EDUInformer co-founders Ashley Wallace & Sarah Gord
Today marks the first day of Black History Month. Black History Month was first recognized in 1976, but the idea dates back to the early 1900s when a Black historian named Carter G. Woodsen co-founded an organization dedicated to the study of Black history.
And although Black History should be integrated and celebrated throughout the year, I wanted to take the opportunity to share a local business that has put together a useful workbook for parents and educators of school-age children.
Ashley Wallace & Sarah Gord are educators who met while teaching in Oakland School District, located in the San Francisco Bay area. They are experienced educators with over 15 years of combined teaching experience. In addition to holding Masters Degrees in Education, Ashley & Sarah have both served on their schools’ leadership committees. The workbooks they create are culturally-responsive, well-researched, engaging curriculum that your kids will love! Today, Ashley lives locally in Danbury with her wife and their 8-year old daughter, Emma. Sarah is based in Canada.
Ashley and her daughter Emma
Ashley & Sarah, first off thank you so much for sharing your workbook Celebrating Black History Month with us. Before we dive more into the workbook and how parents can use it, can you share a bit about your backgrounds? What motivated you to start EDUInformer?
You’re welcome, and we are happy to share this brand-new workbook with everyone. I [Ashley] am always looking for extra learning resources for my 8-year old daughter. As she is both Latina and Black, I struggled to find age-appropriate resources related to her heritage and culture. The more I researched, the more I saw a lack of cultural and religious holidays she could connect to. My wife and I want her to be a global-minded person, and the holiday and/or cultural workbooks I was finding were often filled with mostly coloring activities and cartoon characters, and many holidays were underrepresented. We celebrate Día de los Muertos in our house, and I wanted her to learn about the holiday, but couldn’t find anything I liked. I decided to create a workbook for her that had a healthy mix of learning and fun. As Sarah and I rarely create any educational resources without each other, I showed it to her to see what she thought, and thus began EDUInformer Learning! Together we knew we could bring culturally-responsive learning workbooks to the age group.
What was your inspiration in creating this workbook?
After creating many workbooks for mostly single-day holidays, we decided that we’d start creating holiday month workbooks in 2022. These workbooks are twice the size of our regular holiday workbooks and focus more on reading informational text and writing. As urban educators, we’ve always prioritized Black Americans’ achievements, inventions, activism, and other contributions to the United States throughout our curriculum design, but we felt it was important to create a workbook specifically honoring Black History Month in February. Of course, we recognize that this is just the beginning and learning about Black history should happen all year long!
How can parents use this workbook in their own homes, particularly for families with children of different ages? For example, how would you scale it down for Pre-K or up for older elementary & middle school ages?
Parents can print the workbook, ideally single-sided, or their kids can work on it digitally, either on a tablet or computer. With a tablet, they can use the Markup tool directly on the document to complete the activities. If using a computer, we recommend using Kami, a Google Chrome extension that makes it super easy to write and color on a PDF. For younger kids, we recommend parents read the text and directions out loud and work through the activities side-by-side. For slightly older kids, encourage them to read the text and directions out loud to you, offering support when they get stuck. Older kids or those who are more comfortable readers can complete the workbook independently or with your support. Find the level your child is comfortable with, and then go from there!
You have a huge selection of workbooks available. Can you let us know how others can find your workbooks? And what’s next for EDUInformer?
Our workbooks can be found in our Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers shops and each week we release two new workbooks (including video previews) on our Instagram. We always publish workbooks for major holidays in advance so parents can be prepared with fun, engaging activities ahead of time. We’ve also just published our very first physical workbook – The Northeast Region! It has over 100 pages of activities, a full northeast region section, and flashcards! It includes the full workbooks for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as well as a section bringing them all together. The digital version is already available, but soon you’ll be able to order the physical book from our Etsy shop. This is just the first of many published workbooks to come from EDUInformer Learning this year!
Ashley and Sarah have been kind enough to create this unique link to download the Black History Month workbook for free, as well as a set of printable posters that go with it. Stay up to date with their other workbooks by following them on Instagram.
