Why I Ask Educators To Review My Homemade Learning Resources (And What It Changes For Kids)
Last Tuesday, I was wiping oat milk coffee off my keyboard while my 7-year-old pried a Lego brick loose from under my kitchen table, waiting for an email from Clara, a 5th grade general ed teacher I know from our neighborhood book swap. I’d sent her the fraction resource I’d spent three weekends making for my oldest, who still struggles to connect equivalent fractions to the actual measuring cups we use for cookie baking, and I was half hoping she’d get back to me before spring break, half not wanting to rush her during parent-teacher conference week.
I didn’t always do this. Three years ago, when my oldest was in 2nd grade and still couldn’t retell a simple picture book without jumping from the first page straight to the ending, I got frustrated with the store-bought sequencing worksheets. They were either too easy—just sorting numbers under already ordered pictures, which didn’t challenge him—or too hard, asking kids to sort four steps when he could barely keep track of two. I sat down one night after he went to bed and made my own set: 20 different groups of picture prompts, drawing on what I knew he liked—dinosaurs, baking chocolate chip cookies, building bike ramps in the backyard. I thought it was perfect. I shared the free PDF in our local homeschool co-op group, and within a week a dozen people had downloaded it. A week after that, one comment stopped me: “This is great—have you had a classroom 2nd or 3rd grade teacher look it over? You’d be surprised what they catch that we miss as parents.”
I thought about that for a couple days. I knew Mia, a 3rd grade teacher who coached my youngest’s rec soccer team, so I texted her. I asked if she’d look through my 8-page sequencing set, I’d give her a $50 Starbucks gift card for an hour of her time. She said yes, and we met at the coffee shop down the street after school one day. She brought her marked-up printed copy with her, blue ink smudged at the edges from being stuffed in her teacher bag.
First thing she pointed out: I’d made every single prompt 3 steps. “Most kids who struggle with sequencing are still working on 2-step sequences for a month or two before they move to three,” she said. “You’ve got great topics here, but you’re skipping the entry point that a lot of kids need. The kids who already get 3 steps don’t need this worksheet anyway, right?” Then she pointed to the wording under one set: “Prior to building your bike ramp, you gather your wood.” She laughed and said, “I haven’t seen ‘prior to’ in a 2nd grade level text in five years. Kids this age don’t know that word. It throws them off before they even get to the actual task.” The last thing she pointed out: I’d made everything black and white to save ink for parents printing at home. She said, “If you add a tiny green dot next to the first step in each set, kids with working memory issues don’t have to guess where to start. It takes 2 seconds to add, and it cuts down on the questions I get during small group time by half.”
I left that meeting a little chagrined, but mostly glad I’d asked. I’d missed every single one of those gaps because I was only building this for my kid. I knew he could handle 3 steps, so I assumed that’s where all kids who struggle with this skill needed to start. I use words like “prior to” in my everyday writing, so it didn’t even occur to me that it would be a problem. As homeschool parents, a lot of us make our own resources because nothing off the shelf fits our kid’s specific needs. But we only have our own kid’s data point. A classroom teacher sees 25 new kids with that exact same struggle every single year. They know what trips up 80% of them, because they’ve watched it happen again and again.
I adjusted the resource that weekend. I added 10 new 2-step prompt pages, swapped out “prior to” for “before” and all the other odd wording I hadn’t noticed, added that tiny green dot to the first step of every set. I reuploaded it to the group, and that was the first time I started getting messages from parents saying it actually clicked for their kid, where the other resources hadn’t. One mom told me her son with ADHD went from getting every sequence wrong to getting most right in two weeks, just because of the 2-step entry point and the green dot cue.
Now it’s become my routine for every resource I make. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t need a tenured professor with a PhD. I just look for a current classroom teacher or special ed educator who works with the exact age and skill level I’m targeting. I always pay for their time, too—most teachers don’t have extra hours to give away for free after grading papers and planning lessons, and a $50 or $75 gift card for an hour of their time is way cheaper than any pre-made curriculum I’d buy off the shelf. I also don’t just ask “what do you think?” I ask three specific questions: What’s one step that’s too easy or too hard for the age level I’m targeting? Are there any words or concepts that feel out of place that I wouldn’t notice? Would you pull this out for your small group, and what would you change before you did?
Right now, I’m still waiting on Clara to get back to me about that fraction resource. I know she’s got back-to-back conferences this week, and she’s chaperoning the 5th grade field trip to the zoo on Friday, so I’m in no hurry. I’m sure she’ll catch something I missed—probably something about how I ordered the practice problems, or a word I used that’s too advanced, or a small adjustment that makes it work for more kids. I’d rather wait a month for a good review than put out something that works for my kid but doesn’t work for anyone else. It’s not that I can’t make a good resource on my own. It’s just that one extra pair of eyes that sees this specific struggle every day makes it better for everyone.
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