Finding educational content for kids is almost a full-time job
I know, I lived it.
For a year I worked 3 jobs. I was a part-time PhD student, a cocktail waitress and a tutor for 3 little Russian boys. The activity that took the most time, by far, was teaching the kids. They were a family with 3 boys, aged 8, 6 and 3 and I taught them for 2.5 hours every day of the week. The 3-year old was too young for proper learning, but he wanted to be like his big brothers so he got a 30 minute session at the end to feel grown up.
From early on I found that ‘regular’ teaching materials like the ones the kids got in schools were hard to come by. Some weren’t good, some were too like schoolwork and most you had to pay for. I wanted the kids and myself to be interested in what we were learning, so I started making most of the content up myself.
“I found that ‘regular’ teaching materials like the ones the kids got in schools were hard to come by. Some weren’t good, some were too like schoolwork and most you had to pay for. ”
I started small – little experiments with balloons and static electricity alongside the maths worksheets they got from school. Sometimes I’d bring in a Roald Dahl book to read rather than the book they got given in their Reading Lesson. But it quickly spiralled.
Soon I was filling workbooks with wordsearches and comprehension stories, drawing treasure maps they had to navigate around using maths. At one point the older one asked me why Russia and America were friends during the Second World War but didn’t like each other afterwards. It seemed simpler to explain the history of Russia from 1917 onwards so I ended up making a PowerPoint presentation about Communism and the role of Stalin – all suitable for an 8-year old.
The kids loved it. Once I had to go to a conference for a week, so I spend the preceding days filling pages and pages of workbooks with a week’s worth of exercises for them to do in my absence. The same night I gave them their ‘homework’ their mother rang me to ask if I had any more as the boys had finished everything.
Engaging kids and getting them really excited and interested in different things is possible. It just takes a lot of time. I have so much sympathy for primary school teachers who have to find or create teaching content for the kids as well as actually trying to teach it to them, all within a 40-hour workweek (although I think we all know most teachers’ weeks expand long beyond that).
The workbooks that we make as part of Deliberate Travel are a small drop in the ocean of what is needed to engage and educate kids. But it’s a start. What I learned when I worked with that family was that kids love activities but they aren’t tricked by schoolwork. They can tell the difference between content which teaches them something new and exciting and explorative, and which content just needs to be done to satisfy the teacher (or the schoolboard).
“Kids love activities but they aren’t tricked by schoolwork. They can tell the difference between content which teaches them something new and exciting and explorative, and which content just needs to be done to satisfy the teacher”
We hope that DT workbooks can be a source of fun for kids, while teaching them just a little bit about the world, enough to stimulate their curiosity and start looking around on their own. We try to spread our choice of countries across the globe, not just sticking to places that kids have already heard of, but to introduce them to some new ones. Who knows, maybe they’ll end up going there one day?