Building Custom Learning Materials for Elementary Kids: What We’ve Learned and We Need Your Honest Feedback
Last Tuesday, I was wiping crumbs off our chipped blue kitchen table after peanut butter and jelly lunch, waiting for my 7-year-old Leo to finish the reading worksheet I’d put together for him. He’s in second grade, has been obsessed with all things prehistoric since he got a T-Rex costume for Halloween two years ago, and hates generic reading comprehension questions that ask him what the main idea of a story about a cat going to the park is. The printer jammed when I printed the first draft of his worksheet, so I had to wait an extra two minutes while it re-spooled, and I was half-convinced he’d go back to building Lego instead of finishing work. For the past six months, I’ve been working with a group of other parents and elementary teachers to put together a tool that makes custom worksheets, activity sheets, and review packets tailored exactly to what a kid needs to work on and what they love. That Tuesday, I’d made one for Leo: three short paragraphs about how T-Rex teeth regrew when they fell out, with questions that hit the exact skills he’s been practicing this semester (finding key details, using context clues to figure out new words). He sat down, finished it in 12 minutes, then asked if we could do another one about Triceratops after dinner. That’s the small win we’ve been seeing over and over in our early tests, but we still have a ton of questions we want other people’s honest input on.
One of the teachers on our team, Rita, who teaches 4th grade 20 minutes from our town, tested the tool with her class last month. She has a group of 12 kids who are working on basic multiplication, and half the class lives and breathes youth soccer, while the other half is obsessed with K-pop. She made two separate sets of word problems: one all about league scoring stats and practice times, the other about concert ticket sales and album pre-orders. She told me over peppermint tea in her classroom after school one day last week that the number of kids who finished all 15 problems went up 40% from the generic worksheet she’d used the week before. But she also had a catch: one of her advanced kids, who can tell you every Manchester United player’s stats off the top of his head, called her out on a wrong number in one of the problems. That’s the kind of issue we’re still sorting out, and we don’t have all the answers yet.
What we do know from our tests so far is that matching learning materials to a kid’s current obsession cuts down on homework and classwork fights more than almost any other trick I’ve tried as a parent. I used to bribe Leo with 10 minutes of screen time after he finished his work, and we’d still spend 20 minutes arguing before he sat down. Now, I just plug in the skill he needs and “dinosaurs” into the tool, and he gets started without me asking twice. This works even if you don’t use our tool, too: if your kid loves ballet, next time you need to practice addition, make 10 quick problems about how many leotards are in the costume closet, how many dance shoes are needed for 8 girls, how many tickets are left for the end-of-year recital. It takes two minutes to adjust, and it makes a bigger difference than any sticker chart or reward system I’ve ever used. For teachers, the benefit is even bigger: Rita told me she used to spend three hours every Sunday cutting and pasting materials from different websites to make different versions for her reading and math groups. Now she spends 45 minutes, and she gets to leave school by 5 p.m. most days instead of staying until 6 to prep.
But for every win, we’ve had a new question pop up that we can’t answer on our own. For example, fact accuracy: some parents have told us a wrong fact about a T-Rex or a soccer player isn’t a big deal, because it turns into a quick research moment where you and your kid look up the right number together. Other parents have told us they don’t have 5 extra minutes to check every fact, they just need a worksheet that’s ready to go when their kid gets home from school. Same with skill level: sometimes a 2nd grade multiplication problem comes out a little too hard, or a little too easy, and you have to regenerate it. Is that a minor inconvenience you’re okay with, to get a custom material in two minutes, or is that a dealbreaker for you? We also don’t know what other materials people actually need: we’ve built worksheets, flash cards, and at-home activity sheets, but do you need custom spelling lists? Do you need study guides for unit tests? Do you need printable game boards for center time in class? We’re guessing, but we want to know what you actually use every week.
Last week, I passed out sample worksheets at our elementary school’s parent coffee, and a mom of a 4th grader who loves soccer asked to try the tool for her son’s multiplication homework. She texted me the next morning saying he finished his work in 20 minutes without complaining, which had never happened before in the two years he’s been doing multiplication homework. That made me feel like we’re on the right track, but I also know that what works for Leo and that mom’s son won’t work for everyone.
We’ve got a free trial of the tool open right now, and we’re asking anyone who tries it to give us honest feedback, good or bad. We don’t need glowing reviews if it doesn’t work for you. We just want to know what works, what doesn’t, and what we need to change to make it something you’d actually reach for every week. It’s still a work in progress, built by parents and teachers who get how much time and energy goes into prepping learning materials that actually work for kids. And that progress is only going to happen if people tell us what they really think.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Building Custom Learning Materials for Elementary Kids: What We’ve Learned and We Need Your Honest Feedback