Also known as the rallying cry for the back-to-school season. 

I’m in the era of parenting where each morning comes with multiple fashion-related tussles. Yesterday’s 8 AM tussle was about wearing a unicorn horn to school…I lost 🦄

How are y’all doing, Ammis and friends? Hanging in there, I hope.

There are certainly some ways I’ve been employing AI to make back-to-school smoother. I’m excited to share some of those tidbits with you. Plus, if you’re curious about AI’s role at school in the 2025-2026 academic year, we’ll be digging into that as well!

In today’s ammi.ai, you’ll discover:

Let’s grow! 🌿

First, a few fresh blooms from our garden:

Our biggest sale of the year is here! AI Literacy for Busy Moms™ is 66% off.

Only $99 or 3 monthly payments of $33.

This is our flagship, 5-module course that helps you cultivate real confidence in the AI age. Inside, you’ll:

✨ Want to try before you commit? You can view the syllabus here and preview the first chapter, Seeds: Adopting a Growth Mindset, for free. Get a feel for the course before you dig deeper.

👉 Use code SCHOOL2025 at checkout to grab the discount.

 If you missed our conversation with Dr. Cornelia C. Walther last time, don’t worry. We had to postpone due to some unexpected technical difficulties.

That means you still have a chance to join us for what promises to be a powerful and thought-provoking session.

What you’ll learn:

In the age of AI companions, real, human friendship is where it’s at! Excited to host our very first IRL meetup, AI-powered Moms, for Houston Ammis and friends to come together and grow.

We’re kicking off the meetup with a simple, super casual meet-and-greet boba date!

Come as you are, with or without kids. No rules, no judgment. Just a good time and good tea.

If you’re interested in replicating this meetup in your town/city, let’s connect! Happy to share templates, formats, and learnings with you. 

Today’s letter is brought to you by:

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Apple Sauce

The ‘sauce’ - or overview - on AI apps you may find useful.

Today’s apple: Agenda Hero

Every time I come across an AI app that’s suspiciously awesome, I always bet that an Ammi is somehow involved. This time, I didn’t have to guess – I met the Ammi behind the AI before meeting the AI itself!

Caren Cioffi is a Bay Area-based Ammi & founder of Agenda Hero. Agenda Hero allows you to convert anything to calendar events: email (random appointment dates and times buried in dense paragraphs), images (all those Whatsapp invitation pics), PDFs (school calendars).

You can customize and add those events to your existing Google, Apple, or Outlook calendar(s) with just a click. Bonus: You can share beautiful agendas easily with anyone.

We 💚 practical tech that makes our lives easier around here, so I hope this is useful for you.

⚠️ Ammis and friends: Always check privacy policies and verify any AI-generated health, safety, or education advice with trusted human experts. This is not an ad or official endorsement. AI tools evolve rapidly—features and safety may change. Mind your pics, mind your files, mind your deets, and stay safe out there, y’all!

Planting the Seed

Explore AI topics and headlines in simple language.

There’s a noticeable shift going into this school year. A vibe shift from “No AI allowed” to “Let’s try to integrate AI responsibly, put some guardrails around it, and foster AI literacy among students and teachers.”

This shift may be due to a big push at the federal level for AI in K-12 education.⁴ It may be because students have been using these tools all along, some responsibly and some recklessly.³ It may be because schools and teachers who are integrating AI responsibly are seeing benefits. ⁵Or some combination of the above.

In this section, we’ll use our homegrown Trunk Framework to help you navigate AI + education with confidence.

The gist of the framework:

Let’s grow 🌿

🟢 The good: These tools can make learning more personalized, tailored to the student's pace, and engaging. They can help struggling students keep up or even enrich, amplify, or fast-track their learning. Teachers report saving up to six hours a week when AI helps with prep and grading.¹

🟡 The not-so-good: The cheating issue is real. Misuse can erode critical thinking ability. AI outputs can be biased or factually inaccurate. Human outputs could be flagged as “AI-generated”. Some parents and teachers worry about screen time, safety, and loss of human creativity.

🌿 What you can do: Encourage kids to use AI as a study buddy, not a shortcut. Build fact-checking habits and set house rules (e.g., start assignments with no AI, then refine or amplify with AI). Ask teachers what tools are in use, whether opt-out options exist, and confirm that if AI is used for grading, there’s always a human review.

Check out this Carnegie report — it’s comprehensive and beautiful!

🟢 The good: AI policies mean less confusion. It means accountability. And it’s the bare minimum we need to align on a healthy future with AI. Proper AI literacy training ensures teachers and students can adopt AI responsibly.

🟡 The not-so-good: Adoption is fragmented. Only 40% of U.S. districts have formal AI policies. ⁶In rural and under-resourced schools, adoption lags, risking wider inequities. Some policies remain vague, leaving families and teachers to interpret rules on their own. Plus, inconsistent rules from teacher to teacher may lead to confusion, and students may pay the price.

🌿 What you can do: (You know what I’m going to say…) Join the conversation! If your district or school doesn’t have an AI policy, demand one! If they do, make sure you and your children (the students) understand it. Get any clarifications you need.

Here’s a great checklist by aiPTO’s Dhani Ramadhani on questions to ask:

Running through these trends and tools, my biggest concern is that students are being swept along in a global race for “the biggest, fastest AI.” Too often, the focus is on competition or ‘preparing tomorrow’s workforce’ and not on what truly helps children flourish.

I’m all for AI literacy, for leveraging technology to amplify human potential. But if we don’t move thoughtfully, we risk repeating the same mistakes we’ve seen with AI more broadly — rushing ahead without enough attention to guardrails, safety, or well-being.

Additionally, I challenge our Ammi collective to think bigger and bolder. As parents, we can hold space for an alternative goal: not just preparing kids to compete, but to thrive. We don’t really know what jobs will exist in 20 years. But we know we want our kids to be happy, healthy, and incredibly human.

Maybe it’s time to ask broader questions:

I would love to know what you think!

P.S. One thing I am constantly reinforcing with my young kids is the difference between humans and machines. It may seem silly, but that line is blurring. Here’s my free AI Literacy Lesson for Little Kids:

Fruitful Harvest

Fresh AI picks from the community garden.

🍒 Back to School prompts to help ease into the new school year by our friend Sarah Dooley of AI-Empowered Mom.

🍇 Quinta Brunson on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast - As a HUGE comedy nerd, I love Quinta Brunson’s show Abbott Elementary. I also love everything Amy Poehler has ever done. You can imagine my delight when Quinta joined Amy on her new podcast. So good, so funny, and AI does make a special appearance! Highly recommend.

🍉 Speaking of podcasts + AI + education, hear from the Education lead of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models and chatbot, on their role in education and some insights on how students are really using AI.

Cultivating Conversation

Your insights nourish our garden.

Thanks for spending a few of your precious, precious minutes with us.

See y’all soon,
Ruqaiya
Ammi by day, Ammi by night