Unlock Your Parent Potential

The most powerful learning tool your child has is already at home.

It’s cheaper than a tutor and much more engaging than a learning app.

It’s you.


A collection of art supplies on a white textured surface including a blue plastic container filled with Crayola crayons, a yellow pencil resting on top, a pair of blue scissors, a black plastic jar, and a book titled "The Art of Paula Pettay" with a color-block cover in blue, green, yellow, red, and black.

Parent Potential empowers parents to play a confident, meaningful role in their child’s learning during the critical kindergarten through third-grade years. Through just 20 minutes of positive, focused time a few times each week, families will create consistent, high-impact learning moments—no teaching experience required.

A clock with a red and white face, showing 20 minutes, with half the clock in red and the other half in white.

Built around simple routines, learning target cards, and a shared family notebook, the program strengthens parent-child connection, supports academic growth, and helps learning at home feel doable, joyful, and sustainable

A man and a young girl sitting at a table, looking at each other, with the man smiling and the girl appearing curious.

Here’s How It Works

The Parent Potential Toolkit includes:

  • Training modules on 5 Routines

  • A set of Learning Target Cards

  • A Learning Notebook

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.

Next Level Support

Want More? Parent Potential also offers live support from Mr.M or his team of teachers to answer questions or through virtual sessions. Click here for more info:

The Toolkit
Ask Mr.M

Our 5 Routines

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Join a movement in the making!

Follow Parent Potential on one of these platforms and get insights from Mr.M that can transform your family’s life. There are so many moments each day as parents we can maximize with some tips and tricks from educators. Here is our latest tip:

You are the sunshine for your little flower.

The Blog

A Father’s Story

“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 flipping a switch.

From practical advice like “letting the kid have a say in the background of his zoom screen will give the kid more confidence and maybe get him to participate more.” to more direct instruction; “kids don’t learn gradually. They learn in jumps. It’s long stretches of seemingly no learning, then a light bulb, boom – they get it.”

Mr. M has seemingly seen it all. ”
— Albert

Using the Toolkit

Choose a card

A man and young girl playing a card game together at a table. The man is wearing glasses and a green plaid shirt, smiling as he reaches for a card. The girl has red hair in pigtails and is wearing a yellow shirt, smiling and looking at the cards.

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!

A spiral planner opened to a page with 12 small monthly calendars for each month of the year, organized in three columns and four rows. Each calendar has colored dots marking specific days.
Red poster with white and orange text and icons. It mentions "2nd" and "the Parent Partnership." Icons depict two people talking, a person reading a book, and a bed with a moon. Contains a QR code at the bottom.

Work on it

A man with glasses and a beard showing a red phone to a laughing girl with curly hair in pigtails, seated at a table against a light-colored background.

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)

A child's drawing showing a television on a stand, with a person watching it. The tv screen displays a person and a star. Two pictures are hanging on the wall, one with an 'A' and another with children. Below the drawing, there is handwritten text that talks about Mr. Pursly watching TV and a story about shooting stars.
Educational worksheet with instructions to discuss child's ability to categorize words by concepts and shades of meaning. Includes a list of categories: Clothes, Plants, Tools, Weather, Forest Animals. Contains a section to write words for each category and a colorful grid with images representing Food, Clothes, Shapes, and Vehicles.
A man and a young girl playing a card game at a table, both smiling and reaching for cards. The man has glasses, a beard, and is wearing a green plaid shirt. The girl has curly red hair in pigtails and is wearing an orange shirt. There are colorful cards on the table.

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.

A cluttered desk with snack packs, children's drawings, and handwritten notes, including a pink box with 'GRAZIA I COG' written, a blue box of fig bars with 'Great Job' written on it, and a card with colorful drawings of a house, sun, and animals.
A collection of colorful owl stickers organized by seasons, including fall, winter, spring, and summer, with matching empty puzzle spaces numbered 1 to 14 for each season.
A cartoon man with glasses and a beard looks worried as a young girl with pigtails reaches for a red and green UNO card on a table, with additional UNO cards in front of her.

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!

A man in a suit showing a green card to a woman in a classroom or library setting with books and posters in the background. They are sitting at a table with colorful cards laid out.
A colorful logo with purple, red, yellow, and blue blocks, and the words 'Parent Potential' written at the bottom.