Each lesson in LifePath is labeled with the type of lesson. One type is Color. If the word “coloring” makes you picture the fluffy filler part of a science curriculum — give me two minutes, because it’s the opposite of that.

Here’s what most curricula do with the human body. They hand a kid a diagram, the kid labels the parts, memorizes the words for a test, and forgets them by spring. Names in, names out. Nothing actually understood.

In LifePath, the coloring is how the understanding gets solidified. Let me show you with the lesson you have in your sample classroom, How We Make Speech.

Put your hand on the front of your throat with me and make a long “vvvvv” sound. Feel that buzz? Now switch to “fffff.” Same lips, same tongue — the only thing that changed is your voice turned off. That buzzing is your vocal cords, right here at the top of your trachea, opening and closing incredibly fast.

So as a kid colors in the vocal cords, the larynx, the epiglottis, I’m telling them what each one is doing and their hands are busy finding what we are talking about. They are making new discoveries. And that’s the key. When the hand is involved, the brain slows down and pays attention in a way it never does with a diagram that it’s just labeling. The coloring isn’t decoration. It’s the thing that makes it stick.

And I’m passionate about using the correct terminology. We aren’t coloring a throat or a windpipe. We’re coloring vocal cords, a trachea, and a pharynx. These are the exact structures I’m thinking about as a doctor when someone comes in hoarse, or with a cough that won’t quit, or losing their voice. Your kid is coloring the real thing so when they are the one at the doctor, they know what the doctor is talking about.

I’ve also created a curated video library for students. As a parent you get to choose if they have independent access or not. Either way, after doing a lesson, they can watch it in the real world. One of the videos for How We Make Speech is an MRI of a beatboxer. In it, you’re looking inside their actual throat while they perform, watching what actually happens with the soft palate and the vocal cords.

That’s what your kid just colored, pushed to the absolute limit. Once they’ve spent a lesson learning how speech is made, they do not forget watching it do that. This is the rhythm of every LifePath lesson — you learn it with me, then you see it alive in the world.

So coloring gets the anatomy in.

But understanding a structure is a different thing from understanding a decision — like why a sunburn at nine years old is can matter at forty. That’s the next lesson type, Write, and I’ll show you tomorrow.