The hardest part of a custom topic isn’t writing it. It’s choosing it. Parents tend to reach for the subject they wish their child cared about, fractions usually, and then wonder why the topic sits unopened. The trick is to start from the obsession that already exists and let the school subject arrive through the side door.
Pick the obsession, not the gap
If your seven-year-old can identify a car by its badge from across a car park, that’s a topic. It carries vocabulary, spelling, countries of origin, and a natural sorting problem. You are not choosing a subject; you are choosing a doorway.
A topic your child chose gets three attempts. A topic you chose gets one, on a good day.
Write four short lesson pages
Four sections is the sweet spot: enough to be worth reading, short enough to finish before dinner. Plain sentences. One idea per page. The quiz will do the work of checking whether it landed.
Set ten questions, and make two of them hard
Ten questions, four options each. Eight should be answerable by anyone who read the lesson; two should need a second read. That ratio is what turns a second attempt into rereading rather than guessing, and the best attempt is the one that lands on the leaderboard, so there is no penalty for going again.
Written by The PebbleYard team
We build the app and use it on our own kids.
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