Greetings Eddies!
Are your kids obsessed with YouTube?
OpenEd founder Isaac Morehouse shares this advice:
One of my younger kids wanted to make YouTube videos—and wanted to watch them all day. So we made a rule: until you've created an episode, you can't consume one.
It doesn't have to be good, we told him. You don't even have to like it. Just create something, then go study what other people built, and come back to create again.
Digital devices are neither bad nor good on their own. They have the most power when they let us be curious and creative. They turn on us when they suck us into being only consumers or critics.
I've watched the pattern with Minecraft and Roblox. Kids start by playing, then they watch other people play for inspiration, then they just watch, and pretty soon the motivation is gone.
If you consume too much, you start to feel like whatever you make won't be good enough because you're comparing it against MrBeast.
"Create first, consume later" keeps the spark alive.
Once your kids have made something of their own, here's a list of our favorite YouTube channels worth learning from:
Miacademy - multi-subject lessons made for homeschoolers
Peekaboo Kidz (Dr. Binocs) - animated science explainers for ages 5 to 10
Twinkl Teaching - quick videos that pair with printable activities
Homeschool Pop - geography, history, and social studies from fellow homeschoolers
Mark Rober - engineering, glitter bombs, and problem-solving for tweens and teens
CrashCourse - structured series on everything from astronomy to entrepreneurship
TED-Ed - beautifully animated lessons that start a conversation
Code.org and Scratch Team - coding tutorials that move from blocks to text
Art for Kids Hub - step-by-step drawing for the whole family
Two Cents (PBS) and The Financial Diet - money and entrepreneurship for teens
Further reading
Why a kid's screen is engineered to be hard to put down, with Daylight Computer founder Anjan Katta: Your Kid's Screen Was Built Like a Slot Machine
The case for coaching screen use instead of just capping it, with Outschool founder Amir Nathoo: Stop Limiting Your Child's Screen Time (Do This Instead)
That’s all for today.
— Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)
