Our Story
Our great-grandmother and her students in front of her one-room schoolhouse.
Our Experience
Our team has lived the challenge of weak or non-existent curriculum firsthand — and we’ve spent our careers creating solutions. Lumina’s team combines the classroom experience of teachers, coaches, and leaders with the proven success of designers of award-winning curriculum.
We craft learning experiences that enable all students to access engaging grade-level content while creating instructional support for teachers that blends research with practical classroom instruction.
We have spent the past 15 years writing and editing research-based, nationally awarded curriculum for the following publishers, among others:
The Heritage of Lumina
We are April Croy and Michelle Palmieri, co-founders of Lumina, and. . . sisters! We come from a long line of educators, tracing back for generations. Our family passed down the legacy of believing deeply in the power of a strong education to help create a bright future for all students.
Lumina honors that legacy while providing something new and bold for this generation of students and teachers.
Bedtime stories with our father,
a college professor
Meet the Thread-Weavers
Growing up, we played school the way other kids played house. We wrote worksheets for each other, taught full “lessons” in the living room, and graded assignments with intense seriousness. We didn’t know it then, but we were already becoming curriculum nerds.
We grew up and did the obvious: we both became teachers.
I’m Michelle.
I began my career teaching upper elementary students, and it wasn’t long before I realized how much I loved creating curriculum from scratch. I would spend summers developing units to engage and challenge my students. This was long before the advent of online sharing of resources existed, so I worked from what I could create myself! That creative spark eventually became my calling. The process of curriculum development made me come alive. Since then, I’ve devoted my career to designing knowledge-rich, cohesive curriculum that honors teachers’ expertise and sparks wonder in students. This work continues to inspire and fuel me every day.
I’m April.
My career began in the opposite direction: in a high school classroom, teaching everything from reading intervention to AP English with no curriculum available. I spent hours each summer in the library, preparing lessons for the smiling faces joining me in the fall. This summer deep dive ignited my passion: I felt most alive writing lessons, shaping curriculum that would make my students’ learning richer. My joy in the classroom was helping students prove to themselves that they could think analytically and come away from a text with a deeper understanding because of the conversations they had with their peers.
We both left our classrooms to pursue jobs that would allow us to more intensely pursue curriculum writing. We worked at different companies, shaping major national literacy programs, from foundational literacy to reading intervention to core ELA. The curriculum we wrote is used in thousands of classrooms.
But everywhere we went, we saw the same problem.
Curriculum is too divorced from classroom realities. Overstuffed lessons weigh teachers down, yet lack key components that unlock student learning. So, we decided to take a bold move and form our own company, a nimble team dedicated to practical, engaging curriculum.
Years before Lumina was even a dream, we spent our family Christmas break studying each other’s curriculum.
The Lumina Promise
Drawing on decades of experience in classrooms and curriculum design, we are reimagining what curriculum can be. With Lumina, you won’t find heavy scripting or pages of optional fluff. You will find a clear, research-aligned progression of instruction, practical guidance, and space for your expertise to shine. We’re committed to making instruction clearer, more purposeful, and more powerful so that students can engage easily and learn deeply.
We bring our unwavering commitment to curriculum that drives real results. Our goal is to unlock every student’s unique potential through compelling stories, coherent pathways, and thoughtfully designed lessons, all rooted in the most current pedagogical research.
Let us help you prepare students to question boldly, think deeply, and make meaning for themselves.
We’re excited to partner with you!
Contact Us
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