{"id":1311,"date":"2019-03-01T16:01:02","date_gmt":"2019-03-01T16:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kinneybrothers.com\/blog\/?p=1311"},"modified":"2024-04-21T14:46:20","modified_gmt":"2024-04-21T14:46:20","slug":"bounce-learning-kids-on-kinney-brothers-publishing-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kinneybrothers.com\/blog\/blog\/2019\/03\/01\/bounce-learning-kids-on-kinney-brothers-publishing-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Bounce Learning Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Bounce<\/a>
Visit Bounce Learning Kids<\/a> by clicking on the links below the images.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is an interview with Christopher D. Morgan of Bounce Learning Kids<\/a> with a special lineup of educational products for your regular, special needs, or English language classes. Enjoy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q.\nYou have a lot of products in your TpT\nstore. How and why did you get into making education resources?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A.\nI began making them for my own two children and it developed from\nthere. I\u2019ve always been a hands-on father and I wanted to be\ninvolved with my children\u2019s education from the get-go. Right around\nthe time I was using flashcards to teach them word sounds, I went\nonline to find resources to help me. I quickly found the quality of\nwhat was out there wanting so I decided to build my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q.\nWhat was your very first resource?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A. I wanted to teach the kids the difference between consonants and vowels. The problem was that at that age, the very words \u2018consonant\u2019 and \u2018vowel\u2019 are themselves difficult words for a small child, which I quickly discovered when I tried to explain this in words. With the kids sporting classic deer in the headlight stares, I decided to \u2018show\u2019 them instead of \u2018tell\u2019 them. I went to my graphics workstation and fiddled around until I came up with a comb design, which I thought would do the trick. It shows the alphabet twice, once with all the vowels enclosed in a block and once with all the consonants enclosed. The two blocks fit together like two combs. The idea was that it would visually convey the fact that a letter can either be a vowel or a it can be a consonant but not both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q.\nWhere did Bounce Learning Kids comes\nfrom?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A.\nBecause of the success of my vowels and consonants design, I was\nspurred on to make more resources. Over the next few months, I\nchurned out lots more of them. Eventually, a parent from one of my\nkids\u2019 playmates saw some of the resources and suggested I share\nthem so that other parents could benefit from them. I thought nothing\nof it but quickly found my designs were being well-received. I got so\nmany positive comments, which of course only spurred me on more.\nBefore I knew it, I had around 2,000 designs in my portfolio. A good\nfriend suggested I turn it into a business, and thus Bounce Learning\nKids was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q.\nWhat makes your products different?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A.\nI design my products first and foremost to function correctly. They\nmust be visually appealing and interesting. Otherwise, the child\nsimply isn\u2019t going to enjoy using them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q.\nAren\u2019t all education resources\nsupposed to be that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A.\nYou\u2019d think so, but that\u2019s sadly not the case. My kids started\ncoming home from school with worksheets, for example. Frankly, I was\nappalled at the poor quality of them. When I went online again to try\nto find better ones, I found it was a common trait almost everywhere\nI looked. I could find plenty of worksheets, but they were all\ndesigned more to get the parents to download them than to work\ncorrectly as education resources. Oftentimes I\u2019d find numeracy or\nliteracy sheets, for example, where a couple of clip-art graphics\nwere included to \u2018make them look more like children\u2019s resources\u2019\nbut that was about it. The quality really wasn\u2019t there. They would\neither be boring and uninspiring or simply ineffective as learning\ntools \u2013 or both! This infuriated me to no end. Once again, I\nthought I could do better, so I started making my own worksheets but\nbuilt them from the ground up to function correctly first and\nforemost. I very rarely \u2018pretty them up\u2019 by adding infantile\nclip-art images. When other people do that, it makes me cringe. I\nthink there\u2019s a real danger of being condescending to the kids by\ntreating them that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q.\nWhat makes your resources function\nbetter than others?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A. It\u2019s all about making them functional but also visually appealing and interesting. Worksheets (which is just a fancy term for a printed page of information that the child must write onto) fall into two basic categories. They are either \u2018instructional\u2019 or \u2018testing\u2019. That is to say they either \u2018teach\u2019 (convey new information) or they gauge the child\u2019s level of understanding (testing their knowledge). Many of my worksheets both teach and test at the same time. They are also designed to be visually appealing, interesting and, most importantly of all, fun. Who wants to do simple learning by wrote when you can have an engaging and fun worksheet that\u2019s an actual pleasure to complete? If you disguise the learning by encapsulating it in play, it takes the stress out of learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are some of the Literacy products in my line-up:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hands-on Reading 2<\/a> — Coordinate grids ‘B’<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Calendar time ‘E’<\/a> — Compound words ‘B’<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A versus AN ‘D’<\/a> — Apostrophe ‘A’<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q. Do you specialize on Literacy products?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A.\nI do have quite a few Literacy resource kits in my portfolio, but I\nhave many more products that hit other disciplines as well. At the\nmoment, my resources fall into one of six broad categories:<\/p>\n\n\n\n