My kids and I had our first WordPress learning session this morning. I was inspired by a presentation at WordCamp Phoenix lead by Abbie Sanderson. We’re also having a Kids and WordPress session at our upcoming WordCamp, so what better way to work through the process but with my own pliable children, right?
Fortunately, we’re blessed with many laptops so my two older kids both sat down with a workable laptop and a fresh install of WordPress that I installed for them in advance (no wp.com for my kids, thank you very much, they have their own domain and a mama with server space).
As a side note, and an insight to my kid’s personalities: my 12 year old son loves the default WP 2011 theme, my 10 year old daughter doesn’t. He thinks it’s cool, she thinks it’s ugly. Sorry WP, but you aren’t getting the 10 year old demo here :D.
My kids work better if I’m more flexible and they seemed to be more interested in how their site looks, so we started with the Appearance tab on the Dashboard. I showed them how the custom header works in the new 2011 theme. They uploaded pictures to be used as their defualt header and played with the customizable background colors. Working with the built-in theme options was really enjoyable for them. I could have left it at that, but then I wouldn’t be a self-respecting homeschool mom (or annoying mom, depending on who you ask).
I had my kids head on over to Pages to create an About Me page. They each uploaded a picture, aligned it however they wanted and used all the fields for images: title, alt, and caption. Then they typed a few words about themselves. That was the part they thought was annoying, poor things.
Later on in the day, my kids were dying to get back at it and do some more work on her new blog. A future WP addict in the making!
Karen Alma 