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When Eva went to stay with family friends for a week, she watched her friends’ younger brother playing educational games on his iPad. After seeing how much he enjoyed learning from these games, the Woodside Heights resident said she wanted her younger brother Eli to have the same experience. But her mother was skeptical of exposing the 4-year-old to that much screen time.
So Eva, then 8 years old, decided to make Eli some games herself. In the age of the “iPad kid,” she wanted to create something tangible for her brother to play with. And that’s how the Big Sister Workbook, a collection of learning and imaginative play games Eva made for her brother, was born. Soon the book could find its way into bookstores.
“I wanted it to be so it teaches him, but he can also have fun,” said Eva, who’s now 9 years old and a student at Sacred Heart in Atherton.
Activities range from math games to art projects. To teach Eli about commutative property of addition, Eva designed what she called a flip-flop game, which gives a list of addition problems like 2 + 3 = 5 and asks the user to reverse the numbers on the left of the equals sign and redo the problem to show that the answer remains the same. On the page is an illustration of a pair of pink flip-flops drawn by Eva.
Another page simply asks the user to draw a picture of someone special to them, with a blank rectangle below to be filled in. In the original workbook, the space is filled with a colorful portrait of Eli and Eva’s nanny.
All the text in the book is in Eva’s handwriting, which has signature flourishes, like circles instead of the dots on i’s typical of adult handwriting. For Eva, the homemade look conveys a sense of authenticity.
“If it’s printed, it feels like reading a long chapter book, but if it’s handwriting it feels more like a story … like someone understands, not like a robot talking to you,” Eva said.
In creating the workbook, Eva also incorporated feedback from her brother. When Eli struggled to count on his fingers to solve math problems, Eva drew a number line to help him visualize the process of addition.
After seeing how engaged Eli was when he did Eva’s activities with her, their mother Leili Baghaei said she was inspired to turn Eva’s creation into something more.
“She’s extremely creative in terms of making board games, drawings, paintings … and I felt like this could be the start of something bigger,” Baghaei said.
When Eva was asked about who else she has been testing her lessons on, she named several other young children.
“We are getting to a point where we have to say no to people in terms of wanting playdates,” Baghaei said. “There is only one Eva, and she has 20 playdate requests.”
To help get the ball rolling, Baghaei started a campaign on Kickstarter with the goal of raising $10,000 to fund the production of the book. The campaign reached just over half of its target as of Sept. 1 and will close in two weeks.
Baghaei also runs an Instagram account to showcase Eva’s ideas and progress. Eva is not involved with the Kickstarter or posting on the Instagram account, which has more than 900 followers.
The version of Eva’s book that will be published remains a work in progress. In an interview, Eva laid out a litany of potential ideas, including incorporating different textures like felt — “Eli really likes feeling things,” she said — and having pop-outs for some of the math pages, depending on the ability of the child using the book.
While Eva’s favorite part of the process is developing the characters, she also enjoys teaching her brother the math problems. She said she often looks back on educational activities she preferred when she was younger to inform her creations.
“I used to have an activity book back when I was a little girl, and there were some activities I really liked, and some I didn’t … I like to think of activities I liked more than others and make more of those, and then think of how I could teach them,” Eva said.
Eva is currently designing a 50-page iteration of the book, but she said she hopes to produce a version that can last for five months. She said that when she worked with her brother, they usually did around three pages per day.
Baghaei said that they are aiming to begin shipping books six months after the Kickstarter campaign closes. “It’s probably going to be closer to two months, cause six months is way too long,” Eva said.
“She is very optimistic,” Baghaei said.
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