Every now and again, I come across something that simply begs to be shared with my daughter (age six going on 16). I’m not a fan of using video and screen time for “educational purposes”, but sometimes a great one comes along and I feel compelled to watch it with her. Or in this case, five great short ones.
Planet Money is a podcast sponsored by National Public Radio (NPR) in the USA. The Planet Money team spent months researching, documenting, and putting together a month of podcasts on the life of a T-shirt, from start to finish, and all the people who’s lives are touched along the way. The process and the people involved, from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the factories in Bangladesh, Columbia, and Indonesia, and the various shipping methods in between are all fascinating and much more complex than one might think.
All of this material has been condensed into five short videos, each just a few minutes long, on the Planet Money website. If you can get to a VPN, it is worth watching with your kids. Not only will they be mesmerized by all that goes into making a humble T-shirt, they will also likely never look upon a shirt in quite the same way again.
To learn more, check out http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/title.
Photo courtesy of npr.org
