the routine icons on the front of the card to select what you both feel like doing.
It can be more efficient to sort out cards by the routines and place piles where you will use them the most!
Work on it
Use the back of the card to guide you through the scripted activity. Each card leaves lots of room to take this into new places and make it your own.
The QR code on the front of the card will take you to a grade level support page with further training videos for the routines and activities at this age.
If you are using a Project card, make sure you follow the series in order (ie Card A, B and C)
Celebrate!
After your 20 minutes together, soak in the moment. You have connected with something your child will see (or has already seen) in class.
We recommend you build a box or place to put the cards you finished and pull the next sticker on the puzzle in your notebook.
Help is there
If you run into confusion, you are welcome to click on the “Ask Mr.M” button on our website. If you need further support, we offer hourly sessions with Mr.M and other expert teachers to deepen your practice.
Don’t be shy to share any confusion with your teacher, as this information allows them to target their time with your child in class!
Our Story
Hi, its Mr.M. I am a career educator, teacher mentor, and school leader. I began my journey in 2004 as an elementary school teacher in Downtown Los Angeles, where I quickly learned that academic success starts with breaking learning down to skill level and empowering students and families to partner with the school.
Over the years, I developed methods rooted in Universal Design for Learning (UDL)—strategies that meet diverse learning needs and make content accessible to all. These practices became the foundation of my work both in the classroom and later as a principal, where I mentored teachers in both charter networks and traditional school districts.
With the introduction of the Common Core Standards and their emphasis on critical thinking, I dove deeper into Bloom’s Taxonomy, an educational framework that describes levels of cognitive learning—from simple recall to complex analysis and synthesis.
My passion has always been clear: to help students and families take the wheel in their learning journey. That belief continues to drive everything I do.
When COVID-19 hit, schools shut down and students were sent home—many without internet or computers. It took months before state-funded hotspots and Chromebooks reached our families. In that critical gap, Parent Potential was born.
I focused on empowering parents to become instructional aides at home. We provided them with grade-level learning targets and simple, effective routines to support learning—no tech required.
By 2022, our school, Everest Value, had set itself apart. Thanks to consistent use of these methods, our students showed significant growth on the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium), the national benchmark for Common Core proficiency.
In 2019, 45% of Everest students were proficient in Math and ELA. By 2022, that number rose to 52.5%—while state and district averages declined. California’s average dropped by 4%, with LAUSD falling below 35% proficiency.
Below is a testimonial from Albert, a fellow parent who reached out during remote learning—and became one of our first success stories.
A Father’s Experience
Like so many parents we found ourselves trying to teach our kids at home with mild success and the focus spent on just keeping the kids quiet so we could work from home. It didn't take long to realize that without any experience, training or patience for teaching the only ones really suffering from distance learning were the kids.
My wife convinced me to ask for help.
In the meantime Chris was spearheading a vocational training for parents unfamiliar with education for the public charter school in Los Angeles where he serves as its principal and substitute math or language arts teacher for any class Kindergarten to Eighth Grade.
I've known Chris for almost twenty years and I always remembered he said, "in third grade, kids go from learning to read to reading to learn." Chris is a raconteur with deep practical knowledge of education and learning. He was kind enough to take my call and explain just a few basic concepts to me. I couldn't believe how much confidence that tiny little bit of knowledge gave me and helped the kids become more intrinsically motivated to learn. Like shining a light.” - Albert
