Teaching tools for classrooms that have to work with very little.
Three things I made for the schools and learning centres I've worked in on the Thailand–Myanmar border, and for the classrooms they reminded me of back home. Each one is built to be used by a teacher with no budget, no training day and no reliable internet.
Written and illustrated by James, published with the support of Elim Center
In Good Hands
Ask a young child to sit down and talk about what's bothering them and usually nothing happens. Give them a page to color and a sentence to say, and a lot comes out. This book teaches one routine a child can use when a feeling gets too big — go to your Safe Base, calm your body, tell a grown-up, come back when you're ready.
A small dinosaur walks through the ordinary hard moments: growing and feeling strange in your own body, being hungry and angry about it, getting hurt and going quiet. Each page is a short line the child can say out loud — I feel scared, I take a slow breath, I am not alone — and then color in.
The back half is for the adult. A guide on what a Safe Base is, when to send a child there, and the five steps for walking them through it. Also what it is not: not a punishment, not isolation, not a place you get sent when you've been bad. Most of the harm comes from getting that part wrong.
- For Early readers — TBC, confirm ages
- Inside Twelve coloring pages, new words, adult guide, certificate
- Teaches Naming a feeling, slow breathing, asking for help
- Languages English, translations on request
- Note The stories are written from a Christian perspective
S$5 printed, plus shipping
Buy a printed copyGet the PDF, free
Downloading. If nothing happens, use this link.
No waiting and no reply needed — the file downloads the moment you press the button. I keep your email so I can tell you if a translation or a revised edition appears. Nothing else, and never passed on.
The deck
Ready for Anything
A financial literacy game that isn't a lecture with dice attached. Two to four players take a job, collect a salary, decide whether to pay for insurance, and then draw a card — a promotion, a hospital bill, a market crash, a neighbour who wants a loan. The lesson lands because somebody loses money in front of everybody else.
The deck covers salaries and jobs, insurance premiums, investing, personal shocks and economic shocks. A round takes about 25 minutes, which is a class period with setup. The teacher's guide is printed on the box, not in a separate booklet nobody keeps.
Money is a gated literacy. Some children inherit it at the dinner table; others are never handed it and are then blamed for not having it. The argument behind that is the same one my research makes about English.
- Players 2–4, or teams
- Time About 25 minutes
- Teaches Salaries, insurance, investing, risk
- Includes Action deck, money, teacher's guide
The printed deck is the only thing here that costs money, because it's the only thing that has to be made and posted. Classroom sets of six or more are discounted — ask below.
The same game, free
The same game, on any phone in the room
A version of Ready for Anything that runs in a browser, holds the money and the deck for you, and works with the wifi off. Open it on a phone, plug the phone into the projector, and the class plays against the wall. Nothing to install, no account, no data leaves the device.
It tracks each player's money, job, insurance status and investments, deals the action deck, and walks a turn through in the right order — so a teacher who has never played it can run it cold. The teacher's guide is built into the app.
This version exists because a printed deck costs money and has to be shipped somewhere. A classroom with one phone and no budget can still play. That's the whole reason it's free.
- Runs on Any phone, tablet or laptop browser
- Internet Only to load it the first time
- Accounts None
- Best used Projected, teacher-led
One file. Save it to a phone and it keeps working with no signal.
Where this comes from
I'm James Ungureanu. For four summers I've helped run week-long English camps at schools and migrant learning centres near the Thailand–Myanmar border — about 300 students a year, across two Thai public schools and two NGO-run learning centres.
Alongside the teaching I spent a year researching why children in those communities enrol in school and then disappear from it. That meant reading the policy — Thailand grants every child fifteen years of free basic education regardless of nationality or status — and then interviewing eight people who watch what happens after that promise is made: specialists at the IOM, researchers at Georgetown, Penn and Chulalongkorn, and the directors of two border NGOs.
What came out of it was a way of seeing the problem in three stages. Thailand has solved the first one. It has not built the second or the third, and the organisations filling that gap do it without legal recognition, without a certification route for their own teachers, and without student records that transfer anywhere.
- EntryCan the child enrol?Largely solved
- ParticipationCan the child stay and learn?Carried by NGOs
- ProgressionCan the child reach a qualification?Weakest
Some numbers from those interviews: border teachers earn around US$1.50 a day and stay about two years. By grade ten or twelve, roughly one student in five finishes. Globally the same shape holds — about half of refugee children reach primary school, a fifth reach secondary, and one to two percent reach university.
Three things came out of this, and they sit at two different rungs.
- In Good Handsa coloring book — participation
- Ready for Anythinga card game — progression
- Ready for Anything for phonesthe same game, free — progression
A child who can't settle themselves doesn't stay in a classroom. Four of the eight people I interviewed raised unmet psychological need without being asked, and none of them had a counsellor to refer anyone to. In Good Hands is for that rung, and it came out of teaching English and emotional vocabulary in those camps.
The finance work is for the rung above. My research argues that English functioned as a gate — it decided who got hired and who got heard, taught to some children as an inheritance and withheld from others entirely. Money is gated the same way. A family that has never held a bank account, been offered insurance, or seen a wage arrive on a fixed day isn't short of intelligence; they've been kept outside a body of knowledge that everyone on the other side of the gate calls common sense. One NGO director I interviewed moved his entire programme from ages 7–18 to 18–25 and added vocational training, because that was where young people were failing — not at school, but at the step after it.
Ready for Anything teaches the shape of that step before anyone has to take it: a salary, a premium, a loan, a run of bad luck. It didn't begin at the border — it came out of a school investment committee, where I built teaching seminars instead of running the usual stock competition. But it's the same instinct as the rest of this. The material that would have taught it didn't exist, so I made it.
Schools, learning centres and NGOs
The app and the coloring book PDF are free to use right now — download the book here, open the app here. Nothing is means-tested and there's no application. If what you need is printed copies and the cost is the thing in the way, say so and it won't be: bulk sets are discounted, and donated where that makes more sense.
If you need any of this in another language, ask and I'll produce it — I'd rather translate it properly than hand you a PDF and leave you to it. Thai, Burmese and Karen are the versions I'd most like to see in use.
Printed copies, and anything that needs a person
For quantities, a translation, donated copies, or a question. This one comes to James and he answers it.