Linh Ha | Portfolio

Personal works

Being a mother of 2 young children and an ex-teacher, I am passionate about education and I make educational materials outside of my full-time work.

Breaking down very basic concepts like spelling, time, basic math principles so that very young children can learn and understand is a big challenge that I took on, and it taught me a lot about empathy and user-centered design.

Project Type

Educational material, illustrations

Skills

Procreate, Photoshop

Phonics Wheels

I had an idea to create these phonics wheels when I was teaching my daughter to read.

She was 2 years old, already had a good grasp of letter names and sounds but struggled to put the sounds together to form a word. I came up with the idea of these wheels that you can spin to show how different words can be formed by just changing the first letter of the word. This is called phonemic substitution and it's an important skill to master before learning to read.

My daughter liked playing with the wheels and it helped her form an understanding of phonics before she turned 3, and she's a fairly fluent reader at age 4. Here is my process:

Researched the most basic CVC (consonent-vowel-consonent) words and made a list of 90 words that make up 15 word families.
Made a very simple physical mockup to see how the 2 layers of the wheels should be shaped like and how to align them when rotated.
Draw all of the illustrations for the words using Procreate
Make the wheel design in Photoshop, then print and assemble the wheels

Aside from the wheels, I also made phonics flash cards and puzzles, below are some examples:

Interactive children book

I also designed and assembled this interactive book about farm life for my daughters both for education and entertainment.

I am inspired by how imaginative children are, and how they don't require a lot of fancy toys but just the bare minimum to get their creative minds fully immersed in imaginative play.

This book is both a gift for them as well as for myself, I had a lot of enjoyment making it and also learned how to make those simple mechanisms to allow for really fun interactions with just flat pieces of paper, like how to make the plants grow. Here is my process for this book:

Draw a very rough sketch of my idea on Procreate
Make a physical, very tiny mockup of the book to see what pieces need to be made and how to bind everything together into a book
Draw out all the pages and components using Photoshop and Procreate
Print and assemble

The assembly process of the book can be seen here. Below are some previews of the book:

More projects

Pitch, creative ideation, mockup

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