Can custom learning materials fit your kid’s unique needs? We’re testing a new tool and want honest feedback
Last Tuesday at 7:15 a.m., I was wiping congealed oatmeal off the kitchen table when I glanced over at my 9-year-old Leo, who was already staring down his fourth grade math homework like it had personally insulted him. He’d been stuck on equivalent fractions for three weeks, and the generic worksheet from his textbook wasn’t helping. All 20 problems used pizza slices as an example, which he’d decided was babyish, and half the problems covered skills he’d already mastered the week before. By problem three, his pencil was tapped out, and the edge of the paper was crumpled in his fist.
I’d been here before. I’d printed free worksheets from Pinterest that had typos and mixed three different skills into one page. I’d bought a $12 workbook that had one chapter on fractions and 11 chapters he didn’t need. As a part-time third grade intervention teacher, I deal with this exact problem five days a week in my classroom too: a student who needs 10 extra problems on one specific gap in their reading, or a kid who checks out of every word problem because the context doesn’t interest them, and there’s nothing out there that fits just what we need right now.
Six months ago, a small group of us – teachers, parents, and a couple of developers who were fed up with the same issues – started working on a tool to fix this. The idea is simple: you tell it exactly what skill your kid or student is working on, what grade level, how many problems you need that day, and what your kid’s current obsession is. Two minutes later, you get a custom worksheet or flashcard set that matches all of that. We’ve been testing it with our own kids and classes, and now we want honest feedback from other parents and teachers to make it better.
I tried it first with Leo the day after that oatmeal-stained morning. I input fourth grade, equivalent fractions with unlike denominators, 12 problems, theme: space. Leo’s been sleeping with a Jupiter plushie for six months, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. Two minutes later, I had a printable sheet. The first problem read: “Two NASA rovers collected rock samples on Mars. Rover A filled 3/4 of a container of basalt. Rover B filled 5/8 of a container. What is the equivalent fraction for 3/4 with a denominator of 8?”
Leo leaned in when he saw the rover illustration. No crumpling, no complaining that it was too hard. He finished all 12 problems before I even packed his lunch for school. I tested it the next week with my intervention group at school. One of my students, Javi, lives and breathes horseback riding, so I made all his addition word problems about sorting hay and counting show jumping rails. He finished twice as many problems as he usually does in 20 minutes, and asked if he could take the extra one home to do for fun. Another PTA parent I know tested it for her second grade daughter, who hates boring sight word flashcards. She made a set themed around ballet, and told me her daughter asked to practice twice that week – something that had never happened before in two years of sight word homework.
What’s surprised me most, even as a teacher, is how much small, specific adjustments cut down on homework fights. I used to think matching problems to kids’ interests was just a silly gimmick to sell overpriced workbooks. But now I see it’s just reducing unnecessary friction. When a kid doesn’t have to force themselves to care about a problem they don’t relate to, they can put all their focus into the skill you actually want them to practice. If your kid is having a bad day after school and can only handle 8 problems instead of 20, you don’t have to cross out half a pre-made worksheet and argue about why they don’t have to do the rest – you just make one that has 8 problems. If they’re working on one specific skill gap, you don’t have to sift through pages of mixed practice to find what you need; you build exactly what you need. That adds up to less stress for you and less frustration for them, which is the biggest win most of us can ask for when it comes to homework.
It’s not perfect, of course. Sometimes the theme comes out a little wonky – I asked for dinosaur-themed multiplication problems once and got a word problem about a T-Rex buying three and a half gallons of ice cream, which was unexpected, to say the least. Right now we only cover math and reading skills for kindergarten through fifth grade, so we don’t have anything for middle school or high school yet, and we’re still working on adding options for extra spacing and simpler wording for kids with dyslexia or fine motor needs. We don’t know what we don’t know, which is why we want honest feedback, not just praise.
If you’re a parent who’s spent hours scrolling the internet for the right practice sheet for your kid, or a teacher who spends their Sunday evenings making custom worksheets from scratch because the pre-made ones don’t fit your class, we’d love for you to test it. Tell us what works. Tell us what’s annoying. Tell us what feature you need that we haven’t added yet – whether that’s digital assignments kids can complete on a tablet, more niche themes, skills for older kids, or accessibility options I haven’t even thought of. We don’t need polished, polite input; we need the real stuff that will make this tool actually useful for the people who need it most.
Last night, after Leo’s soccer practice, he did eight fraction problems themed around penalty kicks, and got seven out of eight right. It’s not going to fix homework forever, and it won’t make every kid love math. But it’s fixed that small, constant frustration I’ve dealt with as both a parent and a teacher, and we want to make it work for more people. All we ask is that you tell us what you really think.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Can custom learning materials fit your kid’s unique needs