Grades 1-8 · 10 minutes a day · 7-day free trial

Ten minutes a day, before it becomes “I’m just bad at math.”

BrightStep is a ten-minute daily learning check-in for children in grades 1-8, used by families anywhere in the US. It adjusts to what they can already do, then tells them to go play.

You already keep track of school. You’ve looked at tutoring and seen what an hour costs. BrightStep is the practice in between: a short session that ends on its own, and a dashboard that shows you the exact questions they keep missing.

Start the free week before the next report card See sample questions

One account covers every child · Cancel anytime · No ads, and nothing is ever sold to your child

What some of our early users say

Their own words, unedited.

My daughter was behind for her grade and now she feels all caught up with her reading and math.

Marina, parent. Her daughter did it 15 of her first 21 days.

Allowed me to keep my girls engaged on a long overseas vacation, and they feel comfortable with their back to school.

Marcela, parent (early user)

Shared with families by a school PTA.

You’re not guessing what “needs practice” means anymore.

The grown-up dashboard shows accuracy and difficulty for every subject, the standards behind the questions they missed, in plain words, and the exact questions they keep getting wrong. Check it when you want. Not every night.

The Practice more panel: grade-level standards named in plain words, each with how many questions were missed — What to practice, named the way the standard reads. Not a code.

The Keeps missing panel: the actual questions a child has gotten wrong, with how many times — The actual questions, worst first. Five minutes together, and you know where to spend them.

A child's home page: five of six subjects done for the day, streak and stars at the top — Their side of it: five of six done, then go play.

This is what the teacher meant by practice.

What a 10-minute daily learning routine actually does

It runs itself

No lesson planning, no printing, no worksheets to hunt down, no nagging. Your child opens it, does their check-in, and it's done. You look at the parent dashboard when you feel like it, not every night.

An after-school routine that sticks

The same short session every day, at whatever time fits your family: after school, before dinner, or over the summer to hold the ground they gained. Streaks and points make it theirs, and a deep question bank keeps daily math and reading practice fresh instead of repetitive.

They start it without being asked

Because it's short enough to finish and theirs to own. Underneath, real questions about starting the hard thing first, beating distraction, keeping a promise to yourself, and getting back up after a bad grade, taught on purpose, not left to chance.

Confidence in real subjects

Difficulty adapts to each child: hard enough to challenge them, never so hard they quit. Aligned to Common Core and NGSS, so practice reinforces what they learn in school.

See the actual grade-level questions

Every question is written for one specific grade, and the academic ones are tagged to a Common Core or NGSS standard, so a fifth grader and a sixth grader never see the same set. A session is four questions in grades 1-2, five in grades 3-5, and six in grades 6-8. The difficulty then moves with your child: hard enough to be worth doing, never so hard they quit.

Math · Grade 5

A store sells 12 notebooks for $6.00. Another sells 8 for $4.40. Which is the better price per notebook?

Real reasoning, not drill-and-kill.

Life Skills · Grade 7

Research suggests procrastination is usually about…

✓ avoiding an uncomfortable feeling like boredom or fear of failing

Why “just try harder” never worked.

Life Skills · Grade 2

When you can NAME a feeling out loud, it usually…

✓ gets a little smaller

Naming an emotion genuinely reduces it.

Off-screen · Grade 2

Ask a grown-up at home: “What was the best part of YOUR day?” Then really listen.

Some of the best activities happen away from the app.

See sample questions

Built to be finished, not lingered in.

This is the real interface, and the real feedback a child gets the moment they answer.

Every question explains itself, right or wrong.

📱 Works on iPad and iPhone with a custom app icon. Add it to the Home Screen in about twenty seconds. It opens full screen with no browser bars, and there is no App Store download.

In writing, they build the sentence.

Every writing session ends with a stretch. It starts with something plain, like “The dog ran.”, and your child grows it one piece at a time: what kind, how, where, why. Each piece lands on the board in its own color. Tap the wrong kind of word and it says what that word does instead, so they learn the job each piece is doing.

Older kids get the harder moves: a clause that adds a twist, an aside between commas, what happened because of it. Then they stretch one on their own. That part isn't marked right or wrong, and what they type is never saved.

The rest of learning belongs here too.

Reading and Math keep skills sharp. But the part parents tell us matters most is the rest of it: a child learning to start the hard thing first, to notice what set them off at school, to say “I just want you to listen right now” instead of slamming a door, and to ask a parent about their day.

Those are in here on purpose, written for each grade, and many of them are activities to go do rather than questions to answer.

Our family: the original test group.

Why we built BrightStep

When summer vacation started, I wanted to keep our kids engaged with a little schoolwork. But I didn't want it to be a burden, not on them, and honestly not on us either. Nobody wanted to spend the summer nagging.

I didn't want another app that spikes them up and lets them crash after. I wanted something short that repeats what they're already learning at school, and that builds a routine they keep on their own. That's when we started putting BrightStep together.

It worked better than we expected. Lately, two of my boys are on it three or four days a week. Not every day, and not every day a full one. But they ask for it, on weekends when nobody's making them, and even when we're away on a trip like the one in that photo.

Then other parents started asking whether their kids could use it too, and one of them gave us the idea for the chore list. Enough of them asked that we decided to open it up. It felt wrong to keep it to ourselves.

What you get as a parent

You can see whether it’s working without turning it into another thing you have to manage.

A dashboard behind a PIN

Accuracy and difficulty for every subject, what to practice more, the questions they keep missing, streaks, and a 14-day heatmap.

Screen-time limits you set

Three escalating levels. The hard stop pauses the app until you enter your PIN.

You approve the rewards

Stars buy avatars and real-life rewards at prices you set, or rewards you make up. Chores can earn stars too, if you turn them on. Nothing costs you anything without your say-so.

Privacy by design

First name and grade, nothing more. No ads, no tracking, no social features, no contact with strangers.

One plan. Every child.

Third grade and seventh grade on the same account. Each child gets their own profile, their own grade-level questions, and their own dashboard. You pay once for the house.

They earn it. You approve it.

Stars come from finishing the work. They buy avatars, and real-life rewards you set the price of: movie night, stay up thirty minutes, one you made up. Turn on chores and those earn stars too, with you approving each one. Nothing inside is sold to your child, and the only thing we ever mail is a plaque with their name on it, at 150 full days.

A child's chore list: make your bed, clear the table, take out the trash, each with an I did it button

What BrightStep won’t do

It ends.

Most apps built for children are designed to hold them longer. This one is designed to hand them back to you. When the screen-time limit you set runs out, the app stops. It doesn't beg for one more level.

It sells your child nothing.

No ads, no tracking, no in-app purchases, no social feed, no messages from strangers. We store a first name and a grade. That's the whole file.

It won't replace school.

Ten minutes a day is practice, not a curriculum. Anyone promising an app will teach your child a full year of math is selling you something. This keeps what they learned in class from leaking out.

It won't get longer.

Four questions a subject in grades 1-2, five in 3-5, six in 6-8, and that's the ceiling. A session a child can't finish is the session they quit, and a routine that breaks is worth nothing. In our house, a day on it averages under ten minutes.

What another year of this costs

An hour with a private tutor usually costs more than a month of BrightStep. A year is $250 for every child in the house, about 68¢ a day. Setup takes two minutes, and the first week is free.

The gap doesn’t hold still while you decide. It widens quietly, and somewhere in there a child stops saying “this is hard” and starts saying “I’m just bad at this”, which costs far more to undo than to prevent.

Start the free week before the next report card

Worried they’ll use it twice and lose interest? That’s exactly what the free week is for. By day seven, look at one thing: are they opening it without being asked? If not, cancel in two clicks and pay nothing.