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Visionaries Welcome!

HOME is a nature-based, homeschool bridge that welcomes profoundly dyslexic learners to connect with nature at Rising Oak Nature Education and thrive with personalized, 1:1 academic support, reflecting real-time, ongoing research into the science of learning and reading.

Learn More About Our Application Process

OUR MISSION

Provide scalable, comprehensive, personalized assessment and remediation of dyslexia in order to:

  • Harness each individuals diverse and full potential to contribute in their community and world

  • Advance social equity and harmony

  • Enable broader 21st century education reform by transforming models of school and education

At HOME we focus on:

Honoring nature and the interdependence of all living things.

Green letter H inside a green circle.
Illustration of a large green tree on a grassy hill

One-on-one, personalized curriculum design and delivery for literacy and math

A green circular symbol with a dark green outline and a dark green inner circle, resembling a target or a logo.
Drawing of three stacked hardcover books with green covers.

Meaning, belonging and understanding of our ourselves, our community, our environment and world

Green letter 'M' inside a green circle.
Green and white illustration of Earth focusing on North and South America.

Experiencing joy and wonder every day with our school community

A green letter E inside a green circle.
Illustration of a yellow sun with rays, surrounded by white flowers and green leaves.
Green oak leaf with multiple lobes and a central stem.

The HOME program is designed with the following Core beliefs:

A young girl with brown hair, wearing a gray jacket and black pants, sitting on a large rock in a wooded area. She is drawing in a small spiral notebook with a yellow pencil, holding it with her right hand and resting her arm on her lap. She is wearing colorful sneakers with pink, purple, and blue accents. The ground is covered with leaves and small plants, and there are trees and greenery surrounding her.

Personalized Education

All children deserve a personalized education designed to help them achieve their fullest potential while developing their curiosity, desire and ability to become life-long learners.

Six children wading in a shallow creek surrounded by dense green foliage, with some of them reading books.

Grounded in Nature

In an increasingly digital world, nature provides an ideal environment for grounding our nervous systems and optimizing our ability to do the ‘hard work’ of learning. We find deep connections and wisdom in experiencing nature as an essential teacher.

Shadow of seven people standing at the edge of a shallow lake with a grassy shoreline and trees in the background.

Connection

All children deserve to feel a sense of belonging in their community and require this connection to thrive; Thriving requires both broad and deep social connections and an understanding that we each have a responsibility to to develop and contribute our own unique gifts and talents back to the whole .

Child with messy hair holding a leaf and looking through a magnifying glass outdoors.

Joy and Wonder

These fundamentally human experiences should be intentionally cultivated every day. We especially need to bring these experiences into learning for this historically underserved population of students.

A green oak leaf with visible veins.

A Few Important FAQs

  • HOME is designed for profoundly dyslexic learners who require personalized assessment, sequenced intervention and 1:1 program delivery for language arts and math in order to achieve their full potential. We have a handful of spots in our inaugural cohort available for the 2025/2026 school year.

  • Dyslexia exists on a continuum and while about 20% of the total population is estimated to have a dyslexic profile, a small fraction of this population will present with profound dyslexia. Dyslexia diagnosis do not generally indicate if your child’s dyslexia is mild, moderate or profound.  However, profound dyslexia is often characterized by extreme test scores and long-term struggles learning to read even with solid, professional dyslexia tutoring. Profound dyslexia also, almost always, presents with co-existent learning conditions including attention and executive functioning challenges further compounding struggles with learning.  

    When your child’s dyslexia is profound, you have likely found it extremely difficult to navigate school systems.  Public schools have limited resources to support this complex profile which often leads to these students being underserved and falling farther and farther behind their peers. Private schools, even those designed specifically for dyslexic learners, often won’t accept profoundly affected students due to their complex learning needs, closing that avenue to your child. Families may resort to homeschooling and private tutoring which allows you to fully customize your curriculum but leaves you without a school community.  With the HOME program, we want to end this cycle for children and their families.  Profound dyslexia should not disqualify these brilliant minds from school and a sense of belonging. Their unique learning styles are simultaneously their greatest challenge and gift.  And if we fail to address the challenge, we collectively lose the gifts. 

  • HOME is the only program of its kind in the Bay Area, inviting kids to belong in a school community while simultaneously providing ongoing 1:1 assessment, remediation and support recommendations for their individual learning needs in language arts and math. We do this by providing a tightly knit community of diverse, multi-age learners.  Some of our peers learn to read in a typical fashion, some have more mild forms of dyslexia and others experience dyslexia profoundly. By doing our learning together, the multi age group normalizes the variations in reading abilities across learners. Some students are learning to read and other students are reading to learn. By removing expectations and  teaching methods that require students to read fluently by a certain age, we remove literacy as a gate to learning in our program, while simultaneously doing the deep work to unlock literacy for our most challenged learners. Profoundly dyslexic students will not thrive when they are blindly plugged into commercial programs. While we can’t offer unlimited programs on campus, we can commit to partnering with you to create a coherent, prioritized, sequenced learning plan to help identify and address underlying deficits that may be preventing your child from reaching their potential.  We are looking to partner with families who want to jointly tackle these challenges and be part of finding solutions for their own child and our children collectively.

  • As a homeschool bridge program, HOME students learn together in Rising Oak’s vibrant, multi-age community of approximately 30 learners, Monday - Thursday from 8:30 AM - 3:00 PM.  Tuesdays and Thursdays focus on enrichment including art, drama, service learning, gardening, and animal husbandry. Mondays and Wednesdays provide a deep focus on math, reading, and writing.  While Rising Oak students do their math, reading and writing work in small groups based on personal progress and growth, HOME students take this time to work 1:1, for the entire block of time, with educational therapists and specialists at their precise level and on their personal goals for growth. 

    A sample schedule for a Monday/Wednesday is listed below: 

    • 8:30-9am free play 

    • 9am - morning meeting/jobs

    • 9:15am - math

    • 10am - 10:45 - snack and recess

    • 10:45 - 12pm - ELA 

    • 12pm - 1pm - lunch and recess

    • 1 - 1:30pm - read aloud 

    • 1:30 - 2:35pm - Writing/handwriting

    • 2:35 - 3pm - end of day clean up and wrap up

HOME @ Rising Oak Enrollment Process

  1. Registration Request

    Please send an email to info@homeatrisingoak.com to let us know you are interested in learning more about the process.

  2. Virtual Chat

    We will set up a time to meet online and learn more about your child’s learning journey to date, any assessments you may have received, and what you are seeking in a program. We will also use this time to answer questions that you might have about Rising Oak or the HOME program so you can assess if applying is the right next step for your family.

  3. Application and School Visit

    When you decide to apply to the HOME program you are simultaneously applying to Rising Oak Nature Education. You will be co-enrolled in both programs. Your child will experience the full community and curriculum offered by Rising Oak  and the additional HOME service of 1:1 educational support during each of their literacy and math blocks. This will include roughly 4 hours/week of personalized curriculum delivery through HOME.

    After you’ve completed the Rising Oak application, we will contact you to arrange a tour. 

  4. Applicant Review

    In our inaugural year of HOME, we only have a few spots available. This will significantly limit our ability to enroll students who might be well suited to the program. The program prioritizes students whose previous school experiences indicate a profoundly dyslexia learning profile. And, because you are co-enrolling in Rising Oak, we will also be considering how your child fits into the social fabric of that community of approximately 30, multi-age learners. If finding the right school has been difficult for your family, we want to be absolutely mindful of ensuring our program can deliver what you and your family want and need for your child at this time.  We are committed to making and sharing these conversations with you openly and offering enrollment where we feel we can help your child experience success and joy.

  5. Register for the 2025/26 School Year

    When your family, Rising Oak and the HOME program feel like the right match, prospective families will be invited to register.

We can not wait to welcome you HOME!