Children's podcast brings Malone education to life
In a culture that is inundated with screen time for children and adults alike, podcasts offer relevant opportunities for learning that stretch the mind and increase imagination.
For Jim Jacob ’10 and his family, podcasting keeps bedtime stories alive with trustworthy content that helps parents engage their children in new ways.
The HeyMrJim brand (which houses Kids Short Stories and Kids Animal Stories) first developed accidentally in 2019 for Jacob’s three sons (ages 4, 6, and 8) when he was out of town on business as a corporate medical engineer.
“My wife, Jocelyn, asked me to record bed time stories for our boys so she could play them while I was on the road,” Jacob said. “So I started recording made-up stories and texting them to her. After a while, those files got lost in our text threads, so we felt that storing the recordings in a podcast app would be a good way to ‘distribute and store’ them to her phone and their iPads for easy access. This was never meant to become a public thing, but it quickly grew an audience organically and other children started sending in ideas for their own adventures. Before I knew it, I began creating new stories about kids using their imaginative story ideas.”
A biology graduate of Malone, Jacob uses the knowledge he gained at Malone for his Kids Animal Stories content in particular.
“My favorite classes at Malone allowed me to study animal behaviors and local ecology out in the field,” he said. “Creation and learning came to life in those settings, and that’s what I’m trying to reproduce in my podcasts. Finding creative ways to get children excited about learning can be hard, but as a parent I’ve come to see that they often learn best through story. An exciting story will pull in all ages to learn. That’s a really valuable lesson I gleaned from my time at Malone.”
Now a podcast creator full-time, Jacob recently signed a deal with iHeartRadio and Collab, and both Kids Short Stories and Kids Animal Stories have become Top Kids Podcasts around the world.
The Jacob family lives just outside of Charlotte in South Carolina, but they are also available on your digital device, ready to encourage imagination and create connection within your own family.